By Terry Manning
Many times over the past few years I have listened to what some people have said or read what they have written and thought, “What the heck are they talking about?!? Do they even know?”
They throw around words with such confident ignorance it makes me wonder whether they even know how words work, that words have meaning, and that words have impact.
There’s a lot of evidence to the contrary.
But then I see how some of these same people kidnap words, hold them hostage and bend them to their own purposes. Terms like “woke” and phrases like “DEI.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with either.
Whether you are talking about a person who has woken from slumber or gained awareness of a particular issue or piece of knowledge, what is wrong about being “woke?” Yet we have a whole segment of the American population who feel their pulse increase and the hairs on the back of their neck stand up when they hear it.
Diversity. Equity. Inclusion. All nouns connoting representation, balance, fairness and access, but many now think they refer only to discrimination against white people.
Before he took office for his second term, President Trump liked to say Joe Biden’s administration was “weaponizing” the justice system against him as he was investigated for a variety of misdeeds.
Never mind that the court cases, mostly at the state level and therefore of no direct connection to the Biden Department of Justice, often resulted in guilty verdicts, indicating with a strong degree of certainty the investigations were justified.
Now, though, when the president actually is weaponizing the Justice Department to go after people who participated in those investigations, his high-profile defenders cry foul and lob insults when we ask about his petty attempts at lawfare.
The trap for the casual observer is thinking all this is political tit-for-tat. They did it to him, now he’s doing it to them. Or worse, if the legal system wasn’t really being “weaponized” before, then maybe it’s not being weaponized this time and Trump’s enemies deserve to be prosecuted.
It continues with Antifa, short for anti-fascist, which in the parlance of the conservative movement under Trump, is a bad thing. I guess that means they think fascism is … a good thing?
Every conservative is a “real American.” Every liberal is part of the “radical Left.” The educated are “elitists,” while the uneducated — and often, purposefully misinformed — are “the smartest people.”
I felt like we had reached a new low when I saw a video clip last week where an ICE agent pulled out his smartphone to record a woman who was recording him on her phone. When she laughed at his gesture, he taunted, “We have a database … Now you’re a domestic terrorist.”
She and I had the same thought: “For recording you with a phone?”
Then I reminded myself how often protests against the use of excessive force by immigration control agents are characterized as “insurrections.” The president directs federal agents to provoke and to escalate because thinks insurrection will allow him to declare all-out war against protesters and their support networks.
I’m sure people who witnessed the sidewalk shooting death of nurse Alex Pretti last weekend feel like we already are at war. As expected, Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem and other Trump officials rushed to defend what to most people looked like a disarmed man being shot to death by a mob of masked gunmen.
Interesting that this happened not just in a blue city (Minneapolis) in a blue state (Minnesota) governed by a Democrat, but in a blue city in a blue state where the governor and elections officials have refused to surrender voter rolls to the Trump administration.
White House officials say they need information on every registered voter in this nation so they can maintain election integrity, but their history shows they often intend the opposite of what they promise.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi offered to stop the ICE assault in Minneapolis if the voter rolls were handed over, but doesn’t that mean the immigrant threat that supported their presence was not the reason they were sent in the first place?
People who should know better are saying a lot of things right now they don’t mean, and they know we know they don’t mean them. They’re going to say them anyway because they know the more noise they create, the harder it will be for people to focus on what matters most.
They will keep lying, but we must learn to listen with our eyes.
Terry E. Manning worked for 20 years as a newspaper journalist. He can be reached at teemanning@gmail.com.
