- Moderator
- #1
Political correctness was the pendulum of culture swinging to far to the left. But now, we're seeing the opposite. The anti-political correctness crowd, culminating in Trump's electoral victory is encouraging a far more open and socially accepted form of hate. Where it used to be socially condemned, it's now applauded, as free speech and part of the mainstream, set against the backdrop of rabid anti-immigrant and anti-other fears.
How The Internet Fueled The Rise In Hate Crimes In California | Fast Company | The Future Of Business
How The Internet Fueled The Rise In Hate Crimes In California | Fast Company | The Future Of Business
Messages about the “otherness” of immigrants have gained an expansive audience. “Bigots have become especially nuanced and skillful at hanging onto the coattails of important public policy debates that are going on in the mainstream,” Levin says. “There’s an online cottage industry that attaches bigotry to real policy issues from national security to free speech on campus to the economy.”
“Some groups continue to promote overt racism and bigotry,” Levin continues, “but some are changing their branding, or toning down the swastikas. And their arguments are no longer that Latinos and immigrants are genetically inferior. It’s that they’re culturally or religiously inapposite to American ideals. Or sometimes the message is shrouded in the idea that we’re under attack from terrorists.”
Scrubbed of the eugenics ideology or race war rhetoric that may have helped spawn them, and freed from the stigma that comes from being the clear intellectual property of Nazi skinheads or the Ku Klux Klan, many of these messages about the otherness of immigrants have gained an expansive audience among Americans who might not embrace them in their raw form. While these views haven’t been given much credence on NBC’s Meet the Press or in the op-ed pages of the Washington Post, they’re regularly part of the conversation on Fox News, and they constitute the bread and butter of breitbart.com—which now enjoys a monthly readership greater than the entire populations of Great Britain, Germany, or France.
“Some groups continue to promote overt racism and bigotry,” Levin continues, “but some are changing their branding, or toning down the swastikas. And their arguments are no longer that Latinos and immigrants are genetically inferior. It’s that they’re culturally or religiously inapposite to American ideals. Or sometimes the message is shrouded in the idea that we’re under attack from terrorists.”
Scrubbed of the eugenics ideology or race war rhetoric that may have helped spawn them, and freed from the stigma that comes from being the clear intellectual property of Nazi skinheads or the Ku Klux Klan, many of these messages about the otherness of immigrants have gained an expansive audience among Americans who might not embrace them in their raw form. While these views haven’t been given much credence on NBC’s Meet the Press or in the op-ed pages of the Washington Post, they’re regularly part of the conversation on Fox News, and they constitute the bread and butter of breitbart.com—which now enjoys a monthly readership greater than the entire populations of Great Britain, Germany, or France.
