It is an old childhood truism that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”

In the United States, where speech is protected with a constitutional and social ferocity like no other country in the world, this has always been the default position. We want strong, full-throated debates, and we don’t want to punish people for using language that offends.

But sometimes, language crosses the line. Sometimes, and even our own jurisprudence recognizes this, language can incite violence. That’s one of the exceptions to the almost absolute protection for free speech. And then we have those situations where language is used not so much to incite as to dehumanize. And if you are no longer human, you are no longer protected against inhumanity.

Take the Rwandan massacres. In 1994, the ruling Hutu government enlisted the aid of several radio stations, most notably Radio Television Mille Collines (RTLM), to spread propaganda among the illiterate Hutu population, urging them to look at their Tutsi neighbors as animals. The station exercised an immense amount of power and influence in the country. Concordia University has gathered the transcripts of some of those recordings, and they chill the blood. According to the preface to those transcriptions:

“From October 1993 to late 1994, RTLM was used by Hutu leaders to advance an extremist Hutu message and anti-Tutsi disinformation, spreading fear of a Tutsi genocide against Hutu, identifying specific Tutsi targets or areas where they could be found, and encouraging the progress of the genocide.”

We all know what happened. Starting in April 1994 and continuing for 100 days, over 800,000 people were murdered by the Interhamwe, the government forces. And those radio broadcasts helped gin up the anger against the Tutsis.

Of course, the genocide would have occurred without the radio transmissions. But the words used and disseminated by those in positions of authority were powerful weapons, turning people’s opinions against an innocent but hated ethnic minority. Words are cheap and plentiful, and the arsenal is easily replenished.

I write this not to compare what happened this weekend in Butler, Pa., to the Rwanda genocide. Donald Trump is not dead, he survived an assassination attempt, and the killer was neutralized. We do not even yet know his motives, and it will likely be a while before we do. In the meantime, conspiracy theorists will weigh in with their tin foil hat opinions. I do not own any of those.

But I am also not insensitive to the fact the political climate has become dangerously heated over the last eight years. When Donald Trump was elected back in 2016, women, in particular, acted as if they had been ordered to purchase burqas, leave school, and keep their wombs open for rental. Minority groups started screaming about the revocation of rights, and we were told that everyone in the Trump administration was one level down from Satan.

But it’s when he left office that things started to really ramp up, to the point that this past week alone, I counted at least 127 times on the combined networks of CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC and CBS that Trump was called “a threat to democracy,” or variations of that phrase. I started actually taking notes and writing down the times the words were mentioned after a roundtable on CNN used the terminology on every single broadcast between seven and midnight. It was a script, and they all used it.

When they call someone a “convicted felon” because they actually have been convicted, albeit under questionable circumstances, you can be annoyed at the lack of grace. Still, you can’t say it’s inaccurate. But when you paint someone as a dangerous man, a despot, someone who will destroy the country, force women to push out babies and then die on the delivery table, create concentration camps for immigrants and allow police to kill minorities at will, you create a very dangerous dynamic in society.

Most reasonable people won’t do anything. Most will just shake their heads and say, “Yeah, I hate the guy. What’s for dinner?”

But there are far too many people like the 20-year-old in Butler, Pa., who decided to go out in a blaze of glory targeting the “threat to democracy.” A troubled, diseased mind is susceptible to rhetoric and propaganda. It is political malpractice to give them the push they need.

Thank God Donald Trump survived. Now can everyone just shut up?

Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers