Words & Phrases We Could Do Without

‘Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals...’ and antifa too!

White House mouthpiece Karoline Leavitt declared last week that Democrats’ “main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” That followed Speaker of the House Mike Johnson smear of 7 million people preparing to turn out for peaceful No Kings Day protests. Johnson declared that millions of fellow Americans were the “Hate America” crowd, the “pro-Hamas wing and the, you know, the Antifa people.”

Who knew there were 7M such people in the United States?! And how clever they are—terrorists disguised as grandmothers, babies in strollers, aging veterans, young parents, and spirited folks wearing inflatable animal costumes. Those sly “Hate America” types decided to bring American flags, hold up images of the Declaration of Independence, dress in 1776 garb, and reaffirm in hundreds of thousands of signs proclaiming their love for America. It turns out this hateful crowd is everywhere: in big and small cities, rural areas, mountain ranges, and beach towns. The Villages in Florida; Bozeman, Montana; all across Texas; in hundreds of red cities and counties; and even those beyond our borders are stocked with such signs.

To be clear, ten times the number that turned out on Saturday (roughly 70M) turned out to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024. That’s an awful lot of “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”

Photo by Alex Gruber

We have to remember that the worst act of domestic violence in our lifetime was perpetrated by anti-democracy extremists on Jan. 6 at our Capitol, where Trump supporters attacked police, smashed windows, defaced the halls of Congress, and bore the flag of traitors (the Confederacy). Trump pardoned all of them, including the most violent criminals.

Yes, on one level it is absurd—stupid, even—for MAGA Republicans to denounce an entire party, tens of millions of Americans citizens, as outside the body politic. (They no doubt helped drive turnout.) Republicans are now effectively suggest that about half of the country should be arrested, deported, or worse. In going full partisan, Trump is in essence conceding that he is not president of the United States; he is just the leader of an increasingly unpopular cult. Likewise, in declaring it open season during the shutdown to hurt Democrats who benefit from programs, fire Democrats who run them, and dismantle programs Democrats like, Trump is only reaffirming that he only cares about those who support him. (Of course, he is hurting those supporters even more severely, given the overrepresentation of red state Americans who benefit from Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies.)

This is more than rhetorical hypocrisy. MAGA politicians who, for instance, insist Charlie Kirk’s murder was the result of “hate speech” (notice how—as of yet—no sound evidence has emerged that the killer was motivated by leftwing ideology) have no business demonizing and dehumanizing Democrats. They certainly have no basis to flyspeck Democrats’ accurate descriptions of the views and rhetoric of MAGA politicians (including the vice president, who blithely excuses adults spewing bile about rape, the Holocaust, and Black people, and knowingly fomented baseless vitriol against Haitian immigrants).

If their rhetoric was “merely” irresponsible, hypocritical, and disgusting, MAGA pols’ attacks on millions of Americans would be bad enough, but along with excluding half of the country from “real America,” the administration is simultaneously launching a terrifying legal offensive involving every aspect of federal power from ICE to the IRS to the FBI to the Justice Department.

Trump’s executive order to identify “antifa” as a domestic terror organization becomes all the more dangerous when he and his party label everyone and anyone it dislikes as terrorist, Hamas operative, or a member of antifa. Those phases emerging from the mouths of autocrat bullies have lost all meaning. If “terrorist” or “antifa” can apply to grandmas, parents with kids, veterans, students, teachers, government workers, scientists, elected Democrats, and other patriots who peacefully demonstrate, then these labels applied by Leavitt, Johnson, and Trump apply to millions of Americans become farcical.

It is past time to acknowledge that the whole antifa/Hamas/illegal immigrant/terrorist demonization shtick is a clumsy, unconstitutional maneuver to weaponize the federal government against anyone who does not fall into line in Trump’s autocracy.

Anti-fascist is the most accurate term to describe the vast cross-section of Americans of different ages, races, creeds, ethnicities, beliefs, geographic locations, jobs, specific complaints, and political affiliations who turned out to demonstrate peacefully (unlike ICE agents who kidnap and brutalize Americans in the streets, use pepper spray and other weapons, and show up masked and unidentified).

If Republicans bothered to pay the slightest attention to what demonstrators say, write, and do, they would know that anti-fascism is what has bound them together, just as anti-fascism bound together the Allies in WW2, the men and women who fought Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan and liberated the death camps, the opponents of dictators like Viktor Orbán and Jair Bolsonaro and Vladimir Putin, and the civil rights protestors who marched and died to liberate the Black population from white oppression, violence, and persecution.

So let’s dump these absurd slurs. In their anger, hatred, and panic in the face of a diverse democracy, MAGA politicians have made a mockery of the vocabulary they are using against their opponents. If MAGA wants to declare war on or silence millions of patriots, they cannot complain when we identify them as autocrats or fascists. They define themselves by what they are against.

That still leaves open a question for Trump and his fellow slanderers: If anti-fascists who pay tribute to democracy, free speech, nonviolence, empathy, the rule of law, and our founding documents are the target of MAGA’s ire, what does that make Leavitt, Johnson, Vance, Trump, and the rest?