Since the tactic of writing off half the country as “Nazi” “garbage” wasn’t working, the Democrat Party’s unofficial PR team has a new shorthand for everything they don’t like: “hate.”
At Sunday’s Grammys, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio — a man who looked at himself one day and decided he wanted the entire world to refer to him as “Bad Bunny” — put this shorthand to practice, magically distilling arguments about immigration policy into a binary between “hate” and “love.” Celebrity award acceptance speeches are low-hanging fruit as far as journalistic criticism goes, so I’ll spare you a further breakdown, but you can read his comments here if you’re a glutton for punishment.
The weaponization of the word “hate” is nothing new. Since 1990, the Southern Poverty Law Center has managed a list of “hate” groups, which now includes “Radical Traditional Catholicism,” Moms for Liberty, the American College of Pediatricians, and “pickup artists.” (SPLC defines the latter hate group as “a community of men who use certain seduction techniques referred to as ‘game’ to pursue sexual relationships with women.”)
But the slur has been deployed with renewed moral preening recently, at immigration agents who are enforcing immigration laws that a majority of the country voted to start enforcing.
Look for photos of white liberals taking to the streets to make their disdain for law enforcement known, and you’ll probably see someone who forced their kid to hold a sign like “Love over Hate.” Small-time revolution spokesman Abdikarim Khasim, who also works as a “Minnesota rideshare driver,” announced at a Minneapolis gathering that Americans “are facing a tsunami of hate from our own federal government.”
In Tallahassee, Florida, on Monday, a smattering of high schoolers played hooky to “protest” immigration enforcement. In the eloquent words of its teenage organizer, “The hate in the halls is loud, but we want to be louder.”
The oppressed high school population of resort town Park City, Utah, declared their commitment to “choose love not hate” in a walkout last week. (Their expressions of “love” and “unity” included “ICE IS BETTER CRUSHED” and “THE ONLY ICE I LIKE IS THE ICE MY TWO GAY HOCKEY BOYFRIENDS SKATE AROUND ON,” alongside an Orwell quote.)
Reducing your political opponents and their beliefs to “hate” allows you to dismiss them entirely, without the inconvenience of having to engage with any perspectives but your own. It also spares you the trouble of having to say specifically why you don’t like things like countries having borders and rapists being deported. Like the nonsense smear “election denier,” it has enough moral superiority and vague meaninglessness to ostracize your intended target without actually saying anything.
There are the obvious realities that these same people have no problem “hating” ICE agents who are doing their jobs. They’re so full of “love” that their battle screech is “F— ICE,” black ICE agents are getting called “f—ing house n—–s” by the self-appointed hate-haters, and oh look there’s been an 8,000 percent increase in death threats against ICE agents and their families.
Nor do these moral arbiters express qualms about hating other conservative-coded bogeymen such as Donald “literally Hitler” Trump, J6ers, or Charlie Kirk, a husband and father whose public assassination was celebrated publicly on the left. Obviously, they’re unbothered by the hate in the hearts of the illegal aliens who murdered Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and an untold number of other innocent Americans. The hypocrisy is so obvious and tired that it’s hardly worth pointing out anymore.
But the mindless “hate” bashing isn’t just hypocritical; it’s a worldview giveaway. Hate, after all, can be properly directed at evil, and every leftist invoking Christianity must also reckon with the command in Romans 12:9 to “hate what is evil.” God Himself “hates the wicked.”
That’s an uncomfortable truth for many today because they are uncomfortable with the reality of evil. Laken and Jocelyn’s murderers weren’t “evil,” in this framework; they were just victims of a system that created them. Cultures that normalize the rape and abuse of women and children aren’t “wicked,” they’re just different from your heteronormative Western ways and also you’re a racist for noticing.
The rapists and murderers can’t really be bad, so the guys who are trying to arrest them must be bad. Suicidal empathy is just Christian ethics minus the reality of evil.
The “F— ICE” crowd borrows from the remnants of Christian ethics enough to assign righteousness to itself and badness to scary ICE agents in masks. But they have to couch their moral crusade in sophistry about how they’re fighting evil in a really nice, loving way. Sure, Renee Good drove her car into an ICE agent, but she told him she wasn’t mad at him!
The same dynamic is at play in poll numbers showing Americans want mass deportations, but also want ICE agents to be nice to the murderers, rapists, and other lawbreakers they’re deporting. Society has grown uncomfortable with strong, masculine responses to injustice. Public hangings for our worst criminals were deemed inhumane and replaced with execution at the tip of a needle, mimicking medical care. When Brett Kavanaugh got visibly angry at being accused of being a serial gang rapist, he was crucified for daring to show outrage. There’s a reason all the anti-ICE protesters are “fighting” with annoying whistles and childish taunts, and (thankfully) not the traditional forms of warfare you might expect from people who believe they’re under “Nazi” rule.
“Hate” is just another word for meanness, which is the opposite of niceness, which is the guiding ethic of the postmodern liberal mind. The worst thing you can do under this moral regime isn’t an act, like murdering an innocent girl while she’s jogging — it’s having hateful feelings.
Elle Purnell is the assignment editor at The Federalist. She has appeared on Fox Business and Newsmax, and her work has been featured by RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.
