Shortly after midnight this morning, Joshua Micah Marshall, founder and head of Talking Points Memo, put up a piece titled Trump's Blood Libel & Press Failure to which my wife just pointed me and which I think is perhaps as important as any piece written in response to the hate-filled rant by Trump in Phoenix two days ago.
First, for starters, the idea of “blood libel” comes from anti-Semitism, the false, hateful and dangerous notion that Jews needed the blood of a Christian in order to make the matzoh for Passover. It has been around for centuries, often with tragic consequences. Marshall, being of Jewish background as am I, is well aware of what the term is, and is using it deliberately.
You can get a sense of Marshal’s focus by his opening words:
Even now, after all that's happened, most political reporters find themselves either unwilling or unable to identify Donald Trump's tirades as hate speech. But they fit the textbook definition, inasmuch as it's even a useful concept.
He explores a bit the notions of what hate speech is, from familiar use of denigrating terms and beyond. He also calls to task the news media for not being direct enough on what the contents of the speech in Phoenix really were, writing
There's no question that what Trump's Wednesday night speech was was hate speech, a tirade filled with yelling, a snarling voice, air chopped to bits with slashing hands and through it all a story of American victims helpless before a looming threat from dangerous, predatory outsiders.