Thursday, March 08, 2018

"GLOBALIST": AN ANTI-SEMITIC SLUR, BUT SO MUCH MORE

So ... about the word "globalist":
The term “globalist” has been used at the White House at least three times this week in reference to an outgoing Jewish Trump administration official, raising some eyebrows because the word is increasingly used in xenophobic and anti-Semitic contexts.

The word came up on Wednesday when a reporter asked White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders whether a similar candidate will take the place of Gary Cohn, the outgoing director of President Donald Trump’s National Economic Council.

“He was a noted free trader, a globalist. Will the president seek another globalist, another free trader?” Fox News reporter John Roberts asked.

This followed Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, using the word “globalist,” in quotation marks, to describe Cohn in a statement that was tweeted by his department on Tuesday....

I should do a deep dive on this, but I'm lazy, so I just did a Google image search for "globalists," and, yes, George Soros comes up a lot, but not every globalist is Jewish:















Much of the booga-booga scaremongering around the concept of globalism focuses on Jews, but "globalist" can also refer to the pope and Bill Nye the Science Guy; also Chelsea Clinton and Bill Gates, as well as Hitler and Rupert Murdoch's kids. To some extent it's just the right-wing cussword "elitist" on steroids -- you and I are probably globalists to these pinheads, because we saw Lady Bird and don't run screaming if we see a woman walking down the street in a hijab. Or maybe the precise definition of "globalist" is "elitist with great wealth or a big media presence" (because, to the right, "elitist" on its own doesn't presuppose wealth -- anyone with left-of-center politics and non-Applebee's tastes is an elitist). I'm sure the creators of these graphics think most "globalists" are Jewish, including many of the ones who obviously aren't. But the slur is flexible.

No comments: