Liberals heard ‘dog whistle’ in speech to Poland
Trump said Western civilization stands for “family, for freedom, for country, and for God,” and elsewhere in the speech predicted the West will “prevail” against “radical Islamic terrorism.”
“Trump’s speech in Warsaw was an appropriate, even eloquent, speech worthy of a president speaking of America,” conservative Bill Kristol, a frequent critic of the president, tweeted afterward.
“The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” Trump also said. “Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?”
Yet the speech was called a “white nationalist dog whistle” by Washington Post writer Jonathan Capehart.
Atlantic writer Peter Beinart claimed that Trump’s reference to the West, quoted above, is some kind of racist code word.
“’It’s a strange day,” began a National Review Online editorial, “when praising the Warsaw uprising, the Solidarity movement, and Pope John Paul II makes you a neo-Nazi…”
Longtime conservative activist Bob Vander Plaats of the Family Leader tells OneNewsNow the left-wing reaction, not the speech, is an obvious ploy if you know what to look for.
“There’s little amazement or wonder why the liberal media would attack that,” he observes, “because they see that as completely out of step with their goal of having government in charge and government being our ultimate source.”
The Federalist senior editor David Harsanyi analyzed the reaction from left-wing website Vox, which is often cited by conservatives to gauge left-wing hysterics. A writer at Vox predictably claimed Trump’s speech “sounded like an alt-right manifesto” to the ears of liberals.
Yet in a speech supposedly sprinkled with Nazi-like code words, Trump praised the people of Poland for their attempted uprising against the Nazis in 1944 with a monument behind him, the Federalist editor pointed out.
The “Warsaw Uprising” broke out in August 1944 when the Polish resistance attempted to liberate the city from the Germans. The fighting lasted for approximately 60 days before the Germans regrouped and defeated the Poles, killing or wounding about 216,000 fighters and civilians.
Harsanyi wrote:
In this supposed alt-right manifesto, Trump also praised the Polish for resisting communism and Nazi campaigns that meant “to demolish freedom, your faith, your laws, your history, your identity – indeed the very essence of your culture and your humanity.”
Washington Times columnist Robert Knight tells OneNewsNow he was struck by the difference between Trump’s speech in Warsaw and Barack Obama’s 2009 “apology tour” of Europe and the Middle East.
While Obama “hailed” the Muslim world and attacked the U.S., says Knight, Trump told the Polish people that Poland and the U.S. share “fundamental values” that are Judeo-Christian values.
In yet another anti-West display, Vander Plaats says it’s bizarre that the mayor of New York City travelled last week to Germany, site of the G-20 summit, to join anti-capitalist rioters who fight Hamburg police.
“Which really runs in the face of everything that this country was founded on,” he says of Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Comments from Robert Knight have been added to the story.
Leave a Reply