In 2015, candidate Trump self-identified as a nationalist, as in putting the needs of his country above the needs other countries. His opponents noticed that most of his supporters were white. Yes, they were nationalists who happened to be white. Nothing wrong with that, so far.
Then Trump’s critics turned “nationalists who happen to be mostly white” into “white nationalists.”
White nationalists are racists by definition.
But once you have labeled a leader a white nationalist, which most of us agree implies racism, is it a stretch to say that person is also a white supremacist? After all, what’s the point of being racist if you don’t think your subgroup is the most awesome one?
Human beings are not rational creatures. We are easy to program with what I call “word-thinking” of the type that evolves nationalist, to nationalists who are mostly white, to white nationalists, to white supremacists. There is no logic connecting those things, just similarities in words.
This happens on both sides of the political divide. If Democrats say they want universal healthcare, and they self-label as Democratic Socialists, you can depend on the pundits on the right to relabel them to “socialists.” But that’s not the end of it. Once you have labelled someone a socialist, is it really that different from communism? In the rational world, there’s a big difference, but in the world of word-thinking, once you are a Democratic Socialist, you’re a socialist, and once you are a socialist, you’re basically a communist, and once you are a communist, you are basically Stalin, and once you are Stalin, you have the blood of tens-of-million of people on your hands because the trouble will start any day now, right?
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