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Rightwing Disinfo Outlets Love Dog Whistle Attacking Free Market Capitalism As Communist 'Thuggery' [1]
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Date: 2022-12-20
The well-funded Republican campaign to attack big businesses for considering oil spills, sweatshops, and swindlers bad for profits has kept rolling lately, with Texas Republicans doing their best Joseph McCarthy impressions to try and find the communists on Wall Street. Unsurprisingly, they have ended up shooting themselves, and their own constituents' retirements , in the foot.
But as we look back at this year and forward to the next, we can’t help but worry about where the anti-ESG campaign is going. (For those just tuning in, ESG refers to the Environmental, Social and Governance considerations that businesses use to weigh risk and make investments.)
Case in point is a NYPost column by Betsy McCaughey . It's mostly the standard fare, but two things stood out among the otherwise routine anti-ESG script.
"Wall Street asset managers," McCaughey wrote, "are putting capital in companies with woke policies and choking off capital from companies that don’t kowtow to their ESG agenda." Now to us, that sounds like a weird way of saying that the free market is allocating capital how it sees fit in order to avoid the risks of businesses that are prone to environmental disaster, social justice-driven boycotts, or bad governance. But McCaughey's next line declares that companies considering financial risk and public opinion "Sounds like the Chinese Communist Party, not America."
As proof, McCaughey, former Lieutenant Governor of New York, rests her case on the fact that Blackrock's ESG operations employ people who worked for Obama and donated to Sens. Warren and Sanders. That's it.
Apparently Democratic supporters having jobs is "like the Chinese Communist Party," whereas, by contrast, Republicans like McCaughey are free to implicitly demand that companies like Blackrock fire anyone who's ever donated to a Democratic campaign unless they want to continue getting harassed by GOP officials .
But McCaughey's out-of-left-field invocation of China, and "the Chinese Communist Party" specifically, isn't the only non-sequitur of a dog whistle in the piece- though it is one. In the same way Chris Rufo made "CRT" toxic , "CCP" is a recurring trigger-word for conservatives , especially in the Covid-19 era when they falsely blame China for intentionally spreading coronavirus.
So after ringing that pavlovian 'CCP' bell while attacking Blackrock for employing Democrats, McCaughey writes that "ESG is thuggery, using financial clout to accomplish what Americans would never approve at the ballot box."
And boy did the headline editors across the disinfo media landscape take note!
While the NYPost edited McCaughey's "thuggery" for its headline about "the thuggish 'ESG' woke agenda," the syndicated headline from creators.com ratcheted up the racism. Just like how McCaughey shoe-horned the "Communist China'' angle into her piece, headline editors at RealClear and TownHall both went with "ESG Funds Use Financial Strong-arming and Thuggery CCP Style." The Daily Caller , mirroring other rightwing disinfo outlets, instead went with the headline "The Left's ESG Scam Is A Mirror Image of CCP-Style Thuggery."
Media recognition of the use of "thug" as coded language goes back to at least 2014, when TV outlets used the word 625 times in discussions about (Stanford University graduate and) star NFL cornerback Richard Sherman, in response to an (emotional) interview he gave directly after he helped send his team to the Super Bowl . Sherman, who (if it isn't already obvious from context clues) is Black, said 'thug' is "the accepted way of calling somebody the N-word nowadays."
Seven years later, in response to criticism of a local sports announcer calling a Black basketball player who was ejected for breaking an opponent's nose a "thug," Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn wrote , "You can complain" that the word's meaning "evolved without your consent from a race-neutral equivalent to 'ruffian' into a potentially toxic term," but "you can't now say you haven't been put on notice" (emphasis added).
No one's saying that any use of the phrase "thug" is always meant as a more respectable version of the racist slur. But given the increasing overlap of the fossil-fueled campaign against ESG standards and algorithmically-amplified hate-mongering on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., its use in multiple outlets should serve as a warning of what's to come in 2023.
Smearing Wall Street's financial due diligence concerning environmental, social, and governance issues as 'communist thuggery' may not make a whole lot of sense for those who see ESG as a small step capital has made to protect itself from the climate crisis. But to those who have been trained by the repeated use of the word "thug" to accompany footage of Black protestors, for whom "communist" was the ultimate insult growing up during the Cold War, and who have been led to believe Covid is a CCP bioweapon, the reaction is so instinctual they probably don't even recognize it.
These headlines merely provide further proof of what we've known for years: Republicans use racism as a tool to build support for otherwise unpopular policies, turning complex issues into three-letter dog whistles.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/20/2142890/-Rightwing-Disinfo-Outlets-Love-Dog-Whistle-Attacking-Free-Market-Capitalism-As-Communist-Thuggery
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