During the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton said that half of Trump supporters were a basket of deplorables. Right-wing anger ensued, and Clinton later apologized for stating the truth. Earlier, during the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama stated, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” He was right: That bitterness is what ultimately led to Donald Trump being elected in 2016. Candidate Obama apologized shortly after the remarks were made public, and the Clinton campaign jumped on them as derogatory—even though he was right, and was actually prescient about 2016.
Recent history is littered with Democrats apologizing for offending delicate Republican sensibilities. Tell the truth about Republicans, and they will whine and complain about it until the Democrat apologizes. It has become a game with Republicans. The conservative movement in this country has gotten so good at demanding apologies that it was able to get a report from the Department of Homeland Security on right-wing extremism (i.e., terrorism) pulled in 2009.
The report called this convergence of factors the “most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States.”
Conservatives went ballistic.
Michelle Malkin blasted it as “one of the most embarrassingly shoddy pieces of propaganda I’d ever read out of DHS.” Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) said the administration was “awfully willing to paint law-abiding Americans, including war veterans, as ‘extremists.’” Then-Rep. Steve Buyer (R-IN) — the top Republican on the House Veterans’ Affairs committee at the time — called it “inconceivable” that some veterans could pose a threat.
Most notably, then-Republican Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH)
attacked Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano for releasing the report at all. “[T]he Secretary of Homeland Security owes the American people an explanation for why… her own Department is using [‘terrorist’] to describe American citizens who disagree with the direction Washington Democrats are taking our nation,” he demanded.
President Obama’s Homeland Security secretary at the time, Janet Napolitano, apologized for the report and removed it from department’s website. The report was right! Just two weeks ago a right-wing extremist went on a shooting spree in Dallas. This was not an isolated incident. In February of 2019, NPR reported, “The FBI arrested U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Christopher Hasson of Silver Spring, Maryland, after labeling him a domestic terrorist who pushed for a ‘white homeland’ and had a hit list of Democratic politicians and media figures.”
There are far more: The Southern Poverty Law Center maintains a lengthy list of right-wing extremist attacks in the United States, most of which have made national news but have rarely been called out as acts of terrorism by the media.
The most recent case of conservatives demanding an apology from a Democrat? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said that the camps created by and used by the Trump administration to hold asylum-seekers are concentration camps. Ocasio-Cortez said, “The US is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are. If that doesn’t bother you … I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘never again’ means something.”
There was a predictable uproar on the right.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is correct: They are concentration camps. And if you are not disturbed by them, you are the one with the problem. This is also not the first time in U.S. history that concentration camps have been operated on U.S. soil. There is no reason for these camps to exist; there is no reason for children to be separated from their parents. The people in those camps are coming here legally and requesting asylum. This “crisis” is wholly created by Trump and his cabal. We need more Democrats calling this Republican cruelty out.
So far, Ocasio-Cortez has held her ground and not apologized for speaking the truth. It is time other Democrats follow her lead and speak the truth about Republicans. They don’t like to hear the truth—they will whine, complain, and demand apologies. No more—no more apologies to them. They are tearing this country apart with hatred, bigotry, and division. If their feelings get hurt, so be it.