(CNN)When Donald Trump ran for president, one of the core pillars of his pitch to the voting public was this: Political correctness is a cancer eating away at the body politic.
“We have to straighten out our country, we have to make our country great again, and we need energy and enthusiasm,” Trump said during an appearance on “Meet the Press” in August 2015. “And this political correctness is just absolutely killing us as a country. You can’t say anything. Anything you say today, they’ll find a reason why it’s not good.”
People responded — big time. The idea that liberals and/or the elites had made it so that no one could say what they thought, for fear of being labeled intolerant or un-enlightened, was a powerful one in the very communities that Trump was appealing to: Whites watching the society and culture they had grown up with change faster and in ways that, in some cases, made them deeply uncomfortable. (Exit polls in 2016 showed Trump got 57% of the white vote, 8% of the black vote and 28% of the Hispanic vote).
Like much of Trump’s appeal, there was a kernel of truth in it. Speech — on places like college campuses, for example — had been curtailed over recent years by usually liberal groups insisting offense and demanding “trigger warnings” in classes and quads. There was a frustration among many that having views that diverged from what liberals had decided was acceptable were being shouted down.
The problem with Trump’s assault on political correctness is that he took it so far that he clearly emboldened not only those lurking in the shadows to bring their hate speech into the light of day, but also lowered the overall bar for what is considered acceptable discourse among politicians and other leaders in the country.
The first piece of that equation — the rise of hate speech — has drawn most of the attention publicly because, well, that’s what these purveyors of intolerance want. From the murder of 11 Jews at a synagogue in Pittsburgh by a man who voiced anti-Semitic views in online forums to the white supremacist marches in Charlottesville, Virginia, that led to the death of a counter-protester named Heather Heyer, we’ve seen these abhorrent views on display more and more — and often with disastrous consequences.
The Anti-Defamation League has said that incidents of public anti-Semitism — bomb threats, vandalism etc. — surged by 57% in 2017. There were a total of 1,986 anti-Semitic incidents reported in the US in 2017; in 2016 that number was 1,267.
A study by the Center for Hate & Extremism at the University of California San Bernardino showed that in 2017 hate crimes reported to police in America’s 10 largest cities rose 12.5%. It was the the 4th…
