Speech Is Violence—Unless The Left Says It: Democrats’ Hypocrisy On Speech
Right-Wing Speech Is Violence, And Left-Wing Speech Is Aspirational And Freedom Loving
By Chuck Warren
Newsflash: Democrats and their media partisans are hypocrites. Over a week ago, President Trump pushed the president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, on the persecution of white Afrikaners. Ramaphosa has repeatedly defended the chant, “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer.” According to Ramaphosa, however, this is just “a liberation chant and slogan.”
On the left, outlets from the New York Times to CNN have rushed to defend the slogan.
In 2023, the Times “reported” that the chant requires historical context and colonialism, imperialism, apartheid, and blah blah blah, but really, those words are meant to “mobilize against an oppressive system.”
After the confrontation in the Oval Office, the Times went further:
The chant was popularized during the anti-apartheid movement in the 1990s, when Black South Africans were fighting a brutal and racist regime. Veterans and historians of the apartheid struggle say the song should not be taken as a literal call to violence, an assessment that a South African judge agreed with in a 2022 ruling. But the video of Mr. Malema was seized upon by right-wing commentators, including Elon Musk, the South African-born billionaire who left the country as a teenager, as evidence of violence against white people.
CNN also brought in an expert to provide ‘historical context’ that this is just an anti-apartheid chant (apartheid ended 35 years ago), and that most of the land in South Africa is owned by Afrikaners.
But even then, the South African expert mentioned that most black South Africans also oppose the chant, which makes it funny that progressive, white Americans are so adamant about defending it.
This is just the latest version of Democrats’ hypocrisy on speech.
Last year, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib tweeted that actually the Palestinian slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is not hateful speech but “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.” Social scientists have a term for this: lie!
Of course, the New York Times has similarly defended the slogan, providing, wait for it, historical context!
Bernie Sanders also refused to condemn it. Just a year before, he condemned the slogan of the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, “between the Sea and the Jordan [River] there will only be Israeli sovereignty,” which is nearly identical, but also, it has been dropped by Likud as an official slogan, which Sanders did not mention because you should never let facts get in the way of your ideological agenda.
Or remember that Democrats were trying to send Trump to prison because of his January 6 speech? His crime was saying, “We fight like hell, and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.” PBS even counted that Trump used the word fight or fighting 20 times.
Joe Biden posted it on Facebook and accused him of inciting violence—in addition to trying to put him in prison.
But guess who said “fight like hell” first: Elizabeth Warren! During a 2020 campaign Zoom line, Warren said, “We’re in this fight, and we’re going to fight like hell.”
“Fight” is Warren’s favorite word. When she was running for president, in a single speech, she used the word fight or a derivative of it 44 times!
Not only did the left-wing media not object—they treated her as their darling when she was a presidential hopeful before she dropped out of the race.
In 2024, in an ad, Biden also promised to “fight like hell.”
As for Trump saying that we could lose our country, let’s remember how many times Democrats said that we would lose our democracy if Trump won. Democrats and the legacy media will be quick to jump and s
ay “but that didn’t incite violence,” except that people literally tried to kill Trump—he was literally shot!—as a result of their hyperbolic talks.
Should Trump now prosecute them for inciting violence? According to their logic, he should.
Democrats love to say that speech is violence—but they have no problem using the exact words they call violence. What they really mean is that conservatives should shut up.
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Chuck Warren only and not his co-host Sam Stone or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.
If the Left didn’t have double standards, they would have no standards at all.
This is a stupid polemic. South Africans are struggling to overcome their difficulties and don’t need this. I think you are projecting your racist American fantasy onto the country. I think most all South Africans do not appreciate your using them for political purposes.