While right-wing rhetoric has been ramping up the anti-immigrant fascistic rhetoric since the beginning of the 2016 election, it feels like the recent 2024 vice presidential debate really made it clear that the right has moved to blaming immigrants (and the Democrats and anyone else they don’t like) for nearly everything these days. The suggestions to deport and punish anyone they don’t like have ramped up as well. This should be deeply concerning, both because it’s having actual negative effects on real people and because the pattern of fascistic rhetoric it falls into is not a healthy path. In this post I plan to analyze how some of this rhetoric works so that we know how to continue to fight against it toward a healthier world for us all.

As I analyze this, I’ll be referring to and quoting from Jason Stanley’s excellent short book How Fascism Works quite a bit.

Where I’m Coming From

As always, I’m coming at this as a former pastor’s kid from a right-leaning white Evangelical church who grew up to become a communication scholar.

My academic discipline has long been concerned with preventing things like the Holocaust from happening again through analyzing the rhetoric that allows that to happen. I have long shared that concern—and as I’ve discussed many times before here, the tools of my field have helped me to recognize many of the ways my own church and context have been vulnerable to fascistic rhetoric.

Appalled at This Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric for Years

Out of this context, I’ve been watching in horror since that first candidacy announcement of the former president who became president after the 2016 election, coming down the gold stairs declaring that Mexican r*pists were coming to get Americans.

I was appalled once again when both he and his current vice presidential candidate used national debate platforms to create and defend untrue narratives about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, saying they would deport them despite their legal immigrant status.

Understanding the Context: Fascistic “Law-and-Order” Rhetoric

I was appalled by these things, but not terribly surprised. Jason Stanley’s excellent little book How Fascism Works explains why in chapter 7, titled “Law and Order.”

“Fascist law-and-order rhetoric,” he says, “is explicitly meant to divide citizens into two classes: those of the chosen nation, who are lawful by nature, and those who are not, who are inherently lawless. In fascist politics, women who do not fit traditional gender roles, nonwhites, homosexuals, immigrants, ‘decadent cosmopolitans,’ those who do not have the dominant religion, are in their very existence violations of law and order. By describing black Americans as a threat to law and order, demagogues in the United States have been able to create a strong sense of white national identity that requires protection from the nonwhite ‘threat.’ A similar tactic is use internationally now to create friend-enemy distinctions based on fear in order to unify populations against immigrants.”

Others Are Impure, Not Us

In short, then, fascistic rhetoric tries to make the rightwing base feel superior, “pure,” and on the side of a righteousness of sorts by painting Others, including immigrants, women, Democrats, and LGBTQ+ folks, as criminal in nature, just by being the way they are.

This type of rhetoric has, as we’ve seen in the Holocaust and other awful situations, actually justified the dominant group in committing all sorts of crimes against the human rights of those people.

“They Are Criminals. We Make Mistakes.”

Stanley goes on to explain why this is possible without crippling amounts of cognitive dissonance by pointing out that “the word ‘criminal’ has a literal meaning, of course, but it also has a resonant meaning—people who by their nature are insensitive to society’s norms, drawn to violate the law by self-interest or malice. We do not generally use the term to describe those who may have inadvertently broken a law or who may have been compelled to violate a law in a desperate circumstance. …The word ‘criminal’ attributes a certain type of character to someone.”

He then highlights the reason the “in-group” tends not to see their own crimes as “criminal”: “They are criminals. We make mistakes.”

Tying This to Unhealthy Forgiveness Rhetoric in Abuse Cases

I’d like to pause here and point out that it doesn’t seem to be an accident that white Evangelicals and other clergy have used similar frameworks when employing abuse of forgiveness rhetoric during abuse scandals. Suddenly the clergyperson accused of abuse, in that case, is the “we” that “makes mistakes,” while the actual victim is seen to be a “criminal/sinner” for “refusing to forgive” the abuser for whatever horrific thing they have done.

As described in the excellent short documentary For Our Daughters (available for free on YouTube—please watch if you haven’t already! I previously talked about and linked to the film here), this example explains at least some of the overlap between conservative Christianity/Christian nationalistic discourse and the current right-wing fascistic rhetoric.

A Way of Deflecting From One’s Own Group’s Sins While Hurting Others

After all, it’s much easier to believe, for a lot of conservative people, that a group like drag queens are pedophiles by nature than to grapple with the idea that leaders of one’s own group are actually sexually abusing people.

(Can we just quickly say that’s rather the opposite of what Jesus stood for? Just read the Parable of the Good Samaritan for an example….)

Tying Together Clergy Sexual Abuse Rhetoric Back to Immigrant Rhetoric

Stanley goes on to explain that pinning r*pe as a crime on others that are seen to be “impure” by nature is actually a strong focus of fascistic rhetoric when he says that “the basic threat that fascist propaganda used to raise fear is that members of the targeted group will r*pe members of the chosen nation, thereby polluting its ‘blood.’ The threat of mass rape is simultaneously intended as a threat to the patriarchal norms of the fascist state, to the ‘manhood’ of the nation. The crime of rape is basic to fascist politics because it raises sexual anxiety, and an attendant need for protection of the nation’s manhood by the fascist authority.”

This passage brings us full circle, explaining why I was so concerned from the very opening statement of the 2016 candidacy of the 45^th president.

This Rhetoric Has Been Entirely Too Effective

The fact that he, a man who has now been convicted in court of sexual assault and many other crimes, was claiming that there were somehow hordes of “Mexican r*pists” coming to get people (read: white Americans), has not only been a classic sort of projection of blame on the easily targeted Other, it’s also placed him squarely in the wheelhouse of Naziesque fascistic rhetoric since the beginning of his campaign.

The fact that this rhetoric has continued to the point where 2024 campaign signs are regularly accusing Democrats of “open borders” is a proof that this rhetoric has had entirely too strong an influence on much too large a segment of the American public.

So Important to Keep Fighting Against This Rhetoric

It is so important that we reasonable folks continue to fight back against all versions of this disturbing rhetoric as long as we can.

Many people’s lives and well being have already been irresponsibly disrupted by this rhetoric—just ask the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, and all of the women and LGBTQ+ folks in red states, to start.

Let’s keep doing what we can to prevent more of this literally unhealthy nonsense from bearing more bad fruit.

A Final Charge

Go team #AssertiveSpirituality! Let’s continue to do what we can where we are with what we’ve got to keep speaking up against the toxic crap toward a healthier world for us all. We can do this thing.

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