Political Censorship: How the Left Is Trying to Frame MAGA Hats as Symbols of Hate

A Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat, on Jan. 22, 2019. Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times

Commentary

A united front of legacy news outlets, Silicon Valley billionaires, leftist “community organizers,” and Democrat politicians are pushing a political censorship campaign targeting conservatives.

Their goal: to frame President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan of “Make America Great Again,” or “MAGA,” as a symbol of hatred. They can then use this to justify online political censorship and the suppression of Trump’s voter base.

The public just witnessed two incidents in which legacy news outlets were exposed as having reported false stories that helped to shape their “white nationalist” narrative. The first involved Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann, who was harassed by a Native American man while wearing a MAGA hat and then defamed by news outlets and public figures. The second involved “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett, who staged a fake hate crime against himself.

Despite the fact that both of these incidents were debunked, the narrative remains. And for those pushing it, this narrative has strategic value.

Political Weapon

Actress Alyssa Milano still has a tweet, posted after the Sandmann incident, that states, “The red MAGA hat is the new white hood.”

Milano’s tweet is just one example showing that for many people, an incident doesn’t need to be real to evoke emotions; and once an emotional memory is formed, it can be agitated and sustained for political use.

Hillary Clinton is also capitalizing on this momentum. She said in an April 9 tweet, “The white nationalists certainly think MAGA is a white nationalist slogan.” She linked to a Huffington Post article that claims “far-right extremists” around the world are using “President Trump’s slogans and MAGA hats” as a symbol for their movement.

Making statements like this is strategically valuable for the left. Facebook, for example, recently banned content that supports “white nationalism” and “white separatism” on its website. Under this policy, if political operatives can frame the MAGA hat as a symbol of “white nationalism,” they can use it as a tool for political censorship that can limit Trump’s messaging in the 2020 elections, or as a weapon to launch attacks on anyone who supports the slogan.

Power Words

This strategy isn’t new. It ties to communist tactics of using “power words” and to ancient concepts of using certain words for invocation and manifestation.

Under socialist systems, power words are essential tools for controlling the public. Words evoke images, feelings, and concepts; and socialist agitators use this mechanism by transforming words into political tools by altering the images, feelings, and concepts that the words evoke.

Under Mao Zedong in communist China, for example, the meaning of the word “mixin”—in English, “blind belief”—was altered; originally a traditional concept of belief, it became a tool used to attack religious believers as being superstitious. Mao imbued the word with violence, using it in the state’s campaigns against the so-called “Four Olds” of customs, culture, habits, and ideas.

It’s important to remember that communist systems draw heavily on dark occult traditions. Hegel and Engels pulled concepts from Hermeticism; earlier socialist thinkers, from Gnostic naturist systems.

In spellic concepts of magic, the use of power words ties to the ideas of invocation and manifestation. The use of “spells” invokes an image or concept that then manifests in the conscience. From its initial manifestation, it can then be imbued and strengthened to manifest physically. Popular examples of this theory can be found in books like “The Secret,” which talks about using directed consciousness for physical manifestation.

When this method is applied to politics, words are used to invoke concepts in the public consciousness. These concepts are then agitated through disinformation or propaganda to manifest public demand, and the public demand is then acted on physically through policy.

In recent examples, we saw this happen with the ideas of “white nationalism.” Fake incidents were manufactured against Sandmann and by Smollett to shape concepts; news outlets and public figures agitated these concepts with disinformation and propaganda to create a public response; and now online platforms and public officials use this response to promote regulations for censorship.

Memetic Warfare

From another perspective, what’s in use is a form of memetic warfare. Memetics is a modern theory on how ideas develop over time to eventually impact a culture. Memetic warfare is the intentional introduction of ideas, and the manipulations of their development, to create an intentional cultural outcome.

The Hegelian dialectic uses a strategy of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis to analyze social outcomes, and communist movements have used similar concepts from their inception. Marx adopted Hegel’s dialectic and its idea that “conflict leads forward” to shape his own system of dialectical materialism that uses strategic inversion to agitate for social change. Both theories work by subverting processes in motion.

Today, these methods are all in the toolbox of leftist political agitators who seek to mask their true agendas behind an illusion of the public good. It’s the “above and below“ strategy at play: First, create the illusion of demand, then respond to the demand to institute social change.

With these tactics, facts no longer matter. What matters is the residual emotional memory and its associated notion. Like Pavlov’s dog, the victims of this are conditioned to react to certain words as stimuli; and through this socialist tactic, the poor souls of the new left are being turned into political attack dogs, conditioned to salivate with rage.

Joshua Philipp is a senior investigative reporter for The Epoch Times.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.