When Did It Become Okay to Speak the Unspeakable?

(Note: Commentary in this posting are the sole opinion of the author and do not represent the position of CSUSB or other individuals associated with CSUSB).

As we experienced the recent 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle, I am asking the same questions I have been asking since December 2015. On December 7, 2015 - seven days after the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, California (not far from where I teach and in the Inland Empire community where I have lived for over 30 years), then-candidate Donald Trump's campaign issued the following statement: "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on." Trump read this statement out loud at a rally in South Carolina. This was not the first time this rhetoric had been put into the public sphere. Candidates for various local, state, and federal elections had for many years been using anti-Muslim rhetoric and, more generally, racist rhetoric. American elections throughout the U.S. are historically rife with racist words and ideas. During my lifetime, I had seen this in local politics where I grew up, but it did not seem to be out in the mainstream American political spheres during my childhood in the 1970s and 1980s.

Subtle language and hidden concepts were often used to express the same extreme views. But, what I was seeing as the 2016 election continued was a landscape where it seemed perfectly fine to put out and run for political office on racist views and ideologies. Hence, everyone knew how you felt about individuals and groups of individuals. As Brian Levin and I tracked changes in hate in the U.S. at the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at CSUSB, I began to see racist ideology and related framing (i.e., the selection and presentation of certain aspects of perceived reality to promote it) and violent rhetoric become normalized. Fast forward to the recent U.S. presidential cycle ending with Donald Trump being elected as the next U.S. President, this normalization continued and became more part of the mainstream. Even though it was discussed in the media and by various political and societal leaders, there was no explicit discussion of how we have gotten here. The complexity of this phenomenon is that the rhetoric does not align with ethnic identities. Instead, as the recent 2024 elections showed, individuals whose identity is tied to a particular ethnic group sometimes use and often consume ideology that attacks and suggests that individuals who share the same ethnic identity are subhuman and inferior.

For this reason, I have decided to add my voice as an objective scholar of hate and political violence to understand better how we have gotten here and what will potentially happen next. In an upcoming book, Mainstreaming Madness, I will examine this phenomenon through a scholarly lens. For more general audience consumption, I have decided to post here and will release a podcast?called?Mainstreaming Madness in the Spring of 2025. Through talking to scholars who study these types of phenomena, political leaders from both sides of the aisle in America, community leaders, and the American people, I hope to shine some light on where this mainstreaming started, how it is affecting American political discourse today, how similar phenomena occurred in the past, and what it may mean for the future of America. I will also explore how this is not a uniquely American experience, as we see similar things happening worldwide.

In the next posting of our exploration of this mainstreaming, we will use the 2024 elections as a starting point to unpack what is occurring. The question to be explored will be: What is causing this greater acceptability of racist and violent ideology and the rhetoric associated with it?