The left wastes time weaponizing everything, from policing to immigration, and it’s rotting our infrastructure |
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The left wastes time weaponizing everything, from policing to immigration, and it’s rotting our infrastructure
SETH BARRON is the The Post’s Associate Editorial Page Editor, and the author of “The Last Days of New York” and the new book “Weaponized: The Left’s Capture and Destruction of America’s Sacred Institutions” (Humanix Books, out now). In the adapted excerpt below, he writes about weaponization and the current political landscape.
We have heard a lot about “weaponization” over the last few years. On social media, it has become a kind of shorthand, like the word “gaslighting,” for anything that someone finds annoying or unscrupulous.
For instance, it is common among relationship counselors or observers of the dynamics between men and women to talk about “weaponized incompetence.”
This phrase usually refers to men pretending not to understand how to handle young children or the complexities of meal prep to get out of doing housework. Men have used their alleged inability to do things as a defensive weapon in their war with women.
Or you might hear about “weaponized intimacy,” which occurs when someone withholds love or sex to get their partner to do what they want — such as, I guess, meal prep or taking care of the kids.
My intention is less to talk about weaponization in the sense of interpersonal relations and more about the core meaning of the term as it relates to the contemporary political scene. In America today, weaponization refers to the use of ostensibly neutral institutions or concepts for political or ideological ends that would be difficult to achieve without leveraging the good reputation of those institutions.
It is common, for instance, to hear about “the politics of cruelty,” the title of a 1994 book by feminist Kate Millet. Millet’s book was about the use of torture by authoritarian regimes, but the term has been repurposed to characterize conservative policies as cruel.
Work requirements for food stamps or making public benches difficult to sleep on are examples of the politics of cruelty.
But consider, for instance, the ways that immigration — a process that Americans generally look kindly on — has been made a tool for the disruption of American political life, the suppression of wages, and the eradication of American cultural memory.
Citizenship has been devalued, weaponized, and turned against the citizens of the country, who are told in so many words that their time at the helm is over.
Policing, which historically has maintained a high reputation among the public, has been systematically and tendentiously tied to the legacy of slavery and a narrative of global oppression in order to disrupt public order, allocate........