Empty phrases routinely populate our politics. But ever so often, there are irrefutable moments where rhetoric is wielded as a weapon to be used in animating hostility.
“The day the Latino, African American, Asian and other communities realize that they share the same oppressor is the day we start winning because we are the majority in this country now,” state Rep. Gene Wu advised during a Dec. 31, 2025 interview that resurfaced over the weekend. “We have the ability to take over this country and to do what is needed for everyone and to make things fair.”
In a clip that spanned less than 30 seconds, it was more than enough to garner close to 12 million views, 10,000 retweets, and thousands of comments.
Wu, who is chair of the Texas House Democratic Caucus, is hardly the only progressive under the Pink Dome to sprint to the left of the Blue Dog banner. Last summer, when the redistricting battle was in full tilt, other Democratic members dropped all pretenses and declared they are “REALLY calling [Texas Republicans] racist.”
The rhetorical daggers of labeling Trump an “existential threat” or his supporters “Nazis” have become so commonplace that their repetition normalizes a language of deadly hostility that treats political opponents as abstractions to be neutralized, not merely citizens to be contested.
But it doesn’t stop there. On Don Lemon’s podcast, CNN commentator Bakari Sellers went mask off, saying the country needs to be “fumigated” and “exorcised” from the Make America Great Again movement.
“We need a more aggressive approach to go in and surgically remove the cancer that is the Donald Trump and MAGA movement,” Sellers prescribed.
Gone are the days of simply offering Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, critical race theory, and Environmental, Social, and Governance investing as ways of reshaping America. Now, the revolutionaries are stepping on the accelerator.
The apocalyptic imagery and hypothetical horror are a dark prediction.
The realm of partisan politics is in the doom loop of the 1960sm with the heirs of a postmodern vanguard now professionalizing their progressive ideology into every facet of American life.
However, the classical forms of warfare remain—and it begins by designating who is a friend and who is a foe.
“The high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy,” political theorist Carl Schmitt writes.
No longer are shield and sword required to resolve conflict, nor even the courage once demanded by open confrontation. These civilizational clashes are now recast as ideological disputes.
Yet history has not ended.
The ethnic, cultural, and political realities once thought resolved continue to assert themselves against abstractions that pretend to not exist.
It has been, and remains, the white, heterosexual male who is cast as a permanent moral offender for the progressive left in America. These “oppressors” are framed as eternally culpable and structurally tyrannical regardless of individual conduct or circumstance.
The left has found its necessary antagonist, a symbolic repository for collective guilt that must be sustained in their effort to preserve the coherence of a disordered narrative — and justify its permanent posture of accumulating power.
Our language of crisis has only revealed the growing partisan divide in America. The vocabulary of resentment and revolution is shaping the emotional and moral atmosphere in which we learn how to see one another.
So long as some continue to sow the seeds of crisis, the pathology of permanent opposition will deepen until conflict is no longer merely rhetorical but lived in increasingly destructive and violent forms.