On October 13, The Federalist ran Auguste Meyrat’s op-ed arguing that socialism and Islam both aim to plunder the West. It is built on France’s school protests over teacher shortages and names two Muslim American politicians. The headline gives a faith one verb, pillaging, and one target, the West. That is the hate word at work: a whole people written as one body with one aim. The evidence underneath is French high schoolers. The op-ed’s own first paragraph says the unrest began with a faculty protest at Saint-Exupéry High School over budget cuts. The counts that exist are about age: 1,793 held, about 90 percent minors. No report in the coverage counts anyone’s religion. The verb does the work a count would have to do. A plain sentence would say that students protesting missing teachers and classes of 32 to 35 pupils clashed with police, and thousands, mostly teens, were arrested. The habit the headline rides is us and them: when someone from the other group riots, the whole group did it; when one of ours does, he is the exception. The page climbs the same way, medieval armies in paragraph five, two living American politicians in paragraph ten. The same morning, RealClearPolitics headlined “Islam Is Not Compatible With Western Civilization” and The Daily Signal “Corporate Islamification”. Three outlets, one grammar: a faith as the actor, the West as what it acts on. Three weeks before a midterm in which El-Sayed is running for the Senate, a reader who accepts that his faith is built on plunder has been handed a way to read his name as a threat. Whatever the writers meant, that is what the sentences leave behind.
