New York- When Rep. Mary Miller embarked on her first campaign for Congress, she described herself as the salt of the earth, in American terms: a mother, grandmother, and farmer who embodied the “central northeast values of faith, family, and freedom”.
“Working hard, using our God-given talents, and loving one another,” declares a voice in the video clips of Miller, a 63-year-old Republican from Illinois, who included her family, prayers and a tour of her farm in a announcement in early 2020.
However, there is another side to Miller’s image. Since she entered Congress, she has routinely vilified Democrats and liberals, calling them “evil” communist allies of China who want to “destroy” America and its culture.
And that President Biden’s plan, as she commented on Twitter this spring, is to “flood our country with terrorists, fentanyl, child traffickers and members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang.”
Miller’s provocative words underscore the extent to which polarizing rhetoric is currently intertwined among House Republicans, especially among those like Miller who voted against certifying Biden’s victory, according to a review The New York Times did of partisan language in the last 10 years.
Analyzing tweets, Facebook ads, newsletters and congressional speeches — more than 3.7 million documents — it mostly used natural language processing, a technique that uses software to extract information from large amounts of text.
The Times counted the words that were linked to academic research to detect divisive political content, as well as terms that are used as a way to polarize — such as “fascist” and “socialist”, “ extreme right” and “extreme left”.
House Republicans have piled on such rhetoric since former President Donald J. Trump took office, the analysis found.
A year and a half after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Republicans on average have used divisive words and phrases more than twice as often as Democrats in tweets, and six times more in emails sent to voters.
At the forefront of this polarization are Republicans who voted to reject the Electoral College results that sealed Trump’s defeat last year.
A recent Times investigation revealed that those lawmakers helped cement the myth of election theft and partisan orthodoxy.