American history has proven, through formative passages of puritanical ethnic cleansing and eugenics-driven racial apartheid, that discourses need not be true or even intelligible. Discourses of imperialism and dehumanization just have to be resonant, palatable to crowds bent on vengeance, then remade into law.

XREF: Connects to discourse theory (Foucault) and how false narratives gain institutional power through emotional appeal rather than accuracy.

Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamopho…, loc. 275