We Are Not Racists, Hillary

 

Hillary Clinton’s recent disparagement of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” was an error on many levels. It was a political error, worthy indeed of Donald Trump at his most vain, where Hillary chose to slander a segment of the American electorate in order to bask in the laughter of her audience – thereby violating the sound political principle that you are best to criticize your opponent, not his supporters.

Her joke was a moral error in its condescension and hatred toward a distant and largely unknown rabble upon whom she and her howling acolytes projected their own hatred in the form of a mostly imagined racism.

Most crucially though, Clinton’s slash at the Trump deplorables constitutes an error of analysis. Because Hillary’s remark embodies the elite view – indeed the elite gestalt –  within which Donald Trump’s supporters are mostly aging white people bitter about the waning of their economic and cultural influence and animated by their hatred of Blacks and gays and Hispanics and Muslims. Whereas the truth is that Trump’s supporters – while they may indeed possess varying levels of prejudice and provincial bigotry toward those and other minorities – are in fact animated by their hatred of those elites (and their condescension).

No one can question that the job of policing and purging the Trump campaign of its racist fringe elements – and they are fringe elements – falls to Trump supporters themselves. Many conservative #NeverTrump pundits, for example, have lamented the anti-Semitic cranks – part of the infamous “alt-right” – and their online vitriol. These idiots do not help the cause.

But speaking as a physicist with an unusually multicultural pedigree and as a Trump delegate with extensive travels in the campaign circles, I can say I have seen almost nothing of the intolerant, jaundiced malice toward people of a different hue that supposedly afflicts half of the Trump constituents.

The error inherent in Clinton’s basket of deplorables remark (which has been loudly seconded by many liberal columnists even at respectable media outlets) is, I believe, a failure of imagination resulting from life in the echo chamber of the left.

What I mean is this: If you cannot conceive of any legitimate grounds for criticizing the moral purity of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, then the argument that movement-inspired harassing of police has in fact cost many more Black lives at the hands of criminals than it has saved at the hands of the police, will appear to you as nothing more than veiled racism.

If hundreds of thousands of children and fatherless “family units” flooding our southern border and entering the US essentially with impunity does not concern you; if you are insulated from the impact of lowering wages, overcrowded emergency rooms, trashed public parks and the existence of a lawless underground which shuns the police – all of which unrestricted illegal immigration spawns – then you are likely to view those who insist that illegal aliens should be returned to their home country and we should build a wall to stem the flow as mere haters of brown people.

If you view the Orlando Pulse massacre as the product of an aberrant mind with no origin in the Islamic faith, or the proliferating sexual assaults in Europe as the nagging problem of a dispossessed but mostly benign migrant population, or the reaffirmed fatwa – complete with millions of dollars of bounty – on Salman Rushdie as a symbolic gesture by the Iranian Mullahs of no real concern, then the plan to put future US visa applicants to an ideological test as to whether they support honor killings or execution of homosexuals or stoning of adulterers will probably strike you as hateful and xenophobic.

Seeing Trump supporters as bitter clingers yearning for a lost era of racial supremacy is an easy mistake to make for those who view the world in black and white and yellow and brown. Ultimately, however, drawing a caricature of your opponent is an effective strategy only if you yourself know where the cartoon leaves off and the substance begins.


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  1. Mike LaRoche Inactive
    Mike LaRoche
    @MikeLaRoche

    Michael Stopa:If hundreds of thousands of children and fatherless “family units” flooding our southern border and entering the US essentially with impunity does not concern you; if you are insulated from the impact of lowering wages, overcrowded emergency rooms, trashed public parks and the existence of a lawless underground which shuns the police – all of which unrestricted illegal immigration spawns – then you are likely to view those who insist that illegal aliens should be returned to their home country and we should build a wall to stem the flow as mere haters of brown people.

    I’ve tried explaining such to the open borders nuts and immigration squishes, but they don’t want to listen.

    • #1
  2. Mike LaRoche Inactive
    Mike LaRoche
    @MikeLaRoche

    Michael Stopa:But speaking as a physicist with an unusually multicultural pedigree and as a Trump delegate with extensive travels in the campaign circles, I can say I have seen almost nothing of the intolerant, jaundiced malice toward people of a different hue that supposedly afflicts half of the Trump constituents.

    You reading this, Avik Roy?

    • #2
  3. Larry3435 Inactive
    Larry3435
    @Larry3435

    All very true, Michael.  And it is worth mentioning that Trump really has nothing to do with it.  Hillary would be slinging this very same mud, no matter who the Republican nominee might have been.  Although I have to admit, I would have particularly enjoyed watching it if the nominee had been Rubio.  Watching the elitist white woman call the up-from-poverty Latino man a racist would have been kind of fun, and I’m sure she could have done it without a hint that she understood the irony.

    • #3
  4. Paul A. Rahe Member
    Paul A. Rahe
    @PaulARahe

    Very nicely put.

    • #4
  5. Front Seat Cat Member
    Front Seat Cat
    @FrontSeatCat

    Kind of like calling the kettle black – I think many used that term to describe her actions on many occasions – I understand there are t-shirts out that say I’m a deplorable – entrepreneurship at its best!

    • #5
  6. Martel Inactive
    Martel
    @Martel

    Larry3435:All very true, Michael. And it is worth mentioning that Trump really has nothing to do with it. Hillary would be slinging this very same mud, no matter who the Republican nominee might have been. Although I have to admit, I would have particularly enjoyed watching it if the nominee had been Rubio. Watching the elitist white woman call the up-from-poverty Latino man a racist would have been kind of fun, and I’m sure she could have done it without a hint that she understood the irony.

    When it’s a minority they go after, they just switch to the “traitor to his own people trying to suck up to white people” game.

    They’re experts at manipulating the narrative, so we need to develop expertise in throwing it back in their faces.

    • #6
  7. Viator Inactive
    Viator
    @Viator

    https://theconservativetreehouse.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/hillary-birther.jpg?w=640&h=640

    • #7
  8. BR Member
    BR
    @

    Is it possible that the online very vocal but anonymous  alt-right are not real people at all? I might live in a bubble, but I don’t personally know people like that, haven’t seen anyone in public resembling them.  Could the anonymous online presence be funded by HRC’s 100M smear campaign like the paid protesters at the Trump rallies?

    • #8
  9. MJBubba Member
    MJBubba
    @

    BR:

    Is it possible that the online very vocal but anonymous alt-right are not real people at all? I might live in a bubble, but I don’t personally know people like that, haven’t seen anyone in public resembling them. Could the anonymous online presence be funded by HRC’s 100M smear campaign like the paid protesters at the Trump rallies?

    No,  there really are white supremacists; they are not hard to find if you want to go looking for them, and they hate the Democrat Party.  That makes it easy for the Left to use them as part of their smear campaign.   I saw them show up at TEA Party rallies in 2010, and everyone else there made it clear that they were un-welcome.

    It does not help that Trump has staffers who don’t know how to screen out their stuff when looking at internet memes.   That was a particularly damaging blunder.

    • #9
  10. MJBubba Member
    MJBubba
    @

    We are not sexists, either.

    Our pitch should be to everyone who has a job.   “We like employment.   We want better-quality employment, for everyone who wants it (and for a few who don’t).   And, for all their yammering about jobs, it has been proven that Democrat policies and programs lead to fewer jobs and more lower-quality jobs.   They brag endlessly about new jobs, but those are just jobs for workers that were needed to fill out new paperwork from all their extra regulations (Obamacare especially ginned up lots of paperwork).   Those kinds of jobs do not improve the economy, but actually put the brakes on the economy.  Support Trump; he at least has business experience and has employed people, unlike anyone on Team Obama or Team Hillary.”

    • #10
  11. Michael Stopa Member
    Michael Stopa
    @MichaelStopa

    BR:

    Is it possible that the online very vocal but anonymous alt-right are not real people at all? I might live in a bubble, but I don’t personally know people like that, haven’t seen anyone in public resembling them. Could the anonymous online presence be funded by HRC’s 100M smear campaign like the paid protesters at the Trump rallies?

    Love a good conspiracy theory, BR! Not sure I believe it but love it all the same!

    Does Hillary have an army of trolls following her and attacking her from the left? Oops! I forgot! It’s the whole Bernie Brigade!

    • #11
  12. Matt White Member
    Matt White
    @

    BR:

    Is it possible that the online very vocal but anonymous alt-right are not real people at all? I might live in a bubble, but I don’t personally know people like that, haven’t seen anyone in public resembling them. Could the anonymous online presence be funded by HRC’s 100M smear campaign like the paid protesters at the Trump rallies?

    I wouldn’t be surprised if some of it is a false flag operation, but I’m sure that’s not all of it. It’s pretty well known that people are less restrained with in the anonymity of the Internet. People will filter their thoughts more in person.

    • #12
  13. BR Member
    BR
    @

    You’re right, @Michael Stopa,  I guess I was engaging in conspiracy theorizing! Not to defend my conspiracy theory or anything, but I have a harder time believing that so many Americans are racist than believing that the story is at least partly made up (the number of hardened racists in this case) by someone with such a well documented tendency to bend the truth to her advantage. HRC et al would love to have the unenlightened  believe that the fellow who committed the  terrible shooting in the SC church was the poster child for the alt-right, even though guys like him are sick individuals, not a political movement.

    • #13
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