Saturday, July 20, 2019

more on Trump and racism (morons, Trump, and racism)

Styx hasn't heard a convincing argument that Trump is racist:


Chandler Crump with his own argument for why Trump isn't racist:


Styx on Trump's antagonism and the deeper strategy behind his trolling:


On Chandler's channel, some thoughts on the "Send her back!" chant:


I can't say I have much sympathy for Omar on that front. She obviously hates her adoptive country, so why not go back to Somalia? And as Styx notes in the video below, country of origin is not a race:


The obvious flaw in the "logic" of the "Racist!" accusation is that phenomenon X can be explained by a competing hypothesis, but that hypothesis is rejected out of hand for no reason. The leftist says Trump singled out the Squad (Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib) because of their dusky skin color. How does the leftist know this? Can he read minds? Of course not; he's merely psychologizing (i.e., thinking he knows others' thoughts), which is often a form of projection. But the competing hypothesis is that Trump singled these women out, not because of their skin color (there are plenty of other "people of color" in Congress, so why were they spared Trump's ire?), but because they have obnoxiously declared—as I wrote earlier—"a degree of shame about, scorn for, and disloyalty to their home country." This alternate hypothesis explains Trump's attack on the Squad just as well as the Trump-is-racist hypothesis does, so why automatically default to racism as the explanation unless one is blinded by one's own political ideology?

The leftist will doubtless respond that Donald Trump has a documented history of racism, and things like the 90s-era video currently making the rounds (Trump says "Indians" a lot while testifying before Congress about competing casinos) prove this claim, and make it probable that Trump's latest tweetstorm is in the same vein. The problem is that every instance of supposed "racism" by Trump, far from being a slam-dunk conclusive example of racism, must be interpreted by the left as such, in a vain effort to establish a pattern. There is no moment, on either audio or video, where Trump ever declares whites to be superior to people of other races or ever explicitly disparages people of other races. There is no moment when Trump, per Chris Cuomo's recent badgering interview with Republican Senate hopeful Kris Kobach, openly declares himself a racist. (Besides: what racist actually goes around among the general public saying, "Ha ha—I'm a racist!"?) There is nothing—nothing—for Trump's accusers to latch onto as direct evidence of racism. It's all spurious implication, inference, and argument. Wake me when Trump actually starts building internment camps for minorities, FDR-style (FDR, that liberal bastion, did this for ethnic Japanese and Italians).

You want to accuse righties of that sort of racism? Then look not at Donald Trump, but at rightie Asian-American pundit Michelle Malkin, who actually is on record as advocating internment camps for illegal immigrants—real internment camps, not the border detention facilities we currently have. Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter are both on record as supporting some rather ghoulish methods for dealing with illegals, which is one reason why I avoid reading or listening to them. When has Trump come out for FDR-style internment camps? Never. Not once.

According to the "logic" of the PC crowd, if a minority declares something, you can't criticize that minority because, when you do, you reveal yourself to be a racist. This is almost certainly what is really motivating current accusations of racism against Trump. But by that logic, when a black man says, "If you don't love this country, fuck off to a better one," the black man can't be rebuked or rebutted because to do so would be racist. (I already blogged about Ken Hamblin in my other post; I actually started reading his book, Pick a Better Country, on Amazon; Hamblin turns out to be a fantastic writer. There's no e-book version of Hamblin's book, but I've put the dead-tree version of his book in my Amazon shopping cart.)

I guess the left has no choice but to either (1) ignore criticism of the left when it comes from blacks and other minorities, or (2) excoriate and revile those minorities by calling them the sorts of racist names that the right supposedly uses all the time. So disparage Chandler Crump, whose videos appear above, at your own risk. If you claim he's arguing in bad faith or being otherwise "uppity," then I call you a racist because you're attacking a young black man. See how this works, PC guys? This is a mess you made for yourselves when you decided to walk the road of identity politics. In all honesty, when I find videos by black folks who explicitly declare Donald Trump not to be racist, I expect you white-knight PC leftists—who likely are white and in the grip of a white-savior complex—to shut up, sit down, know your place, and listen humbly to your betters when those good folks—be they the black #WalkAway crowd or actual black conservatives—are speaking the God's honest truth to leftist power.



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