Isn’t it funny that we live in a country where the word “deplorable” is now a racial slur? Of course, America being post-racial dictates that calling out racism is the new racism. This phenomenon isn’t reserved for anyone with an abundance of melanin. Anyone who dares to voice an opinion that challenges the ideological purity of Neandertals of the conservative kind opens up themselves to the wrath of the rubes who support Donald Trump.
Hillary Clinton recently said that half of Donald Trump’s supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables.” She highlighted their racist, xenophobic, and bigoted views to justify this claim. While Clinton has come under fire for plainly stating this, the truth is that she’s absolutely spot-on about the base of Trump’s support. I’m just not sure if a “bucket,” is enough to fit the rolling dumpster fire of weaponized stupid that is Trump’s most virulent fans.
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”
There’s enough evidence to support Clinton’s claim. In fact, as I pointed out some time ago, polling shows that a majority of Trump’s white supporters are of the opinion that they’ve lost a foothold on the American dream because of minorities. Which if true – which, it absolutely isn’t – just says that some white folks are letting their privilege go to waste. Yes, apparently they’re not doing “whiteness” right. However, if asked to trade places with a person of color, they’d probably spit in your face and call you anything but a child of God.
Here are a few nuggets borne out by polling via ThinkProgress:
- Two-thirds of Trump supporters believe that Obama is a Muslim
- 59% of Trump’s supporters believe that Obama wasn’t born in America
- 40% of Trump’s supporters believe blacks are more “lazy” than whites
- 50% of Trump’s supporters believe blacks are more violent than whites
- 16% of Trump’s supporters believe that “whites are a superior race.”
- 20% of Trump’s supporters are opposed to Lincoln freeing the slaves
In the event that much of what I’ve said about Trump is the same ole same old liberal media bias. Do me a favor and check out the following video. In it, you’ll see South Carolina Trump supporters waving Confederate flags, express their racist, xenophobic, and islamophobic views as reasons for support Donald Trump for president. In doing so, many of them warn us of what they see as the impending horror that is “White ethnic cleansing.”
You may be of the opinion that it wasn’t a smart move politically on the part of Clinton. After all, the rules of political campaigning say that supporters of your opponents are off limits to candidates. However, this being an atypical election cycle where conventional rules do not exist. Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with what Clinton said. After all, isn’t the other side all about placing a premium on political incorrectness, as well as, giving rise to the far-right fringe of the Republican party who has rebranded themselves as the alt-right?