Poll: Exactly Half of Voters Found Trump's Judge Statements "Racist"

And yet nearly 100% of the media, the GOP establishment, and the conservative intellectual class found them "racist."

So what can we determine based on this?

Well, here are the possibilities:

1. That the media, the GOP establishment, and the conservative intellectual class are simply better -- smarter, more perceptive, more moral -- than the stupid fucking American voters they hover above on their gossamer thrones of cloudwisp and starshine.

2. That the media, GOP establishment, and conservative intellectual class share similar cultural/class inputs which lead them to think in exactly the same way, and the lack of intellectual diversity among them tends to make them miss things that other people know, and furthermore, their intellectual insularity -- forever talking only to each other, and carefully curating out of their timelines anyone from any different sort of background -- then hardens them in their unchallenged opinion.

For example, Ginch Bangwell (Kurt Schlichter), who is a practicing lawyer, said the first thing every lawyer does when he gets a judge assigned to a case is check his background.

But, to hear the professional middle class/media/conservative intellectual class tell it, such calculations and guesses are wholly inappropriate and are textbook racism and no one who is involved in a legal matter should ever make guesses about judge behavior based on "profiling."

Or, as a commenter put it here: Certainly, it is not the case that every prosecutor tries to stirke as many black women from a jury as the constitution will permit, and every defense attorney definitely does not try to strike every middle-aged white man from the jury.

I mean -- it's ideologically forbidden. And Theory is all that matters in the real world.

Theory's all that matters, guys. And certainly an Intellectual Class should be proud and even arrogant about its utter lack of contact with the real world.

Unchallenged unanimity of opinion is healthy in any intellectual tradition!

Once upon a time, conservatives prided themselves on being more practically-minded than their ideologically-possessed liberal brethren. They'd roll their eyes at the most strident, Strong Form, Politically Correct and Pure claims about the absolute inappropriateness of ever taking race or background into account -- whether choosing who to give additional screenings to on TSA lines, or who to pat down for contraband or guns, or even who to cross the street to avoid late at night.

No more. The conservative intellectual class has now embraced the most airy-fairy disconnected-from-any-tangible-reality Strong Form of political correctness long urged by the left, and it all took to get them to agree to this was to have it be momentarily convenient in making the case against Trump.

By the Way: On Trump's comments, you could claim he said one of two different things:

1. That every Hispanic must be "unable to do his job" due to his "heritage," as the intellectuals and the media prefer to claim.

2. That Trump guessed that the judge probably didn't like his position on the Wall -- something the media usually agrees with (when they put up their polls showing 85% of Hispanics disapproving of Trump and the Wall), and which Hillary agrees with -- or else why would she use Trump's wall comments to attempt to sway Hispanic opinion?

When Hillary's surrogates say they're going to tie the Wall around every Republican's neck -- I assume there's a reason for doing that, right? I assume Hispanics are not up in the air about it. I assume they sort of have an opinion, right?

But the intellectuals find that there's a little too much nuance in the last formulation of the charge, and intellectuals like moving around words to make ideological steel traps out of nothing at all, and they also like making things easy for themselves (they're kind of lazy, and prefer to argue against the most absurd version of an opponent's claim they can imagine rather than the strongest version of an opponent's claim they can imagine), so they all naturally chose Version One.

Or, let me adjust that claim: It may be that intellectuals like mental exertion and considering difficult questions.

Ideologues, however, do not enjoy this, and prefer things to be as simple and Beyond Any Possible Question and The Science is Settled as possible.

posted by Ace at 06:25 PM

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