You Are Still Crying Wolf

1. Kudos to him for putting in the "Edit" about the inaccuracies in exit-poll data, but it's a really big "Edit" and casts doubt on most of his initial premise.

2. No mention of Bannon? This article was written yesterday, and we knew Trump had chosen Bannon to be his right-hand man long before then.

3. No mention that Trump believes that an American judge of Mexican heritage can't judge him? Of the birther claims? Or of playing to white fears with completely make-believe images of "inner cities" being war zones?

4. The jiu jitsu over saying that banning "All Muslims" from entering the country isn't really racism because "most Muslims are white(ish)" is nonsense.

5. And yes, it is special pleading. The author goes out of his way to explain things in a way that is unique to Trump:

> 15. Don’t we know that Trump supports racist violence because, when some of his supporters beat up a Latino man, he just said they were “passionate”?

> When Trump was asked for comment, he tweeted “Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country”.

> I have no idea how his mind works and am frankly boggled by all of this, but calling violent protesters “passionate” just seems to be a thing of his. I think this is actually a pretty important point. Trump is a weird person.

Oh. Ok. He doesn't support beating up people. He's just "weird."

----

Edit: Also the author seems to have confused two statements of "passion." Trump's tweet about "small groups of protesters" was made just the other day. Instead, after the beating up of the Latino man, he said

"I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate, they love this country, they want this country to be great again."

Note that not only is he calling those men "passionate," he is essentially justifying their actions by bringing up their "love of country," which is particularly telling in the case of men beating up an immigrant.

At least a couple of the other arguments also have problems. He tweeted twice about the protests:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/11/do...

The first one was dismissive, the second one was supportive. Why not discuss them both?

The other one that jumped out at me was the taco bowl. I'm pretty sure lots of racists like tacos, tacos are delicious. So liking tacos doesn't say a whole lot. I'd go so far as to say that ham-fisted pandering using a taco bowl says more than liking tacos.

And the taco-bowl picture is captioned with "I love Hispanics!"

Most people don't talk this way, but everything he says about minorities lumps them together: "The Hispanics." "The Blacks." "The Muslims."

> “I have a great relationship with the blacks, I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.” [1]

> “The Hispanics are going to get those jobs, and they’re going to love Trump.” [2]

> “I’m doing good for the Muslims,” [3]

[1] http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2011/04/14/6471219-trump-... [2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-border_us_5... [3] http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/09/politics/donald-trump-don-lemo...

How seriously are we meant to take an article on Trumpist racism that includes:

"When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

Note how totally non-racist this statement is. I’m serious. It’s anti-illegal-immigrant. But in terms of race, it’s saying Latinos (like every race) include both good and bad people, and the bad people are the ones coming over here. It suggests a picture of Mexicans as including some of the best people – but those generally aren’t the ones who are coming illegally.

It's not just that Alexander chooses as the first words following Trump's most famous racist quote "note how totally non-racist this statement is", but also the degree to which his logic insults the reader's intelligence. Mexicans "include some of the best people" (note that Trump didn't say that --- he said that their best people don't come here), just not the ones who come here illegally (note that Trump didn't say that --- he's talking about all Mexican immigrants). Alexander's own paragraph isn't even coherent on this point!

Can you explain the problem with Trump's comment with the judge for me please? Assuming that Trump thinks/ knows he's being offensive to Mexican at large, wouldn't the idea of a judge, even an American one, with some relations to Mexico might not be impartial toward him be a reasonable idea?

Is it the notion of a judge being unprofessional to the point of biased an unacceptable thing to imply?

For the same reason we don't say that a black judge is unqualified to judge on issues regarding race.

Do you agree that such a suggestion in that case would be out of line?

"If you classify people into ethnic groups, you're a racist" is waaaay too powerful to use to prove "Trump is a racist". Unless you're willing to accept that pretty much everyone is a racist. Which perhaps some people are ready to accept, but it's not a very useful classification at that point.

I also disagree with that section but why do you feel it affects the article as a whole? For that matter, I disagree that the article is about "trumpist racism"; that's just a symptom of what it talks about.

The whole article is like this. It's just a sequence of showily contrarian takes that fall apart when you read them closely. The author is counting on you not doing that, just like Steve Bannon is counting on Americans to just take his word for it when he says he has nothing to do with the "alt-right".

I actually didn't know, so I went ahead and did a quick search on your example.

On [0], it does mention a case with that situation.

> In 1974, Federal Judge Leon Higginbotham issued his decision in Comm. of Pa. v. Local 542, Int'l Union of Operating Engineers, explaining why he as an African American judge with a history of active involvement in the civil rights struggle was not obligated to recuse himself from presiding over litigation concerning claims of racial discrimination.

Further thought and I agree that the judge should not need to recuse himself from said case (in your question). However, that's a distinction on whether the suggestion itself is out of line. In the quoted snippet, the judge did have to point out an explanation for his sitting it, so at the least, there seems to be some consideration for the suggestion.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_disqualification

You're just nit picking on his writing at this point (the part about "best people"). Instead, if you think it doesn't hold, can you explain how Trump's quote would be categorically different than the 2 other quotes he has in that section?

I wanted to point that bit out, too. There's a stack of problems with the original statement that his comments ignore to come to out-of-the blue conclusions.

1. "Sending." This isn't Castro's boat lift. No one's sending anything. As a general rule, you have to have bigger ambitions than your options to emigrate.

2. "Their best" == you. Or perhaps he means "not even sending you".

3. Yes, the immigrants are poor and poverty is associated with crime. The other half of that is that illegal immigrants are more likely to be victims, especially since they often feel that they cannot report crimes.

4. "Some, I assume, are good people." Maybe. Although I have never met one. Or heard of anyone who thinks they're good people. Ok, I admit, they're literally Mephistophiles incarnate.

Although the article is mostly pretty good, I have no idea how the author reached the conclusions he did here.

The author reads more into Trump's words than he actually said, but I agree with the sentiment. I never thought that what you call Trump's "most famous racist quote" was racist at all.

In immigration you never get a representative set of the source nation's citizens. Sometimes you get lucky, like the US around WW2 and you get mostly the intellectuals and people who are well of. It's no secret that Syrian refugees in Europe are disproportionately physically able males. And sometimes people look back at some immigrant influx and decide to make a movie called Scarface.

Shutting any discussion of that topic down as "racist" speaks not well of America.

That seems like a super weird comparison? There's some odd local conclusions being drawn/methodology being used but it doesn't seem to me to be the point of the article. Mostly what it gives is a run down of how else you can perceive these things about Trump.

What the author seems to be concerned with is: How does a guy that is blatantly evil in many ways in the eyes of so many people actually get a large percent of the vote? How did we get there?

It's making a pretty solid case that there is a lot of either baseless or unnecessary attacks against Trump's character which dilute the actual issues. Or maybe I'm extrapolating from what I believe is already the case, but it does give some other perspectives.

It doesn't matter that these perspectives "fall apart", the author isn't actually defending Trump. When you talk about perspective, it could be written by a bowl of soup and still be valid.

In addition to the point raised by another reply, here's a thought exercise: who can stand fit to judge someone who has made defamatory remarks about everyone? Is the way out of a case to simply say something negative about every possible judge?

(No.)

My understanding is that judges, particularly at the higher levels, are assumed to be capable of remaining impartial unless there is a specific conflict of interest. Specific, like "I was involved in this case as a judge at the circuit level" or "I was an investor in this company" etc.

It's more that showing him tweeting "I love Hispanics" is an unintentionally hilarious way try to prove that someone isn't racist.

I'll speak to this point, because it's subtle but important.

The essence of racism is the refusal or inability to understand others as fully human. It's possible to be racist without hate.

My father didn't hate Chinese people, he liked them and respected them, but he couldn't quite see them as the same as him in the fundamental way. He said once, "Chinamen make good citizens."

When I visited New York City, I noticed that the races got along but self-segregated. I went to a large business cafe and all the tables were each one "race": Blacks, Whites, Asians, Hispanics.

Growing up in San Francisco my friends and all the people I knew were pretty eclectic: Hawaiian-born Chinese, Mexican-American Mormon, Japanese/White (his mom called herself a "rice-clackah" ("cracker" is a racial pejorative for White, and Japanese people stereotypically have trouble pronouncing the 'r' sound) she loved scandalizing people with that...), Black bi-sexual, etc..., and none of us every really "tripped" on it. We were all just people hanging out together.

Like Sesame Street, we were the real thing of what you see on Sesame Street.

I don't want to be all East Coast v. West Coast, but I definitely feel weird when I hear people talk about "I love the Blacks."

"BLACK people" vs. "black PEOPLE"

To quote Bob Marley (quoting Haile Selassie): "Until the colour of a man's skin / Is of no more significance / than the colour of his eyes"

And here's Albert Einstein: "A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

It is out of line, because the suggestion is only being made to the black (or Mexican, or female, or...) judge.

Has a white judge ever needed to explain why he didn't excuse himself on a case regarding race? Why not? Why is the white judge the default "impartial" judge, and the black (or Mexican) judge the one who is assumed to harbor bias?

(Edit: An in your example, it's really the "active involvement in civil rights struggle" that is more pertinent, not his race. We judge people by what they do, not the color of their skin or the origin of their grandparents.)

"Picking on his writing"? Look at the article we're talking about. It's the rhetorical equivalent of a game of Operation.

I think the main point the article makes, and maybe I'm willing to come around on it, is that the term 'overt racism' when referring to Trump is maybe exaggerated. Maybe it is 'only' 'subtle racism', while 'surrounding himself with open racists'.

But another issue that this article completely ignores is the subtle sexism that permeated the Trump campaign. Catch phrases like 'Trump that Bitch'; or when Guiliani says

"Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman, and the only thing she’s ever produced is a lot of work for the FBI checking out her emails?"

Note this was distorted by people on the left to show that Guiliani is openly sexist by ending the quote after 'woman', and pretending it didn't continue. But as a full statement, this juxtaposition of man and woman, one glorified and the other dismissed, phrased as a rhetorical question, actually reads pretty sexist to me.

I also tend to think the alt-right movement much bigger than the 50K that the author claims. It's not very monolithic, there are many related off-shoots. For example, the associated /r/TheRedPill has 170K members, and that's just one of them.

Sociology has a very relevant concept - "labelling":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labeling_theory

It's a super weird comparison if you grant the author's premise and don't read critically. But the author has selected a tendentious premise; there is no setting on the "charitable" knob that allows Alexander to downplay or ignore instances of overt racialist rhetoric from Trump, since the whole point of his piece is to immunize Trump from charges that he's a racialist candidate.

I mean, for fuck's sake, he tries to claim that Trump is less racist than Mitt Romney. There nobody in the world who believes that, except for Alexander's readership, who want badly to believe it.

> It's no secret that Syrian refugees in Europe are disproportionately physically able males.

What? I never heard that before, so took exactly on minute to Google "Syrian refugee demographics" and found that this myth originates with Ben Carson.

In fact about 49.5% of Syrian refugees are male, and only 21.8% of them are males ages 18-59.

https://www.factcheck.org/2015/09/stretching-facts-on-syrian...

I don't know the author but I'm sensing you do and that's causing some bias. My read of it was that the "racist" label is being applied too quickly, too liberally and too often. The question of whether Trump is racist matters less than the issues that arise when a label like that becomes a weapon.

That's true and all, but classifying people into ethnic groups is not evidence that any of what you said is true about a specific person. I don't think it disproves anything about what I said... if you're going to say that classifying people into ethnic groups is sufficient to call someone racist, you've made everyone racist. Which may be true for that definition of racism, but it's then not useful to say that Trump is racist in that sense. I don't think most people are looking to use definitions of racism that classify Hillary and the entire Democratic political strategy as "racist". Applying that definition selectively is just more wolf-crying.

That article just cites UNHCR data [1], which is for immigrants registered in middle east (not immigrants in Europe). That's a completely different set of refugees than those that managed to arrive in Europe.

Numbers for Europe look different. Lukily eurostat (the statistics department of the European Commission) has a great statistics tool. [2] shows that about 60% of Syrian refugees registered in Europe are male (a bit less in the last three months, more in the past). Of these males, about 50% are between 18 and 34 years old (again, it was more extreme, is becoming more normal in recent months) [3].

Compare this to the Syrian population (for example with data from the CIA world factbook), and you find that the people arriving in Europe are more likely to be male, and more likely to be young males, than the average Syrian population. It's not the gigantic trend that some people make out, but that's why I said "disproportiantely", not "exclusively". In any case it's no myth but a very real trend.

1: http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php

2: http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?query=BOOKMA...

3: http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?query=BOOKMA...

First, let me say that reading the OP has eased my worry that the President-Elect "is racist" (at least no more than typical, which unfortunately is still pretty racist, but let that pass for the sake of discussion.) I no longer think that Trump is racist in the sense that he hates non-whites. (I'm also really annoyed that the media I frequent did such a poor job portraying the guy in this regard, but that's a whole 'nother issue.)

I do still believe that he, and most people, are racist in the sense of having a hard time relating to "The Other" as another aspect or manifestation of "Self". But here we are getting far from the political and into deeper interpersonal relations. In other words, this is something that can't really be addressed by laws, so it is formally outside the bailiwick of the POTUS. However, I would still rather the POTUS be someone conducive to the greater good. Trump seems out of his depth here, as in so many other areas.

Men between the ages of 18 and 34? Otherwise referred to by the Obama administration as enemy combatants[1] I'm not sure what it says about a conflict when the people most likely to be able to defend their homes leave, while their families remain. 1: http://www.juancole.com/2012/05/how-obama-changed-definition...

Having trouble relating to "The Other" is pretty universal this election cycle. Like the multitudes who believe that everyone who supports Trump is a Racist.

The standard, and in my opinion most useful, definition of a racist is "a person who believes that a particular race is superior to another" not "having having trouble relating to people of different backgrounds". That's not racist, its just human.

I'm seeing this criticism in a few places, but in context, it's a strong argument, and in fact a nice summary of the piece as a whole:

What if there’s a candidate who does something more like, say, go to a KKK meeting and say that black people are inferior and only whites are real Americans?

We might want to use words like “openly racist” or “openly white supremacist” to describe him. And at that point, nobody will listen, because we wasted “openly white supremacist” on the guy who tweets pictures of himself eating a taco on Cinco de Mayo while saying “I love Hispanics!”

In other words, if this guy is already a 10 on the racism scale, what do we do when somebody even worse turns up? Do a Spinal Tap and turn it up to 11?

Well, my problems with Trump voters (or as I think of them, "the Idiocracy") start waaaay back in the sticks.

You see, I've seen "Gremlins II".

To me, voting for Donald Trump is like voting for Yosemite Sam. This is so much worse than Governor Schwarzenegger. I wake up in the middle of the night and experience a shock when my mind presents the thought, "President Trump". It's like Arthur Dent's early morning scream of horror as he recalls that he's stuck on prehistoric Earth. And this is all before we get to the racism, climate-denial, and so on.

Tuesday night he sent his spokeswoman Hope Hicks to tell the press pool that he's in for the night. Then he bails and goes to dinner without telling the press, leaving Hicks to pick up after him. So either Hicks lied to the press or her boss burned her. The whole thing is unpresidential in my opinion, and no racism in sight.

How will your opinions shape what you do for the next few years or so?

Why do you ask?

-----

Quite frankly, I am in an existential crisis. The world no longer makes sense to me. The world that contains "President Trump" as a real thing is like... unreal. It's like I've woken up in some alternate reality, except it's not.

This is real.

Millions of people voted for Donald Trump for POTUS and to me that makes no sense.

I don't think I'll do anything. What is there to do? Why bother?

Well, with strong opinions, I have hope that they'd motivate you to do something. I'm trying to figure out what I can do that's both constructive and effective. One of the things specifically I want to do is make sure I'm listening to people who I don't necessarily agree with and understand where they're coming from. With your tone and phrasing, particularly in your descriptions of Trump voters, and seeing a lot of similar language on both sides of the voting divide, I'm genuinely interested in how that's going to affect what you do.

That was all thought of before I saw your comment updates. I hope you can figure out something that you feel is constructive. Feeling hopeless is terrible.

The thing is, my strong opinion is that Trump is basically a human cartoon character, so that leaves me just blown out of the water that so many people take him seriously. That's where I'm at right now, and where I've been this whole time he's been campaigning, like, "C'mon y'all, you're not serious. Where's Ashton Kusher, 'cause I'm being punk'd."

And yet, here we are.

So I don't want to participate. It's all fun and games until somebody elects Donald Trump president. Now I want off the planet, or back through the looking-glass, or whatever. I said, half-jokingly, that if Trump got elected I was going to sit in the middle of the largest nearby intersection with a sign around my neck saying "Give me food or kill me" and wait for death. I can't actually do that because I'm the breadwinner in my family, but yeah. Take my BS with a grain of salt: I'm a lonely curmudgeon with no friends who rarely leaves the house. ;-)

As for constructive and effective things to do, call your reps, participate in government, keep communicating your values in word and deed.

I really don't think this geriatric clowntroll will last four years. He has no idea of the demands that are going to be placed on him, and I think it will wipe him out in short order.

I'll make the observation that people have increasingly been conflating nationalism and racism. If Trump wanted to single out Hispanics or Latinos, he had the vocabulary to do so--identifying a country of origin and its people is not sufficient for racism.

Folks've gotten sloppy, and it's costing them in these sorts of arguments, you included tptacek.

People didn't call him a racist for tweeting the taco bowl. Here a leftist rag mocks him for it without throwing around much racist at all:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-taco-bowl_u...

This one, no accusations of racism:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/5/11603760/donald-trump-taco-...

Nope:

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-05-05/donald-trump-...

Only the tweet from W. Kamau Bell:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/05/politics/donald-trump-taco-bow...

The reaction to it wasn't OMG that proves he hates hispanics, it was WTF.

So what it boils down to is that when a guy who might be racist eats a taco, all you learn from the eating of the taco is that a taco was eaten. The tweet isn't relevant to answering the question. It's noise, it's not evidence in either direction.