Betty Cracker’s right — that would be a great name for a band:
… “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables’. Right?” Clinton said to applause and laughter from the crowd of supporters at an LGBT for Hillary fundraiser where Barbra Streisand performed. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.”
Clinton then noted, as she has several times in the past, that Trump has “given voice” to white supremacist and anti-Semitic voices on the Internet.
“He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric,” Clinton said. “Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”
Clinton then transitioned to a more positive message, calling for empathy for the “other half” of Trump’s supporters who feel left behind by the government and the economy.
“That other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change,” Clinton said. “It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different.
“They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead end,” Clinton said. “Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”…
The Trump campaign and its enablers promptly leapt for their mic-equipped fainting couches, appalled at the very idea that an American politician might reject the support of people like this:
… In a windowless room in a swanky hotel half a block from the White House on Friday afternoon, three of the most visible leaders of the Alt-Right movement held a two-hour press conference to discuss their affection for Donald Trump and their hopes for a white homeland. The white supremacist Alt-Right movement has grown over the last eight years or so, incubated in racist forums like StormFront and meme-loving corners of the internet like 4chan and 8chan. Its members generally share a disdain for political correctness, feminism, zionism, Jews in general, immigration (especially Hispanic and Muslim immigration), and anyone who criticizes them for holding these views.
The three Alt-Right leaders who gathered in D.C. this afternoon made two things very clear: They think white people are genetically predisposed to be more moral and intelligent than black people, and they do not want to share their envisioned utopian ethno-state with folks of the Jewish persuasion. There’s some disagreement in the Alt-Right on what they refer to as “the Jewish question.” But the big take-away was that Jews are suspicious.
Jared Taylor, who founded the white supremacist American Renaissance site, explained the Alt-Right as predicated entirely on the belief that some races are inherently superior to others—the movement, he said, is “in unanimity” in rejecting “the idea that the races are basically equivalent and interchangeable.” There are genetic differences in race that make some races more ethical and intelligent than others, he said. That’s what the Alt Right is all about…
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Apart from the tragicomical version of the Great Sorting now taking place, what’s on the agenda today?
Saturday Morning Open Thread: “Basket of Deplorables”Post + Comments (339)