Matters of form, not substance are the things that get Donald Trump in trouble with the media and the establishment in 2016. Trump has not mastered the Orwellian arts; empty words, doublespeak, vacuous promises, and cluelessness.
Trump is especially vulnerable because he is not one of the usual suspects, not a career politician, nor career "activist," nor a card carrying member of the American Bar. Pardon any redundancy.
No major political party welcomes the parvenu these days, any newcomer who actually builds things or makes a career or a living outside of government. Neither party trusts workers or entrepreneurs either, folks who actually do useful things: work for a living, care for their families, and pay taxes.
America has been captured today by three demographics: official social democrats, right and left, with permanent government tenure; an urban underclass that has come to see inert dependency as just another career choice; and various micro-cultures that use skin color, gender, religion, or sexual proclivities to define their special or hyphenated status.
The hyphenated American is partial to simplistic adjectives like black, brown, or white to characterize the "other." Racial parsing with adjectives of color is now a common form of democratic racism.
So along comes Trump, a guy who creates jobs and employs people; a chap who speaks candidly about the aforementioned social pathologies that politicians have exploited for decades. Alas, racism and immigration are but two of many issues where Trump runs afoul of media, political barons, and that host of urban special pleaders.
So far, the Trump campaign has been saved by the wisdom of crowds, ordinary Americans who don't work for the government or live off handouts. Cops, firemen, and the military are worthy government exceptions too. Elites have little affection for men and women in uniforms of any sort. You may have noticed that press and politicos now have police in the crosshairs as if the thin blue line, not urban punk culture or Muslim terror, is the real threat.
Many Trump supporters, taxpayers without college degrees for example, are special targets this year too; a demographic which includes almost anyone in the country who actually works for a living. If Trump has done nothing, he has exposed the pervasive contempt that liberal American elites have for ordinary citizens who didn't go to college, but still hold jobs, care for their kids, and pay the bills.
Attitudes, images, and opinions about Trump now seem to be coalescing around two issues, race and immigration. Truth be told, they are two sides of the same coin with a host of subordinate issues like national security and financial Armageddon.
Still, 21st Century America might be approaching a binary abyss: ghettoes of dependent, hyphenated special pleaders at odds with independent fellow citizens who don't require adjectives to modify the meaning of "American."
We should note that Barack Hussein Obama had a golden opportunity to address the American racial divide for seven plus years. He did not! Indeed, Obama's half-assed tenure may, in part, be a function of defining himself by halves, as a "black" American, a reality that can never be more than half true. Indeed, disingenuous skin color parsing at the White House is a now a benchmark for that national edition of politically correct racism. Identity politics and bigotry are brothers from the same sorry mother – especially if mom was "white."
Trump is an outspoken opponent of open borders, a policy that might alter the hegiras of illegal Mexicans and hostile Muslims alike. Immigration has been an open wound for decades, but only Trump has made novel, if not radical, suggestions for new policy. For this he is labeled a "racist."
Piers Morgan, of all people, pointed out that the late Muhammed Ali, erstwhile melanin role model, had more vile thingsto say about Jews, women, Christians, and white men than Donald Trump could ever imagine. Of course, Ali wasn't running his mouth for anything at the time other than the Nation of Islam -- or jockstrap sainthood.
"Muslim" can be an adjective or an ideology, never a race; and "Mexican" is merely an adjective too that describes a nation of origin, not a race either -- no matter what La Raza believes.
Terms like "Hispanic" and "Latino" are fairly recent neologisms born of political correctness. Most countries with Spanish and Portuguese heritage are now faint echoes of motherlands in Europe. If class distinctions, skin color parsing, and human rights abuses are social metrics, save Islam, no demographic is worse than that of rhetorical "Hispania" south of the American border. Few genuine Spaniards or Portuguese call themselves "Latino" or "Latina." Italians and Frenchmen have better claim to Latin, or Roman, roots anyway; yet neither uses such cloying terms of self-aggrandizement.
Ethnic authenticity in Spanish speaking South America is factually limited to the indigenous or Native Americans. Ironically, colonial abuses like slavery and genocide are imports from Spain and Europe, not necessarily native pathologies. Withal, pale skin is still a social asset, and whiter is customarily thought to be better in the Spanish speaking third world.
If ideology matters, it was Mexico and South America that welcomed the human detritus of totalitarian Communism and National Socialism at the end of the last century. Trotsky was a Mexican favorite. The so-called Hispanic world provided refuge for some of the worst genocidal bigots fleeing Europe before and after WWII.
Melanin parsing and religious bigotry among Latino/Latina elites is traditional. Racial parsing in the Americas is home grown tradition reinforced by the church and the descendants of European colonists, often successful "Latinos/Latinas" like Gonzalo Curiel and Sonia Sotomayor in the United States.
Both Sotomayor and Curiel define themselves by hyphen or adjectives that suggest racial separatism under a guise of common professional interests. La Raza, literally "the Race," is an example, although neither Mexicans nor Puerto Ricans, as noted earlier, have ever been classified as "races." Modeled on groups like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, La Raza's predicate is ethnic or religious superiority and separation. The stillborn ambition of La Raza, in many of its incarnations, seeks to return the American southwest and California to Mexico.
Cutting California loose might have some merit, while retuning Mexico to Spain might make more sense these days rather than ceding the entire American southwest to Mexico.
Beyond La Raza affiliations, Justice Sotomayor cemented her place in the skin game by claiming that a "Latina" brought sensitivities to the bench that might be absent in "white males." Ms. Sotomayor is clearly a captive of the "Latin" myth too, complimented by sexism and white fright. No surprise that the "first Latina" justice trashed her white male colleagues at UC Berkeley. If Sotomayor were truly the "wise Latina," she might limit her trash talk to chambers.
If you are on the bench and think of yourself, or others, as gifted by adjective or hyphen, best keep it to yourself.
Gonzalo Curiel has roots in a hyphenated barrio too. As a student, Gonzalo was a member of a race predicated college fraternity. Indeed, at a time when he had hair, the aspiring jurist curated an afro and pledged the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, a "black," Greek house with a skin predicate and a toxic history of brutal pledge hazing. Judge Curiel is also a founding member of an affiliated Kappa race based alumni association. That history is now augmented by memberships or affiliations, like Sotomayor, with various "La Raza" legal groups.
If you follow the news, La Raza is the group that flies the Mexican flag, not the stars and stripes, during parades, protests, demonstrations, or riots.
Beyond language, Sotomayor and Curiel have a profession in common. They are both lawyers, the real nexus of Trump's complaint.
Lawyers, like journalists, are universally reviled, with approval rates in single digits. "If it bleeds, it leads" is the core ethic for media types just as billable hours are the lodestar for lawyers.
Nevertheless, there is no evidence, beyond assertion, that lawyers or judges are any more objective than journalists or skin tone fraternities like Kappa Alpha Psior La Raza. Elevation to the bench doesn't change beliefs. Demi-god status just illuminates the past -- and hidden agendas. What man would want to come before Sotomayor with her bias towards "white males?"
Sotomayor's misandry may be a wash in a stew like the Supreme Court, but Judge Curiel is a solo act on a Left Coast bench where any La Raza ties are more than probative.
If "race" politics now play an essential role in judicial appointments, how do identity politics not play a part once an appointment has been made? The American judiciary has the right, maybe even an obligation, to be as partisan and corrupt as any other American institution.
For hyphenated Americans, especially misandrist racists, Donald Trump is the great white whale of American politics, a symbolic phantasm that must be harpooned -- and destroyed.
The "browning" of America may be inevitable, but identity politics, the melanin ethic, is enlightened in the same sense that open borders are cultural progress. When a white, should we say pink, chap like Donald Trump comes before a California bench, the accused knows better than to expect an O.J. Simpson outcome. No jurisdiction plays the skin game better than the Left Coast.
The only thing worse than being too dark, in many so-called Hispanic subcultures, is being too white.
As a successful, white, male, heterosexual who opposes open borders with Mexico, Donald Trump has every reason to question the impartiality of a hyphenated-American jurist with life-long ties to a de facto, if not de jure, "black" fraternity and more recent ties to a macho Mexican malapropos like La Raza
"It's always good to be underestimated." – Donald Trump
G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of national security.
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