Fresh off the digital presses, copypasting from an email (with a few key weblinks added and text additions in brackets):
I now have in my head for the blogging queue the subject of whether Trump is a racist. I'd indicated in a previous couple blog posts that the evidence supports a low to medium probability that he is a racist. The only good piece of evidence that I know of is the policy of his housing company in the early '70s that got him in legal jeopardy. (Question: Is someone who engages in racial discrimination for monetary/business reasons thereby a racist? What if that's the only solid data point we have to go on and it's nearly 50 years old? [Nevertheless, this piece of evidence has the virtue of being evidence of something he did, not just of what he said, where Dems have applied the policy of assuming worst.]) The other data points that the Democrats use only serve to support my claim that the Democrats are an intellectual basket case - or, that the evidence that they are an intellectual basket case exceeds the evidence that Trump is racist. There are legitimate alternate explanations for any number of the racially-charged statements he's made [his political inexperience, say; or any number of zany things he's said in the campaign and elsewhere which he subsequently backed off from, say; his penchant for over-the-top rhetoric, say; his being an equal-opportunity offender, say], which *Democrats didn't bother to consider* before jumping to the conclusion that they're evidence of racism. This damns the Democrats more than anything. The fact that one could bring up alternative explanations and *then* have them debate those explanations doesn't erase the fact that they didn't bother previously.
This has a lot to do with the Dems being in an echo-chamber and not listening to the other side. This ties into the lack of viewpoint diversity on campus. Do you know about the ugly episode at U Penn with Prof. Amy Wax? I don't see any evidence that the Dems/lefties/"progs" want to face up to what happened there, and the "trigger" there ("bourgeois values") was even less than anything Trump ever said. This also ties into the thoroughly slimy approach the Dems took to smearing Kavanaugh, and definitely ties into the standards of evidence assessment they used there. I will submit in the post that their standards for convicting Kavanaugh is the same as their standard for convicting Trump, which means their intellectual credibiltiy is shot.
Whataboutism about the GOP (the fact that it nominated Trump, say [even if he was supposedly the only candidate who could "beat HRC"]) won't help the Dems' credibility (who looked the other way from their candidates' setting up that server without so much as seeking State Dept. approval - which she would not have gotten - and all the wikileaks stuff). The Dems pride themselves on that intellectual and moral superiority, a false pride they derive from their campus experience in good part, but there's no good evidence that they have an edge over the GOP. A comparison of the WSJ and NYT op-ed pages can confirm this. Speaking of which, the NYT signed Bret Stephens over from the WSJ well over a year ago and the numerous times I've looked at the NYT pages since he hasn't appeared there, even though he's better than the names I keep seeing there. What gives?
Before I even get to the topic of Trump's alleged racism blog-wise, though, I'll probably address the question of whether the average American is intellectually equipped to assess the evidence properly - they'd have to get into being able to define 'racism' adequately for example - and to address that question one would need to examine what the current American cultural/intellectual infrastructure is like compared to, say, a generation or two ago. I will use as one obscure but important data point the fact that Mortimer Adler's monumental works 'Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought' and 'Great Treasury of Western Thought' are out of print and there is no adequate substitute for them. The fact that there is not a (well-known) public intellectual comparable to Adler('s level of learning) around right now is troubling. (That's even before considering the lack of any adequate well-known substitutes around these days for Rand.)
[Addendum: What a month, huh?]
