Hillary Clinton should probably take her doctor’s advice and nap when she has pneumonia, because when she’s sick a tired on the campaign trail, apparently she’s also sick and tired of all the bullshit. At a fundraiser in New York City, after just being introduced by well-known transgender actress Laverne Cox, she proceeded to give a pretty typical stump speech, with the emphasis on a generic theme of don’t rest on your laurels, this thing isn’t over and we can’t take our eye off the ball, don’t take your foot off the gas, yada yada, all that crap because if we screw up and let our guard down, that asshole might win.
Right? Pretty standard stuff.
And before we go on, let’s remember that she’s speaking to an LGBTQ audience …
OK. So the stage is set, and pneumonia Hill drops this:
“I know there are only 60 days left to make our case — and don’t get complacent, don’t see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think, well, he’s done this time. We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”
OMG! I’m so shocked.
Except, no. I wasn’t. And neither were the vast majority of people not working for a Republican politician trying to spin this into a massive Liberal Conspiracy against “Real” Americans, or some such nonsense.
Basically … she did what, exactly? Called half of Trump’s supporters bigots in some form or fashion? Is that news? Really?
In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, “Let’s sum up.” She didn’t call half of Americans “deplorable.” She called half of Trump supporters deplorable, an accusation that some of his own Republican adversaries had been making against him through the primaries and an explanation by the RNC and Mitt Romney for why they had been trying to find ways to replace Trump on the ticket or run a third party challenge against him for months. At the moment, according to the poll aggregator at FiveThirtyEight’s Now Cast for national polls, Clinton is running at about 42 percent and Trump at 40 percent (we’ll round it up to 40 for poor Little Donny. (This leaves about 18 per percent undecided, of which half say they’re voting for Gary Johnson, but stoners say lots of shit they never actually follow through on.)
So, Clinton is saying that 20 percent are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic” yada yada. Basically, one in five. So, if you take that at face value, you have to think to yourself, “Do I know that many bigots?” Some of you will say “No, of course not. I only associate myself with the most enlightened individuals in the plastic bubble in which I live.” Others of you will say, “Wait, when did you meet my family?”
Over the past few days, there have been plenty of better journalists than me (such as German Lopez and Matthew Yglesias for Vox and the crew at FiveThirtyEight in a group chat) breaking down that number and putting forward more than enough statistical evidence to show that Clinton was more than justified. But the kicker is that they’re trying to examine a number that is too high. This is because only about half of Americans actually vote. According to Pew Research, in 2012 the good ole U.S. of A. turned out a pathetic 53.6 percent of our voting age population at the polls. So, to give Poor Little Offended Donny some more favorable press, let’s round that down to half for more math that even a deplorable Trump supporter can understand.
Applying that filter, those 40 percents for Hill and Donny is actually 20 percent. And half of 20 is 10. So we’re talking about 10 percent of people. And not only that, but 10 percent of voting age U.S. citizens. One in 10. Now let’s re-ask the question from earlier: “Do you think that one out of 10 people you know is a bigot?”
C’mon now, tell me, when the fuck did you meet my family?
With all seriousness, one in 10 is not a bombshell. If you’re shocked at that number, shocked I say!, then you’re trying really fucking hard to be shocked. And I joke about my family, but my upstate New York country family is pretty open, easy-going, and liberal in many ways. But also in all seriousness, is 10 percent of my family either “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic,” … or … “Islamaphobic”? Uh, yeah. Yeah they are. I have eight uncles and aunts on one side and a couple more on the other. I have one uncle who loves to post to Facebook about how illegal immigrants are ruining the country, and another one who posts memes about how people on welfare are the scum of the Earth. And those are just the ones “brave” enough to put that crap on Facebook. The truly racist members of my family are probably smart enough to not turn on a computer. (I mean, if they did, the Muslim Obama Government Cabal could read their thoughts and come for them, amiright?)
Some of the controversy could be summed up by a tired, pneumonia-riddled, exhausted Clinton leaving out a conjunction. Which could make a lot of difference in the meaning of the statement. Because someone “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, AND Islamaphobic” is a true snowflake of a scumbag, someone deserving of the Alt-Right Hall of Fame of Dirtbaggedness. But someone who is “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, OR Islamaphobic” is just that asshole uncle you wish would stop posting his political beliefs and go back to putting up pictures of his granddaughter’s latest soccer game.