Maher, of all people, should know better

Bill Maher Smacks Media For Uncritical Coverage Of Trump's Racism

Maher has spent decades fending off accusations that his suspicions and criticisms of Islam are racist, but Karoli quotes him thus.

Note that Maher as quoted does not flatly accuse Trump of racism, despite Karoli's take.

Trump straight-up rants about how non-white foreigners are ruining the country. 

From claiming unauthorized Mexican immigrants are drug dealers and "rapists," to saying he wants to deport 11 million people, to arguing that China is "killing us" on trade, Trump's political message is uncut xenophobia if not outright racism[.] 

. . . . 

With the exception of Bernie Sanders, Trump is now drawing bigger crowds than any other candidate. 

That mass basis is a key foundation of fascism — without the delirious crowds, the fascist demagogue is little more than a deranged street preacher. 

Many of those supporters are out-and-proud white nationalists, as documented in a fascinating "New Yorker" investigation.

Trump, far from a fascist by any stretch, while something of an economic nationalist (see his criticisms of the adverse impact on the US of free trade and too much low wage immigration, most of it illegal), has rejected the idea of American ethnic nationalism.

If Bernie's enthusiasts include radical socialists and even communists or communist sympathizers does that make Bernie personally either?

His enemies will say so.

What will Karoli (or Bill Maher) say to that?

Evan Osnos's story in The New Yorker is a silly hatchet-job, by the way.

Here's a snip.

In partisan terms, his ideas are riven by contradiction—he calls for mass deportations but opposes cuts to Medicare and Social Security; he vows to expand the military but criticizes free trade—and yet that is a reflection of voters’ often incoherent sets of convictions. 

That was a contradiction?

Those are incoherent?

True, his agenda is not in line with the official view of either party, supposing Hollywood liberals speak for Democrats and Wall Street conservatives speak for Republicans.

But that just validates his supporters' - mostly white working and middle class, at a guess - political alienation, cited rather dismissively by Osnos.

Both Hollywood and Wall Street support big scale, low wage immigration and free trade, fair trade being just free trade, anyway, with riders to protect the foreign workers who get jobs producing for the American market.

Trump speaks to the concerns and insecurities of not just Republican but American Main Street by supporting both economic nationalism in defense of their jobs and those other key resources of ordinary Americans, Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid.

Nowadays, many on the left have admitted - Bernie Sanders, for example - that decades of free trade have done billionaires and foreign workers good at the expense of the ordinary working people of America.

And some - Bernie Sanders again, for example - have dared to admit the obvious, that flooding the market with low wage workers, illegal or not, has done its part to hold down wages over that same period while the plutocracy has scooped up the gains of American economic expansion.

And while Osnos, Maher, and Karoli call Trump a racist for these views, open borders, Wall Street conservatives have done the same both to Trump and to Sanders.