‘Important Truth’: Hillary Defends Calling Trump Supporters ‘Deplorables’

‘Important Truth’: Hillary Defends Calling Trump Supporters ‘Deplorables’

Yes, Hillary. Let the hate run through you.

In her latest book, the failed presidential candidate defended her comments for calling former President Donald Trump’s supporters “deplorable,” which she posted in a Washington Post op-ed.

Leading up to her comments, Hillary described her time with former white supremacist Shannon Foley, who now reaches out to those and helps them shed their racism.

Hillary couldn’t believe Foley felt empathy for them. I get that because I highly doubt Hillary has ever felt empathy.

Hillary “marveled at the empathy Shannon managed to summon for even the most (yes, let’s say it) deplorable bigots.” Yeah, double down on it, Hillary:

I’ve struggled with this myself. In 2016, I famously described half of Trump’s supporters as “the basket of deplorables.” I was talking about the people who are drawn to his racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia — you name it. The people for whom his bigotry is a feature, not a bug. It was an unfortunate choice of words and bad politics, but it also got at an important truth. Just look at everything that has happened in the years since, from Charlottesville to Jan. 6. The masks have come off, and if anything, “deplorable” is too kind a word for the hate and violent extremism we’ve seen from some Trump supporters.

In 2022, an editor at a major American newspaper reached out to ask if I would write an op-ed reflecting on my “basket of deplorables” comment six years on. A gunman in Buffalo had just massacred Black shoppers at a supermarket, reportedly influenced by the racist “great replacement” theory, which had been promoted aggressively by Tucker Carlson on Fox News and embraced by many Republican leaders. The New York Times had published a meticulous investigation finding that, on more than 400 episodes of his top-rated cable news show, Carlson explicitly pushed the incendiary claim that immigrants and people of color are displacing Whites. The newspaper editor said that he and his colleagues spent a half-hour at their editorial meeting talking about this report, and “the notion that the most racist show on cable news is also the most popular stuck with a lot of us.” Several editors, he said, brought up my “deplorables” comment and “how prescient” I had been. Did I want to write an op-ed about it?

It was tempting. In 2016, I warned about the rising influence of the alt-right and the threat to democracy from a political movement that endorses violence and refuses to accept basic norms of decency and pluralism. I was largely mocked or dismissed by many in the mainstream media stuck in a “both sides” straitjacket. Now they finally wanted to listen, but they were still intent on exploring this threat primarily through the lens of a six-year-old political controversy. I found that approach emblematic of the media’s shortsightedness, and I declined the offer.

I do wish that back in 2016, people had heard the rest of my comments and not just the word “deplorables.” I also talked about the other half of Trump supporters, “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.” And, I emphasized, “those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.” That’s especially true because many are living with unresolved trauma in their lives.

So, let me get this straight. Hillary admires Foley because she has empathy for people who disagree with her:

Empathy for people you agree with is easy. Empathy for someone you deeply, passionately disagree with is hard but necessary. What Shannon does, feeling empathy for Nazis and Klansmen, is damn near superhuman. As a Christian, I aspire to this kind of radical empathy but often fall short.

Yeah, because you don’t know how to have empathy, Hillary. You prove that in the next part:

Talking about the “deplorables” in 2016, I said, “Some of those folks, they are irredeemable.” Part of me would still say this is objectively true. Just look at the lack of remorse from many of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists who’ve been convicted of sedition and other crimes.

If you truly believed this part, Hillary, you wouldn’t have written this portion of the book the way you did:

But another part of me wants to believe something else. I’d like to believe there’s goodness in everyone and a chance at redemption, no matter how remote.

So Hillary wants to have empathy, and yet, as I just stated, she demeans Trump supporters in this part of her book.

Are there awful Trump supporters? Sure. The Democrats have just as many.

Having empathy doesn’t require launching an “I told you so” tirade. Instead, it sounds like you want people to sympathize with you because no one listened to you until it was too late.

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.