Hillary’s Deplorable Eliminationist Rhetoric

Hillary Clinton’s “Basket of Deplorables” comment Friday night is already being overshadowed by her health episode yesterday.  But it should not be forgotten.

For, as Glenn Reynolds has noted, it is eliminationist rhetoric, words that justify taking away the basic rights of a large segment of the population because they are in the “wrong” group and/or political opponents.

As a reminder, she said this:

You know, just to be grossly generalist, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. 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 have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric.

Now some of these folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.

So she smears almost a quarter of American voters with hateful traits, then says they “irredeemable” and “not America.”

You don’t have to be a historian to hear echoes of the eliminationist rhetoric of Nazis and Communists from the 20^th Century.

And she said this to a LGQT fundraiser in New York City.  It is safe to say many in the room have no problem taking away the freedom of speech, freedom of religion, livelihoods, and more from conservatives, particularly those who hold traditional values about the family.  And they indeed cheered her on.

Thus what Hillary did is the moral equivalent of going to a KKK rally and speaking on how “irredeemable” “those n____s” are or going to a neo-Nazi rally and speaking against “the Jews.” She went to an audience that wants to take Constitutional rights from many political opponents, and she said, yes, those political opponents you hate really are “deplorables,” “irredeemable,” and “not America.”

Regardless of her faux political apology, this should disqualify her from the presidency.

We can and will disagree on much.  But we must agree that the revival of eliminationist totalitarianism, now vocally backed by Hillary Clinton, must be stopped.