This may cost Hillary the election. As SLL argued in “Much More Than Trump,” the mainstream media and political establishment have simply the real sources of Trump’s support. “Basket of deplorable” is a disastrous mistake, an unjust denigration of a segment of the populace that has been unjustly denigrated for years. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:
Several days ago, the WSJ reported that in a change of strategy, Hillary would tone down her personal attacks on Trump to distance herself from an increasingly uglier mudslinging campaign on both sides. It didn’t last long: perhaps after she saw the latest polls which continue to slip away from her favor, and confirm the two candidates are again neck and neck, on Friday night during an LGBT fundraiser for her campaign in New York hosted by Barbara Streisand, Hillary unleashed an unprecedented ad hominem attack on what amounts a quarter of America, calling half of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.”
Cited by BuzzFeed, Hillary made a statement which 4 years ago effectively lost Mitt Romney the election: “you know, just to be grossly generalist, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”
“Right?” she said as the crowd laughed and applauded. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it,” Clinton continued. “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.”
Clinton said the other half are people struggling who have found hope in Trump’s message.
“That other basket of people are 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 a change,” she said. “They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”
In other words, Hillary believes that half of America either see its future in a dead end, or is a gruesome caricature of a “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic” redneck, something she has recently equated to the “alt right.” In a recent speech Clinton tried to tie her GOP rival in with the so-called alt-right movement, a loose fringe group that exists largely online and often appeals to anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and white nationalist individuals.
While we enjoy Hillary’s attempts at broad-stroke stereotyping, what is rather ironic about Hillary’s instant alienation of about a quarter of Americans, is that five months ago the liberal FiveThirtyEight.com website found that Trump voters’ median household income was higher than the median in every state, sometimes by a wide margin; and that 44% of Trump voters have college undergraduate degrees, compared to 29% of US adults. In fact, the median household of a Trump voters is far higher than that of a Hillary supporter.
To continue reading: Hillary Calls Trump Supporters A “Racist, Sexist, Homophobic, Basket Of Deplorables”
“. . . the mainstream media and political establishment have simply [? energized ?] the real sources of Trump’s support. ‘Basket of deplorable[s]’ is a disastrous mistake . . .”
Looks like a corollary of the Streisand effect. ‘Deplorables Syndrome’, maybe call it?