It wasn’t enough that Hillary Clinton, if elected president, would inevitably be under a non-stop deluge of subpoenas for her and her minions over the myriad (and still growing) unresolved issues surrounding her private email server and the Clinton Foundation. Should she really be in the White House or behind bars?
On top of this, we now know for certain that, whatever half-baked apology she has given, Hillary thinks roughly a quarter of the population she would be governing are misogynists, racists, homophobes, Islamophobes (whatever that means) and the like — aka, in her now immortal words, a “basket of deplorables.” How she expects to bring the country together remains to be explained.
In the real (non-Hillary) world, these “deplorables” would be called the American middle class, those folks who are supposed to be suffering at the hands of the one percent — you know, the victims of the endlessly trumpeted (by the Democrats) “income inequality.”
Hillary deemed these people “irredeemable” at a fundraiser while introducing Barbra Streisand to a giddy audience, some of whom undoubtedly have net worths upwards of fifty million — like Hillary, Barbra, and just about every Democrat I know.
Well, not every, but many. Admittedly I live in Hollywood, a wildly skewed demographic, but unlike most denizens of Tinseltown, I have spent a considerable amount of time recently among these so-called “deplorables,” aka, in movie parlance, “flyover people.” I can report observing absolutely no misogyny, racism, homophobia, or even Islamophobia — unless you count the occasional poster condemning radical Islam, not very phobic in my book, especially on the anniversary of 9/11.
I can also report — and this is the interesting, although perhaps not surprising, part — that these “deplorables” were almost always a helluva lot nicer than the people I have run into over the years in Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, including, one can safely say, most of Hillary’s fundraiser audience Friday night.
Folks in the South and the Middle West are just a lot easier to be around, “deplorable” though they may be. They also make you feel welcome, even those of us from Tinseltown who may not deserve it.
Which leads me to a touching story, at least I think it’s touching. One time during my peregrinations following the Trump campaign–I’m not going to say where to protect the privacy of the individuals involved–my wife and I were straining up against the rope of the press section, trying to hear what the actual people were saying. (The press is segregated off for most of these events.)
A stern-faced young man around twenty, dressed in an usher’s uniform, signaled us to move back. His job. We obeyed, particularly since he was black and there weren’t many blacks there. Trump had already been making his outreach to African-Americans and I wondered what this young black guy thought of it. Probably not much.
Further down the rope, my wife and I engaged a white female Trump supporter around fifty in conversation. She was very excited to be at the event and seemed to be quite cognizant of the issues for a “deplorable” out here in the sticks. But we hadn’t talked more than a minute when the usher headed our way — we were crossing the line again.
But then something surprising happened. The young black man and the older white woman knew each other from some time ago. She had been his high school teacher — and evidently a favorite one. The black youth thanked her profusely for urging him back then to get a job, which he clearly had. He was also going to community college, he told us, and was voting for Trump. He added that last fact in a low voice, looking over his shoulder. It was an act of bravery for him.
So who is “irredeemable”? Clearly not that young man, far from it. We took pictures of him with his former teacher.
It won’t surprise you that I think Hillary is the “irredeemable” one. Much of what she said at the fundraiser and on the often-cited Israeli television show (not to mention how many other times we don’t know about) was projection or something close to it, a wish that there was something wrong with her opposition when there is something decidedly wrong with her.
She is kind of a sad woman, trapped in time, not fully aware of the world around her — or willfully blind to it. Otherwise she would never have said what she did and made such a puerile, fake apology, obviously instigated by a panicked staff. Whether she has cognitive issues from her fall, I don’t know. But somehow, I suspect she may be now drifting off into space in her own “basket of deplorables.” At least I hope so.
Roger L. Simon is a prize-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His most recent book is—I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already. You can read an excerpt here. You can see a brief interview about the book with the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal here. You can hear an interview about the book with Mark Levin here. You can order the book here.
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