ANNALS OF OIKOPHOBIA: ThinkProgress Senior Editor Is Scared Of His Plumber:

A visit from a plumber left ThinkProgress senior editor Ned Resnikoff “rattled” due to fear that the plumber may have voted for Donald Trump.

Resnikoff stated his fears in a November Facebook post, a screenshot of which is now making the rounds on the Internet.

The plumbing visit, which came four days after the 2016 election, became a harrowing experience for Resnikoff even though the plumber was “a perfectly nice guy and a consummate professional.”

“He was a perfectly nice guy and a consummate professional,” Resnikoff shared. “But he was also a middle-aged white man with a southern accent who seemed unperturbed by this week’s news.”

Resnikoff said his fear was rooted in the chance that the plumber knew he was Jewish.

“While I had him in the apartment, I couldn’t stop thinking about whether he had voted for Trump, whether he knew my last name is Jewish, and how that knowledge might change the interaction we were having inside my own home,” he said.

The “uncertainty” of the situation left Resnikoff “rattled for some time.”

This reminds me of law professor Wendy Brown’s backwoods encounter with a man in an NRA hat who helpfully fixed her car, only to be the star of a Yale Law Journal article in which she speculated that he might have been a rapist. That produced Doug Laycock’s memorable piece, Vicious Stereotypes In Polite Society. (Really, click through and read it, you’ll be glad you did). Things haven’t gotten any better in the 25 years since. (And I remember Laycock telling me at the time that he was disturbed to have some of his colleagues tell him — quietly, when no one was around — that he was “brave” to have published that piece. Moreso today!)

On the other hand, I had some workmen at my house a while back and the foreman looked at me and said, “You’re the InstaPundit, right? I read you all the time . . . but I’m really one of Ace’s Morons.” And I felt good about that.