As I noted in a previous post, Ben Shapiro thinks Barack Obama was an extremely divisive president, in spite of his rhetoric about healing and unity. Why? Because the election of Obama in 2008 proved that America had overcome whatever racism it had in its past. He should have just shut up about the issue. He didn’t; white America reacted angrily to the suggestion that systemic racism was still a thing and that some of them were bigots; Trump was elected in 2016; and the rest is history. Is Shapiro right?
He’s living in fantasyland. The vehemence of the support for Sarah Palin in 2008 and the birther controversy are powerful evidence that racism was firmly embedded in the reactionary right long before Obama said anything about white cops and vigilantes shooting black people. Trump’s use of the military in blue cities, undertaken in the face of urban crime rates that have fallen dramatically, is evidence that it still exists; it is an article of faith among reactionaries that we need to keep an occupying force in our cities to keep black violence from spilling out into real (i.e., white) America.