It is a meme among those on the right for a long time that anyone who steps even slightly out of the left-wing orthodoxy will be labeled “some kind of ist or phobic.”^[1] When the left in America is voted out of power, the leftists say that the nation’s racist core is once again in charge, and no progress in race relations whatsoever has been made. In fact, everyone who didn’t vote for the left-wing candidate voted for a dumber, crueler, more evil America because they are those kinds of people. Any attempt to say it was the economy or crime or the border is, according to the left, a weak smokescreen for this unfalsifiable core truth.^[2] 

This is, of course, self-evidently false. First of all, it’s more than a little presumptuous to claim to know the hearts of half the country. Secondly, it indicates a profound arrogance to believe that nobody could disagree with the speaker and vote for the only other viable option on the ballot. But at an even more practical level, even those who are not terminally online and hyper-political are allowed to and do in fact vote. They can see that prices for essentials like food and gas have gone up. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s response to this was, for example, “if you can’t afford a tank of gas, buy an electric vehicle.”^[3] It is a stretch to assume that every border town in Texas shifted towards Trump because of racism. It is more ridiculous to see non-white voters shift to Trump and assume that they are racist as well^[4]