Since everyone covering politics has to keep themselves busy seven days a week, we’ve been treated to a great deal of coverage over President Trump’s alleged racist tendencies. Most recently it involved a series of tweets directed at “The Squad” which were critical of things they’ve said in the past and suggested they “go back” to where they came from, fix the conditions in those countries, and then come back and “tell us how” it’s done. So are these charges of racism resonating with the public? According to some recent polling, not nearly as much as the cable news talking heads would have you believe. (Washington Times)

A new poll has tracked the nuances of racism charges that continue to surround President Trump. “Voters are closely divided over whether President Trump is a racist, but one-in-three Democrats think it’s racism any time a white politician criticizes a politician of color,” said a Rasmussen Reports survey of 1,000 likely U.S. voters released Wednesday. It found that 47% of all voters think Mr. Trump is a racist, down three percentage point from 50% revealed in a similar poll conducted 18 months ago. Yet a near a majority of voters — 49% — now disagree and say the president’s opponents and critics are accusing him of racism “only for political gain.”

To see members of the two major parties splitting so widely on such questions is nothing unusual. But it’s the second statistic in the excerpt above that really caught my attention and plays heavily into the analysis we see coming out of news outlets like MSNBC and CNN on a regular basis. Fully one-third of Democrats believe that any time a white person expresses any criticism of a politician of color, that’s racism. (Also disappointing is the finding that 16% of both GOP and unaffiliated voters were willing to say the same thing.)

If you don’t find that remarkable you’ve probably been spending too much time in front of the television. If you are pushing back against an elected official’s support of something like the Green New Deal, Medicare for All or higher taxes, how is that in any way related to race? Even more shocking is the idea that criticizing an opponent for antisemitic remarks makes you a racist if the antisemite in question is a person of color. It’s as if we’ve lived to see Idiocracy coming to life in the real world.

But these views are repeatedly reinforced in the mainstream media on a daily basis and pushed to the forefront by elected officials. In case you didn’t see it already, Ayanna Pressley has a message for some of her colleagues: Stop being the wrong kind of “black.”

“If you’re not prepared to come to that table and represent that voice, don’t come, because we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.” — Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.)

Since when is anyone a “brown voice” or a “black voice?” God forbid you were a “white voice” I suppose. Somebody apparently forgot to bookmark some important goals, such as dreaming of a world where people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Unfortunately for the rest of the black and Latino community, we now have cultural overlords who will let you know which opinions are acceptable and on which subjects you need to sit down and shut up.

Hopefully, that poll I linked at the top is in the ballpark and most of the country is rejecting this nonsense for the politically motivated shilling it is. But it’s still a sad state of affairs.