With shit like this on Fox News, why is anyone ever surprised that some people on the left sometimes exaggerate the influence of racism in America? https://t.co/LYYK6eIcxA

One of the weirder and more revealing obsessions of the conventional wisdom is the widespread assumption that anybody who mentions America’s obvious problem of Latino Littering, such as Tucker Carlson, Amy Wax, Ann Coulter, or myself, must actually have in mind something unspeakably more evil than littering: We must be accusing Latin American immigrants of Ritual Pollution or Corruption of Blood or the Taint of Amalek or something. “Littering” must be a metaphor for something deep and dark.

But, no, actually, when I point out that Latinos tend to litter a lot, what I really mean, deep down, is that Latinos tend to litter a lot.

In fact, as I’ve said many times over the years, littering is about the most socially constructed problem imaginable and we know we could socially deconstruct, because white people deconstructed their own tendency to litter a lot about a half century ago. In fact, the most famous anti-littering public service announcement, 1971’s “Crying Indian” TV commercial specifically engaged in racial shaming of whites as pointing out that we were uglying up with our littering this beautiful country we took over from the American Indians.

We could probably do something similar with shaming Latinos into not uglying up this beautiful country so much, except that the whole concept that Latinos litter too much is considered, by the conventional wisdom, to be some kind of genocidal dog whistle.

Why this insanity?

I think because progressives tend to have a lot of deep dark racist thoughts that feel like they can only suppress with an immense effort, like Dr. Strangelove’s urge to shout Heil Hitler, by projecting all their racist disgust on to extremely sane and positive-minded people like me who see problems and think about ways to ameliorate them.