Donald Trump is truly bringing out the best in everyone this Christmas season and that’s just as true among liberals as conservatives. (I’ve given up on sarcasm tags in these articles.) Seriously, if you’d like a look at the type of honest debate partners who are staring across the aisle at you this season, look no further than the Daily Beast’s own Michael Tomasky. He’s very worried about the current state of the GOP and wants to warn you all against slipping further into a futile maelstrom of racism and hate. With that in mind, he reminds us that Republicans are A Neo-Fascist White-Identity Party. And make no mistake… white people are a big problem in the party of old white people. (We’ll pass for a moment on the irony of the fact that Michael is barely younger than me and arguably a fair bit whiter.)

Before getting to the good bits of this “analysis” you have to sit through Michael’s fascinating history of how we arrived at… the Oklahoma City bombing. (No, wait! Come back! I promise we’re getting to the good part soon.) Michael talks at length about the rise of Right-wing militia movements going back to Ruby Ridge. Covering this event, you can hear the subtext of Tomasky saying / not saying that Randy Weaver had it coming to him. The level of research the author did for this piece is on display when he claims that federal agents shot and killed a survivalist in Idaho named Randy Weaver, when in fact Randy survives to this day and would likely be terribly disappointed to learn that he’s dead. (His wife and son were killed.)

Somehow, in Tomasky’s mind, the protests of conservatives regarding federal assaults such as in Ruby Ridge and the Branch Davidian compound led directly to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. And where does the trail take us from there?

The line from all this to the rise of Donald Trump, based wholly on his immigrant-bashing rhetoric, is direct and indisputable. Back in August, in The New Yorker, Evan Osnos went out and spoke to white nationalists and far-right figures who were enthusiastic about Trump. One, a man named Jared Taylor, who edits a white nationalist magazine, told Osnos: “I’m sure he would repudiate any association with people like me, but his support comes from people who are more like me than he might like to admit.”… The Republican Party of Trump is becoming a white-identity party, like the far-right parties of Europe. Yes, it includes token members of other races, which accounts for Ben Carson, who’s just a political idiot, whatever his skills in the operating theater. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are in a different category as Cubans; in our political discourse, we throw them into the mix as Latino, but of course Cubans are very different culturally and politically from other Latinos;

That’s some seriously breathtaking thinking right there. But the big takeaway is the disdain that the aforementioned, elderly, very white Tomasky shows for the idea that Trump is out there appealing to white people. But wait, you might say. Doesn’t Barack Obama appeal to black voters? Perish the thought! (Emphasis from original)

But whatever one wants to say about those three and others like them, they’re part of a tiny minority in a party that’s probably 97 percent white people, a significant percentage of whom are now openly embracing their racial identity; that is, they’re supporting Trump as white people, because they feel he will protect their white privilege. And yes, this is very different from why black people voted for Obama as black people, and if you even need me to explain that, you’re totally lost.

I see. So even if there actually were voters supporting Trump just because he’s white, that’s bad. But if any black voter supported Obama because he’s black, that’s… different. Actually, Michael, rather than the reader being “totally lost” a better ending to that paragraph might have been, “and if you even need me to explain that, don’t ask because I have no idea what I’m talking about and don’t interrupt me when I’m trying to get Hillary elected.”

There’s more in this ball of barely muted hatred than I could possibly cover in one column. But as I said at the top, if you want to know what you’re dealing with in the 2016 Battle of Ideas, read Tomasky’s column in full. It’s a nearly perfect example of liberal logic… such as it is.