This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Here's what you need to know about this Super Tuesday CNN segment everyone is talking about. A few minutes after Donald Trump's never-ending victory speech ended, Jeffrey Lord, Trump's knight in shining armor on the CNN pundit panel, had just said the Republican establishment's "view of civil rights is to tip the black waiter five bucks at the country club." His fellow panelist, Van Jones, was pissed off. And while the whole discussion started out absurd—Donald Trump is the man to upend the tip-at-the-country-club paradigm?—this discussion somehow evolved into a useful microcosm of the race debate raging in America at the moment.

"The things that Donald Trump has done, and not just in this race, are horribly offensive," Jones said. "You can go back with this guy for a long time." He then referenced the Central Park Five case, where Trump played a role in whipping up a public outcry against five black and hispanic teens accused of raping a white jogger in New York. All were tried and convicted, then cleared of the crime years later. Trump called the city's decision to settle with the wrongly convicted men, who had spent nearly a quarter century behind bars, a "disgrace."

"We have a big problem, now," Jones continued. "There is a dark underside here, and S.E. [Cupp] is right. He is whipping up and tapping into and pushing buttons that are very, very frightening to me, and frightening to a lot of people. Number one: when he is playing funny with the Klan, that is not cool...I know this man when he gets passionate about terrorism. I know how he talks about terrorism. The Klan is a terrorist organization that has killed—" Lord jumped in: "A leftist terrorist organization."

This is bizarre on its face, but it's also one of many instances where Lord attempted to fit the issue of race into a left-right, liberal-conservative, Democratic-Republican vortex. He repeatedly said the Klan were "liberal" and were Democrats. The first part of that is highly debatable, but the second part is not. Southern Democrats were the party of segregation and the paramilitary forces who helped enforce it.

"I care about American history," Lord sneered. "It counts."

In that case, surely he'll acknowledge that, when the Democratic Party incorporated Civil Rights into its platform, Strom Thurmond led the southern segregationists out of the party and, after a brief stint of independence, into the Party of Lincoln. But Trump's cable news consigliere had no time for that—he quickly moved on to how the Democratic Party is responsible for any and all racism that exists today.

(Trump is not the only one who's got someone in the tank for him on CNN's panel. Former Ted Cruz communications director, Amanda Carpenter, was there to spin the election returns for him in real time.)

"What you're doing here, Van, is dividing people," said Lord. "We're all Americans, Van. This is what liberals do. You are dividing people by race. This is what liberalism is all about.""The Klan divided people by race," Jones responded. "The Klan killed people by race.""And they did it to further the progressive agenda."

But while he was eager to prove the Klan was advocating for national healthcare, Lord also seemed to think that, like Fight Club, the first rule of race is you never talk about race. "Innocent kids," he said, when Jones said the Central Park Five were both innocent and black. And later:

"We have to make sure, as Robert Kennedy used to say, that this nation is colorblind. We have to, as President Kennedy used to say in that Birmingham speech, that race has no place in American life or law. That's what we have to do, and we have lost that totally because the Democratic Party insists on dividing people by race, and it's wrong. It's morally wrong."

It all bears a striking to resemblance to Stephen Colbert's position on race, back when he played a reactionary conservative pundit on The Colbert Report. "I don't see race," he'd say, "But if I did..." or "People tell me I'm white and I believe them." It's what seems to have become an essential part of conservative theory on race: if you don't acknowledge race at all, racism will cease to exist and we will live in a colorblind utopia. Sometimes, this manifests in particularly ugly ways:

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

But as much as Lord can say that Democrats are The Real Racists, take a minute to consider some of the things that Donald Trump has said and done in regards to minorities:

Meanwhile, African-Americans who attend his rallies are still being treated like this, whether or not they're protesters:

Maybe it's time to grow up. This is real.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io