In my last post I gave a list of attributes and then asked you to decide who I was talking about: Hitler in 1925, or Douglas Ernst today. After I had published that post (Hitler’s Footsteps), my imaginary girlfriend asked me about a couple of the attributes I mentioned and how she thought I was stretching the truth too much for a reasonable person to say that they could be applied to both Hitler in 1925 and Douglas Ernst today. One specific attribute she doubted was “race is always an issue for him”, since I didn’t go into detail about why that could apply to Douglas Ernst, her reasoning was that I just made up a list in my head, without checking to see if all of them could be applied to both Hitler in 1925 and Douglas Ernst today. What kind of blogger would I be if I just made shit up? Douglas Ernst, I’d be Douglas Ernst. After initially rejecting her claim, my reasoning being anyone who read Douglas Ernst’s blog could easily see how race is always an issue for him, and planning to ignore it completely, it occurred to me that Douglas Ernst would react the same exact way, and the idea of doing anything the way that Douglas Ernst would do it is unsettling. That is the reason I decided to address this one attribute and see if I could elaborate on why race is always an issue to Douglas Ernst in an attempt to keep this blog’s level of credibility far above the angry partisan rhetoric of Douglas Ernst’s rants.

If you had 100 conversations with Douglas Ernst and he made it a point to mention that he was DEFINITELY NOT GAY in 99 of them, would you think he was gay? Now switch the word “gay” for “racist” and you’ll start to see where I’m going. Douglas Ernst has written 500 blog posts and all of them could be considered a conversation with Douglas Ernst: Douglas Ernst really enjoying hearing himself spout bullshit while you sit there and observe how bullshit flows. If we could somehow data mine all those posts, I’m calling them conversations, would we find an unusually high percentage of Douglas Ernst denying that he (or people like him) is a racist? Luckily, Google was invented for just such an occasion. If you perform some basic searches you can see how often the douglasernstblog.com site mentions specific terms: “Racist” 358 results; “Racism” 33 results; “Race” 357 results; “Racists” 39 results; “Racial 19 results; “Racially” 48 results. If you add those 5 search results up you have 892 examples of Douglas Ernst claiming that he (and people like him) is DEFINITELY NOT A RACIST without anyone but himself prompting him to do so (my imaginary girlfriend read this and mentioned that it is impossible for him to have 892 different posts about racism when he only wrote 500 total. She’s no scientist, so how could she prove such a thing? After some debate, we agreed on the word “examples”.) If Douglas Ernst mentioned that he was DEFINITELY NOT A RACIST in 172% of his blog posts, would you think Douglas Ernst was racist?

If I held a series of conversations with someone and constantly mentioned that I was DEFINITELY NOT A RACIST to them, even when unasked, I wouldn’t expect that person to believe me when I said that race isn’t an issue for me. The fact that I was bringing up race, or racism, in a vast majority of our conversations shows that race, or racism, is always on my mind. If I can’t reasonably expect someone to believe that race isn’t an issue for me, then the only alternative is that race is, indeed, an issue for me. That’s how we use reason and logic, we eliminate one possibility and focus on what remains. If race, or racism, really isn’t an issue for Douglas Ernst, then he wouldn’t need to mention that he (or people like him) isn’t racist so often, you could easily read (or write) 500 blog posts without ever thinking about race, or racism, if the author truly considered it a non-issue. But, with Douglas Ernst’s blog, that isn’t possible because he wrote about race, or racism, in a vast majority of those 500 posts because race, or racism, is always an issue for him.

Sorry to wander off the main path when I promised I would always be marching forward, but it seemed necessary to highlight this attribute so that later on I can use it against him in a surprising new way. I’m hoping you’ll forgive me for this side step and stay with me on our journey so that together we can find out if Douglas Ernst hates America.

Smurfalot