Apparently tired of blaming her 2016 election loss on Russians, fake news, the Electoral College, Russians again, James Comey, voter suppression, Jill Stein, campaign finance laws, Anthony Weiner, and the Russians again, Hillary Clinton has settled on a new excuse: White women who voted the way their husbands, sons, or bosses told them to.
Seriously.
In a speech in India over the weekend, Clinton went even further--claiming that in addition to these submissive white housewives, entire states went against her because their citizens didn't like the fact that black people have civil rights or something.
These comments are utterly shocking in their bitterness, but also in the way that they reveal Clinton's latent prejudices. Assuming that she really believes that the reason that millions of white voters (many of whom voted for Barack Obama twice) abandoned her was because they didn't like the fact that black people have rights or that Indian-Americans are succeeding, her remarks are in themselves racist. She is ascribing a characteristic (racism) to a group of people (whites) based on nothing more than their skin color.
Moreover, her assertion that white married women only voted against her because their husbands, sons, or (presumably male) bosses told them to is stunningly misogynistic, as it assumes that millions of women lack the intellectual capacity to form their own opinions about politics and instead rely on the explicit direction of the men in their lives.
This, however, shouldn't be much of a surprise from Clinton, who has made a number of revealingly racist and sexist statements throughout her three decades in the public eye.
It was especially ironic that Clinton made her disparaging remarks about white voters in India, as she herself made an extremely offensive joke about Mahatma Gandhi running a gas station in St. Louis back in 2004.
When she first ran for President, Clinton employed what many avowed liberals claimed was an overtly racist campaign against Obama, even going so far as to allegedly leak a picture of him in traditional Somali Muslim garb to the Drudge Report during the height of their primary battle:
The Clinton Campaign of course denied leaking this to the Drudge Report, but during an appearance on MSNBC the following day, Clinton Surrogate Stephanie Tubbs-Jones repeatedly implied that Obama was really from Somalia, saying "I have no shame or no problem with people looking at Barack Obama in his native clothing, in the clothing of his country."
This rather transparent attempt at portraying Obama as a "foreigner" appears to have its roots in a 2007 memo from longtime Clinton strategist Mark Penn, who advocated for highlighting Obama's "lack of American roots" by pointing out that "his roots to American values and culture are at best very limited."
Years earlier, Clinton was even more overt in her racism, labeling young African-Americans as "super-predators" during a speech in support of her husband's 1996 crime bill.
In early 1992, when her husband first ran for President, Clinton made not one but two different disparaging remarks about women for which she was forced to apologize:
In asserting that she was neither "some little woman standin' by my man like Tammy Wynette" nor someone who would "stay at home and bake cookies and make teas," it was painfully obvious even then that Clinton was deeply resentful of women who chose to become homemakers.
Now, it seems, she is so resentful of all women who didn't vote for her that she is perpetuating the sexist notion that they couldn't possibly have made up their own minds and instead simply did what their husbands told them. And her assumption that those husbands were motivated by racism and sexism reveals a deep-seated prejudice against white men.
Such prejudice would almost be surprising if Clinton didn't spend three decades spouting it.