SO BASICALLY, WHAT MAKES THE AD “RACIST” IS THAT IT’S EFFECTIVE:
WaPo identifies the man as Luis Bracamontes, who — after he’d been deported twice — killed 2 California law enforcement officers. In the video, Bracamontes laughs about the killings and says he wishes he’d killed more of those “motherfuckers.”
One way to counter this intense presentation of the illegal immigration issue is say it’s the “Willie Horton” approach, which good people are supposed to understand and know to be racist. . . .
The argument is that people are too afraid of crime, and we need to calm down and discount our primal reaction because to be virtuous we ought to discount our fear because we understand that some portion of it comes from inappropriate racial sensations. Nudged to restructure your feelings, watch Luis Bracamontes again and tell me whether you felt more calmly rational about the problem of crime in America. . . .
I suspect that those making the argument that Trump’s ad is a “Willie Horton” move don’t mean for us to make a precise adjustment and consider the issue of border control after discounting the part of our thinking attributable to racism. I think they too are attempting to produce an excessive and emotional reaction. They would like us to think Trump is deliberately stimulating racist impulses in the deep reaches of the human psyche, and that makes him so despicable that he must be completely opposed. But that offers nothing to those of us who have — after discounting for racism — a genuine, justified fear of crime.
h/t GR