At a glitzy fundraiser in New York on Friday night, Hillary Clinton effectively insulted millions of Americans in a statement that was far more pernicious, in both tone and substance, than Mitt Romney’s obsessively-scrutinized “47 percent” comment.
Speaking to an audience of high-profile liberal celebrity donors, including Barbara Streisand and Laverne Cox, Clinton condemned exactly “half” of all Trump supporters, claiming that they come from a “basket of deplorables.”
“To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” Clinton snickered. “Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.” The other half, she qualified, are fed up with the government.
In short, she took a page out of the degenerate SJW gospel of identity-politics, branding her political opponents with every vacuous “-ist” and “-ism” this side of 90s PC culture.
It was a shameful moment that she quickly came to regret. Or at least her campaign operatives, after looking at the electoral map and analyzing swing-state demographics.
“Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that’s never a good idea. I regret saying ‘half’ — that was wrong,” she said in a statement Saturday.
The apology was politically-expedient and likely disingenuous given the fact that campaign insiders say that she’s been using the phrase “basket of deplorables” to refer to Trump supporters for a number of weeks now.
Moreover, the apology came with a caveat. Shrewdly, she doubled-down on her claim that the Trump movement is inherently bigoted, while merely suggesting that she shouldn’t have quantified the precise number of bigots.
Here’s the full apology.
“I won’t stop calling out bigotry and racist rhetoric in this campaign.” —Hillary pic.twitter.com/C3Z7GybJ53
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 10, 2016