"Who could have imagined ... that one day one of America's two major parties would break down historic barriers by stating that blatant racism doesn't disqualify its candidate for the White House?"

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COMMENTS: 
*  Trump's supporters are mostly white males with average intelligence and less than average work ethic. They have discovered that they cannot make it in America when women, gays and minorities are given they same opportunities that white males have had for centuries. So they scapegoat minorities for their own shortcomings. ...
*  As long as we keep highlighting the grievances of one group over another you'll get blowback. When there are more protected classes than not, the world has run amuck. Somehow non handicapped white men under 50 are fair game (the only non protected class left) but disagree with BLM and you're a racist?  Both rapists deserve the same sentence, which judge do you think was right? Being black or a swimmer who is also a rapist should earn you 25 years. Period
*  PC is simply a way to control a debate by controlling the language.
*  so you brand Trump as a racist for questioning a judge who joined a boycott against Trump but you cheer black lives matters who say white grand juries can't be fair to black people?  can you be more delusional?
*  Take a few deep breaths Will. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  I think most people don't like language that is insulting to groups of people based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.  That is a good thing, and we have made a ton of progress there.  I also think most people (probably including you yourself Will) wince or roll their eyes when they see rigid speech codes and the punishment of suddenly "incorrect" thought.
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'Political correctness' isn't killing America. Injustice is.
By Will Bunch, June 8, 2016

As you've probably heard many times in the last 24 years [sic], political history was made yesterday. Who could have imagined, back when Hillary Clinton was growing up amid the trimmed lawns and cultural conformity of the Eisenhower years, that one day one of America's two major parties would break down historic barriers by stating that blatant racism doesn't disqualify its candidate for the White House?

In fairness, Donald Trump's ugly declaration that hero Judge Gonzolo Curiel can't judge his Trump University fraud case fairly because he's "a Mexican" (who was born in Indiana ... just saying) is no real surprise to anyone who's watched his campaign continue to devolve since 2015's Endless Summer of Trump. Bizarre, racism-flecked proclamations is what the Donald does...Trump gonna Trump, amirite?

But what do we make of someone like House Speaker Paul Ryan, who lifts weights like he's the Incredible Hulk but when issues of moral courage show  up on the beach, he runs away like a 98-pound weakling? Ryan had admitted that Trump's comments were, and I quote, "racist" yet won't change the House Speaker's lame endorsement of Trump, because winning an election means more in 2016 than losing your soul.

But establishment political hacks like Ryan are also afraid of a force that Trump has tapped into that they themselves did not see coming: Unabashed hatred of the culture that conservatives have come to brand as "political correctness," which they see as shoving a certain world view and language about minorities, women, gays, the disabled, etc., down their predominantly white throats.

When one talks to Trump supporters, the common theme heard again and again and again is that their man "tells it like it is." That doesn't mean he tells the truth -- no candidate ever has rated more poorly with fact-checking sites. It means they admire how he says openly the things his supporters say or think privately about Latinos or Muslims or women.

"I'm so tired of this politically correct crap," Trump told a rally in South Carolina last fall, when his odious stock was steadily rising. Millions of voters got that. One 22-year-old, with a good-paying job in cosmopolitan San Francisco, told The Atlantic that this was his primary reason for supporting the short-fingered vulgarian.  He told the magazine that, in his view, America has gotten to the point "where it's almost impossible to have polite or constructive political discussion.  Disagreement gets you labeled fascist, racist, bigoted, etc."

The realities of the so-called "political correctness" fight are a lot more complicated. As I've written in the recent past, some campus crusaders have indeed gone was way too far in using social injustice as an excuse to clamp down on free speech by people they disagree with; in one outrageous example, stealing the school newspaper because of an op-ed that some campus activists didn't like. Those tactics are beyond counter-productive. They yield the moral high ground.

But the problem here -- and it's a huge problem -- is that the "war on political correctness" is largely just an excuse for Trump's mostly white, heavily male group of supporters to dismiss any grievance -- no matter how legitimate -- by women, by the LGBT community, by racial and religious minority groups, as just liberal "white noise." That assumes some kind of fictional, magical world where all serious social inequity was pretty much wiped off the earth in black-and-white footage of the 1960s, so that's all that remains in their book is left-wing rebels without a legitimate cause.

And yet nearly every day, even if you're not looking for it, a story of rank injustice and unfairness in today's America will all but smack you in the face. Sometimes, they cross over into the broader national dialogue, as happened this week with the shockingly light sentence meted out to Brock Turner, 20, a now convicted rapist who happened to have been a star swimmer at an elite university, Stanford.

Turner was caught in the act, raping a drunk and unconscious woman near a trash dumpster after a party on the Northern California campus, and chased down by two heroic strangers. Turner's defense that the woman somehow consented, despite her lack of consciousness, was rejected, yet the judge in the case, Aaron Persky, meted out a lighter sentence than one could possibly imagine (the law allowed for up to 14 years). The young man got six months (but probably just three) behind bars -- to be served now in a prison but a county jail -- and three years probabtion. Said Persky, himself a former Stanford athlete: "A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him (Turner)."

But what's truly shocking is that Persky (who now faces a recall drive, and rightfully so) meted out this light wrist slap after listening to the victim, 23, read an unbelievably moving 7,000-word statement about the severe impact on her. It was both a gut-wrenching account of the soul-crushing aftermath of sexual assault and a bitter, stinging indictment of America's sick rape culture:

After a few hours of this [getting tested for evidence of rape], they let me shower. I stood there examining my body beneath the stream of water and decided, I don’t want my body anymore. I was terrified of it, I didn’t know what had been in it, if it had been contaminated, who had touched it. I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else.

The woman was disgusted at news accounts that seemed to express more concern about Turner's swimming future than her own welfare:

And then, at the bottom of the article, after I learned about the graphic details of my own sexual assault, the article listed his swimming times. She was found breathing, unresponsive with her underwear six inches away from her bare stomach curled in fetal position. By the way, he’s really good at swimming. Throw in my mile time if that’s what we’re doing. I’m good at cooking, put that in there, I think the end is where you list your extracurriculars to cancel out all the sickening things that’ve happened.

Turner -- yeah, sure, he lost some stuff like his scholarship, but he will still basically be free to get on with the rest of his life before the first autumn leaf hits the ground. This woman lost a piece of her soul that she will not get back -- not in three months, not in three years, not ever. Of course, maybe Turner's swimming times did matter in the end. Maybe that's why he received a sentence that almost certainly would not have been in the cards had he been almost anyone else.

Indeed, the columnist Shaun King noted that a 19-year-old star football player at Vanderbilt -- also an elite private university -- named Cory Batey was similarly caught, amid overwhelming evidence, of sexually assaulting a woman, tried and, like Turner, convicted on multiple felony counts. Unlike Turner, Batey was sentenced to the mandatory minimum of 15 to 25 years in prison.

Maybe it's because it was Tennessee..or just maybe Batey didn't get the same break because he is black.

As some have pointed out this week, the typical problem in America isn't too- lenient sentences but sentences that are too harsh -- assuming you are poor or non-white, or simply not privileged in the manner of Brock Turner and his ilk. The social movement that sparked so much of the Trump-flavored ire against so-called "political correctness" -- Black Lives Matters -- marched to call attention to America's highest incarceration rate in the developed world, and that blacks are three times more likely than any other group to be killed by the police in this country.

That's not political correctness. It's just correct.

I actually wish Black Lives Matter was a little more active these days. Someone should be keeping alive the name of Dayshen McKenzie, a 16-year-old asthmatic youth who collapsed and died after he was chased through the streets of Staten Island by a gang of white kids hurling racial epithets. Such an incident might have been front page news 18 months ago, but recently such daily outrages have been buried in the rubble of Trump's destructive campaign for the White House.

For the most part, the so-called "war on political correctness" is nothing more than an organized effort by society's privileged classes to thwart the march of social progress for those in America who work harder for less pay, who get punished severely while the wealthy and the white-collar crooks walk away scot-free, and who live under daily threats of violence or abuse. In a nation with runaway income inequality and a justice system that's slanted for the few, "political correctness" is not the thing that is destroying America, or making it not great.

It's the injustice.
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