The left’s conception of racism and racists is as delusional as the right’s ideas of “natural” criminality and some supposed genetic tendency of some ethnicities’ Citrullus preferences.

I won’t say the left and the right are equally stupid. No, that’s clearly wrong and a false equivalence. But the left’s stupidity is of the variety that incapacitates it in dealing with the world as it is, while the right’s is not.

This makes a lot of difference.

This piece and others like it is why usually I don’t read Crooked Timber anymore.

Yes, sure, believe that the only reason to oppose something directly harmful to you like unrestricted immigration is that you are racist. Makes sense. Or even if they are racist, pretend that is not symptomatic of something else — something, oh, perhaps caused by the ten-for-a-dollar intellectuals who faff about in places like Crooked Timber pushing globalization and free-for-all red-in-tooth-and-claw trade, thus devastating communities the CT types would never demeans themselves by visiting.

I would call them pseudo-intellectuals, but alas they are actually intellectuals, just not very good or sagacious ones.

When you have 23 years of education but are still as dense as a box of cadmium, why did you even bother to spend all that time in university?