[fsaneq2]

Alright, I'll bite, even though I can't vote here, so I suppose my opinion doesn't really matter and I would not say I am a strong supporter of either candidate.

There are many issues with your question ("Why would you support a racist candidate if you weren't also racist").

First, most of what I've heard about Trump being a "racist" is his comments about illegal Mexican immigrants (which is not a race... it's a group of by-definition criminals, since last time I checked illegally entering the US is, well, not legal). Similarly for the more rigorous checks of people coming from countries having known radical islamist ties -- not a race (and FWIW, many leaders across the world are proposing essentially the same thing -- but Trump gets singled out for some reason). People also seem to paint Trump as being very anti-immigration, though I fail to see how Hillary is any better. Neither appears to have any plan to do anything about highly skilled immigrants -- Hillary does have some stop gap measures for non-skill-related immigration (why does this take priority over immigrants who contribute more to the economy..?), but that's about it.

So then, I'm not that convinced he's a racist in the first place, at least not much worse than everyone else. It's not like you're either an angel or a racist -- probably everyone has some unconscious prejudices, and I'm not going to base my rating of people based on how carefully they choose their words. Content not delivery.

But more importantly, it is entirely possible to support a racist candidate even if you are not racist. Simple example: one candidate is racist but has mostly reasonable policies. The other candidate is "not racist" but proposes to nuke all of the world the day they're elected. It's always a tradeoff.

[dragonwriter]

> illegal Mexican immigrants [...] a group of by-definition criminals, since last time I checked illegally entering the US is, well, not legal

Improper entry is a crime, but lots of illegal immigrants aren't guilty of it, but only unlawful presence, which is a civil wrong, not a crime (it is illegal but not criminal -- these things aren't the same.)

http://blogs.findlaw.com/blotter/2014/07/is-illegal-immigrat...

[foldr]

Trump's racist credentials go quite a way beyond his comments on illegal Mexican immigrants. For example, there are his comments about judge who allegedly can't do his job because he is "Mexican" (though born in Indiana):

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/31/opinions/trump-attack-on-j...

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/07/politics/paul-ryan-donald-...

And there were the times he retweeted bogus crime figures from a white supremacist twitter account:

http://fortune.com/donald-trump-white-supremacist-genocide/

And of course the time he called for all Muslims to be banned from entering the USA.

[Tycho]

Trump said the judge had a conflict of interest.

[foldr]

He said that the judge had a "conflict of interest" because his parents are Mexican.

[Tycho]

Yes, that his ties to his Mexican heritage would suggest that he would be biased specifically against Donald Trump due to Trump's position on Mexican immigration. This is not a particularly strong argument but it's hardly racist. Racist would be some unconnected national lawsuit controversy where the judge made a questionable decision and Trump said 'what do you expect? he's Mexican.'

The judge in question was a member of an ethnic/activist Hispanic lawyer's group. Imagine if the judge presiding over a case with a prominent African American plaintiff turned out to be a member of 'The Dallas Lawyers Association for White Culture' or something. I doubt that everyone who pointed this out would be considered racist.

[foldr]

As Paul Ryan put it, suggesting that someone can't do their job properly because of their ethnic background is pretty much the textbook definition of racism.

The goals of the California La Raza Lawyers Association are (i) fighting prejudice against Latinos in the legal system and (ii) encouraging Latinos to go into law careers. Swap out 'Latinos' for 'white people' and neither of those goals really makes sense any more, because whites and Latinos in California have different histories and face different problems. For that reason it's unclear what sort of organization the 'Dallas Lawyers Association for White Culture' would be, or what sort of goals it would have. The analogy doesn't make any sense.

Trump has, not surprisingly, been shamelessly lying about the association and trying to paint it as some sort of Mexican supremacist organization. As you might expect, given that it counts a very respectable judge amongst it's members, it is no such thing:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jun/...

All of this is happening because Trump is a bigot. I think it's quite possible that he believes in the conspiracy theory that he's concocted. However, there have so far been no signs of Curiel doing anything inappropriate:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/06/...

[Tycho]

Paul Ryan's comment completely ignores the context. The job of a judge is to make unbiased decisions. A judge engaged in ethnoactivism may conceivably be biased against a defendant whose political platform runs against those interests. This is simply not a racist claim. The mistake you and Ryan make is to misinterpret it as a much more general claim than it actually is.

You said there was an extensive list of racist comments by Trump, but then the only examples you can bring up are incredibly flimsy. It's therefore hard to take your accusations seriously.

[drewrv]

Thanks!