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It is an absolutely straightforward example of a racist comment. Trump knows full well that his complaints about Curiel are baseless, so he's lashing out by trying to make something out of the fact that the judge has Mexican parents. In other words, he's using racial insults because he's lost the argument. In legal and logical terms, he might just as well have said that Curiel is a poopy pants.

Quite often there are efforts to weave conspiracy theories around Trump's incoherent ranting. So in this instance, there is some kind of story about how the California La Raza Lawyers Association is a shady "ethnoactivist" group, whatever exactly that is supposed to mean. All of this is just a way of providing cover for another one of Trump's uncontrolled bigoted outbursts. The judge is a member of a completely unremarkable kind of law association. It is no different from a gay judge being a member of an LGBT bar association, or a black judge being a member of a black bar association. Everyone knows that these sorts of organizations have the purpose of tackling specific problems faced by (respectively) LGBT and black people in the legal profession. To say that membership of such an organization can disqualify a judge from a particular case is effectively to say that gay judges can't make judgments on gay issues and black judges can't make judgments on black issues. That would be racism/homophobia par exellence.

By the way, you may recall that Trump has expanded his comments on judges since. He also believes that he could not be judged fairly by a Muslim judge. I wonder what complicated theories people have come up with to try to justify that comment.

It says something quite extraordinary about the present state of the country that there are people willing to defend a Presidential candidate who attacks a federal judge using ugly racist language. Even mainstream Republicans like Paul Ryan don't want to touch this.

[Tycho]

It's a simple implication of bias for this particular case. The example of the Muslim judge is also straight forward. No complicated theories or conspiracies are necessary. People whose common sense is not clouded by liberal hysteria can see this.

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Donald Trump has offended every ethnic, national and religious group other than white Christian Americans, and thinks that this gives him the right to be tried by a white Christian judge with American parents. Apart from having no legal merit whatsoever, this kind of speculation about possible biases degenerates into incoherence, since there are many different facets to any judge's background and many of them will point in different directions. For example, Curiel was appointed to the state superior court by a Republican governor. Does that mean he shouldn't try the case because, as someone with probable Republican sympathies, he might be biased in favor of Trump? You could fish through Curiel's background and come up with all kinds of speculations about possible biases. Trump chose to take the low road here and throw a bone to his racist supporters by making a totally irrelevant reference to the nationality of the judge's parents. Let's not dignify that disgusting behavior by pretending that Trump was making some kind of legitimate complaint about possible bias. If he had a legitimate complaint, his legal team would be arguing it.

>People whose common sense is not clouded by liberal hysteria can see this.

So Newt Gingrich is clouded by liberal hysteria? He called Trump's comments regarding the judge "inexcusable". And I guess Paul Ryan must be another closet liberal hysteric. It's quite incorrect to paint this as the fringe liberal left vs. common sense. The split of opinion is simply the split between racists and non-racists.

[Tycho]

Compare these two statements:

"A defendant, who is running for office on a promise to get tough on Mexican immigration, questioned the neutrality of a judge from a Mexican immigrant family who is presiding over a private lawsuit against the individual."

"A politician, who is running for office on a promise to overturn carbon emissions legislation, called into question the credibility of climate scientist on the grounds that he was of Mexican descent."

Paul Ryan's comment applies to one of those statements, not the other. We don't need to discuss the overall merit of Trump's argument, I'm just saying it's not good evidence of Trump being racist.

(The liberal left is anything but fringe... as far as I can tell, American political discourse is dominated by liberal hysteria, with a few other oddities mixed in like hero worship of the police and military, and unswerving support for Israel. But I digress.)

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I'd say that locating Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan on the liberal left is quite a heroic attempt to save that particular argument! If it is really your view that they are left wing liberals, I wonder if your definitions of other terms (e.g. racism) may be so idiosyncratic that a productive discussion is impossible.

As to your comparison between the two statements, it's important to understand first of all that neither of them makes any sense. So in fact it is important to discuss the merits of Trump's argument. As I said before, there are multiple aspects to Curiel's background which point in different directions as to his possible biases. Why is it that Trump chose to focus on unfounded speculations regarding the influence of his ethnicity? Because dogwhistle racism is part of his platform. What he's essentially saying is that the judge is not a "real" American and hence can't be trusted.

[Tycho]

The entire edifice of modern liberal politics seems to be built upon the very idea of conscious and unconscious bias on the part of people wielding some fraction of institutional power. Usually it's referred to with terms like 'white privilege' or 'patriarchy.' Calling this out as racist or sexist doesn't get much traction. On HN I even recall repeated discussions on whether white programmers can be trusted construct non-racist algorithms.

[foldr]

People wielding institutional power do have conscious and unconscious biases. It's not racist to point that out. But you do seem to have an unusual definition of the term, so I'm not quite sure what you have in mind there. Are you trying to suggest a comparison with what Trump is doing? If Trump has evidence that institutions controlled predominantly by people with Mexican ancestry are systematically discriminating against white Americans, then he should make it public.

The "racist algorithms" thing sounds made up.