Wearing a Trump Hat is Sure Sign You’re a Racist, Claims CNN

Isaac Bailey, a CNN opinion writer is claiming that wearing a MAGA hat, or any hat supporting our President is a clear sign you’re a racis...

Isaac Bailey, a CNN opinion writer is claiming that wearing a MAGA hat, or any hat supporting our President is a clear sign you’re a racist or support racism.

Racist against who exactly I’m not sure, but CNN is claiming wearing the hat, or supporting the President is a clear sign of racism.

Take a look at what passes for thoughtful journalism at CNN these days:

It matters that this occurred under a President who won his office by openly spouting bigoted rhetoric, who kicked off his campaign saying Mexican immigrants were rapists and bringing crime, after spending several years spreading the bigoted conspiracy that the first black President wasn’t fully American, and who defended white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, as good people.

Of course there are no actual examples of Trump using racist and hateful language, but lets go on.

That context cannot be divorced from the image of the MAGA hat any more than the Confederate flag can be divorced from the brutality of chattel slavery. 

And yet, every Donald Trump apologist will try to say otherwise — that it’s just a hat, or that it is worn by different people for different reasons.

How do I know?

Because I’ve listened to similar excuses in my native South Carolina about those who wear or fly the Confederate flag.

They do so to honor their ancestors, I’ve been told, or to embrace Southern heritage, or because they are exercising their First Amendment rights.

The MAGA hat, like the Confederate flag, wouldn’t elicit outraged reactions if it were only a piece of cloth that harkened back to bygone days never to be relived. But it isn’t. It is a signifier for those who believe America was great during some point in the past they dare not name, knowing if they do, it would reveal a time when it was worse for people of color. 

Not sure what the confederate flag has to do with a MAGA hat except in the mind of the CNN writer. Also record low black unemployment under Trump must be the worst time for people of color for CNN. That’s bad, racist and bigoted.

When was America “great”? When millions of black people were slaves? When hundreds of thousands of black men were sold to US companies via convict leasing?

Maybe during the heart of Jim Crow, the height of lynching, or when black people struggling with drug addictions were viewed as criminals to be controlled, not fellow human beings needing help?

America was great before ninnie leftist liberals corrupted so many American institutions and corrupted so many young people to dislike their own country.

The Confederate flag wouldn’t elicit such outrage if that flag didn’t fly on statehouse lawns and in statehouse buildings and in other public spaces for so many decades, even into the 21st century.

But it did, and does. That MAGA hat wouldn’t elicit such outrage if Trump were just a man who used bigotry for his own ends, and a reality TV star instead of President of the United States. But he is President of the United States.