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Cataloguing all of the president’s “racially tinged” comments would be a Sisyphean task. The point is that Cohen’s testimony tells us nothing that we weren’t already pretending not to know. No revelation can settle the “debate” over whether our president is a racist, because there are some objective truths that the conventions of “objective” journalism simply can’t abide. It is not acceptable for a person to be “a racist” in contemporary American discourse. Racists are, by definition, deserving of contempt and stigmatization. But CNN and the New York Times cannot consistently (i.e. day in and day out) treat the leader of the Republican Party as a figure worthy of scorn, and retain their claim to neutrality. Thus, their options are either to acknowledge the fact that Trump is a racist — but remain neutral on the question of whether there’s anything wrong with that — or pretend that there is some ambiguity about whether the Oval Office is occupied by a racist, who is using the state’s monopoly on violence to advance racist ends.
Understandably, they have chosen to play dumb. And nothing Cohen said Wednesday will cause them to wise up.— Eric Levitz
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