Ace of Spades has been one of my favorite conservative websites for almost a decade now, and even though its Trumpophilic bloggers and readers are dumping all over NR these days, I think the “fissure in the GOP” thing will be old news a week after the election, so I don’t take it too seriously. So although I’m using an AoS item as an example in this post, it’s not meant as a condemnation, just as something to ponder.

Anyway, here is an item from last night’s AoS news roundup:

Black Vanderbilt professor says Black Lives Matter movement is ‘pure Marxism’
The cornerstone of conservative philosophy is that people are individuals, and must be treated as such. They are not their race, their sex organs, their religion or their sexual preferences. If we forget that, we have ceded that vast majority of the playing field to the left. They’ve got the ball, 1st and goal on our one yard line before we even start the game. Never, never, never, NEVER fail to challenge the premise when arguing with them or you’re doomed.

So people are individuals, not their race, and must be treated as such; but this distinguished scholar at a highly regarded university is not even named (for the record, it’s Carol Swain), but simply described as “black.” Being an editor myself, I understand that headlines need to be grabby and pithy, but the transition is a bit abrupt.

Is it a contradiction, though? Not really. A person’s race is, in fact, relevant when the topic under discussion is one involving race. The problem is that to liberals, everything involves race, and therefore a person’s race is always relevant. (The same goes for “gender identity,” religion, sexual preference, etc.) They take a tiny exception and expand it to cover every possible situation, like a topologist defining a coffee mug to be identical to a Hula Hoop. The best thing about this tactic is that it’s self-perpetuating: By bringing race into every discussion, they make race a part of the discussion, which ipso facto makes it relevant. As Weirddave, the author of the above item, points out, that’s the rhetorical trick we need to stand up to.