At first glance an attractive and colourful plant, with an initially sweet aroma. Too late you find it’s a vile and stinking alien wreaking desecration.

It’s a ploy that rubs racism into the noses of those who can smell its stench, and yet exudes a highly attractive pheromone to those less attuned.

To demonstrate that the speech is racist requires asserting that the audience is racist (or at least has been taught the corresponding idiomatic vocabulary).

And of course, how politically incorrect to assert that the nation is racist. Shoot the messenger!

Emperor’s new clothes: Only racists can find this speech racist. Or, this speech is only racist if the audience is racist, and let he who is without sin cast the first aspersion of racism against it.

We are human. We did not evolve in the last hundred years. Our misdeeds define us, they do not define our forefathers. Tribalism, racism, xenophobia, are not congenital defects that modern medicine has now eradicated. It’s the folly of mankind to think history teaches him anything except his future.

So, anyway, to those like you who can spot them, such speech is obviously a tactic of demagogues, but tell me, just how many people will listen to you when you tell them the emperor’s a crypto-racist and by definition they’ve been complicit?

There are cultural meanings and idiomatic contexts.

The question is: Who elects the US government? Those able to recognise sophisticated, but ultimately crude attempts at manipulation, or everyone else?

Does this demagoguery presage totalitarianism?

How soon will the sky fall?

Now, does any particular columnist really not see the implication, and get the platform because his or her particular brand of obtuseness and density hits a sweet-spot of appeal (“evolution”), or is it a deliberate fabrication (“intelligent design”)? These don’t have to be completely mutually exclusive, but I think it’s a pretty strong divide.

It’s fundamentally unprovable, but I wonder about particular people.

You are jumping to conclusions here. Have you spoken to Jacoby about his intentions? If not, you can only guess about what they are.

And if you need to guess, Occam’s razor is a handy instrument to select the most likely option. You said Jacoby is a conservative. Wouldn’t the most likely explanation then be that Jacoby is a retard who should not be allowed near power tools such as printing presses?