In 1979, I was visiting the mall with a couple of friends. Middle parted, feathered hair was de rigueur for most everyone, male and female alike. This guy passed us going the other way with a really severe mullet. It was the new hallmark of the punk movement before it became the Crown of Kings in rural America. At the time, something about it just seemed Frankensteinian to me. One of my buddies did a double-take, stopped, and held his gaze. We'd not yet seen hair like that. The punker guy stopped and yelled back, "What the hell are you lookin' at?!!!" Not interested in trying to start a fight, we moved on. But had an honest conversation ensued, it might have sounded like this.

"Your hair. I'm looking at your hair."

"What's wrong with it?"

"Nothing, just never seen hair like that before. It's different. You had to expect people to stare, but it looks ok, man."

Now, nobody sports a radically new fashion statement without realizing someone will notice. If they don't, they either live in a bubble of self-absorption or are looking for an argument. And so it is with Jasmine Crockett (D-TX). By now, everybody knows that she went to the most expensive prep school in St. Louis ($33,000 a year) but speaks publicly in street language. She's been called out for being fake, insincere, inauthentic and a panderer for doing this, because obviously it's just a part that she's been playing since entering politics. But those who've noticed are the ones getting the criticism.

Take Laura Ingraham and her guest Raymond Arroyo, for example, who opined on her show last month that Crockett "had communicated in a ‘very different’ way with her during a past interview,” but now talks like “’I’ma do this, and I’ma do’ — it all seems like just a TikTok challenge or something […] it’s very odd.”

More: Trump Calls Jasmine Crockett 'Low-IQ,' and She Immediately Proves Him Right and Then Lashes Out

'Nothing to Sell but Hate'—Greg Abbott Brings Savage Reality to Jasmine Crockett

Tabitha Bonilla, a political science professor from Northwestern University, called Ingraham's comments "overtly racist." She also went on to accuse “many in conservative media” of “invok[ing] tropes and belittl[ing] the people who disagree with them rather than engaging with the substance of the disagreement.”

Backing her up was Deepak Sarma, a teacher at Case Western University who, among other fields of study, specializes in courses on Psychedelics, Postcolonial Studies and The Grateful Dead. The bio on the school's website ends with "Verily, their job is to shed light and not to master." Verily...mmmmkay. Anyway, Sarma went on to say that Ingraham and her guest Arroyo “are, quite obviously, stoking the fears of their (already biased) viewers […] I am not surprised and it is similar to the rhetoric put forth by [President Donald] Trump to dehumanize people who are not ‘white.’...By focusing on her expressions they are exemplifying just how deeply entrenched their historically dominant language game, which, is being threatened...Crockett’s critics are offended by her very existence, and her language is just one part of this...The rise of MAGA and Trump have revealed that many Americans continue to see Black people as second-class citizens. Blacks in public and prominent positions threaten these derogatory stereotypes.”

Okay, so my point here is to note a couple of things. First, it's Crockett herself doing this meme. The language is transparently inauthentic but intentional. Second, it would be unreasonable for her to think that it will go unnoticed and uncriticized. And like the guy with the mullet, it's about drawing attention to oneself. It isn't beyond the realm of possibility to think that most politicians are fraudulent to some degree, but it's actually quite astonishing when one goes to such lengths to get up on a soapbox and proclaim it to the world. The fact that a couple of left-wing academics want to defend that and criticize Ingraham and Arroyo for noticing is pretty ridiculous. And to the extent that it is, it's inversely damaging to developing and impressionable brains that get fed this kind of messaging in a classroom of "higher learning." Brains that get a consistent diet of such dreck leave college without the opportunity to learn critical thinking skills. 

Is it racism or could it be that neither Fox News commentator believes Crockett is genuine?

If you're going to be fake about who you are, is it reasonable to believe that your messaging is based on fakery as well?

Isn't the race card just overplayed these days, and couldn't critics just be getting tired of political frauds?

Any of these could be a possibility that, in a fair arena of ideas (like college is supposed to be) ought to be explored before assigning intent. In college, I had 27 hours of philosophy. It was a lot more than the core 12 hours required by the school, and while these classes were often sedative, I realize now how important they were to my thought process. First, you never assign intent to the person who made the proposition you're discussing. In a debate you'll lose because ad hominem attacks always fail. It's far better to use the Socratic Method to question the foundation of the proposition until it either falls apart or you can demonstrate that it's a weak house built on weaker joists. In the academics' statements above, I don't see any underlying predicate that Ingraham and Arroyo could be racist. They just don't like Crockett because she's loud, obnoxious and vapid. Ingraham has said so before. But the teachers quoted are throwing racism out there as a fact of the matter. It's the dirty sock of intolerance. Surely it will stick to the wall. As for Bonilla's quote accusing "many in conservative media” of “invok[ing] tropes and belittl[ing] the people who disagree with them," this is just what I see her doing. 

And besides, these are the same people who call Trump Hitler. So much for tropes.

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