Chris Graham: It’s OK to be a racist now, so, save your being outraged

Herschel Walker paid for another abortion. Kanye West spouts more anti-Semitic hate. Donald Trump says … pretty much anything.

People get outraged.

Rinse, repeat.

I’m struggling for what good it does anymore, for us to get outraged.

I think what those of us who are outraged at the general tone of modern life, which skews more and more every day toward the outrageous, is, if we show our outrage, those who somehow aren’t automatically outraged will see why they need to be.

I’m starting to think that, yeah, we’re wrong on that.

Way wrong.

The folks who are not only not outraged at, for example, the hypocrisy of a man running for the U.S. Senate claiming to be virulently anti-abortion who has paid for at least two, but actually seem to think there’s not even anything hypocritical about it, just don’t care.

They didn’t know who Kanye West was before he bent the knee for Trump, and let’s be honest here, when they walk about him, and Herschel Walker, they use the n- word, and not endearingly, but again, they don’t care what West or Walker are saying, or doing, just that those guys are on their side.

You can almost hear these people saying: Yeah, they’re stupid n-words, but they’re our stupid n-words.

The TV spots running during the baseball playoffs blatantly blaming Democrats for opening the borders to “illegal immigrants” who rape 3-year-old kids serve two purposes: pissing off those of us who have a shred of human decency, and reinforcing to the “base” that it’s not only OK to spout off this kind of nonsense publicly, it’s encouraged.

Every time the folks at Fox would run one of the spots, I changed the channel, and didn’t go back, like that did any good.

I read something recently about the aha! moment of the 1980 presidential campaign, when Jimmy Carter all but said that Ronald Reagan was a racist (which he was), and instead of the fallout being, Well, Martha, guess we can’t vote for Reagan, because he’s a racist, it was, Wow, you mean, I can vote for a racist!

That’s what Trump stumbled into back in 2016. He didn’t make America racist; he just made it acceptable to publicly be a racist.

And a misogynist. And a religious hypocrite.

You might think you can convince people that you maybe know from work or from your kids’ soccer team or wherever that you didn’t think thought this way that they need to be outraged at whatever the latest thing is to be outraged about, but, guess what … that’s who they are, and really who they always were.

Which is to say, they don’t share your outrage, are never going to, and since that’s all we’ve got, to be outraged, we’re going to need to find something else, or we’re going to lose our country, if we haven’t lost it already.