Of all the Republican presidential candidates, Rand Paul really
gets where black Americans are coming from. That's what Rand Paul says, anyway. He understands what black American men are facing vis-a-vis this whole business of being killed by police officers for curious or unexplained reasons. He
gets that the criminal justice system we all rely upon can be, for some,
dangerously unfair.
The justice system must be reformed, Paul said, because people can be falsely convicted. [...] Paul pointed to the case of Richard Jewell, who was accused of the Atlanta Olympic bombings in 1996.
"If Richard Jewell had been a black man in south in the 1920s he wouldn't have lived the rest of the day," Paul said.
I'm not sure if Paul is trying to make the case that racial prejudice in our justice system is at least better than it was in the southern states in the 1920s, but that seems a low bar even by Republican Presidential Candidate standards. No matter, that's not where Paul will be going with this.
"Bias because of color, because you're Jewish, or because you're an Evangelical Christian, or because you teach your kids at home. You can be a minority for a variety of reasons," he said.
Sure, but American police forces aren't exactly gunning down homeschoolers on the streets or chokeholding Evangelicals to death over a few loosies under the fear that the Christian would otherwise be able to summon their holy Jesus powers to throw off all the other officers in a fit of superhuman rage, so it's not
quite the same, now, is it. If the summary execution of black Americans and the progress we've made on that since the 1920s (sigh) is just a lead-up to pointing out the horrible outrages suffered by the Judeo-Christian Base(TM) during their daily lives, that's a hell of a denouement.
(To be charitable, there are probably fifty times more homeschooling Americans for Rand Paul than there are black Americans for Rand Paul, so Paul was likely just trying to explain the Baltimore and Ferguson and New York and Cleveland and so on shootings in a way that his own supporters could understand and get riled up about.)
This is pretty much where Rand Paul is at, in the modern debate over violent police tactics and systemic prejudices in law enforcement. He's willing to boldly give the audience a few sentences about how these things are bad, but then quickly wanders off again lest anyone think he'll be offering up ideas on what to do about it—sometimes with a joke about how at least his train doesn't stop in those rotten places, other times with an "and that's why this is like homeschooling" message patched on in order to reassure his audience that no, of course he doesn't consider any of that more important than whatever petty insults they may face.
For this he is considered the boldest candidate, if not downright inspirational, if not a dangerous anarchic force in his party. He's just so in touch, you know?