'Stop digging': TNR's Brian Beutler can't tweet his way out of branding Ben Carson a 'token'

Last Friday, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg wrote a column about Ben Carson’s growing popularity in the GOP presidential race. As he observed:

How strange it must be for people who comfort themselves with the slander that the GOP is a cult of organized racial hatred that the most popular politician among conservatives is a black man. Better to ignore the elephant in the room than account for such an inconvenient fact. The race card is just too valuable politically and psychologically for liberals who need to believe that their political opponents are evil.

He also said this:

One could argue that he’s even more authentically African-American than Barack Obama, given that Obama’s mother was white and he was raised in part by his white grandparents. In his autobiography, Obama writes at length about how he grew up outside the traditional African-American experience — in Hawaii and Indonesia — and how he consciously chose to adopt a black identity when he was in college.

According to Goldberg, a lot of liberals took issue with that particular point. So yesterday, he wrote a follow-up piece in response to those liberals, many of whom accused him of “whitesplaining”:

It seems to me there are three things going on here: 1) shooting the messenger, rather than engaging with my actual argument; 2) anger at a secondary point — that Obama’s experience as an African American is less “authentic” — and treating it as if that was the point of the column; and 3) racket protection.

The New Republic’s Brian Beutler, for one, wasn’t all that interested in actually hearing Goldberg out:

Goldberg genuinely believes that tokens confound the racial critique of U.S. conservatism. https://t.co/TegfJUsTUO pic.twitter.com/bYc9XFwGFI

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) November 3, 2015

Geez. Talk about not getting it — and exhibiting actual racism.

@brianbeutler Why "tokens"? Are black conservatives not allowed to think for themselves politically? Who gets to decide?

— Let's all calm down (@NikVanHelsing) November 3, 2015

@jaschrein token doesn’t refer to Carson’s beliefs but to the way white people use him to absolve themselves of explicit and implicit bias.

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) November 3, 2015