BUCK: There’s an MSNBC host who is talking about the “white backlash” and moral panic over critical race theory. I wanted you to hear this because there’s so much in this that is wrong and not true. Their explanations are getting weaker and, honestly, more preposterous and more desperate — which means that the pushback against CRT overall is hitting the mark. But let’s play this. Play 2.

CHRIS HAYES: If you are a political adviser to Donald Trump or Republicans (clicks tongue) and you survey the American populace at this moment in the twenty-first century and you look at out at all the issues, all the things going on and you decide that indeed white backlash and moral panic over critical race theory…

If you think that backlash is so powerful that it provides such a nuclear furnace of rage that it will be the key to taking over Congress in the midterms, well, then, you are conceding the central premise of critical race theory itself, which is that indeed racial resentment — the preservation of racial hierarchy, particularly for white people — is in fact the central-ordering (snickering) conflict in American society.

Right? Because if you think that’s the key to win the elections, not whatever jobs or I don’t know, inflation, right? If the key with winning the elections is mobilizing white backlash along these lines then you’re really saying, “Yes, yes, American politics is inescapably about race!”

BUCK: So, Clay, no one’s saying it’s the key to winning elections. This is his analysis. I think it’s so funny. There’s so much projection that’s going on here. But beyond that when he says, “the nuclear furnace of rage of white backlash” and all this stuff, this is the classic thing that the left keeps doing, which is, “We’re gonna call everything we want that we don’t like ‘racist,’ and if you have a problem with that, that’s because of how racist you are.”

CLAY: Well, that’s the key, right? There’s literally no way to respond to this without being called racist. They have created a model that accuses everything in America of being racist, and then if you say, “Hey, you know what? I don’t think that America is the most racist country that’s ever existed in the world. Maybe we’ve done a few good things for global equality”? Well, that’s your white privilege talking, Buck. That’s your racism. This is your inability to understand and embrace all the evils that you — you awful, horrible white man — have caused in this country. It’s crazy.