Aside from being reminded just how corrupt and deceitful she was about her email (and our national security) as secretary of state, we haven’t heard a whole lot from the Democrat presidential nominee lately. But yesterday in Reno, Nevada, Hillary Clinton took a speech originally intended to explain more about her economic program and made it into an race-baiting indictment of Donald Trump, saying his campaign had made the “alt-right” of foreign policy isolationists, immigration hardliners and a smattering of white supremacists a mainstream part of the Republican Party. This followed on the heels of the release of a campaign ad making the claim that “these [alt-right] people support Trump because they believe Trump supports them.”

Clinton is like every other Democrat in seeking to play the race card at every opportunity, but the circumstances here were particularly suspect. Trump had made the case earlier in the week in Michigan that blacks had “nothing to lose” by voting for him. And he has a point: It’s obvious that Democrat policies of doling out to the minority community just enough to survive but not enough to thrive in return for their votes demanded a different approach. And Trump had “nothing to lose,” either, as his polling numbers in the black community barely register above zero.

For years, conservatives have agonized about how best to reach out to this most monolithic of minority voting blocs — one that barely gives the GOP the time of day. Even if Republican support among blacks only reaches 25%, they theorize, it would cripple the Democrat machine that has run most of America’s large urban poverty plantations for decades. Case in point: Detroit, which is a poster child for urban decay, hasn’t had a Republican mayor for over half a century.

But speaking Wednesday in Jackson, Mississippi, Trump took a more accusatory approach. “Hillary Clinton is a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future,” he shouted. It’s an approach that won’t win any friends at The Washington Post, but the message wasn’t aimed at them. (The Post couldn’t resist adding that the audience was “vastly white.” Just wondering: Do journalists ever report on the racial composition — or the size of the crowd — at a Clinton event?)

So in her Reno remarks, Hillary trotted out the usual suspects to promote the agenda stamped on her race card: David Duke, Alex Jones and others who speak the “divisive rhetoric” that mainstream Republicans dismiss as the product of the outer fringe of the party. “Of course there’s always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial resentment,” said Clinton. “But it’s never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it, and giving it a national megaphone. Until now.”

There is a compelling argument, though, that Hillary is bringing this subject up as a means of giving this small portion of Trump’s base more attention than it deserves. “Hillary is openly inviting them to center stage in the national debate,” wrote John Sexton. Before this campaign began, most people had forgotten about overt racists like David Duke, but in this political climate he may be seen simply as the flip side of the Black Lives Matter movement. As proof of this newfound celebrity for Duke, people now listen to and quote him from his internet radio broadcast, where he noted, “I believe the values of the alt-right — my values, your values — are winning right now in the Republican Party. But we’ve got to carry it forward. We’ve got to get Donald Trump elected.” (Duke, however, has stopped short of formally endorsing Trump, and Trump, after initially whiffing on the subject, disavowed Duke.)

That enthusiasm from Duke makes the sobering assessment by D.C. McAllister harder to take, because this most recent tactic from Hillary is just another recitation from the race card the Left has played for decades. “Instead of recognizing what the Left has been doing and fighting it with their own social psychology counter-strategy, conservatives have allowed themselves to be stigmatized,” writes McAllister. “They have unwisely accepted the premise (consciously or unconsciously) that they’re somehow guilty for America’s racist past, and have set out to prove they aren’t racist. They have failed.”

Yet we offer two more counterpoints to Clinton’s racial smear. The Democrat-founded KKK, which her ad pins on Trump, hardly exists any longer beyond a handful of guys (often Yankees, by the way) who suffer from personal demons and do not represent any modern political movement. And it was Democrats like LBJ who said of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, “I’ll have those ni**ers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” So which party is racist again?

For Trump, there may be no right answer — his remarks about illegal immigrants from Mexico, Muslims from the Middle East, and other minorities are already public record and are part of both his appeal to certain segments of society and the cause of revulsion from millions of other voters. But witness two of the concluding sentences of Hillary’s speech: “And I’ll tell ya, when I was growing up, in so many parts of our country, [Olympian] Simone Manuel would not have been allowed to swim in the same public pool as [fellow Olympian] Katie Ledecky. And now together on our swimming team they’re winning Olympic medals as teammates.”

Hillary Clinton would have us believe that Donald Trump wants us to return to the days of Jim Crow. We, on the other hand, contend that our nation has long since moved beyond that to a point where only agenda-driven media types obsess about the race of our Olympic athletes.

So why can’t we question whether one group’s fealty to a certain political party seems to have done it a lot more harm than good for several decades? The fact that Clinton pulled the race card so ham-handedly clearly means she has no answer for this legitimate query about the Democrat Party.