Recently, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump traded insults, each of them accusing the other of being a bigot. Whereas most people cringed at the calling of names, I thought they were both right. Trump showed his own colors when he voiced resentment that a judge born in Indiana shouldn’t be allowed to hear the lawsuit targeting Trump University for no other reason than that he had an Hispanic surname.

For his part, Trump was right to hit Mrs. Clinton that she was the titular head of a party that treats blacks in much the same way that plantation owners treated their slaves, except that the DNC only requires that their black underlings vote, not that they pick cotton.

Hillary Clinton had the audacity to say: “There’s always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, a lot of it arising from racial resentment, but we’ve never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it and giving it a megaphone.” For the briefest of moments, I thought she was doing a mea culpa for embracing the Black Lives Matter movement. But I quickly realized that she is all too aware of the fact that without its assurance of garnering 95% of black votes, no Democrat since LBJ would have won the presidency.

The scary thing about the Clinton game plan is how well it works, albeit on very stupid people and the media. Or do I repeat myself? For decades, their strategy has been to first deny all charges; then to refer to one scandal after another as old news; and, finally, to attack the messengers as members of a massive right-wing conspiracy.

Still, it’s not just the presidential candidates who toss around words like “bigot” and “racist” willy-nilly. It has become the favorite go-to insult for every nitwit in the country. But, as I see it, it’s only bigotry when you condemn members of a minority indiscriminately. If you’re the sort of white person who lumps such people as Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, Condoleezza Rice and Tom Sowell, with the likes of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch and Michael Brown, you’re unquestionably a bigot, as well as an idiot. What’s more, there are probably no more than a dozen of you in the entire country.

The majority of those Americans who condemn people solely on the basis of their color happen to be urban blacks. And the place you will find a great many of them are at the annual MTV Music Awards. That’s where, some years ago, we all got to see several hundred wealthy, privileged, blacks embarrass themselves by chanting for Johnnie Cochran to spring O.J. Simpson from his double-murder rap.

It is also where, quite recently, Kanye West spent several minutes on stage condemning whites and declaring to an audience filled with fools: “We the thought leaders.” Tragically, for millions of ignorant blacks, he be telling the truth.

Then, lest Mr. West hog the limelight, San Francisco 49er back-up quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand up for the National Anthem. The 28-year-old explained that he was protesting this nation’s oppression of people of color. In his case, oppression has taken the bizarre form of a six-year $114 million contract that came with a $12 million signing bonus.

Because I take no interest in football, I admit I had never even heard of the pinhead until he garnered media attention by showing his disrespect for America. By googling his name, I found that he was born to a single young white woman and a black sperm donor, who had taken off even before Colin was born. Fortunately for little Colin, he wasn’t aborted. Instead, he was adopted by a well-to-do white couple. Which makes it all the stranger that to hear him speak, you’d imagine that Mr. Kaepernick had grown up in Compton, Detroit or Harlem. Perhaps he learned English by listening to Kanye West tapes.

Frankly, there are few things more tiresome than hearing someone as rich and as pampered as a professional athlete whining about being oppressed.

What I find interesting is that when people are born to a bi-racial couple, they most often seem to identify with their black half, even when it’s the half that abandoned them early on. I’m not sure if that’s because they think it’s cooler to be black than white or if it’s because kids will often idolize the parent who isn’t around making sure they eat their vegetables, shower, brush their teeth and do their homework.

Of course in the notorious case of Barack Obama, the choice was based on the fact that being black greased his path into politics and, ultimately, into the White House.

On a related subject, a reader recently shared a piece providing the background of Thomas Jefferson and some of his most prescient quotes regarding our Republic, including “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not” and “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”

In response, I wrote: “But let us never forget — as if liberals ever would — that Jefferson kept slaves. Of course so do Democrats, but they refer to theirs as voters.”

There are aspects of libertarianism that appeal to me, but I do wish they would stay out of presidential politics, where their singular role is to play the spoiler, nearly always to the benefit of Democrats. A recent poll of Real Clear Politics showed Hillary Clinton with 42%, Trump with 38%, Libertarian Gary Johnson with 8.1% and Greenie Jill Stein with 3.3%. Of course that only adds up to 91.4%, leaving me to wonder who those 8.6 percenters are. Perhaps it’s those numbskulls who are unaware of who is running for what, but who eventually decide that if everybody else is voting and it doesn’t cost anything, maybe they should get in on it.

But it also confounds me what those 11.4% think they’re achieving by casting their votes for people like Johnson and Stein who have absolutely no chance of winning. Are they so befuddled that they actually place their self-adoration above the makeup of the Supreme Court if Hillary wins the election?

But it is the same question I put to those arrogant GOP big shots who refuse to support Donald Trump because, like a bunch of Emily Posts, they disapprove of his manners and the way he slurps his soup.

The fact is that those Republican members of Congress who are turning their backs on their nominee have put themselves, politically, in a lose-lose position. If Hillary wins, they will remain as powerless as they’ve been under Obama for the past eight years. If Trump wins, how much influence do they think they or their states will have in his administration? GOP presidents are like their party’s symbol: they never forget. Especially not when it comes to their party’s Benedict Arnolds.

But all is not lost. John Ellison, the dean of students at the University of Chicago, greeted incoming freshmen with a letter that read: “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might be controversial and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspective at odds with their own.”

Thomas Jefferson would tip his wig to Dean Ellison, as should we all.