With his rude, classless attack on Carson, Beutler misses three other important points. The first is that, contrary to Beutler’s hysterical denunciation, Jonah is in fact correct: Carson’s current success in the Republican primaries deals a satisfying and humiliating blow to the progressive narrative that the GOP is a party of racist bigots.

The untruth of this narrative is obvious, of course, and has been obvious to anyone whose media consumption consists of anything more than The New Republic, but now it is impossible even for the liberal gatekeepers of the media to cover it up. This is mortifying for pundits like Beutler, who have staked their professional lives on the laughable claim that the Republican Party is hostile to minority politicians and voters.

If you factor in Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, then three out of the four current frontrunners in the GOP race are racial minorities; statistically speaking, at this point it’s the white guys in the race that are becoming “tokens.”

The second point Beutler misses is this: accusing Carson of being a “token” tells us much more about Beutler than it does about the fever-dream Republican Party that he imagines exists. It is, after all, Beutler who is dismissing Carson as a serious candidate based purely upon Carson’s race. Nearly a third of all voters polled by the Wall Street Journal feel otherwise.