Coleman Hughes, host of the podcast Conversations With Coleman and a polite but resolute critic of antiracist ideas, stepped last week into the shrieking maw of social justice orthodoxy on ABC’s “The View” to promote his book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. With hosts like Whoopi Goldberg and Sunny Hostin seeming anxious to tear into a young writer they clearly saw as a proxy for conservative reaction, Hughes seemed in line for an exhausting experience. The setup promised classic culture war theater: staged conflict without resolution or surprise.

Something interesting did happen, however, and it wasn’t the ferocious conflict-laden exchange that went viral and tickled conservative pundits like Dave Rubin and Megyn Kelly so much, The Root wrote an article complaining. The surprise came in the first moments when the studio audience burst into spontaneous applause after Hughes suggested, “We should try our very best to treat people without regard for race both in our personal lives and our public policy.”

It would be the first of several outbursts speaking less to a race issue than an informational one. Here was evidence that ideas dismissed in elite circles as radical and “dangerous” may be popular and widely accepted, even among fans of the most aggressive idea-policing show on TV.

“This was the audience of The View,” Hughes says, adding that the crowd’s reaction suggested the antiracist ideas they were confronting “do not have deep subscription in the Democratic party base even.”

What happened after those first few seconds was so offensive and surreal that a disbelieving Hughes was knocked into something like a fugue state mid-segment. It started when Goldberg offered a scolding introduction that can only be described as a parody of condescension:
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