In Hillary Clinton's recent visit to the India Today Conclave, she made what would be, if she were anyone other than Hillary Clinton, some astonishing statements.

She asserted that "all that red" in the middle of the United States map comprises poor, backward denizens who "don't like black people getting rights" or "women getting jobs."

Here's a peculiar statement that's gotten a lot of attention:

[Democrats] do not do well with white men, and they do not do well with married, white women.  And part of that is an ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, thinks you should.

Think of the open sexism and racism involved in that statement.  Hillary suggests that white women (but not black women, mind you, as they're fully capable of voting their conscience) voted for Donald Trump only because they are incapable of independent thought, choosing instead to be bullied into voting a particular way by their poor, racist, misogynistic husbands.

Those women probably don't care much for her baseless allegations against their husbands and sons.  But I suspect they care even less for how little Clinton thinks of them.  Rightfully, there was a backlash.

Some Democrats were angry about Clinton's statements.  "She's annoying me," says one 2016 Clinton surrogate.  "She's annoying everyone, as far as I can tell.  Who lets her say these things?"

Some Republicans were amused.  "At the RNC, we try not to focus on Hillary Clinton," communications director Mike Reed says.  "We really do try very hard.  But this one's impossible to ignore."

But while Democrats are playing defense in order to distance themselves from Clinton and Republicans are giving her some mild ribbing, Eugene Scott at the Washington Post commits to a diatribe in defense of Hillary's comments in an article titled "Like it or not, studies suggest that Clinton may not be wrong about white women voting like their husbands."

You see, the left believes everything Clinton said.  Leftists may take issue with how she said it, sure, as Hillary's thoroughly proven that she's incapable of tactful rhetoric.  (But all you deplorables already knew that.)  In reality, the left actually believes that white men are coercing their wives to advance white supremacy and that they view their wives as property to be bossed around.  Why else would women not hop on the trolley to empowerment that Democrats are operating?

There's a problem with that, though.  No facts support the claim.  Rather, these are nothing more than dangerous and divisive assertions, offered to the public as facts and "analysis," meant to demonize white males as oppressors and to align racial minorities, LGBTQIA... individuals, some religious minorities, and women as the victims of those oppressors. 

Eugene Scott begins his article by citing Oregon State professor Kelsey Kretschmer.  "We know white men are more conservative," she writes, "so when you're married to a white man you get a lot more pressure to vote consistent with that ideology."

This is a good example of the basic anatomy of fake news.  First, you present something that's true: white men are more conservative.  Then you follow up by making a purely subjective statement that both advances your ideological position and is impossible to quantify with raw data. 

Let's approach that assertion by observing a few broad facts.

First of all, married people tend to vote in political alignment.  Using a database of 18+ million voter registration records, the Washington Post reports in a separate article that 70% of married couples identify in alignment as either Republican (30%), Democrat (25%), or Independent (15%).  It has also been observed by Gallup that 70% of Republicans were married versus 29% of Republicans who were unmarried.

So married couples are more likely to be registered Republicans, and Republicans are more likely to be married.  And white people tend to be Republicans.  Got it.

That tells us a lot about why white women might have voted as their husbands did.  But none of that tells us why "white married" women are uniquely subject to ideological "pressure" from their husbands to vote that way.

Let's implement the variable of race into a thought experiment.  It's also true that black men tend be Democrats.  Yet did you know that 94% of black women voted for Hillary Clinton?   

So let's take that fact, and the fact that married people tend to vote alike.  Imagine if I were to offer the statement "We know black men lean heavily to the left.  So when you're married to a black man, you get a lot more pressure to vote to the left."  If a black woman is married to a black man, her vote for a Democrat should be equally due to the political pressure being applied by her Democrat husband, right?

I used precisely inverted presumptions to reach my conclusion.  It's equally stupid.

But the facts just don't matter for the leftist media, who continue to pitch such nonsense to the American people.  This is about the left's continued inclination to eschew any desire for truth in order to tilt at the windmills of "white supremacy" and battle the phantoms of "the patriarchy" and other unsubstantiated myths, such as the "gender wage gap," which is supposed to result from systemic discrimination.

Hillary's comments are the crazed musings of a fallen political star to whom the left had once hitched its wagon.  But just because there's a glimmer of hope that this event seems to have gotten us closer to Hillary's political relevance being buried forever, that doesn't mean that fake news stories like this, which are making those exact assertions, will be interred along with it.

William Sullivan blogs at Political Palaver and can be followed on Twitter.