Is It Racist to Deride the Star Wars Senate? - The American Spectator

Senator Mike Lee loves Star Wars. Lee made a comment to his Senate colleagues on the Democrats’ stated desire to expand and pack the Supreme Court, likening the potential judicial body to “the Senate from Star Wars” — that is, obscenely large. Republican Sen. John Kennedy (La.) also strayed to that galaxy far far away in his allotted time, saying the Kavanaugh hearings of 2018 were something like “the cantina scene from Star Wars.”

Enter Slate writer Ben Mathis-Lilley to obfuscate the obvious in favor of a bad-faith reading of these quips.

“The Galactic Senate […] is an egalitarian democratic body that, in the Star Wars timeline, is eventually disbanded by the autocratic Emperor Palpatine, whose Galactic Empire was explicitly designed, by Star Wars creator George Lucas, to evoke Nazism,” he writes. “Are Kennedy and Lee aware of these connotations?”

Stephen Kent explains in full why Slate is wrong for The American Spectator