A group of ancient Greek intellectuals known as Pythagoreans believed that all mathematical figures could be expressed as a ratio of integers.  When Hippasus proved to them that √2 was irrational and in fact could not be expressed as such a ratio, the Pythagoreans were so shocked and demoralized, as legend has it, that they decided to drown Hippasus by throwing him into the sea.

The Democrats are today’s Pythagoreans, intellectual elites who don’t accept being wrong very well.  At first, they maintained the irrefutable belief that Hillary Clinton’s defeat would be impossible, and then, later, they desperately clung to the belief that racism was the real reason for her defeat, all the time ignoring the facts lying right in front of them that revealed otherwise.

Forget the fact that John Podesta’s leaked emails exposed that the Democrats were attempting to influence or collude with the media to rig polling through oversampling.

Forget the fact that polls such as Reuters-Ipsos continually sampled Democrats over Republicans by a margin greater than 10 percent.

Forget the fact that Hillary Clinton drastically underperformed in the primaries based on what the polls had projected.  In Michigan, for example, Clinton enjoyed a whopping 21-point advantage over Bernie Sanders in the polls leading up to the Democratic primary there, only to lose to Sanders by 1.5%.

Forget the fact that Hillary’s RCP average poll lead in Michigan was 3.6% (substantially less than 21%) prior to the election.

No, don’t pay attention to any of this.  Hillary Clinton can’t lose.

Yet she did.

And when she did, racism became the reason. It was a “whitelash” and “running on a platform of white supremacy” that brought about this calamity.

Forget the fact that Trump outperformed both Romney and McCain with respect to African American voters (8% to 7% and 5% respectively).

Forget the fact that 33% of the counties that voted for Obama twice flipped to Trump, and forget the fact that President Obama enjoyed a 56% approval rating on November 8, 2016.

No, forget all of it.  Racism is the reason.      

Unable to accept facts that were counter to the beliefs in which they had invested so deeply, liberals attacked their fellow Pythagoreans who dared to point out that the data proved false the assertion that a Clinton presidency was all but inevitable and that racism may not be the reason for Hillary’s defeat.  While Hippasus has taken different forms over the last two months, Nate Silver and Jim Brown stand out as prominent examples.

Nate Silver suggested in the week prior to the election that the polls were skewed and that Trump had a 35% chance of winning the presidency.  The backlash from the left was brutal.  Ryan Grim, the Washington bureau chief for the Huffington Post (which estimated that Hillary had a 98% chance of winning the election), wrote that Silver was “making a mockery of the very forecasting industry that he popularized.”

Jim Brown, who supported Hillary, pushed back against the racism narrative.  He said Trump won the election “fair and square.”  Brown also said he “was pulling for Trump,” that Trump’s “going to be for all the people,” and that he fell in love with Trump for talking about helping African-Americans.

The left, shocked and dismayed yet again, went on the attack.  Marc Lamont Hill called Brown’s comments disturbing and, for making such a comment, likened him to a puppet or trinket being dangled in the air.

The Democrats are in desperate need of undergoing a paradigm shift they can better use to process, explain, and predict world events.  The prescription is clear, and it does not involve James Comey or Vladimir Putin.  Rather, they should take two deep breaths, read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and call me in the morning.