(Apologies to readers bored with this saga, but I know many others find this train wreck fascinating–in any case, I haven't remarked on his displays in over six months.)

One of the mysteries of Twitter's most unhinged law professor is why he feels the need to falsely accuse others of racism so often.  He did it to two of my colleagues and a junior scholar at Wash U/St. Louis after they published an article arguing for raising tenure standards; he has done it repeatedly to a disturbed and traumatized woman (his harassment of this woman is simply breathtaking:  she has 3,000 Twitter followers, he has 750,000, but he has been relentless in attacking her any time she tries to defend herself); he did it, bizarrely, to Mark Ramseyer; and, of course, he has done it to me.

It's no news to readers that Painter is so pathologically dishonest that even one of his own colleagues had to call him out in public about it.  (He has since gone on a jihad against that colleague, and behaved so badly that I hear his Dean spoke to him about it.)  But falsely accusing people of racism and racial animus is particularly reckless and malicious, even by his already abysmally low ethical standards.

So why does he do this so much?  I have two hypotheses:

1.  Recall that Richard  reacted to the article that proposed raising tenure standards in law schools by declaring (incorrectly) that African-Americans would not meet the new standard.  In other words, Richard inadvertently revealed that he had made a nakedly racist assumption:   that African-American faculty could not fulfill more demanding tenure standards (ironically, he did this while attacking the authors of the article as racists!).   

Richard is a self-described "conservative WASP," who spent decades as a Republican, Federalist Society member, and conservative activist, even working for the awful George W. Bush (who, of course, looks good in the eyes of many compared to Trump–although Trump launched no illegal wars of aggression!).  Perhaps Richard's need to accuse others, falsely, of racism arises from what psychoanalysts call a "reaction formation":  i.e., being aware, at some level, of his own racial prejudice, he tries to protect himself from his prejudice by presenting to the world as an enemy of racism and protector of racial minorities? 

2.  Another possibility, compatible with the first, is that given that he is basically a lifelong Republican (until he soured on Trump) with no understanding of or real commitment to liberal values, his over-the-top "political correctness" and reckless accusations of racism and sexism are his crude attempt to make himself sound like he thinks a Democrat is supposed to sound. 

On the evidence, it isn't working very well.  Richard ran last Spring a carpetbagger campaign for the Democratic (DFL) nomination for Congress in a Minnesota district he didn't even live in, and, as in his prior electoral bid (when he got only 14% of the vote, to the incumbent's 76%), he lost very badly (coming in third in an open field, with just 9% of the vote, and this despite spending months smearing the DFL frontrunner, who was endorsed by the DFL and won the nomination with 64% of the vote).  Even his fundraising was tepid, and I suspect most of it came from the retired folks out-of-state who follow him on Twitter because they liked his Trump-bashing television appearances.  It's striking how little having 750,000 Twitter followers means in the real world.