Updated

The author of “What’s the Matter with White People?” may have found her answer: “fears of brown people.”

Joan Walsh, the National Affairs correspondent for The Nation and an MSNBC political analyst, used a weekend spot on MSNBC’s “AM Joy” to say “really good research” had essentially proven voters who cast a ballot for President Trump were simply racists.

“The really good research that’s taken place since the election shows that fear of a changing America is the number one factor that you can see drive really the divides, a white Trump voter from a white non-Trump voter, that it’s fears of brown people, fears of losing the majority,” Walsh said.

Walsh went on to suggest that Irish Catholic working class voters who chose Trump were no longer patriotic because they didn’t support the investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the presidential election – which has so far yielded no indictments nor hard evidence of Trump collusion.

“But you know what’s also sad to me is that this cohort, I wrote about my Irish Catholic working class family, this cohort used to be so patriotic, and so much America—love it or leave it, things that I didn’t like about it, but that was just so stirred by this country’s—what they perceived as its values and much of the same cohort is with Donald Trump—dismissing the Russia allegations, doing nothing to support the people who are trying to get answers, and I find this kind of relative, this relativity about well, you know, if my guy doesn’t think it’s important or if my guy might even be threatened by it, then I don’t care either,” Walsh said. “That is not patriotism. That is something else entirely.”