Can you all stop with this moronic “now’s the time to pull together as Americans nonsense? That’s not happening. When you voted for Trump you specifically voted against an America where we all pull together. You voted for racism and divisiveness. This isn’t Mitt Romney, we’re not arguing about the tax rate for the top 1%. You voted for racism. You rang a bell that can’t be un-rung. Reading between the lines of this “we’re all Americans” sentiment, I see that the guilt of what you have done is already sinking in. You want us to make you feel better and give you a pass. The fact is that because of what you’ve done, we’re not all Americans; your version of America is in direct contrast with my version of America. Because of what you’ve done, we’ll never all be in the same America again.
Donald Trump ran a campaign that asked voters to choose: us or them. I choose them. I choose my brown, black, straight, gay, trans, Muslim, Jewish, Atheist, Baha’i brothers and sisters. I choose them; I choose them even if you and I have known each in real life for years and I’ve never met them. I choose them even if you and I are related. I choose them because by voting for Trump you forced me to choose.
Have anyone else noticed that all these people talking about putting aside our differences and giving Trump a chance are white? This is one of those times where we need to check our privilege. We can go back to our lives and smugly say “don’t blame me, I didn’t vote for him” because deep down we know we’ll be ok. Our black, brown, gay and non-Christian brothers and sisters won’t be ok, they are incredibly vulnerable. When we talk about coming together we mean white people coming together and saying to the rest of the country" sucks to be you." We’re saying we are going to support a candidate endorsed by the Klan so that Thanksgiving won’t be awkward. Maybe if you cast a racist vote, you’ve earned some awkwardness, maybe you being made to feel bad for what you’ve done is exactly what should happen.
(This is just to make me feel a little better, I’m kind of used to being ignored here, carry on.)
So what’s your alternative? Armed revolution? Rioting in the streets? You would have zero chance of winning and would lose the sympathy of the great mass of American people. Every time a Republican President takes office the Left act as if it’s the end of the world and take to the streets saying they won’t accept the result. Who are behaving more like Fascists here, Trump or the people rioting and refusing to accept the political process?
You lost. Behave like Americans. Make all the peaceful protests you want and organize to win the next one in 4 years. To do otherwise is a slap in the face to Obama and to the country itself.
I specifically said that Trump was not a typical GOP candidate in my OP and that he was not Mitt Romney.
You voted for a Klan endorsed candidate. You own that. You don’t get a pass, we don’t let you re-write history. In a couple of years, we don’t let you say “we had no idea he was so extreme.” You knew and you voted for him anyway. You knew and you embraced his racism. You voted for Trump because you are racists and we get to tell you that everyday for the next four years.
Check your privilege? You mean like the 200 plus year tradition of a peaceful transfer of power which the US has. Do you really want protests in all major cities, government paralyzed? Do you really want a precedent that if your guy (or gal) does not win, you can take you ball and go away? Who will that hurt?
Fuck no, you blessed and bloody Yanks! You keep on squabbling and fighting and complaining in all your chaotic glory! You’re like a unilingual medieval Europe - the constant swapping of ideas and arguments will make you stronger in the long run.
Just try to cool it on the anti-intellectualism a bit, okay?
In the immediate future, it means standing up to bigotry and hate as soon as you see it. It means no more sheepishly smiling awkwardly when bigots talk. Stand up against the hate as soon as you see it or read it online. It means not letting them move past what their vote really says. We’ve been pandering to white racists for too long, we’ve let them pretend that Robert E. Lee was somehow honorable and that the civil war wasn’t about slavery as they re-write history. We did all that because we put just getting along ahead of evolving. We must contest every lie and every racist utterance. No more pretending you didn’t hear it for the sake of keeping the peace.
We cannot let Trump’s America be the new normal. We cannot let Klan rallies, assaults on gays and overt racism just become the background noise of our lives. The Klan is marching in North Carolina, own it Trump voters. Get down there and march with your brethren you’ve earned it.
Take your generalizations of racism & bigotry & shove them up your ass - all the way up. Support for Trump cut across many racial lines. The left has NO claim on moral superiority when it comes to fighting racism. Anyone who blatantly dismisses any rational arguments with “racism! bigotry! phobias!” is just trying to mask their insecurities.
Clinton had most of the media & so much support behind her yet she lost because the rest of America is sick & tired of leftist claptrap & name-calling. We’ve seen enough of Hillary when Billdo was in office & she’s done nothing but trip all over herself during her campaign. While Trump had many supporters there were lots who were adamantly against Clinton.
But be honest, it was one clueless, self-important, smug baby boomer against another in this election. The whole thing was a shit sandwich. This gave us a chance to shuffle the deck & shake things up a bit. The sky isn’t falling. Quit crying like a baby & put on your big boy pants already.
Our candidate wasn’t endorsed by David Duke. Our candidate’s plan for dealing with racism in the police force was not “bring back a racist, unconstitutional method of overpolicing minorities”. Our candidate didn’t run on a platform based on nativism and not allowing more brown people in. There were black Trump supporters. There were hispanic Trump supporters. I bet there were even Muslim Trump supporters. This doesn’t change his platform or what he said.
You know, I’ve been looking for rational arguments to vote for Trump for some time now. Like, over a year. Maybe you’d like to mosey on over to the elections forum and offer them. But nobody here has dismissed “rational arguments” by pointing to racism. They’ve merely pointed out that Trump’s explicit racism, islamophobia, and bigotry (less a dog whistle than a bullhorn at this point) is yet another reason why he’s a terrible candidate.
In the primaries, 84% of all mainstream media stories covering Clinton were negative. 84%.
EIGHTY. FOUR. PERCENT.
Three major “liberal” media networks spent more time on Clinton’s email server scandal than on all other issues (you know, those things Clinton had well-thought-out plans for and Trump didn’t give two shits about) by nearly a factor of three. The press played up every “scandal” of hers, whether there was actually anything damning about it or not. They played by “Clinton Rules”.
Can we please let this stupid, absurd, baseless myth of the liberal media fucking die already? It’s well-known that the media doesn’t like Clinton. And it wasn’t just the “liberal” outlets who expressed their disdain for Trump. Right-wing publications made it explicitly clear that Trump was not an acceptable candidate. Numerous newspapers who have never endorsed a democrat stood up and said, “We’re behind Clinton”.
Do you know any LGBT people? Maybe ask them how they feel about it. You owe them an apology.
Trump ran an openly racist campaign. To expect the rest of the nation to come together in unity is to expect us find unity with the Klan. To what end? At what point is accommodating violent racists no longer in our national interests? I’ve reached the conclusion that we’ve come to that point.
The Trump campaign embraced the rhetoric that it was blowing up the old order, but the thing is that explosions are imprecise. You might like to think that your vote was for blowing up business as usual in Washington, but by supporting an openly racist candidate with members of the alt-right white supremacist movement on his campaign staff, the blast radius of your actions included some of the pillars of our society.
Red state America is by far the biggest threat to my way of life and the safety of my friends who don’t happen to be male, white and nominally Christian. The danger isn’t coming from Muslims, or Mexican rapists. It is coming from a white nationalist political movement that now has control of all branches of government.
If you voted for Trump, you own that. You might not consider yourself a racist, but you decided that the Trump campaign’s inherent racism didn’t matter, that you don’t care enough about anyone who’s not white to take their interests into account before casting your vote. We are the decisions we make, you decided to vote in line with a racist movement, you are racist.
So, what is it exactly that we should be doing if not “coming together”?
All I can make sense of in your statements is “we shouldn’t be nice to racist people”, which doesn’t seem to be incompatible with that.
If you’re saying “We should call all Republicans racists all the time and heap scorn upon them”, then I don’t see how introducing more hatred into the system is going to make anything better. Smearing an entire group of people because of the motives of a few is the kind of thing Trump does. Are you saying we should be more like Trump?
To be honest, I’m not sure, but the Trump voters are asking me to come together with the Klan and I won’t do that. Honestly, I don’t think we survive as a nation. The red/blue divide was stark before and now it’s a chasm. I imagine we’ll further Balkanize ourselves and each election we lurch from one side to the other with the new president’s first action undoing the work of the predecessor.
Missed the edit, but I think we try our best to get control of the House then the Senate, use those positions as watchdogs and investigators and where we find evidence of wrongdoing, pursue impeachment.
In our personal lives, be prepared to protect marginalized Americans and stay engaged. Fight every appointment, every measure. Wherever there is a vulnerable GOP elected official whether it is for senate, governor or dog catcher, pour resources into getting them out of office.
I don’t think they are. The Klan doesn’t represent Trump and the GOP any more than the New Black Panther party represents Obama or the Democrats. Trump is definitely a product of his time with some awful beliefs about lots of people, and his voicing those beliefs has emboldened people who are more avowedly racist, but I don’t get the impression that the majority of Trump voters voted for him because they’re white supremacists.
This nation survived four years of open warfare amongst ourselves about whether or not it was OK to own black people. We’ve seen darker times than these and come through.
This type of shit shows exactly why we can’t try to work together. If you’re here constantly dismissing how the other side is feeling, how the fuck are we supposed to get together? If you’re going to pretend that Donald Trump didn’t say sexist and racist things, how can we even talk to each other? When you pretend the woman we wanted to win is absolutely horrible–WHEN NOT EVEN TRUMP DID THAT IN HIS ACCEPTANCE SPEECH–how are we supposed to work together?
That’s the real problem. The people who say it don’t really mean it. Here you are deliberately trying to make the divide larger. That’s why you hate political correctness. You hate the idea of being nice to people who disagree with you.
You want the guilt release of saying we should work together without actually doing the work to make it work. The whole point is just so you can say you tried, and when we don’t take the bait, you can pretend to take the high road.
Similar to how you’ll vote for the guy who says horrible things, then try the high road when Clinton said half of Trump’s followers were deplorables, clearly making a rhetorical point that the rest weren’t, and that we needed to realize that.
This queer is leaving the country. The purge is coming. I wish I weren’t serious. On the bright side, undesirables don’t have to leave right now. If you are a fellow undersirable, you probably have at least a year to get your shit out of Dodge. Don’t wait to late.
I disagree. The Klan very much represents Trump. He has white supremacists on his staff. He is reportedly considering Stephen Bannon for Chief of Staff, an actual, honest to God white supremacist.
Forgive me if I don’t have all the details worked out yet on how to oppose the Klan endorsed president we just elected. All I know is that Black, Muslim and gay Americans don’t have the option to ‘come together’ in the America we just built. I’ll be over there with them trying to figure out how to proceed. I plan on doing more listening than talking.
The best thing I’ve heard so far about the outcome of this election has been from the comedy writer Amber Ruffin, "the thought of someone thinking you deserve fewer rights because of who you are is depressing. But then you realize that by doing what you do every day, you prove to them that you are unstoppable. They can spend their time trying to pass laws to take away your rights and silence your voice, but all you have to do is live your lives right in their faces and it proves that we simply cannot be stopped. "
So while I work out the details, Not My President and if you voted for him, you absolutely are a racist.
