Lyndon Johnson used racial slurs, and he passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which ended segregation. Is everyone who voted for him a racist?
I’m all for getting a better politician. On the other hand, many millions of us voted for her despite her flaws because we love our country and saw Trump for what he was. Why didn’t everyone? Literally, everyone. We’ve been rehashing all of this since November, but Jesus H. Christ, why would anyone vote for that guy? I’ve never heard a reason passed the straight-face test.
FWIW - this article was written by a Texan who is a senior writer for the Federalist.
People who actually live in Akron (ie- me) will tell you that he’s completely mis-characterizing our city in support of Trump’s lie about America being a hellzone.
Yes, there was a batch of specifically-not-very-good-shit floating around last summer but Akron is not overrun by heroin addicts. And the Rubber Industries mostly left in the Reagan years. Blaming disappointment among ex-Rubber workers for the current fiasco is not very rational.
Finally - and I know that facts don’t matter to Trump supporters, but what the hell - I would point out that Akron & Cleveland (Akron is about 30 minutes south of Cleveland, FYI) both went for Hillary in the election, although Ohio went for Trump overall.
My suggestion to conservatives/Republicans is that they should come to Akron and try the heroin for themselves. You never know, guys! You might like it! First hit’s on me!
Ironically, I think the racists who voted for Trump were making a rational choice. Trump and his administration will probably deliver to them.
It’s the people who voted for Trump because they wanted jobs or better health care or lower taxes or national security or an end to political corruption who were fools. Trump’s not going to deliver any of that.
The problem is that while Trump won’t deliver on any of those, I’m sure he’s going to say he did. So the big question will be whether the people who believed his lies in 2016 will continue to believe his lies for the next four years.
Jobs being outsourced overseas is a real problem. Ask anyone who was gathered into a room with his coworkers and was told that their company was shutting down because production was being moved overseas. Border security and ending trade deals might not solve their problems, but Trump was the only politician who took their problems seriously. Clinton’s economic message was the same message these people heard before from establishment politicians. It ignores their problems in favor of policies that might help improve the economy, but doesn’t improve the economy for them. It never takes the issue of jobs being shipped overseas seriously.
The ugly truth is that while free trade deals help our economy and promote global unity, they hurt a few people. And those people were the people who Trump spoke to in the Rust Belt and who in turn voted for Trump.
Well if the choice is between Clinton and Trump I can think of a few reasons that might resonate with some people. I’m generally more progressive than not, but Clinton’s campaign was viscerally offensive to me on multiple levels.
1: Clinton - a fucking Clinton again. Twice with the Bushes and now tag team Clintons. What is this the Roman Republic? NO!
2: A boatload of baggage and questionable ethical behavior in the past. This is who the choice is?
3: The whole aura of this being the obvious end game goal for her and all she endured and put up with re Bill Clinton and her efforts to destroy and discredit his sexual accusers . You could see the game plan for all this revealed at last. It was disgusting.
And yet I still voted for her with her zero charisma (for me) and entitled attitude and all. A lot of progressives don’t seem to get that HRC was NOT an appealing candidate for a lot of people way beyond diehard conservatives. Trump blew past everyone because he promised to upset the applecart and for enough people that was what they wanted.
I didn’t like HRC (personally) and my $6500 deductible Obamacare plan has recently almost doubled to an almost $7000 a year cost (effectively a forced tax) and I have never some close to touching the deductible. If I was in just a slightly different place re the way I was raised I could have easily flipped the lever for Trump.
In the 1960s? You betcha. But not because they voted for LBJ. It would be the rare person in 1960s America who didn’t have ANY racial hang-ups.
But barring that, I’m not sure most people knew how rabidly racist LBJ was. Nor were there many non-racist alternatives.
But see, I don’t think racism is the worst thing in the world. I can work with a racist as long as he’s honest about it. LB Johnson was a straight-up racist, but I think–the horrors of the Vietnam War aside–he really tried to tackle the tough issues of the day–like racism and poverty. His actions were not the actions of a racist–even if that’s what he was inside.
No, what I can’t stand are people who act like racists, speak like racists, and then boo-hoo when you call them on their shit. Because a person like this is a got-damned idiot who lacks any kind of introspection.
And I have a major people who think it’s impolite to call people “racist”, but don’t have a problem with a president who buddies up with racists and their rhetoric. At a certain point, we need to be brave enough to call a duck a duck and not give into special snowflake butthurts.
My brother is the one that I’ve spoken to the most (and have since stopped speaking to about politics as a result), and he simply loves to watch liberals get angry. Liberals are all smug, do gooders (his words) and therefore he likes to see them angry. To be honest, it is a natural reaction to want to watch smug people fall on their asses. Hell, I agree that there is a self righteousness on the left that is unattractive. But, he is entirely unable to separate these people from all liberals.
So, my support of gay rights isn’t because I actually believe in gay rights, it’s because I’m asserting a moral superiority over him. Therefore, he delights in seeing someone stand up against gay rights. No one actually believes in environmental causes, they are just trying to make him feel bad about himself, therefore let’s elect people to shove those causes back in their faces.
Also, he’s an unapologetic racist. So, there’s that too.
I don’t mind calling racist people racist. But I mind calling voters racist because they voted for Trump. Do you believe that the 62.9 million Americans who voted for Trump are all evil racists?
No, realistically some of Donald’s voters are just dumber than dogshit.
But since Donald Trump himself is a big old racist - the kind of racist that actual racist organizations embrace because they see him as one of their own - it’s not unreasonable to believe that Donald’s fans appreciate his racism.
That article you posted, where the Texan goes on about Trump voters feeling like their culture was being left behind? That “culture” was bigotry.
This is the present screening process. It seems to be pretty exhaustive to me, which makes the “thorough vetting” meme just so much nonsense:
The current screening includes, but is not limited to:
- DHS-USCIS in-person interviews abroad to determine eligibility under the law
- Enhanced review for Syrians - before the interview happens, all Syrian cases are sent to DHS HQ for review, which includes screening at DHS Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate (FDNS), which in turn can engage with law enforcement and the intelligence community worldwide
- State Department checks with the Consular Lookout and Support System (CLASS) and the watch list
- Security Advisory Opinions (SAOs) from the intelligence community
- Interagency checks (IACs) with the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) for all refugee applicants regardless of nationality
- Recurrent vetting under the NCTC between the initial check and the applicant’s travel to the US
- Biometrics checks with the FBI’s Next Generation Identification system and DHS’s Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT)
- DOD Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), which includes a database of Iraqi fingerprints
- CBP National Targeting Center-Passenger screening and TSA Secure Flight program vetting prior to admission to the US
- Interpol screening through CLASS and IDENT
- Additional Interpol screening through the Stolen and Lost Travel Documents (SLTD) database
See, I think here’s your problem: it was never your country.
Let’s take this Muslim ban, for example: there’s nothing un-American about it. The U.S. has banned Chinese people, Japanese people, and it wasn’t until 1964 until we stopped using the quota system. Oh, and I’m sure Operation Wetback wasn’t funsies. The U.S. loves to ban based on nationality.
Ask any racial minority and they’ll tell you the U.S. has always been full of ignorant racist people who just want a strong-man to take care of them and make the brown people go away.
I grew up in MD, south of DC.
The Eastern Shore, to be fair, has always been a stronghold for Republicans and their segregationist Democrat forerunners. Trump was always going to carry the Shore, any Republican would.
What’s interesting is how folks in Michigan, Wisconsin, and PA will feel about Trump in 2018. Trump’s victory in MI looks to be due to black men in the Detroit area either not voting, or going for the Republican in unusually high numbers.
There are any number of reasons to oppose Trump’s policies, but nearly everything he has done is stuff that he said he was going to do. Why would that turn away his supporters?
[ol]
[li]It’s not so much his “supporters” as his voters. There are marginal Red voters who can be lost relatively easily (and marginal Blues to be easily won). [/li]
IMHO and generalizing, his actions so far haven’t given much succor to marginal Clinton voters, and have given reason for marginal Trump voters to get turned off. Unless he changes his tune, I will be very surprised to see a positive trend in his approval numbers.
(Anecdata: I have one marginal Trump voter, one marginal Johnson voter, and about four marginal Clinton voters in my acquaintance-sphere. Everyone sounds a lot less happy with him since 1/20, although I don’t know how the Trump voter would answer an “approve/disapprove” question if polled.)
[*]And, of course, some Trump voters did not take his promises seriously:smack:. They might well have reason to be disappointed if he follows through.[/ol]
Trump opponents are in denial about how awful the American public is. So they didn’t foresee him winning because they thought nobody would vote for him, and now they think people will reject him for his actions because they want to believe that his supporters were fooled, instead of knowingly putting a bigoted psychopath like Trump into power because he’s a bigoted psychopath.
Thanks for bringing this up. I live in the same county as Akron and towns all over the county are losing people to heroin. And losing jobs to plants closing. The county went 51% for Clinton and only 43% for Trump. There are a -lot- of angry racist hillbilly white people here but there’s a lot of people of color, educated people, immigrants and generally not-irrationally-angry folks here (those segments overlapping of course). The Summit County Council wrote a letter condemning Trump’s recent “Muslim ban” and the Women’s Marches in Cleveland and DC had tons of participants from Akron and Summit county.
Akron is definitely part of the Rust Belt but it was chewed up and spit out years, if not decades ago. Presidents ago. Akron has those cute shops and baseball stadium due to a renaissance that happened to have happened during the Obama era. And in large part to the Elites that are expanding the university and the nerds that are opening tech firms and niche manufacturing plants in the area. Other than the baseball stadium the best parts of Akron are the library and the museums.
Anyway, Akron is definitely being hit hard by the heroin epidemic but it didn’t make anyone vote for Trump. Quiet northern racism got that 43% from
Where I sit. The article was weird and misguided.
The people who voted for Donald Trump for these reasons are idiots. It wasn’t “establishment politicians” who wanted free trade and globalization - it was corporate executives who wanted it. The people who were hurt by these programs were hurt by Donald Trump and people like Donald Trump.
And do you really think Trump is going to change that? You believe he’s going to dismantle the system that makes him and his friends rich?
I read the article earlier today. It’s a fascinating piece of doublethink, and it resembles several other articles I’ve read. The author twists himself into knots trying to say both “Trump’s constituents are concerned about the lack of xenophobia in current policy and until you liberals understand that, you won’t understand them” while at the same time saying “until you smartass liberals stop thinking Trump’s constituents are a bunch of xenophobes you are never going to understand them.”
Of course, the former comment is framed in weasel words like “immigration” and you might suggest Trump’s constituents are concerned about the economic impact of immigration, rather than being xenophobic. Yet Trump’s first key order was clearly aimed at Muslims from nations with no history of committing terrorist acts against the US, and who are arriving in numbers that pale into insignificance compared to other nations. This was clearly a play towards xenophobia. So Trump clearly considers his constituents to be motivated by xenophobia, even if the person who wrote the linked article does not.
Nm