White Riot

Since the 9th Shaun King has posted sickening reports from around the country. His twitter feed is now filling up with trolls, but this is a sampling from the last three days.

Wild About Harry

When he's right, he's right. And in explicit detail—

White nationalists, Vladimir Putin and ISIS are celebrating Donald Trump's victory, while innocent, law-abiding Americans are wracked with fear – especially African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Muslim Americans, LGBT Americans and Asian Americans. Watching white nationalists celebrate while innocent Americans cry tears of fear does not feel like America.
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We as a nation must find a way to move forward without consigning those who Trump has threatened to the shadows. Their fear is entirely rational, because Donald Trump has talked openly about doing terrible things to them. Every news piece that breathlessly obsesses over inauguration preparations compounds their fear by normalizing a man who has threatened to tear families apart, who has bragged about sexually assaulting women and who has directed crowds of thousands to intimidate reporters and assault African Americans. Their fear is legitimate and we must refuse to let it fall through the cracks between the fluff pieces.

If this is going to be a time of healing, we must first put the responsibility for healing where it belongs: at the feet of Donald Trump, a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate. Winning the electoral college does not absolve Trump of the grave sins he committed against millions of Americans. Donald Trump may not possess the capacity to assuage those fears, but he owes it to this nation to try.

If Trump wants to roll back the tide of hate he unleashed, he has a tremendous amount of work to do and he must begin immediately.

Heartland Values

Via tengrain: a Midwesterner makes some points to the insularity of his Trump-voting hometown, with its fear of people they've never encountered. Patrick Thornton says of his hometown, and the like—

I'm from the rural midwest. All of this talk about coastal elites needing to understand more of America has it backwards.

My home county is 97% white. It like a lot of other very unrepresentative counties went heavily to Donald Trump.

My high school had about 1,200 students. Two were Asian. One was Hispanic. Zero were Muslim. All the teachers were white.
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Many rural Americans have isolated themselves from the rest of the country. They live in very unrepresentative areas.
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Here it is in sharp relief: My HS had more sexual predator teachers (convicted!) than minority teachers. That's a rural American story.

They-a Culpa

Mea culpa is indeed appropriate, but not the kind instinctive for the NYT. That is, "How did we get this so wrong?" hand-wringing, along lines of, Perhaps we really are a liberal, elitist media who were uncomprehending of The Heartland.

It could so easily be dispensed with—if the editors bothered to look at their own goddamn reporting, of four months ago.

11-9; 9-11

If his voters deserve to get it (good and hard), the rest of us do not. Nor does the rest of the world.

Mencken, of course, believed that immigrant masses in cities would make the worst political choices. Yet the most under-populated and backward parts of the country are the ones favored by our antique and intentionally undemocratic system. The Electoral College supposedly existing to prevent an incompetent demagogue from being placed in the presidency, and all that...

Roy Edroso, on the voters who really mattered—

I'm still seeing some people talking about this election as if Trump voters were a bunch of poor oppressed hillbillies desperate to be freed from the meth and misery to which Tyrant Obama had condemned them. But as has been shown, Trump voters aren't poor -- though they obviously do feel as if they've been deprived of something, and that voting for Trump would give it to them....
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Sure, Trump stirred up the Nazis, but look on the bright side, he made the liberal elites sad! I think this was a big part of the winning formula. I doubt Trump voters seriously believe their man will make international trade more advantageous to the U.S., or settle race relations, or bring global peace. But they don't like the people who are actually working on these things; they are delivering unsatisfactory results and, in the Trumpkin mind, that isn't because these things are difficult and complicated, but because they spend too much time thinking about their friends the blacks, the women, the foreigners, and the gays. Never mind your so-called rights, widget sales are fluctuating, now how'm I going to afford that second home? It's gotta be the fault of liberal elites!

You don't have to be a yokel to think like that -- hell, you don't even have to be a Republican. You just have to be a certain kind of American who's always wondering where's his.

In the end, a vote for "Spite."

First time voters seem to have crawled out of the woodwork, when I had wanted to believe they wouldn't manage to register or show up. Certainly, it was not a good sign when PBS decided to run its new voter human interest story featuring this woman—and her white power-heil Hitler tattoos...

Thus did the media blandly present this horror as checking in with Heartland Real America. Month after month after month of a media Trump-Trump-Trump drumbeat, drowning out anything real... It all ends in this feeling of having entered a Twilight Zone episode. The shock now is to know this will be immeasurably longer than a half hour, and an episode which can not be turned off.

New Voters

So, members of this family finally figured out how to register. Is it uncertain whether the wives know how to make marks?

It really should be asked: why is privacy so non-existent in these polling places? This opens the door wide open to intimidation, and—as Trump's ugly mug (and uglier history) suggest—to potential domestic abuse.

Wisdom

Interesting account of going door-to-door in West Dayton, OH—

Mostly talked to older African-Americans. When I launched into the boilerplate about how this is likely to be a very close, very important election, etc etc etc, they’d often give me a raised-eyebrow look that said, very clearly, "do you really think I don't understand what's at stake with this election?" and we'd quickly move on to logistics–polling locations, early voting hours, etc.
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Only a few people want to take advantage of the captive audience to talk politics, but one woman, just getting home from a double shift as I arrived to her house, was pure gold. I'm going to reconstruct my favorite part of her rant as faithfully as possible, but I'm not doing is justice–it was just a marvelous, angry, hilarious rant. The gist of it:

Look, I get it, you white people* had a hard time with Obama being president so you need a racist president. I get it. I don't like it but I get it. But what I don't get is why you needed a racist who is so goddamn crazy and stupid! Couldn't you find a racist who could actually know how to run the damn government? I mean, I wouldn't vote for him–he'd still be bad for people like me–but at least he'd know what he's doing? What good does it do the damn white people when Trump shits the bed? It's not like there's some other special country they move to when he takes this country down. We get a black president and he does a pretty good job, and your response is murder-suicide? You white people need to get smarter about how you do this racism thing.

*she interjected caveats about how her use of "you white people" should not be construed to include people such as myself and Obama/Clinton supporters generally, so this didn't come off as hostile or accusatory as the words on the page might make it appear....

Really no need to interject the caveats, when the crazy and stupid is in everyone's face. But, how could this racism be anything other than suicidally crazy and stupid?