"Stop making people suicidal. Stop telling people they’re going to be killed. Stop. Stop. Stop."
"...Stop terrifying children. Stop giving racism free advertising. Stop trying to convince Americans that all the other Americans hate them. Stop. Stop. Stop."Scott Alexander is a doctor working in "mental health [who] so far [has] had two patients express Trump-related suicidal ideation."
Never heard of him before, but it seems like we all should hear from him, now. He's not a Trump voter or fan, thinks he's "super-terrible". His blog, Slate Star Codex, is a slant anagram of his real name, but he's brilliant in this discussion. A more succinctly-stated, well-documented-proof-ful piece, I don't know if you'll find, than this, entitled:
"You Are Still Crying Wolf"
Go read the entire thing, beginning to end.Addressed to the mainstream media, to most Democrats/leftists/and/or uber-liberals, anarchists, anti-Trumpsters of all stripes:
"A New York Times article from last September that went viral only recently: Crying Wolf, Then Confronting Trump. It asks whether Democrats have “cried wolf” so many times that nobody believes them anymore. And so:He goes on to document the massive evidence against President-elect Donald Trump actually being or supporting or accepting racism/bigotry in any/all of its forms.When “honorable and decent men” like McCain and Romney “are reflexively dubbed racists simply for opposing Democratic policies, the result is a G.O.P. electorate that doesn’t listen to admonitions when the genuine article is in their midst”."I have a different perspective. Back in October 2015, I wrote that the picture of Trump as 'the white power candidate' and 'the first openly white supremacist candidate to have a shot at the Presidency in the modern era' was overblown. I said that 'the media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data, and predicted that:"If Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him.""Now the votes are in, and Trump got greater support from minorities than Romney or McCain before him. You can read the Washington Post article, Trump Got More Votes From People Of Color Than Romney Did, or look at the raw data (source)"Trump made gains among blacks. He made gains among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population.
"Nor was there some surge in white turnout. I don’t think we have official numbers yet, but by eyeballing what data we have it looks very much like whites turned out in equal or lesser numbers this year than in 2012, 2008, and so on...
"The media responded to all of this freely available data with articles like White Flight From Reality: Inside The Racist Panic That Fueled Donald Trump’s Victory and Make No Mistake: Donald Trump’s Win Represents A Racist “Whitelash”.
"I stick to my thesis from October 2015. There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter). All this stuff about how he’s 'the candidate of the KKK' and 'the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement' is made up. It’s a catastrophic distraction from the dozens of other undeniable problems with Trump that could have convinced voters to abandon him. That it came to dominate the election cycle should be considered a horrifying indictment of our political discourse, in the same way that it would be a horrifying indictment of our political discourse if the entire Republican campaign had been based around the theory that Hillary Clinton was a secret Satanist. Yes, calling Romney a racist was crying wolf. But you are still crying wolf." [my emphases]
Have you got the cojones to read it all and actually learn what the mainstream media didn't tell you, when they had the innumerable chances?
Remember: the left and mainstream media--especially the ones we now have proof have been in the tank for the Democrats and especially Hillary Clinton, tipping their palms on that side of the scales to convince you and me, the American public, even right up to about 10pm on the night of the election itself that Hillary was a 1,000% lock--that left and that mainstream media thought Donald Trump was a complete joke and gave him all the free airtime 1) because it skyrocketed their ratings and 2) because they believed they could get us, the Stupid, Uneducated American Voters, to support a Joke Candidate through the primaries and thus wipe out all the "Serious Republican Candidates" so that Hillary would have no "real" competition in the general election and they, the left and the mainstream media, would be able to destroy the Joke Candidate then with all the Access Hollywood/accusing women/leaked tax return coverage they'd saved up for the general election.
Do you really think Hillary's campaign, with their finely-honed, 30-years-experienced, oppo-dirt-digging machine, and the mainstream media, which was digging furiously through its media vaults instead of covering the real news, didn't uncover all that before the GOP nomination was clinched? Ever ask yourselves why they and the mainstream media didn't bring all this up in the primaries? They wanted Trump to win the GOP nomination, because they were convinced he would be the easiest to destroy.
Scott Alexander takes the entire "Trump is racist/hater and will kill/deport/ban/concentration-encamp/separate-you-from-your-family" liberal dogma and completely buzzsaws it with facts.
Want to learn what Trump has actually said, in its entirety, regarding blacks, Hispanics, Mexicans, Muslims, the LGBTQ community, or how Bill Clinton's 1996 immigration platform was so similar to Trump's? Go read it.
"I notice that people accusing Trump of racism use the word 'openly' like a tic. He’s never just 'racist' or 'white supremacist'. He’s always 'openly racist' and 'openly white supremacist'. Trump is openly racist, openly racist, openly racist, openly racist, openly racist, openly racist, openly racist. Trump is running on pure white supremacy, has thrown off the last pretense that his campaign is not about bigotry, has the slogan Make American Openly White Supremacist Again, is an openly white supremacist nominee, etc, etc, etc. And I’ve seen a few dozen articles like this where people say that 'the bright side of a Trump victory is that finally America admitted its racism out in the open so nobody can pretend it’s not there anymore.'And learn about this:"This, I think, is the first level of crying wolf. What if, one day, there is a candidate who hates black people so much that he doesn’t go on a campaign stop to a traditionally black church in Detroit, talk about all of the contributions black people have made to America, promise to fight for black people, and say that his campaign is about opposing racism in all its forms? What if there’s a candidate who does something more like, say, go to a KKK meeting and say that black people are inferior and only whites are real Americans? We might want to use words like 'openly racist' or 'openly white supremacist' to describe him. And at that point, nobody will listen, because we wasted 'openly white supremacist' on the guy who tweets pictures of himself eating a taco on Cinco de Mayo while saying 'I love Hispanics!'” [my emphasis]
"[Notice] that the evidence on the side of Trump being against David Duke includes twenty years of unambiguous statements to that effect. And the evidence of Trump not being against David Duke includes one statement along the lines of 'I don’t know who he is but I’ll look into it' on an interview one time which he later blamed on a bad earpiece and said he totally disavowed.And this fear-mongering came directly from the very top, Obama himself and the "Wannabee-Crown-Me-Now" top, Hillary Herself. Remember this? It's still up--live--even today on the Clinton campaign website!"This gets back to my doubts about 'dog whistles'. Dog whistling seems to be the theory that if you want to know what someone really believes, you have to throw away decades of consistent statements supporting the side of an issue that everyone else in the world supports, and instead pay attention only to one weird out-of-character non-statement which implies he supports a totally taboo position which is perhaps literally the most unpopular thing it is possible to think.
"And then you have to imagine some of the most brilliant rhetoricians and persuaders in the world are calculating that it’s worth risking exposure this taboo belief in order to win support from a tiny group with five-digit membership [the KKK] whose support nobody wants, by sending a secret message, which inevitably every single media outlet in the world instantly picks up on and makes the focus of all their coverage for the rest of the election."
It's amazing that it remained on her website even after it was outed that Hillary and the whole left had been Frog-Punked.
Or learn about this (and Alexander has links to every one of these true incidents):
"Oh, also, I looked on right-wing sites to see if there are complaints of harassment and attacks by Hillary supporters, and there are. Among the stories I was able to confirm on moderately trustworthy news sites that had investigated them somewhat (a higher standard than the SLPC holds their reports to) are ones about how Hillary supporters have beaten up people for wearing Trump hats, screamed encouragement as a mob beat up a man who they thought voted Trump, knocked over elderly people, beaten up a high school girl for supporting Trump on Instagram, defaced monuments with graffiti saying 'DIE WHITES DIE', advocated raping Melania Trump, kicked a black homeless woman who was holding a Trump sign, attacked a pregnant woman stuck in her car, with a baseball bat, screamed at children who vote Trump in a mock school election, etc, etc, etc.Or this:"But please, keep talking about how somebody finding a swastika scrawled in a school bathroom means that every single Trump supporter is scum and Trump’s whole campaign was based on hatred."
"Like Snopes, I am not sure if the reports of eight transgender people committing suicide due to the election results are true or false. But if they’re true, it seems really relevant that Trump denounced North Carolina’s anti-transgender bathroom law, and proudly proclaimed he would let Caitlyn Jenner use whatever bathroom she wanted in Trump Tower, making him by far the most pro-transgender Republican president in history."And finally this:
"Stop fearmongering. Somewhere in America, there are still like three or four people who believe the media, and those people are cowering in their houses waiting for the death squads."Stop crying wolf. God forbid, one day we might have somebody who doesn’t give speeches about how diversity makes this country great and how he wants to fight for minorities, who doesn’t pose holding a rainbow flag and state that he proudly supports transgender people, who doesn’t outperform his party among minority voters, who wasn’t the leader of the Salute to Israel Parade, and who doesn’t offer minorities major cabinet positions. And we won’t be able to call that guy an 'openly white supremacist Nazi homophobe', because we already wasted all those terms this year.
"Stop talking about dog whistles. The kabbalistic similarities between 'dog-whistling' and 'wolf-crying' are too obvious to ignore.
"Stop writing articles breathlessly following everything the KKK says. Stop writing several times more articles about the KKK than there are actual Klansmen. Remember that thing where Trump started out as a random joke, and then the media covered him way more than any other candidate because he was so outrageous, and gave him what was essentially free advertising, and then he became President-elect of the United States? Is the lesson you learned from this experience that you need 24-7 coverage of the Ku Klux Klan?
"Stop responding to everyone who worries about Wall Street or globalism or the elite with 'I THINK YOU MEAN JEWS. BECAUSE JEWS ARE THE ELITES. ALL ELITES AND GLOBALISTS ARE JEWS. IF YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT THE ELITE, IT’S DEFINITELY JEWS YOU SHOULD BE WORRIED ABOUT. IF YOU FEEL SCREWED BY WALL STREET, THEN THE PEOPLE WHO SCREWED YOU WERE THE JEWS. IT’S THE JEWS WHO ARE DOING ALL THIS, MAKE SURE TO REMEMBER THAT. DEFINITELY TRANSLATE YOUR HATRED TOWARDS A VAGUE ESTABLISHMENT INTO HATRED OF JEWS, BECAUSE THEY’RE TOTALLY THE ONES YOU’RE THINKING OF.' This means you, Vox. Someday those three or four people who still believe the media are going to read this stuff and immediately join the Nazi Party, and nobody will be able to blame them.
"Stop saying that being against crime is a dog whistle for racism. Have you ever met a crime victim? They don’t like crime. I work with people from a poor area, and a lot of them have been raped, or permanently disabled, or had people close to them murdered. You know what these people have in common? They don’t like crime. When you say 'the only reason someone could talk about law and order is that they secretly hate black people, because, y’know, all criminals are black', not only are you an idiot, you’re a racist. Also, I judge you for not having read the polls saying that nonwhites are way more concerned about crime than white people are.
"Stop turning everything into identity politics. The only thing the media has been able to do for the last five years is shout 'IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS!' at everything, and then when the right wing finally says 'Um, i…den-tity….poli-tics?' you freak out and figure that the only way they could have possibly learned that phrase is from the KKK.
"Stop calling Trump voters racist. A metaphor: we have freedom of speech not because all speech is good, but because the temptation to ban speech is so great that, unless given a blanket prohibition, it would slide into universal censorship of any unpopular opinion. Likewise, I would recommend you stop calling Trump voters racist – not because none of them are, but because as soon as you give yourself that opportunity, it’s a slippery slope down to 'anyone who disagrees with me on anything does so entirely out of raw seething hatred, and my entire outgroup is secret members of the KKK and so I am justified in considering them worthless human trash'. I’m not saying you’re teetering on the edge of that slope. I’m saying you’re way at the bottom, covered by dozens of feet of fallen rocks and snow." [my emphases]
"Stop. Stop. Stop."
posted by Annie at 1:30 PM
