Over the last twenty-four hours, there has been a discussion about who Trump’s supporters are and if they do fall into a “deplorable bucket”. I want to clarify something right off: there is a difference between a Republican voter — even someone who may vote for Trump — and a Trump supporter. The supporters of Trump aren’t simply “no” votes to Hillary Clinton - that group also includes some, well, pessimistic or out of sorts former liberals.
True Trump supporters are a smaller group; these are the people who followed Trump early on, who make up the backbone of his support network and who promote him endlessly in forums and in real life. This morning, I attended a parade in which Trump supporters flew the “Trump Flag”, as well as shirts that read: “Hillary For Prison” and “#endislam” shirt designs.
Of that much smaller subset, the active strong supporters for Trump, is the core really deplorable? While I looked on as Trump supporters came down our way, Senator Jerry Moran (R-KS) came to speak with us, and I asked him: “Trump keeps saying heinous things; where is the political courage to denounce him?”
Senator Moran responded: “I don’t endorse those kind of things, I don’t endorse candidates in races I’m not in...” This is of course, easily proven false since Jerry Moran has appeared at fundraisers to support numerous candidates that were not, in fact, Jerry Moran.
The point, however, is simple: if you are unwilling to use your efforts to denounce and work vigilantly against something you know to be an evil, you are tolerating it, and we are a country that is better than tolerating evil.
Last year, in August of 2015, I began to write about the problems in Trump’s community, and the message they were promoting.
I warned that the Trump campaign was real, while people thought it was a joke, and I commented that their use of racist tropes and claims represented a way to turn out voters who had dropped away from the system while they either waited for the south to rise again or echoed other racist ideas.
When I first began to follow the strongest of Trump's active supporters and their efforts to recruit others to Trump’s ideas, I pointed out their use of memes, white nationalist tags, and other comments.
How did it work out for me?
www.dailykos.com/…
Within a day I was receiving direct threats, offers to “dox" me - although by this point my name was public and in the open — as well as attacks on family members. That’s right. The first time I had someone attacked directly was my child, who happens to be a person with a disability. It’s amazing that a year later, attacks on disabilities moved away from just this white-nationalist group, they are now about attacking others, and taken up in books like Ann Coulter.
Early Trump advocates, like these, moved on from attacking individuals, like myself, and now they rotate on twitter and other social media. They spend their time attacking Hillary Clinton and promoting Jill Stein and Donald Trump — an odd occurrence, but provably true.
These alt-right supporters rotate back and forth between retweeting, posting on Reddit and supporting Stein, Bernie hold outs and bashing Hillary because, as was said to me in an email 1 year, 1 month ago:
There may not be another election, not if we end up giving these illegals votes. Think about it.
At the time, I thought: eh, this is just another kook. Then Donald Trump himself said this:
www1.cbn.com/…
Donald Trump: "I think it's going to be the last election that the Republicans can win. If we don't win this election, you'll never see another Republican and you'll have a whole different church structure. You'll have a whole different Supreme Court structure."
The individuals who fall into this category? They are prepared to do whatever it takes to win. Divide Democrats by supporting Stein or Bernie holdouts, even when they are opposed to the idea of a Jewish person having any role in anything:
Not all of those who will vote for Trump are deplorable. Some are misled. Some are voting out of fear. Some are voting against Hillary.
But people who will do or say anything to promote division, up hatred, are duping a lot of them and work to preserve what they think is a “white culture”.
If that isn't deplorable, I don't know what is.