Since the election I’ve been in a rage. First it was shock, and for a few days I barely functioned. Some people have compared the feeling to 9/11. For me it was more like when Kennedy was shot. Unreal. Impossible.
But I felt that rage. I don’t have friends who voted for Trump, but I have friends on the left who would not vote for Hillary, and I wanted to say to every one of them, is this what you wanted? Did you make your point? One friend (whom I dearly love) said Hillary was sure to win, but he wanted to make sure it wasn’t by a landslide, which was why he was posting anti-Hillary comments all over Facebook until I told him to stop putting them on my posts. He didn’t want her to think she had a mandate for war in Syria.
I do not want to lash out. Or rather, I desperately wanted to lash out, but I didn’t want to lose people who are important to me.
I wanted to shout at everyone, how can you act like this is a normal election? How can you not see that it’s not about issues. It’s about women I know having flashbacks and nightmares about abuse they have suffered. It’s about children afraid their parents will be deported, or that their family will have to move. I wanted to scream at them, what world are you living in?
And after the election the blame game started. I volunteered for Bernie during the primary season, but I never felt Hillary was the enemy. Others did. I phone banked for the Democrats for a couple of months before the general election, and poll-watched on Election Day.
Then today I read an opinion piece at Newsweek, written by Kurt Eichenwald, that said everything I’ve been feeling, and had the research to back it up.
He begins by describing meeting an admirer at the Philadelphia airport, asking who he voted for, and wanting to punch him in the face when he said he voted for Jill Stein. He explains:
A certain kind of liberal makes me sick. These people traffic in false equivalencies, always pretending that both nominees are the same, justifying their apathy and not voting or preening about their narcissistic purity as they cast their ballot for a person they know cannot win. I have no problem with anyone who voted for Trump, because they wanted a Trump presidency. I have an enormous problem with anyone who voted for Trump or Stein or Johnson—or who didn’t vote at all—and who now expresses horror about the outcome of this election. If you don’t like the consequences of your own actions, shut the hell up.
Eichenwald is one of the few journalists who has actually done research on Trump during the campaign, and has earned the right to be heard. He defines the problem:
The problem this election season has been that liberal Democrats—just like too many Republicans—have been consumed by provably false conspiracy theories. They have trafficked in them on Facebook and Twitter, they have read only websites that confirm what they want to believe, and they have, in the past few months, unknowingly gulped down Russian propaganda with delight. In other words, just like the conservatives they belittle, they have been inside a media bubble that blocked them from reality.
He goes on to look at these theories, namely that the DNC planned the primary season to favor Clinton over Sanders, and that Sanders would have beaten Trump. He looks at the primary debate schedules for 2004 and 2008, and finds that 2016 actually had more debates, and a similar schedule to those years. He addresses the DNC emails by looking at the dates they were sent — which was after it became impossible for Bernie to win enough delegates. He describes in detail how these emails were spread:
According to a Western European intelligence source, Russian hackers, using a series of go-betweens, transmitted the DNC emails to WikiLeaks with the intent of having them released on the verge of the Democratic Convention in hopes of sowing chaos. And that’s what happened—just a couple of days before Democrats gathered in Philadelphia, the emails came out, and suddenly the media was loaded with stories about trauma in the party. Crews of Russian propagandists—working through an array of Twitter accounts and websites, started spreading the story that the DNC had stolen the election from Sanders. (An analysis provided to Newsweek by independent internet and computer specialists using a series of algorithms show that this kind of propaganda, using the same words, went from Russian disinformation sources to comment sections on more than 200 sites catering to liberals, conservatives, white supremacists, nutritionists and an amazing assortment of other interest groups.)
As for the other myth, that if Bernie had been the nominee, Trump would not have won, that Trump won because Hillary was a flawed candidate, he reports what the Republican play book against Bernie looked like (he has seen it). This paragraph give a taste of it; there are several others:
Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.
As for the election? Eichenwald writes:
Trump won slightly fewer votes than Romney did in 2012—60.5 million compared with 60.9 million. On the other hand, almost 5 million Obama voters either stayed home or cast their votes for someone else. More than twice as many millennials—a group heavily invested in the “Sanders was cheated out of the nomination” fantasy—voted third-party. … Jill Stein of the Green Party got 1.3 million votes; those voters almost certainly opposed Trump; if just the Stein voters in Michigan had cast their ballot for Clinton, she probably would have won the state. And there is no telling how many disaffected Sanders voters cast their ballot for Trump.
This is a very long article, and it’s filled with well-researched facts, something we’ve had far to little of during this campaign. Read the whole thing. I’ll end with the closing paragraph:
If you voted for Trump because you supported him, congratulations on your candidate’s victory. But if you didn’t vote for the only person who could defeat him and are now protesting a Trump presidency, may I suggest you shut up and go home. Adults now need to start fixing the damage you have done.