According to the New England Journal of Medicine—Trump is making Americans more angry and mentally ill:
A new review paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that a growing body of empirical evidence shows how presidential elections can have effects on physical and mental health, and can influence behavior. Specifically, they found evidence that suggests that the campaign and subsequent election of Donald Trump has had a negative effect on the mental well-being of Americans, and in particular those in marginalized groups who are vulnerable to discrimination. According to lead author David R. Williams of Harvard University, “Elections can matter for the health of children and adults in profound ways that are often unrecognized and unaddressed.” In the article, the authors summarize specific studies to support their claim and provide potential solutions to the Trump-induced negative health effects.
Empirical research has documented how campaigns that give a voice to the marginalized can have positive effects on health, at least in the short term. Notable examples include heightened psychological well-being and self-esteem among South Africans during Nelson Mandela’s 1994 election, among black Americans during Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign, and among minorities when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. But President Obama and Jesse Jackson famously ran on campaigns of hope and unity. It is no secret that Donald Trump ran on a message of fear and revenge. Fear of Muslims and minorities, and revenge against the Washington establishment that they believe is responsible for all the hardships the country is facing, from terror to healthcare to the economy. Understanding the negative effects of such a psychologically-centered campaign is of great interest, seeing as how Donald Trump and his White House staff continue to use the same tactics to keep their political base riled up and engaged.
The review article also makes it clear that these effects on psychological well-being have real effects on physical health and mortality. An August 2016 study conducted at UC Berkeley that surveyed 1,836 U.S. counties found that there was an elevated risk of death from heart disease among both white and black residents in areas where there was high prejudice, with a particularly strong effect among blacks.
Clearly increased racial tensions are not good for anyone. We’ve already seen reports that these feelings have turned into actions more than 1,000 times before Trump was even sworn in.
Since the election of President Donald Trump, news outlets and social media accounts have swelled with reports of swastikas at schools, racist taunts, and other hate-fueled attacks and acts of intimidation. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has aggregated media reports and gathered submissions from its website, catalogued 1064 such incidents, 13 of which were later debunked as false reports, in the first month after Trump won the presidency. (Twenty-six of those incidents were perpetrated against Trump supporters.) The SPLC has presented that data in aggregate, creating an invaluable record of the scope of post-election hate crimes.
Some of the initial surge of hate has apparently slowed, but it hasn’t stopped. And not only is it making vulnerable minorities more anxious and potentially impacting their health, I think on the whole it’s making racists far more emboldened and brazen, as we’ve seen with having “N*gger” painted on the side of Lebron James’ house to having people screaming “slave” at black customers in Starbucks. It certainly isn’t getting better.
The incident began about 2:30 p.m. Tuesday at Starbuck in the Loop neighborhood, when the man became enraged when some coffee spilled on his light-colored suit, reported WLS-TV.
A photographer from the TV station was inside the coffee shop when the incident began and recorded video, along with other customers.
“Shut up, slave!” yelled the man, later identified as 23-year-old William Boucher. “Do not talk to me!”
Boucher also referred to the man as livestock and suggested he should be tagged with a bar code involving his Social Security number.
“You’re disgusting,” the man yells.
The argument spilled outside, where the dispute became violent.
“Your children are disposable vermin!” Boucher yells at one man, who is also videotaping him, and spits on the 30-year-old man and a 34-year-old woman.
Or a woman in Walmart—of course, Walmart—screaming at a Latina who simply said “excuse me.”
The video, which was posted by Facebook user Eva Hicks and promoted by Shaun King, shows a white woman pushing a shopping cart in Walmart yelling at Hicks to “go back to where you came from” and to “leave America.” Hicks said the woman’s angry rant was triggered after Hicks said “excuse me” and asked her to move her cart so she could access medicine on the shelves.
As the woman kept shouting at Hicks, a black woman walked over and tried to intervene, at which point the white woman told her to “stay out of it.”
The black woman then said she wanted the white woman to “stop being ignorant.”
“A n*gger’s calling me ignorant?” the white woman asked indignantly.
The white woman then told her to leave the store, to which Hicks replied, “This is my country!”
It’s gotten to the point that Breitbart simply isn’t racist enough for Trump fans anymore.
The latest disaster to befall the website happened after two Breitbart writers expressed anti-Muslim bigotry following the weekend terrorist attacks in London that killed seven.
When Breitbart News fired Katie McHugh for her bigotry, the alt-right turned on the conservative website.
“Across the pro-Trump internet, McHugh’s firing was widely decried as a sign of weakness by Breitbart and an attempt by the site — once led by now-Senior White House Advisor Stephen Bannon — to pivot toward a more moderate editorial strategy,” BuzzFeed reported. “In pro-Trump circles, that perceived pivot may prove to be enough to turn away devoted readers.”
That’s right, Trumpites are pissed off about McHugh being fired because they think Breitbart is going all snowflake and auto-triggered. And just who is Katie McHugh exactly? Well ...
One of the lesser known hires from the DC is Katie McHugh who was brought over to “aggressively and insightfully tell the stories that are shaping our political and cultural experience,” according to Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow.
Or, as McHugh put it: “I’m very proud to join the Breitbart News Network to reshape the American political conversation by airing out all the facts.”
“Airing out all the facts”—like this.
Charming isn’t she? No wonder why she’s an alt-right darling. And how’d she get fired from Breitbart exactly? Like this:
“There would be no deadly terror attacks in the U.K. if Muslims didn’t live there,” Breitbart writer Katie McHugh wrote on Twitter.
When actor Pej Vahdat called McHugh a “moron,” she shot back: “You’re an Indian.” (In fact, Vahdat is an Iranian-American)
And according to CNN, Breitbart writer Ryan Saavedra tweeted, “People think I’m kidding when I say this but the crusades need to come back.”
Saavedra later deleted the tweet, but added another: “This s–t won’t stop until people grow a pair of balls.”
You wanna know who singlehandedly pulled off the most devastating terrorist attack in Europe? This guy:
“Breivik is not, and has not, been subjected to torture or inhuman or degrading treatment,” it said.
The 38-year-old rightwing extremist, who killed 77 people in 2011, will file an appeal against the verdict to Norway’s highest court, the supreme court, his lawyer Oystein Storrvik announced immediately after the ruling was published.
In April 2016, an Oslo district court stunned survivors and families of the victims when it found the Norwegian state guilty of treating Breivik “inhumanely” and in “degrading” fashion, in breach of article 3 of the European convention on human rights.
Yeah, besides England going through the Troubles with Northern Ireland for decades between Protestant white people and Catholic white people it’s not like MP Jo Cox wasn’t knifed to death last year by a Muslim, rather than a raging White Brexiteer.
Everybody could agree that her murder was a tragedy. Cox was forty-one years old. She had two young children. She was the first M.P. to be assassinated since Ian Gow, who was killed by the I.R.A., in 1990. She was also the first woman, and the first Labour M.P., to be murdered in office. But it was judged by some as incendiary to politicize the tragedy, however political it seemed at first glance. (Cox had campaigned for the rights of Syrian refugees in her first year as an M.P., and was an advocate for Britain to remain in the E.U.; the man charged with her murder, Thomas Mair, is reported to have shouted “Britain first” as he attacked Cox, and gave his name in court as “death to traitors, freedom for Britain.”)
We’ve also had recent cases of white knife wielding murderers right here in the U.S., such as when ROTC cadet Lt. Richard Collins was killed by racist Sean Urbanski member of an “Alt-Reich Nation” Facebook page and one pastor claimed it was because of evolution being taught in school.
According to David Whitney, a conservative pastor associated with the right-wing Institute on the Constitution think tank, Collins’ murder by a white man name Sean Urbanski was due to evolution being taught in schools. Whitney claimed that Collins was a Christian, and that Urbanski is a “secular humanist,” though there is no evidence to support that claim.
Urbanski, Whitney argued, was the victim of a public school education that taught evolution instead of creationism — teachings that the pastor claims “taught that mankind, including himself, was nothing more than a long compilation of mistakes and mutations and chance occurrences.”
Of course this isn’t all Donald Trump’s fault personally. Many people have many reasons for acting out or turning violent and murderous. Some would be doing exactly the same Trump or no Trump, but I do believe some others feel that Trump’s rhetoric justifies their position and actions, particularly when it happens to be school kids shouting “Trump” at their classmates to humiliate and intimidate them. He says out loud, for everyone to hear, exactly what the voices in their head have been saying. He makes them feel “normal.” And now that their internal envy, hate, fear, arrogance and resentment have been validate — they feel fully justified in acting on out when before they would have been too afraid of being “politically incorrect” or of “offending” someone else.
When you have a president who essentially says everything that’s bad and wrong with America is the fault of immigrants and foreigners, that to put it in blunt terms that America would be just fine if not for all the “niggers, wetbacks, towelheads, gooks and chinks that are holding it back” how can we be surprised when we now see more and more angry, frustrated white people saying exactly that out loud without a hint of shame or embarrassment?
And is it any surprise that they are completely ignorant to the fact that their angst is really just the result of suffering from the exact same economic challenges of market changes and automation that have been impacting black people, Latinos and vulnerable Muslims who’ve been getting suckered into drugs, gangs or even death cults like al Qaeda and ISIS for decades? Is Stormfront really an upgrade from the Crips?
As I pointed out last year when Van Jones asked if we need to racially profile white Christian men because they’ve committed far more acts of mass shootings since 9-11 than any other ethnic or religious group.
...the reality is we aren’t going to hear a call for profiling of white Christian — sometimes supremacist or anti-goverment — men like the Planned Parenthood Shooter, or the Holocaust Museum Shooter, the Tucson Mall Shooter, the Charleston AME Church Shooter, the Texas Baptist Church Shooter, the Knoxville Church Shooter, the Sikh Temple Shooter, the Aurora Theater Shooter, the Columbine Shooters, the Las Vegas Cop Killers, the Sandy Hook Shooter, the Oslo Norway Mass Shooter, the Killer of Dr. Barnett Slepian, the Killer of Dr. David Gunn, the Killer of Dr. John Britton, or the Killer of Dr. George Tiller.
Because it would be ridiculous to try and predict what every white man, or every white Christian might happen to do or believe only because a small, but significant minority of them happen to be vicious murdering radical christian nutjob terrorists.
Just because most mass murdering shooters are white men shouldn’t mean we should massively demonize, stigmatize, fear and use the government to persecute white men in general, right?
Right? [...]
Analyzing the Mother Jones table of 81 mass shootings since 1982 on google docs I found the following.
From the perspective of the victims the totals are Asian Mass Shooters (6 incidents, 72 killed, 31 wounded), Black mass shooters, (12 incidents, 116 killed, 94 wounded), Muslim Mass Shooters (4 incidents, 81 killed, 106 wounded), White mass shooters (47 incidents, 561 killed, 628 wounded).
So again speaking to Van’s point contrasting white and Muslim mass shooting murderers the victim count is 561 to 81. That’s 6.9 to one. The difference in incidents is 47 to 4, that’s almost 12 to one.
Certainly 9-11 itself changes this calculation, but then so does the 4,600 lynchings that took place from the Jim Crow era right up until 1981. Not that this is some ghastly contest, I’m only pointing out that we seem to have a fairly large blindside when some jerk, vicious thug or murderous a-hole isn’t brown or black as we saw with the terrorist who killed two people while trying to attack muslim girls with a knife in Portland.
Police say the disturbance began when a man on a light-rail train "began yelling various remarks that would best be characterized as hate speech toward a variety of ethnicities and religions." Among the subjects of his diatribe were two young women who appeared to be Muslim; one was wearing a hijab.
Portland police have charged Jeremy Joseph Christian with two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.
"In the midst of his ranting and raving, some people approached him and appeared to try to intervene with his behavior and some of the people that he was yelling at," Sgt. Pete Simpson told The Oregonian. "They were attacked viciously."
The suspect stabbed three men before fleeing the train; police located him and took him into custody.
Trump immediately commented about the ISIS attack on London and in Iran, but it took him days to talk about this and then he didn’t dare call it terrorism, but it was.
These people don't even realize that many of them have become the exact same vicious thugs, intimidators, harassers, hate criminals and terrorists that they’re complaining about. And as Trump continues down the legal and moral Slip ‘N Slide he’s currently trapped on with more and more evidence piling up of his corruption and crimes—just how badly will these people lash out when their “savior” is finally brought down to his inevitable, ignominious end?
I don’t think it’s gonna end well for them.