6. What about Trump's "drugs and crime" speech about Mexicans?
Trump said that:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
Note how totally non-racist this statement is. I'm serious. It's anti-illegal-immigrant. But in terms of race, it's saying Latinos (like every race) include both good and bad people, and the bad people are the ones coming over here. It suggests a picture of Mexicans as including some of the best people - but those generally aren't the ones who are coming illegally.
Compare to eg
Bill Clinton's 1996 platform (all emphasis mine):
We cannot tolerate illegal immigration and we must stop it. For years before Bill Clinton became President, Washington talked tough but failed to act. In 1992, our borders might as well not have existed. The border was under-patrolled, and what patrols there were, were under-equipped. Drugs flowed freely. Illegal immigration was rampant. Criminal immigrants, deported after committing crimes in America, returned the very next day to commit crimes again. President Clinton is making our border a place where the law is respected and drugs and illegal immigrants are turned away.
Or John McCain in 2008:
Border security is essential to national security. In an age of terrorism, drug cartels, and criminal gangs, allowing millions of unidentified persons to enter and remain in this country poses grave risks to the sovereignty of the United States and the security of its people.
Trump's platform contains similar language - and, like all past platforms, also contains language praising legal immigrants:
Just as immigrant labor helped build our country in the past, today's legal immigrants are making vital contributions in every aspect of national life. Their industry and commitment to American values strengthens our economy, enriches our culture, and enables us to better understand and more effectively compete with the rest of the world.
We are particularly grateful to the thousands of new legal immigrants, many of them not yet citizens, who are serving in the Armed Forces and among first responders. Their patriotism should encourage all to embrace the newcomers legally among us, assist their journey to full citizenship, and help their communities avoid isolation from the mainstream of society. We are also thankful for the many legal immigrants who continue to contribute to American society.
When Democrats and Republicans alike over the last twenty years say that we are a nation of immigrants but that illegal immigrants threaten our security, or may be criminals or drug pushers, they're met with yawns. When Trump says exactly the same thing, he's Literally the KKK.
7. What about the border wall? Doesn't that mean Trump must hate Mexicans?
As
multiple sources point out, both Hillary and Obama voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which put up a 700 mile fence along the US-Mexican border. Politifact
says that Hillary and Obama wanted a 700 mile fence but Trump wants a 1000 mile wall, so these are
totally different. But really? Support a 700 mile fence, and you're the champion of diversity and all that is right in the world; support a 1000 mile wall and there's no possible explanation besides white nationalism?
8. Isn't Trump anti-immigrant?
He's at least anti-undocumented immigrant, which is close to being anti-immigrant. And while one can argue that "anti-immigrant" is different than "racist", I would agree that probably nobody cares that much about British or German immigrants, suggesting that some racial element is involved.
But I think when Trump voters talk about "globalists", they're pointing at how they model this very differently from the people they criticize.
In one model, immigration is a right. You need a very strong reason to take it away from anybody, and such decisions should be carefully inspected to make sure no one is losing the right unfairly. It's like a store: everyone should be allowed to come in and shop and if a manager refused someone entry then they better have a darned good reason.
In another, immigration is a privilege which members of a community extend at their pleasure to other people whom they think would be a good fit for their community. It's like a home: you can invite your friends to come live with you, but if someone gives you a vague bad feeling or seems like a good person who's just incompatible with your current lifestyle, you have the right not to invite them and it would be criminal for them to barge in anyway.
It looks like many Clinton supporters believe in the first model, and many Trump supporters in the second model. I think this ties into deeper differences - Clinton supporters are more atomized and individualist, Trump supporters stronger believers in culture and community.
In the second model, the community gets to decide how many immigrants come in and on what terms. Most of the Trump supporters I know are happy to let in a reasonable amount, but they get very angry when people who weren't invited or approved by the community come in anyway and insist that everyone else make way for them.
Calling this "open white supremacy" seems like those libertarians who call public buses Communism, except if "Communism" got worn out on the euphemism treadmill and they started calling public buses "overt Soviet-style Stalinism".
9. Don't Trump voters oppose the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves?
This was in
New York Times,
Vox,
Huffington Post,
Time, et cetera. It's very misleading. See
Snopes for full explanation.
10. Isn't Trump anti-Semitic?
I feel like an attempt to avoid crying wolf might reserve that term for people who
didn't win an Israeli poll on what candidate would best represent Israel's interests, or doesn't have a child who converted to Judaism, or hasn't won
various awards from the American Jewish community for his contributions to Israel and American Judaism, or wasn't
the grand marshal of a Salute To Israel Parade, or...
11. Don't we know that Trump voters are motivated by racism because somebody checked and likelihood of being a Trump voter doesn't correlate with some statistic or other supposedly measuring economic anxiety?
Although economic issues are only one part of Trump voters' concerns, they certainly are a part. You just have to look in
the right places. See also:
12. Don't we know that Trump voters are motivated by racism because despite all the stuff about economic anxiety, rich people were more likely to vote Trump than poor people?
I keep hearing stuff like this, and aside from the object-level question, I think it's important to note the way in which this kind of thing makes racism the null hypothesis. "You say it's X, but you can't prove it, so it's racism".
Anyway, in this particular case, there's a simple answer. Yes, Republicans are traditionally the party of the rich. What's different about this election is that far more poor people voted Republican than usual, and far more rich people voted Democrat than usual.
Poor people were 16 percentage points more likely to vote Republican this election than last time around, but rich people (well, the richest bracket NYT got data about) were 9 percentage points more likely to vote Democrat. This is consistent with economic anxiety playing a big role.
13. Doesn't Trump want to ban (or "extreme vet", or whatever) Muslims entering the country?
Yes, and this is awful.
But why do he (and his supporters) want to ban/vet Muslims, and not Hindus or Kenyans, even though most Muslims are white(ish) and most Hindus and Kenyans aren't? Trump and his supporters are concerned about terrorism, probably since the San Bernardino shooting and Pulse nightclub massacre dominated headlines this election season.
You can argue that he and his supporters are biased for caring more about terrorism than about furniture-related injuries,
which kill several times more Americans than terrorists do each year. But do you see how there's a difference between "cognitive bias that makes you unreasonably afraid" versus "white supremacy"?
I agree that this is getting into murky territory and that a better answer here would be to deconstruct the word "racism" into a lot of very heterogenous parts, one of which means exactly this sort of thing. But as I pointed out in Part 4, a lot of these accusations shy away from the word "racism" precisely
because it's an ambiguous thing with many heterogenous parts, some of which are understandable and resemble the sort of thing normal-but-flawed human beings might think. Now they say "KKK white nationalism" or "overt white supremacy". These terms are powerful exactly because they do
not permit the gradations of meaning which this subject demands. This is why I consider it to be crying wolf.
14. Haven't there been hundreds of incidents of Trump-related hate crimes?
This isn't a criticism of Trump per se (he's
demanded that his supporters avoid hate crimes), but it seems relevant to the general tenor of the campaign.
SPLC said they have
300 such hate incidents, although their definition of "hate incident" includes things like "someone overheard a racist comment in someone else's private conversation, then challenged them about it and got laughed at". Let's take that number at face value (though see
here)
If 47% of America supports Trump (= the percent of vote he got extrapolated to assume non-voters feel the same way), there are 150,000,000 Trump supporters. That means there has been one hate incident per 500,000 Trump supporters.
But aren't there probably lots of incidents that haven't been reported to SLPC? Maybe. Maybe there's two unreported attacks for every reported one, which means that the total is one per 150,000 Trump supporters. Or maybe there are ten unreported attacks for every reported one, which means that the total is one per 45,000 Trump supporters. Since nobody has any idea about this, it seems weird to draw conclusions from it.
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.
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.
15. Don't we know that Trump supports racist violence because, when some of his supporters beat up a Latino man, he just said they were "passionate"?
All those protests above? The anti-Trump protests that have resulted in a lot of violence and property damage and arrests? With people chanting "KILL TRUMP" and all that?
When Trump was asked for comment,
he tweeted "Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country”.
I have no idea how his mind works and am frankly boggled by all of this, but calling violent protesters "passionate" just seems to be a thing of his.
I think this is actually a pretty important point. Trump is a
weird person. From his stilted bizarre way of speaking, to his unintentional catchphrases like "haters and losers" and "Sad!", to his habit of answering questions with rambling tangents about unrelated things and how great Mar-a-Lago is and stuff like that, I have a pretty high prior on "Trump has poor understanding of social norms". You can see this on pretty much anything he's asked. When it happens regarding racism - when somebody asks him a question about something racist and he gives a bizarre irrelevant offensive non-answer - then he looks racist.
But he does this on everything. Remember that time when he inexplicably insulted John McCain for being a beloved war hero? Imagine how that would have looked if McCain had been black.
16. Isn't this a lot of special pleading? Like, sure, you can make up various non-racist explanations for every single racist-sounding thing Trump says, and say a lot of it is just coincidence or Trump being inexplicably weird, but eventually the coincidences start adding up. You have to look at this kind of thing in context.
I actually disagree with this really strongly and this point deserves a post of its own because it's really important. But let me try to briefly explain what I mean.
Suppose you're talking to one of those ancient-Atlantean secrets-of-the-Pyramids people. They give you various pieces of evidence for their latest crazy theory, such as (and all of these are true):
1. The latitude of the Great Pyramid matches the speed of light in a vacuum to five decimal places.
2. Famous prophet Edgar Cayce, who predicted a lot of stuff with uncanny accuracy, said he had seen ancient Atlanteans building the Pyramid in a vision.
3. There are hieroglyphs near the pyramid that look a lot like pictures of helicopters.
4. In his dialogue
Critias, Plato relayed a tradition of secret knowledge describing a 9,000-year-old Atlantean civilization.
5. The Egyptian pyramids look a lot like the Mesoamerican pyramids, and the Mesoamerican name for the ancient home of civilization is "Aztlan"
6. There's an underwater road in the Caribbean, whose discovery Edgar Cayce predicted, and which he said was built by Atlantis
7. There are underwater pyramids near the island of Yonaguni.
8. The Sphinx has apparent signs of water erosion, which would mean it has to be more than 10,000 years old.
She asks you, the reasonable and well-educated supporter of the archaeological consensus, to explain these facts. After looking through the literature, you come up with the following:
1. This is just
a weird coincidence.
2. Prophecies have so many degrees of freedom that anyone who gets even a little lucky can sound "uncannily accurate", and this is probably just what happened with Cayce, so who cares what he thinks?
3. Lots of things look like helicopters, so whatever.
4. Plato was probably lying, or maybe speaking in metaphors.
5. There are only so many ways to build big stone things, and "pyramid" is a natural form. The "Atlantis/Atzlan" thing is probably a coincidence.
6. Those are probably just rocks in the shape of a road, and Edgar Cayce just got lucky.
7. Those are probably just rocks in the shape of pyramids. But if they do turn out to be real, that area was submerged pretty recently under the consensus understanding of geology, so they might also just be pyramids built by a perfectly normal non-Atlantean civilization.
8. We still don't understand everything about erosion, and there could be some reason why an object less than 10,000 years old could have erosion patterns typical of older objects.
I want you to read those last eight points from the view of an Atlantis believer, and realize that they sound
really weaselly. They're all "Yeah, but that's probably a coincidence", and "Look, we don't know exactly why this thing happened, but it's probably not Atlantis, so shut up."
This is the
natural pattern you get when challenging a false theory. The theory was built out of random noise and ad hoc misinterpretations, so the refutation will have to be "every one of your multiple superficially plausible points is random noise, or else it's a misinterpretation for a different reason".
If you believe in Atlantis, then each of the seven facts being true provides "context" in which to interpret the last one. Plato said there was an Atlantis that sunk underneath the sea, so of
course we should explain the mysterious undersea ruins in that context. The logic is flawless, it's just that you're wrong about everything.
This is how I feel about demands that we interpret Trump's statements "in context", too.
IV.
Why am I harping on this?
I work in mental health. So far I have had two patients express Trump-related suicidal ideation. One of them ended up in the emergency room, although luckily both of them are now safe and well. I have heard secondhand of several more.
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[/url], 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.
I notice news articles like Vox:
Donald Trump's Win Tells People Of Color They Aren't Welcome In America. Or Salon's
If Trump Wins, Say Goodbye To Your Black Friends. MSN:
Women Fear For Their Lives After Trump Victory.
Vox
writes about the five-year-old child who asks “Is Donald Trump a bad person? Because I heard that if he becomes president, all the black and brown people have to leave and we’re going to become slaves.” The Star
writes about a therapist called in for emergency counseling to help Muslim kids who think Trump is going to kill them. I have patients who are afraid to leave their homes.
Listen. Trump is going to be approximately as racist as every other American president. Maybe I'm wrong and he'll be a bit more. Maybe he'll surprise us and be a bit less. But most likely he'll be about as racist as Ronald Reagan, who employed Holocaust denier Pat Buchanan as a senior advisor. Or about as racist as George Bush with his famous
Willie Horton ad. Or about as racist as Bill "superpredator" Clinton, who
took a photo op in front of a group of chained black men in the birthplace of the KKK. Or about as racist as Bush "doesn't care about black people!" 43. He'll have some scandals, people who want to see them as racist will see them as racist, people who don't will dismiss them as meaningless, and nobody will end up in death camps.
Since everyone has been wrong about everything lately, I've started thinking it's more important than ever to make clear predictions and grade myself on them, so here are my predictions for the Trump administration:
1. Total hate crimes incidents as measured
here will be not more than 125% of their 2015 value at any year during a Trump presidency, conditional on similar reporting methodology [confidence: 80%]
2. Total minority population of US citizens will increase throughout Trump's presidency [confidence: 99%]
3. US Muslim population increases throughout Trump's presidency [confidence: 95%]
4. Trump cabinet will be at least 10% minority [confidence: 90%], at least 20% minority [confidence: 70%], at least 30% minority [30%]. Here I'm defining "minority" to include nonwhites, Latinos, and LGBT people, though not women. Note that by this definition America as a whole is about 35% minority and Congress is about 15% minority.
5. Gay marriage will remain legal throughout a Trump presidency [confidence: 95%]
6. Race relations as perceived by blacks, as measured by
this Gallup poll, will do better under Trump than they did under Obama (ie the change in race relations 2017-2021 will be less negative/more positive than the change 2009-2016) [confidence: 70%].
7. Neither Trump nor any of his officials (Cabinet, etc) will endorse the KKK, Stormfront, or explicit neo-Nazis publicly, refuse to back down, etc, and keep their job [confidence: 99%].
If you disagree with me, come up with a bet and see if I'll take it.
And if you don't,
stop.
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 disfigured, 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. Also, I hear that accusing people of racism constantly for no reason is the best way to get them to vote for your candidate next time around. Assuming there
is a next time.
Stop centering criticism of Donald Trump around this sort of stuff, and switch to
literally anything else. Here is an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country, whose philosophy of governance basically boils down to "I'm going to
win and not
lose, details to be filled in later", and all you can do is repeat, again and again, how he seems popular among weird Internet teenagers who post frog memes. In the middle of an emotionally incontinent reality TV show host getting his hand on the nuclear button, your chief complaint is that in the middle of a few dozen denunciations of the KKK, he once delayed denouncing the KKK for
an entire 24 hours before going back to denouncing it again. When a guy who says outright that he won't respect elections unless he wins them does, somehow, win an election, the headlines are how he once said he didn't like globalists which means he must be anti-Semitic.
Stop making people suicidal. Stop telling people they're going to be killed. Stop terrifying children. Stop giving racism free advertising. Stop trying to convince Americans that all the other Americans hate them. Stop. Stop. Stop.