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Donald Trump, the road that might not lead to the White House!

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Johnny Canuck3 said:
The last time I saw a concentration of man buns, was at the Grad Show at a local art college last year. It's hard to know what their politics were; but I'd hazard a guess that not many of them vote Conservative.
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I don't recall a single Conservative being around when I was in art school. It doesn't go with the creative mindset.

Conservatism, on the other hand, isn't a creative thought process. At its core is a disdain for creativity or anything "new".

(And, yes, that's a huge generalization.)
 
FridgeMagnet said:
If they bitch about "special snowflakes" and "safe spaces" they're clearly keeping up on the talking points. To be fair those are part of traditional mainstream right-wing arsehole discourse as well, but none of the areas you get that from are good.
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exactly...I have a feeling they're far more mainstream here than they are there, as well. so you don't have to be affiliated with the alt-right to espouse them. and I understand your point, but the thing is, and my original point was that I don't think giving this type of thing more attention is the answer. I think the more people who just refuse to give this type of thing credibility, the better. I could be very wrong though. It has seemed to work in my personal dealings with people like this.
 
Yuwipi Woman said:
I don't recall a single Conservative being around when I was in art school. It doesn't go with the creative mindset.

Conservatism, on the other hand, isn't a creative thought process. At its core is a disdain for creativity or anything "new".

(And, yes, that's a huge generalization.)
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It has a specific meaning in Canada. The Conservatives are the party here that would be roughly equivalent to the Republicans.
 
Yuwipi Woman said:
My condolences on that.
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Thankfully we don't have a Trump: although we had a Stephen Harper.

Stephen-Harper.png


He was like the anti-Trump, personality-wise; but more conservative in his thinking.

He was in power 10 years; and almost managed to turn Canada into a place I didn't recognize.
 
The white nationalist who said "Hail Trump" and "hail our people" during a conference in Washington D.C. on Saturday — and who received straight-armed Nazi-like salutes in response — told NBC News Monday that his comments were meant to be "cheeky," "exuberant" and "ironic."
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"We need to take this next step in terms of professionalization and in terms of being able to influence people," he told NBC News, adding that he is "very willing to criticize" Trump and say "things that he's not willing or able to say."
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White Nationalist alt-righter claims 'Hail Trump' comments were 'ironic'

Lighten up everyone...he didn't really mean it! :confused: :rolleyes:

It's just a touch of everyday cheekiness. :facepalm:
 
read this from a military bloke on trumps ascendancy which I thought was worth posting:
To be honest, I can’t look at myself in the mirror while being a black man working for a white supremacist. I know that responsible logic says to stick it out for the sake of my young family, but this isn’t Jeb Bush or Romney winning the election. This is different. I think that this is closer to 1937 Germany than anything else.

I’ve been used to many of my peers in the military having a different viewpoint than mine, since the bulk of them come from the middle of the country. But I was naive enough to think that those differences stemmed from policy or an anti-Hillary sentiment (there is a massive, irreparable lack of trust between our troops and Hillary Clinton. Many folks think she should be in federal prison) instead of good old-fashioned racism. On election night, when it was becoming apparent that Trump was going to win, I tried explaining why I interpreted a vote for him as basically a “fuck you” towards me and people who look like me, but I got nothing but blank stares in return. And of course, FOX News has now become part of our TV watching staple at work for the first time since I’ve been there. They’re so happy. So happy.

I was social and outwardly happy at work prior to the election, but I don’t talk to the majority of the people I work with anymore. If it doesn’t pertain to getting a job done, then I’m completely silent at work. My supervisor has asked me everyday if I’m alright. Everyday I say no. And I won’t be alright. My family with me overseas is terrified. My family and friends back in the States are terrified. And the people at work get to move on with their lives like nothing happened. It’s not fair.

So much of military culture is “next man up” and moving forward regardless of the decisions being made out of our control. But I can’t move on from this. I refuse. Veteran’s Day was this past Friday, and I’ve never been more ashamed to be a part of the Armed Forces. My uniform might as well be a white hood and mask. I feel like I’m literally fighting *for* white supremacy alongside sympathists of white supremacy. I’m getting paid to potentially die for a regime that wants to make life actively worse for every non-white person not named Ben Carson. How do I explain that to my infant son when he gets older? I want to get out, but I’m under contract until [future year]. I don’t know what to do, but “business as usual” isn’t an option.
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theres more here
http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/so...m_medium=recirculation&utm_campaign=tuesdayPM
 
mainly interested me for the point he makes about the standard troopers antipathy towards the clintons. Anyone else, they could have stood anyone else. But no, they chose clinton. Also the point about how he feels like he's going to have some explaining to do to his kid when the kid is old enough. What a mess.
 
The election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency on a platform devoted largely to themes of ethnic nationalism and racial and religious intolerance was a wake-up call to those of us who believed our ethnic group was largely benign, but for small pockets of zealotry at the margins.

As white people, it was our turn to experience the cold shock of discovering that a significant part of our community has been radicalized, sometimes over the Internet, into a form of intolerant extremism that rejects conventional Western values and threatens the integrity of entire countries. That it has so far manifested itself in ballots rather than bombs shouldn’t mask its gravity: Because we are so numerous, our zealots are capable of paralyzing nations.

We need to do what we have long told other groups to do when they face an extremism problem: Speak up about it, identify it, try to understand what has happened to so many people like us, find a way to lead them away from extremism.

His election was the work, almost entirely, of white people. More than 90 per cent of Americans who voted for Mr. Trump were white, and most white U.S. voters, both men and women, cast a ballot for him (even though his opponent got more votes over all). And at least 90 per cent of non-white Americans did not vote for him. This was a white riot – an angry, rejectionist turn by a deeply pessimistic majority within the white population against the far more hopeful and inclusive politics of the rest of the country.
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The scores of white Americans I’ve met over the past 12 months who eagerly embraced, or at least tolerated and voted for, the politics of Mr. Trump are usually, in many respects, impossible to distinguish from other white people. They tend to be normal, middle-class; the largest Trump-supporting sub-segment of them are, like me, men over 45 with only high-school educations. With a few exceptions, they are not overt racists or far-right zealots. Many of them are otherwise quite uninterested in politics.

But these white people have developed a set of beliefs that have led them to see a sort of strongman nationalist politics of ethnic exclusion as being perfectly acceptable, only two generations after their country fought a global war against that very thing. They see it as acceptable, even welcome, that a president-to-be has promised to ban all Muslims from entering the country (“temporarily”), to mass-deport millions of Latino American families who have been living in the United States for decades, to describe those immigrants as “rapists,” to question the citizenship and loyalty of minority Americans.
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These white voters, while they don’t consider themselves racist, do not see a problem with a president-elect whose only response to black Americans is to speak of violence and moral degradation. Or a commander-in-chief who has not seen fit to disavow the phalanx of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan figures who have accompanied and cheered his campaign.

Or a soon-to-be-inaugurated president whose biggest advertising expenditure was a two-minute November ad in which he describes a global conspiracy of meddling Jews manipulating the economy – an ad that the Anti-Defamation League has denounced as resembling anti-Semitic propaganda.
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White extremists are not distinguished by geographical region (Trump voters showed up in the South, the north, the Sunbelt and the Midwest).

Nor, despite what a lot of literature predicted, are they distinguished by poverty or unemployment: Most Americans with incomes below $50,000, and a strong majority of people with incomes below $30,000, voted for Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump got his strongest support from solidly middle-class white people with incomes from $50,000 to $100,000, and also won more support in higher-income groups.
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he first dinner, back in the spring when primary voting was still underway, took place in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland. My companion, who had a beer and a bowl of soup at a sandwich joint, was an affable guy named Burt Weiss, who is in his fifties. He works, at the moment, for the sales department of a pharmaceutical company; it’s a series of short-term contracts strung together, so he doesn’t get a full pension and only very limited medical benefits. He sometimes drives Uber on weekends for extra income.

He told me he was making, between his income sources, about the same sort of money as his father, who’d had one of those classic old-economy shift jobs in a steel mill. But he has less job security and fewer benefits.
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Burt comes close to fitting the stereotypical view of Trump voters as economic victims of a changing economy who are “left behind” by modernization and hit hard by the loss of jobs to technology and China – a profile that doesn’t actually suit that many Trump supporters.

Except that he doesn’t see it that way: “Let’s not kid ourselves, there was nothing great about the kind of job my dad had – it was horrible work that nearly killed him, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,” he said. The Rust Belt’s era of deep alienation and poverty ended with the 1990s; people are still in precarious shape, but the Obama-era recovery helped people in Cleveland. It isn’t the economy, stupid. It’s often something less evident.
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What bothered Burt, and made him tell me he was drawn to Donald Trump’s then-new message, was the people he believed were changing the world around him, making it less stable. Some of them were white guys like him, who he knew were collecting welfare benefits and grants, which he attributed to Barack Obama’s economic-stimulus programs.

But he was especially bothered by the change in complexion in his city. “Look around you, half the signs are in Spanish,” he said. “They come in, not even legal, work for cash, and they get help from the government. I don’t get any help, and I keep paying more and more for health insurance.” He talked about “elites” in Washington more interested in minorities and refugees than in people like him; the idea of giving them citizenship rights appalled him: “They’re getting a free ride into the middle class when I have to work for it,” he said. He didn’t personally know any Central Americans, but he felt drawn to Mr. Trump’s bid to solve the problem through mass explusion.
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“This doesn’t feel like my country any more,” he said – a phrase I kept hearing from Trump supporters. He liked Trump, he said, because he could restore the United States of his childhood. Things, he said, had kept getting worse, and he wanted someone to fix them.

Indeed, one of the strongest indicators of Trump support (and support for far-right movements elsewhere) is a belief that things were better in the past. A much-discussed survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that 72 per cent of Trump voters felt that life and culture had been better in the 1950s – a time before civil rights and racial equality.
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And that sense of decline and pessimism is strictly a white phenomenon: Among racial minorities, six people in 10 feel that life has improved since the 1950s, as do people with postsecondary education. The belief that a golden age once existed, but has been trammelled and despoiled by racially different people, is a classic indicator of authoritarian instinct and susceptibility to extremism.
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The second dinner took place a month before the election. I met Alice – a successful businesswoman, who lives in one of the Florida beachside communities that stretch north from St. Petersburg – for dinner with her two young-adult sons. An educated and worldly woman, she has friends and associates of every race and religion, and her husband is an immigrant from a non-English-speaking family.
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But, she said, she was terrified of the prospect of rising crime brought by “all the refugees and immigrants they’re bringing in here,” people she felt would strain the health-care system and bring down property values. (Florida has a lot of foreign-born citizens, especially from Cuba and Mexico, but they don’t have higher crime rates.) Although her neighbourhood, which is gated and predominantly white, does not see much crime, her family had armed up, accumulating more firearms to protect itself. They spoke favourably of Donald Trump’s management acumen, and his ability to close the border and fix things.
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As we bade farewell, Alice and one of her sons recoiled in alarm when I told them that I’d be driving back to my hotel in Ybor City, the traditionally Hispanic quarter of Tampa (and, since the 1990s, a popular entertainment district for young professionals).

“You’d better watch yourself – I wouldn’t go anywhere near there,” she said. It was the source of fear, the inner-city “hell” of Donald Trump’s speeches. That Ybor City has become an upwardly mobile place has escaped notice. (It was also, not coincidentally, the site of peaceful anti-Trump protests this week.)
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Her anxieties fall into one of the biggest mysteries of far-right support among white people: the phenomenon that has traditionally been called the “halo effect.”

By contrast, white people who live in areas where they’re immersed in longstanding populations of immigrants and minorities – that is, in big cities – don’t generally tend to vote for the politics of racial intolerance. That’s called the “contact effect” – you don’t get anxious about immigration if you live around immigrants. But people who live in mainly white areas that adjoin cities with greater diversity often show very high levels of support for people like Mr. Trump.

“The general consensus in the literature is that you get the strong anti-immigration sentiment when you have a relatively low local share of minorities and immigrants coupled with a high rate of change,” says Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of London and author of The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America: The Decline of Dominant Ethnicity in the United States. “That is, if you live in a very white area but you’re close to an increasingly diverse area.”

Prof. Goodwin has also noted that white people in areas with sudden changes in immigration numbers grow intolerant at first, then become more tolerant after a few years, when the contact effect has been able to kick in.

In other words, proximity is a bigger driver of extremism than is actual experience: It is not economic decline or immigration that cause people to become right-wing radicals, but proximity to those things, from a vantage of white security that feels threatened by the unknown.
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My third dinner occurred on Wednesday, the night after the election, at a steakhouse in an upscale shopping mall in a well-off corner of Sarasota. Four white couples, two of them middle-aged and two in their thirties, gathered around me for their traditional weekly meal out, in nice jeans and button-down shirts and summer dresses. From their relatively un-celebratory tone, I assumed that at least some of them were Democrats, until one of the guys asked the waitress to take CNN off the overhead TV and replace it with Fox News. The other three couples piped up in jovial agreement: “Yeah, CNN sucks,” said Robin, the youngest of the guys.

They’d all voted Trump the day before; in fact, it was hard to find anyone in the joint who hadn’t. And, if you asked, they were pleased with the result. “Finally,” said Sarah, Robin’s wife, “we can start to get this country back to normal.” But you had to ask: None of them regarded the election, or its outcome, as a major event; it was a simple resetting, and they’d moved on.
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When I inquired more, they said something that amplified what Burt Weiss had told me in Cleveland: They thought things had gotten worse, that their country had gone off the rails. But, specifically, they all agreed that too much had been changed, too fast.

“Obama seemed okay, but then he started really imposing his agenda on the country like crazy, with amnesty [proposed for millions of undocumented immigrants] and health care and all the cultural stuff,” said Calvin, one of the middle-aged men. “It was too radical an agenda. If Hillary had won, we wouldn’t be able to recognize America any more.”

This sentiment – also one I’d heard a lot at rallies and in Republican campaign offices – is what many scholars regard as a key identifier of an extremism-tolerant psychology: a belief that social and political change – even if it is broadly beneficial – is to be feared and resisted, and that order, stability and authority are crucial to comfort and security. Combine that with a sense of threatened ethnic identity and membership in a lower-education voting group, and you have what Prof. Kaufmann and other scholars describe as the most potent recipe for support of authoritarianism.
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What is particularly surprising is that the personal circumstances of most Trump voters have improved during recent years: His movement is not a knee-jerk reaction to an actual economic setback (which would have been more the case in 2008 or 1980, when different sorts of U.S. politics prevailed). Rather, it is based on a deeper psychic sense of loss, one not so solidly moored in lived reality.

Carol Anderson, a historian at Atlanta’s Emory University who recently published the book-length study, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide, sees the turn toward Trumpian extremism as a psychological response among many white people not to any actual loss – the Trump voters are typically more well-off people, who have gained in recent years – but to a sense of relative loss of influence caused by the increasingly equal status of black and brown Americans.

“When you’re talking about the angst and anxiety and feeling of being stifled and that kind of despair, what I see is that, as African-Americans advance in this society in terms of gaining their citizenship rights, that there is a wave of what I’ve been calling ‘white rage,’ which are the movements within legislative bodies and within the judicial sector in terms of policies and laws and rulings that undercut that advancement,” Prof. Anderson said during a panel last month organized by the online publication, Politico.
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“You know, if you’ve always been privileged, equality begins to look like oppression,” she said, in what may be the most definitive phrase to describe the crisis of white extremism. “That’s part of what you’re seeing in terms of the [white] pessimism, particularly when the system gets defined as a zero-sum game – that you can only gain at somebody else’s loss.”
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But a psychology of wounded ethnic pride – and often of wounded virility – has overtaken a large part of the white community, and not generally the part that is actually feeling economic pain. If those of us worried about the extremists in our midst want to root them out and turn them around, we need to speak to this underlying sense of loss. It may not be rational or realistic, but it has become profound enough that it has provoked the most extreme and dangerous political event of the century.
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How, then, do we defuse it? Most scholars feel that the portion of the white community susceptible to extremism has been around for at least a decade and a half; it was simply waiting for someone like Mr. Trump to channel its anxieties into ethnic and foreign scapegoats, as Mr. Trump has done to an extent nobody had previously believed possible.

But a politics of racial demagoguery was by no means the inevitable outcome to this moment of emotional displacement among less-educated, more segregated branches of the white community. Nor is it something that has to be tolerated.

It is clear that economic solutions to the actual crises of the postindustrial white working class, however desirable they may be in their own right, are not going to solve the crisis of radicalization, which is rooted far more deeply in perception and context than in reality.
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It might be worth facing the problem directly: If the strongest predictors of white radicalization are a lack of postsecondary education and residence in an ethnically segregated non-urban community, it’s worth thinking of reducing the number of people who live this way. Increasing the proportion of adults with university or college educations is both economically sensible – since this is where the middle-class incomes are found – and also politically wise. Canada has a considerably higher rate of postsecondary education than the United States, and it may be one reason why these currents of intolerant racial politics have not washed up here significantly.

Likewise, creating less-segregated, higher-population-density urban and suburban districts is a good idea in its own right, both ecologically and in planning terms (it makes public transit possible, for example); if it cuts down on pockets of racial intolerance, then it is doubly worth pursuing.
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On the other hand, Prof. Kaufmann suggests that the language of mainstream politics needs to change. If conventional liberal and conservative parties want to win those numerous angry white voters back from extremists like Donald Trump, he says, they’ll need to start talking about our plural society differently.

“I’m interested in how reframing the language of national identity can have an effect,” he says. Instead of celebrating “diversity” as a virtue in itself, it may be better to focus on the other side of the immigration coin, the near-universal tendency of newcomers to adopt universal values, to become part of mainstream society, to intermarry, to become normal people.

“I think if you actually speak directly to the ethnic majority and their anxieties – if you point out the degree of assimilation that’s occurring, the extent to which people are becoming more like each other and their children are becoming just normal Americans, then white people may begin to see them as something other than a threat.”

After all, the tragedy this week was not just that a radical faction within the white community broke away from the rest of the United States and elected an extremist, but that they abandoned the Democratic and Republican parties in the process, leaving mainstream politics without a language that can lead to victory.

If they want to end this nightmare, they will need to find a way to reach 60 million radicalized white people and find words that can bring them back to earth.
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The real reason Donald Trump got elected? We have a white extremism problem
 
Trump did U-turns or partial U-turns on issues including climate change, torture, prosecuting Hillary Clinton, and more in a New York Times interview - he's sounding more and more like a pub bore with no particularly strong convictions who is in way over his head.

I mean, the wind is a very deceiving thing. First of all, we don’t make the windmills in the United States. They’re made in Germany and Japan. They’re made out of massive amounts of steel, which goes into the atmosphere, whether it’s in our country or not, it goes into the atmosphere. The windmills kill birds and the windmills need massive subsidies. In other words, we’re subsidizing wind mills all over this country. I mean, for the most part they don’t work. I don’t think they work at all without subsidy, and that bothers me, and they kill all the birds. You go to a windmill, you know in California they have the, what is it? The golden eagle? And they’re like, if you shoot a golden eagle, they go to jail for five years and yet they kill them by, they actually have to get permits that they’re only allowed to kill 30 or something in one year. The windmills are devastating to the bird population, O.K. With that being said, there’s a place for them. But they do need subsidy. So, if I talk negatively. I’ve been saying the same thing for years about you know, the wind industry. I wouldn’t want to subsidize it. Some environmentalists agree with me very much because of all of the things I just said, including the birds, and some don’t. But it’s hard to explain. I don’t care about anything having to do with anything having to do with anything other than the country.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/23/us/politics/trump-new-york-times-interview-transcript.html
 
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