Tuesday, November 15, 2016

The Eleventh Commandment: Do Not Normalize The Ideology of Donald Trump



1.  Do not normalize Trump values.  Do not normalize bigotry and hatred because it was expressed in a folksy way.

Some already  interpret the election results as a right to go out and kick people who don't look exactly like they do.*  Many are now afraid of their fellow citizens, what they might do, and how far Trump might allow it.  He has appointed an out-and-out racist-misogynist-whitemalesupremacist as his chief strategist, and that man has his ear.  That man's news organization is also suing the media for stating that the organization is one for white supremacists, despite this statement by Bannon himself:

"We're the platform for the alt-right," Bannon told me proudly when I interviewed him at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July.
 For more on that, check out my post below.

2.  Do not expect that Trump will act as an outsider**.   The Republican Congress still aims to give the rich humongous tax cuts, aims to destroy Social Security and Medicare as well as all environmental  protection.  No, we are not going to get Trump-the-billionaire-outsider; we are going to get both the old wingnut fundie your-wombs-are-ours stuff and the old wingnut big-wallet-boyz stuff, but on top of that we are going to get white supremacist horrors.

3.  Stop the bickering about who caused Trump's coup on our side of the aisle.  It's a waste of time, even if the purpose is to learn for the sake of the future, because it's like sitting in your living-room, trying to figure out how to buy better fire insurance while all the time the house you are in is on fire.  Besides, the wounds that bickering cause will fester much longer and create a revenge-is-best-served-chilled mentality in all  participants.

It is the voters who ultimately bear the responsibility for both getting informed and for the way they voted.  A large enough minority of Americans voted for Donald Trump, and that minority will now rule because of the Electoral College.

4.  Stop normalizing what is needed to cooperate with the Trump administration.  You can cooperate with him, but you cannot normalize the vicious hatred in order to do so, you cannot explain that Breitbart News is just an ordinary news organization for just very conservative conservatives when it publishes articles with headlines such as this:

 ‘Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?’

Equal rights for more than one half of this country's population is like cancer?
We cannot allow that way of thinking to be seen as normal.  We cannot collude with those values by normalizing Bannon's messages.

5.  The time to fight back is now.  It is much harder later on when the Trump Reich is in full swing.   And small attempts to destroy the underpinnings of democracy, such as the idea of the president suing the media for what they write, should be extremely strongly protested, because if they are ignored we will soon have no free press.

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* The main targets for attacks have been African-Americans and Hispanics, but women in general have also met with a higher level of attacks and more online threats, and anti-Semitic symbols, such as the swastika, are used more.
 For some recent incidents see here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

And lest you think that feminist bread-and-butter issues will not be affected, note that misogynists also feel empowered.  For one example of how "might makes right" see what this commenter to one of the hate sites has to say about us women:



**  He might, because he is utterly unpredictable.  But what I have seen so far is that he is going to pass all the normal governing to extremist Republicans, while he gets the accolades (and presses the nuclear button, should someone insult him).