wasn't sure how to title this....

[KellyHabersham]

*will try to keep this brief, honestly not sure how to word things*

To give some brief background - "Grace" used to be a member of the church my family attends, she's a lovely person, and happens to be bi-racial.

"Grace" and I are friends on Facebook, and during the last months or so before the election, she began to make more comments/posts regarding race, including to references to her identity as a "woman of X ethnic background." (admittedly, much of that I can't relate to, being from a different ethnic background)

And without getting into all the details, let's just say that "Grace" seemed/seems to feel that anyone who supports Trump is racist, sexist, and a bunch of other stuff. Which is something I highly disagree with, because I do know several Trump supporters who are NOT like that.

Anyhow, it's getting to the point where I'm feeling that while I do not want to unfriend "Grace" on Facebook, I do need to hide her posts from my Facebook feed. And that makes me sad, because this is a woman whom I had liked and had a lot of respect for.

[Rageaholic]

As much as I despise Trump and pissed off that he won, I can agree that this kind of identity politics (from both the far left and the far right) are toxic. I'm seeing so much crap about "white privilege" and "white feminists" that I just have to shake my head.

[AmbrosiaWriter]

It's an awful thing, but I do think you'd feel better if you hid her posts for a time. In the end, the less you see of that awful side that this election has brought out in many people, the better you'll feel and the better you'll think of her.

Just give it some time to cool down. I am pissed that Trump won (...freaking electoral college), however, I understand that I have to wait and see what happens. Assumptions are only going to hurt everyone in the long run of it, and we need to see the blood hit the waters before we start salivating for vengeance.

[KellyHabersham]

It's an awful thing, but I do think you'd feel better if you hid her posts for a time. In the end, the less you see of that awful side that this election has brought out in many people, the better you'll feel and the better you'll think of her.

Just give it some time to cool down. I am pissed that Trump won (...freaking electoral college), however, I understand that I have to wait and see what happens. Assumptions are only going to hurt everyone in the long run of it, and we need to see the blood hit the waters before we start salivating for vengeance.

That's what I'm trying to do......still friends on Facebook with Grace, but no longer following her posts as of this afternoon. I can and do respect many of her views, but have no tolerance for the "it's okay if I have these views because I'm of X ethnic background, but if a white person makes similar comments, they're racist" sort of attitude.

[SkullKing]

And without getting into all the details, let's just say that "Grace" seemed/seems to feel that anyone who supports Trump is racist, sexist,

I think the best commentary I saw on this goes "A trump supporter may not be racist or sexist, but racism and sexism in a president are not deal brakers for them"

[Canarr]

I think the best commentary I saw on this goes "A trump supporter may not be racist or sexist, but racism and sexism in a president are not deal brakers for them"

Yes and no, I'd say. The problem with words like racism and sexism is, that the more people use them, the more they broaden their scope, the less effective they are. The less they mean.

I found this article here interesting. Quote:

There's a related problem: the boy-who-cried-wolf situation. I was happy to see a few liberals, like Bill Maher, owning up to it. Maher admitted during a recent show that he was wrong to treat George Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain like they were apocalyptic threats to the nation: it robbed him of the ability to treat Trump more seriously. The left said McCain was a racist supported by racists, it said Romney was a racist supported by racists, but when an actually racist Republican came along—and racists cheered him—it had lost its ability to credibly make that accusation.

We see a lot of that here in Germany, as well: basically, if you call someone a Nazi for daring to question immigration, or the acceptance of refugees, or the Gender Pay Gap - then what are you going to call someone who actually believes Hitler did the right think in murdering millions of people, and who'd like to bring back gas chambers? You've already used the worst word you can think of, so where could you possibly go from there?

My guess is, it's the same with a lot of Trump supporters. I don't believe the majority of them goes, "Well, sure, he's a racist and a sexist, but at least he's [enter reason here]." I think it's mostly, "Sure, they say he's a racist and a sexist, but they say that about me, too, for taking up too much space on the subway. Screw them!"

And, to finish this: I've read quite a few articles today suggesting that people - especially women - should've voted for Hillary because she's a woman. Which is, well... sexism.

[HYHYBT]

What I've mostly heard isn't that women should have voted for Clinton because she's a woman. It's that they should have voted for Clinton because Trump is horrible to women.

[Mr Hero]

Yes and no, I'd say. The problem with words like racism and sexism is, that the more people use them, the more they broaden their scope, the less effective they are. The less they mean.

I found this article here interesting. Quote:

I think that assessment is spot on. How many of us have had SC's accuse us of being racist just because we won't bend the rules for them? Eventually we just roll our eyes because we've heard it so often it doesn't even faze us.

[Canarr]

What I've mostly heard isn't that women should have voted for Clinton because she's a woman. It's that they should have voted for Clinton because Trump is horrible to women.

I've seen both... Trump's male voters are accused of hating women, his white voters of hating POC, and his female voters of deserting "the sisterhood" and ruining the chance of having the first female president of the US.

All of which is just looking for the easy answers - which just aren't there.

I think that assessment is spot on. How many of us have had SC's accuse us of being racist just because we won't bend the rules for them? Eventually we just roll our eyes because we've heard it so often it doesn't even faze us.

Exactly.

[Anthony K. S.]

I don't believe the majority of them goes, "Well, sure, he's a racist and a sexist, but at least he's [enter reason here]." I think it's mostly, "Sure, they say he's a racist and a sexist, but they say that about me, too, for taking up too much space on the subway. Screw them!"

That doesn't really explain it.

Were these people not following the news?


Did they not see Megyn Kelly grilling Donald Trump at the first Republican Presidential debate for his history of sexist and disparaging remarks about women? Were they not aware that it wasn't just the left, but conservatives as well, who were condemning Trump's infamous comment that Kelly had "blood coming out of her wherever"?

Seth Meyers noted the incredible irony that one of the conservatives defending Kelly against Trump was Erick Erickson.

"It's a big deal when Erick Erickson disinvites you for sexism, because Erick Erickson is a huge sexist," said Meyers, before playing a clip of Erickson saying that, by nature, men are supposed to "dominate" women.

Adding to the irony, Megyn Kelly herself had previously clashed with Erick Erickson over his comments that women are scientifically inferior to men and that having a woman as a family's breadwinner goes against biology and is harmful to marriage and children.

Kelly ripped into Erickson, saying "What makes you dominant and me submissive, and who died and made you Scientist-in-Chief?"


It wasn't just liberals who were criticizing Trump for saying of his GOP primary rival, Carly Fiorina, "Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?"

During the debate, Trump also asked why Fiorina kept interrupting everybody, completely ignoring the fact that the male candidates were also talking over each other. He was called out for that, too.


When that videotape surfaced of Trump saying, "When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy ..."

The people who condemned those remarks included the Republican Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, and the Republican National Committee Chairman, Reince Priebus, among other conservatives.


Paul Ryan and Megyn Kelly both also clashed with Trump over his statement that federal judge Gonzalo Curiel was incapable of fairly presiding over the class action lawsuit regarding Trump University, because of Curiel's Mexican heritage.

Dick Cheney said that Trump's proposed ban of Muslim immigrants to the United States "goes against everything we stand for and believe in." The Republicans denouncing Trump's statement also included Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich.

When Trump tweeted that cringe-worthy picture of himself posing with a taco bowl on Cinco de Mayo, saying, "I love Hispanics," Jeb Bush commented that it was like eating a watermelon and saying "I love African-Americans."

Colin Powell condemned the birther movement as racist and attacked Trump for being one of its leaders. Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele refused to endorse Trump, saying that he had "captured that racist underbelly, that frustration, that angry underbelly of American life and gave voice to that." Republicans slammed Trump for failing to immediately reject the support of white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

And was it the left alone that condemned Trump's characterization of Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists?


The list goes on and on and on ...

So what exactly are we saying here?

Did these people actually think, "Well, Trump has said all of these things about women, about Mexicans, Muslims, blacks, Asians, Native Americans ... and a lot of conservatives have condemned him for them ... Oh, but liberals are saying that he's sexist and racist. Therefore, he must NOT be sexist and racist. I'm sold!"

Seriously?

We don't just form our opinions about candidates based on what other people say about them. If nothing else, were these voters not reading and watching the news and seeing and hearing for themselves the actual statements that Trump had made, quite apart from what anybody else was saying about him?

[mjr]

I've seen both... Trump's male voters are accused of hating women, his white voters of hating POC, and his female voters of deserting "the sisterhood" and ruining the chance of having the first female president of the US.

All of which is just looking for the easy answers - which just aren't there.

I've seen comments where women were threatening to cut their S.O.s off from sex if they even suspected their S.O. was a Trump supporter.

[KabeRinnaul]

I've seen comments where women were threatening to cut their S.O.s off from sex if they even suspected their S.O. was a Trump supporter.

A tactic with at least a 2,427-year history.

[Canarr]

So what exactly are we saying here?

Did these people actually think, "Well, Trump has said all of these things about women, about Mexicans, Muslims, blacks, Asians, Native Americans ... and a lot of conservatives have condemned him for them ... Oh, but liberals are saying that he's sexist and racist. Therefore, he must NOT be sexist and racist. I'm sold!"

Seriously?

We don't just form our opinions about candidates based on what other people say about them. If nothing else, were these voters not reading and watching the news and seeing and hearing for themselves the actual statements that Trump had made, quite apart from what anybody else was saying about him?

Check this out. I think I heard on John Oliver that 40% of Americans now get their news either largely or exclusively through Facebook. And that's filtered. So, if you're a Trump supporter, chances are you don't read about the loads of crap Trump has pulled - or at least, not before you've read how the liberal media is manipulating the truth, or how the Pope endorsed Trump...

Or, check out the Exec Editor at Cracked. His opinion:

Look, we're going to get actual Nazis in the comment section of this article. Not "calling them Nazis for argument points" Nazis, but actual "Swastikas in their avatars, rooted against Indiana Jones" Nazis. Those people exist.

But what I can say, from personal experience, is that the racism of my youth was always one step removed. I never saw a family member, friend, or classmate be mean to the actual black people we had in town. We worked with them, played video games with them, waved to them when they passed. What I did hear was several million comments about how if you ever ventured into the city, winding up in the "wrong neighborhood" meant you'd get dragged from your car, raped, and burned alive. Looking back, I think the idea was that the local minorities were fine ... as long as they acted exactly like us.

If you'd asked me at the time, I'd have said the fear and hatred wasn't of people with brown skin, but of that specific tribe they have in Chicago -- you know, the guys with the weird slang, music and clothes, the dope fiends who murder everyone they see. It was all part of the bizarro nature of the cities, as perceived from afar -- a combination of hyper-aggressive savages and frivolous white elites. Their ways are strange.

Read the article.

[Anthony K. S.]

Check this out.

I have, and I noticed this in the explanation of the Wall Street Journal's methodology :

Q. Are you saying that these views actually simulate what a conservative or liberal sees?
A. No. It’s possible that users have a wide variety of news items appearing in their feeds. These are simply posts from sources that aligned with a majority of users of a particular political view in Facebook’s study.

The WSJ website created those two feeds so that people could see and compare the most widely shared "very liberal" and "very conservative" posts on Facebook. They never claimed that this is what liberal and conservative Facebook users were actually seeing.

More to the point, they never asserted that conservative Facebook users did not have news posts from other sources in their feeds. Which could easily have carried mentions of what was going on in the Presidential election, considering how saturated the news media was with those stories over the past several months.

I think I heard on John Oliver that 40% of Americans now get their news either largely or exclusively through Facebook.

Not quite.

Assuming that this is what you're talking about (the relevant portion starts at 12:15 in the video), John Oliver played a clip of a news anchor asserting that 62% of Americans get news from social media, and 44% of Americans get it specifically from Facebook, according to this study from the Pew Research Center. But look at the study a little more closely.

A 62% majority of adults in the U.S. do get news from social media, but out of that 62%, only 18% say they do so "often." 26% say "sometimes," and the last 18% say "hardly ever."

The study did say that 44% of Americans get news from Facebook. But the researchers reached that conclusion simply by combining two statistics : 67% of Americans use Facebook, and two-thirds of Facebook users say they get news on the site.

That's how you get 44% of Americans using Facebook for news. But the study does not assert that the entire 44% relies on Facebook as their primary or exclusive source of news.

The study has a large section titled "The audience overlap," which states that a 64% majority of the people who get news on social media do so on only one site (most commonly Facebook). But if I'm reading it correctly, that section of the study only observes whether these people get news from other social media sites, not from all other news sources in general.

In other words, these people (most commonly Facebook users) don't get news from other social media sites, but they might still get news from news websites, television, radio, or newspapers. In fact, the study has a section that notes that "social media news consumers still get news from a variety of other sources, and to a fairly consistent degree across sites."

Back in February of this year, the Pew Research Center posted a study that found that a very large majority of Americans were getting news on the Presidential election from multiple types of news sources, with television still being the most common, at 78%.

John Oliver, and researchers as well, have expressed concern that many Americans are putting themselves into "echo chambers" in which they only read news that validates the opinions they already have, but as far as I can see, there doesn't appear to be any hard data on how widespread this is.

So, if you're a Trump supporter, chances are you don't read about the loads of crap Trump has pulled - or at least, not before you've read how the liberal media is manipulating the truth

First of all, it isn't simply a matter of where people choose to get their news from. This stuff was everywhere. News about Presidential elections have a way of permeating just about every aspect of people's day-to-day routine here in the U.S.

If you watch television - even programs that have nothing whatever to do with news or politics - you will see ads and references to the elections and what's happening in them.

Go to a convenience store to pick up some snacks, and you will see the headlines of the newspapers as you walk by them.

Read discussion forums on the Internet, and you will often see people talking about this stuff. Heck, walk down the street, and you might very well overhear people talking about it.

Go to a bar or restaurant, and they might have the news playing on a television set on the wall.

Megyn Kelly said that one of the lowest points of her year was when her 5-year-old daughter asked her what a "bimbo" is. Try as she might, there was no way for Megyn Kelly to prevent it from reaching her daughter's ears.

We live in an Information Age. Nowadays, it is often harder not to find out about things than it is to find out about them.

Second, they always say that about the "liberal media" and their news bias. But conservative media was reporting on this stuff, too. Surely, FOX News doesn't qualify as "liberal," and Megyn Kelly was one of Trump's harshest critics on the sexism issue.

Third, if a person really is partisan enough to intentionally seal themselves in a bubble, to filter out any information that doesn't validate the opinions they already hold, and dismiss out of hand any news that conflicts with their views, then I would submit that it probably doesn't matter what the opposing side says, because the person in question would just ignore it anyway.

In other words, if a conservative is actually partisan enough to do this, then it likely doesn't matter that liberals were "crying wolf" over racism and sexism, because even if they hadn't been, this conservative would just dismiss anything that liberals had to say, anyway.

Finally ... If, after everything I have said, you're still not convinced, Canarr, then I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this. I don't believe that it's really possible for most (if not all) people in the U.S. to have gone this entire year without hearing of the substance of the racism and sexism controversies surrounding Donald Trump. If you still do, then we're clearly never going to see eye-to-eye on this, so I will let the matter rest.

[Anthony K. S.]

Or, check out the Exec Editor at Cracked.

I am addressing this separately, because, well, it's a separate issue from whether or not Trump supporters actually knew the substance of the racism and sexism controversies involving Donald Trump.

Now, I expressed some of my thoughts on David Wong's Op-Ed in a post on this thread.

Here, I would just like to say something. Perception is always going to vary with the individual, but I honestly think that disputing the idea that Trump supporters are racist was probably the least salient aspect of the argument that the author was putting forward.

David Wong did, in fact, acknowledge that the people in these rural communities hold a number of, to put it kindly, misguided beliefs about blacks, Muslims, gays, women, etc., although he also argued that it wasn't as bad as people would make it out to be.

Ultimately, his point wasn't about whether the residents of these small towns were racist or not, or whether they cared that Trump was.

Rather, he was arguing that the economic devastation in these communities, combined with the failure of the political establishment to provide any help or even show any concern, had created a situation so bleak and hopeless that these people felt that they had no choice but to vote against the status quo, any way they could. So even if they did find Donald Trump a despicable person, they simply could not afford to let that stop them from voting for him.

Now ... Please forgive me if this sounds harsh, but people are not under any obligation to agree with what David Wong is saying.

For example, a gay or transgender person living in a red state might have a very different perspective on being asked to relate to the plight of people who have, for decades, fought and voted against laws that would protect LGBT people from discrimination. Or worse.

In fact, I would be willing to bet that at least some of the people who actually live in the small towns that Mr. Wong is speaking of probably don't agree with him (or at least not completely) for one reason or another.

But now that David Wong's perspective has been put forward, I would agree that people here, and anyone else who reads it, should take it into account when deciding whether or not it's fair to judge that for Trump supporters, racism and sexism were not "deal breakers" in choosing a President.

You can choose not to agree with them, but please, at least listen to what they have to say.

All of which is just looking for the easy answers - which just aren't there.

This, I can actually agree with, from both sides.