Aren't You Tired of Hating Trump Supporters?

Everyone's a little bit racist 🎶

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Image from Natilyn Photography on Unsplash

A few weeks ago, I called my grandmother to wish her a happy birthday. I could sense something was very wrong when she answered the phone. She tersely thanked me for the birthday wishes, and quickly changed the subject. The rest of the call didn’t last more than a few minutes; it ended after she told me that she never wanted to speak to me or my spouse again.

I grew up in an abusive family, and familial estrangement has been a common theme throughout my life. Even still, I was shocked by this development — even in my profoundly dysfunctional and perennially cruel family, I never would’ve imagined that a grandmother, in almost any situation, would permanently cut off communications with her own grandchild.

What changed? I call my grandmother regularly; I traveled across the country to visit her earlier this year; I routinely tell her how much I love and appreciate her; I make a real effort to foster a rich relationship with her, because she’s my grandma!

Turns out, my grandma had been seething for a week and a half prior to that call, after reading an article I wrote called “I Don’t Want to Hear ‘There Were Very Fine People on Both Sides.’” I wrote it the day after the presidential debate, when I was frustrated to hear Vice President Kamala Harris knowingly cite a debunked claim that former President Donald Trump allegedly referred to neo-Nazis as “very fine people.”

I wrote it partially because I’m tired of bipartisan disinformation — it’s intellectually lazy and immoral — and partly because I am tired of being afraid from what I perceive to be Democrats’ (and Harris’) complacency and even endorsement of the vile pro-terror, anti-Israel protests sweeping the nation, as well as a disconcertingly soft level of public support for Israel.

The article also explicitly stated, “There are many things I strongly dislike about Donald Trump, and this is no endorsement,” in addition to notes about him having a history of antisemitic incidents, and pointing out that he’s an opportunist. It was far from a glowing review of Donald Trump.

But any criticism of the Democratic presidential nominee, whom none of us registered Democrats actually voted for (speaking of undermining democracy), was tantamount to an enthusiastic Trump endorsement, and that one article was worth not only cutting me off, but decrying how she “used to think [I] would contribute something positive to the world, but now [she] knows anything that happens if that Hitler Trump comes into power will be completely [my] fault.” Thanks, Grandma!

Media Divisions

Older Americans, like my grandma in the Silent Generation, but also Boomers, are more likely to be tuned into several hours per day of for-profit, partisan and sensationalist television news. The Left has spent years decrying older loved ones who were “lost” to FOX News, but few have reported on this phenomenon from the opposite side of the political spectrum.

My grandmother is certainly not watching FOX, but she watches the programs of its numerous, polar opposite competitors — MSNBC, ABC, CBS, etc. She pores over the words of Rachel Maddow and other Liberal pundits, taking in every syllable of their almost singularly “Donald Trump is the root of all evil” programming as gospel.

My grandma lives independently in the house she has lived for almost thirty years; she drives, she has a rich social life at her country club. Her hyper-consumption of Liberal television news is not unique. My Boomer parents have a TV in every room of their home, which is blaring with CNN or something similar from the moment they wake up, to the moment they retire for the evening.

The only difference with Boomers versus the older Silent Generation is that the Boomers are also simultaneously browsing on social media through their second screens, growing further incensed as they consume more “Trump and his supporters are evil fascists” content from Robert Reich, Occupy Democrats, Michael Moore, Andy Borowitz or any other number of snarky Liberal commentators capitalizing on hatred of Donald Trump and his supporters.

Meta and mainstream media alike understand the vast economic potential of profiting from the rage and addiction of older people who did not grow up with a foundational understanding of technology or media literacy. To be fair, I don’t think younger digital natives have by any means proven their capacity to handle massive amounts of information and disinformation through social media, either.

But Boomers and Silent Generation still possess an increased, implicit trust of mainstream media that younger generations do not — they can remember the time of Walter Cronkite, a broadcast journalist who was characterized as “the most trusted man in America,” whereas Millennials can at best remember the rise and shameful fall of Brian Williams.

Since 2016, we have seen “credible” Liberal news media capitalize on Donald Trump with an unforeseen vengeance. They will always blame it on what they perceive to be the threat of his evil fascism, but I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that the addictive, frothing-at-the-mouth hatred that Liberals feel towards Donald Trump helped skyrocket their subscribers, viewers and profits many times over.

Even some devout Liberals have noticed this phenomenon. In late September, one non-Trump-supporting woman lamented the tired Trump-hate phenomenon in a Medium article called “How Kimmel, Colbert, Fallon, and Meyers Killed Late-Night Comedy.”

Almost a decade has passed since Donald Trump the political candidate materially entered the collective consciousness, and we are hearing the same hysteria, the same hatred, the same tired jokes again and again and again. Some of us are still thirsty for more, but many of us are ready to move on.

Trump as Hitler?

I am personally tired of hearing Donald Trump compared to Hitler. I was entirely enmeshed in this rhetoric when I was an activist in 2016, but now, having witnessed his full four-year term, and seeing an actual Nazi-like pogrom against Jews in 2023 (and witnessing the Nazi-like response to it among the American Left afterwards), I no longer find any integrity in this comparison.

Adolph Hitler wrote Mein Kampf ten years before he became chancellor of Germany in 1933, and he is quoted as having written in 1919, even four years before Mein Kampf, that “Rational anti-Semitism must lead to systematic legal opposition. Its final objective must be the removal of the Jews altogether.”

Hitler’s antisemitism was foundational and critical to his rise to power. It’s actually that simple. Leave it to American Liberals to find and accuse people they don’t like of “Nazism” in virtually any situation, as long as it doesn’t actually involve Jews.

Is it true that there are white supremacists who vote for Trump? Unquestionably. Is it true that the former grand wizard of the KKK David Duke has also praised far-left Islamist sympathizer Ilhan Omar? Indeed! And that, my friends, is what we call the horseshoe theory. Sure, there are people on the far-right who are proud Klan members or Nazi supporters.

There are also by the looks of the numbers these pro-terror protests have been getting, significantly more people on the far-left who will proudly stand among Hezbollah and Hamas flags, gleefully calling for the globalization of random acts of barbarism against Jewish civilians.

Earlier this year, there was a somewhat interesting article in The New Yorker about the “Is Donald Trump a fascist?” debate. The answer can sometimes seem murky. And yet, not to suggest that Donald Trump is a purely innocent victim, but aside from gifting us a Democratic candidate that none of us voted for, Liberals have also been hard at work trying to ensure Trump is incarcerated and prevented from holding office, despite somewhere close to half of this country supporting him. It’s not a great look.

At the same time, I would much prefer people pontificate on whether Donald Trump is a fascist rather than a Nazi, because their selective use of the latter term only serves to weaponize the specific suffering of Jewish people to make Donald Trump into an unforeseen mass murderer, all while they scoff at or openly engage in continued threats against Jewish life in the modern era. And to clarify, Donald Trump did not plan, attempt, or commit mass murder. Donald Trump is not Hitler.

Back to my grandma for a moment, on that note. One of the few other things she mentioned before hanging up the phone was that, in addition to never wanting to see, speak to or hear from me again, she wished the same of my partner. Why? Because, following the second assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, my partner wrote on Facebook, “Second Trump assassination attempt. This is not normal. Please stop comparing him to Hitler and seeing him and half of this country as deplorable.”

My grandma, disgusted, assured me, “I’ve known Trump 80 years. Trump IS Hitler.” I had really thought we were at least all on a moral plane where advocating for or defending the assassination of political candidates should be regarded as patently wrong. Clearly, I was incorrect.

Ripping Apart Families and Relationships

I find myself in what I consider to be a somewhat unique situation, in that I spent 5 years doing hardcore activism — attending innumerable protests, staging oil spills, writing social justice articles, getting involved with socialist and climate organizations, and so on. And now, I’m seeing things from a very different vantage point.

A New York Times and Siena College poll from years back showed that 20% of Democrats and 21% of independents reported having relationships hurt due to politics, compared to 14% of Republicans. The majority dated relationship cutoffs to the early days of Trump’s presidency, and many also reported that they didn’t recover from those rifts.

I’m not surprised by these numbers, and I’m not surprised it’s higher for Democrats. It is almost through sheer miracle that I never parted ways with my brilliant, astrophysics PhD-holding best friend from college, who was a Trump supporter (though I’m not proud of some of my behavior, including passive-aggressively bringing Women’s March signs to her wedding. I’m lucky she’s a very reasonable and forgiving person).

At the time, when I was also enmeshed in Seattle’s queer activist community (which very much leans toward anarcho-communism), it was understood that maintaining contact with them was anathema — unless of course you were a white person, and then you owed POCs the privileged access you had to those evil Trump-supporting family members of yours to change their minds!

If you’re wondering, it’s pretty exhausting to posture that much all the time. Especially when you hail from ever-so-noble communities that are rife with hard drug use, sexual abuse, and ironically selective capitalistic values that make it okay for you to be a programmer at Amazon, support fast fashion and child slave labor by shopping from SHEIN, or directly contribute to driving gentrification. None of that matters though if you’re “marginalized” by the “right” standards.

I recently stumbled upon another Medium article that I found to be relatively reasonable, called “Why I Stopped Boycotting Businesses and Cutting People Off Because of Their Political Views.” The article was pretty much what the title suggested, but sure enough, the top comment was as follows:

And there you have it: How can any relationships or even any meaningful dialogue be sustainable when one side earnestly believes that anyone they disagree with politically is simply “evil?” It would seem to me, that if you wanted to talk about fascism, the enforcement of a totally uniform, singular worldview as the only one engendering non-evil seems like the runway towards that.

Are Trump supporters evil?

It is pretty bold to suggest with a straight face that half of this country is literally “evil.” As Hannah Arendt noted of infamous Nazi Adolph Eichmann in The Banality of Evil, Eichmann wasn’t overtly driven by some outrageous, diabolical evil ideology; rather, it was a more mundane, shallow cluelessness that led him to become a “joiner” of the Nazi Party. Rather than ideology, it was the search of purpose and direction that brought him to the cusp of such evil. Sort of like the privileged TikTok brats calling for their classmates to be butchered by Hamas because they’re Jews.

And yet, day after day, with the same holier-than-thou enthusiasm and glee with which Liberals denigrate Donald Trump, they make the same sweeping, extreme proclamations about all his supporters. Take this article, for example, from good Liberal™ Substack and Medium influencer Jason Provencio:

You’ll be shocked to learn that the common traits that ALL Trump supporters allegedly share are “Fear,” “pridefulness,” “stubbornness,” and last but not least, “racist and bigoted views.” Well, that’s rich. But Jason, who is a self-proclaimed “LGBTQ ally” and therefore surely a good Liberal™ and eternally correct authority on everything under the sun, is not alone in this characterization.

A Psychology Today article called “Why Do Many Poor People Vote Republican” had the number one reason listed as “white racism.” Wow, really? For a bunch of Liberals who scream about Jewish privilege because a whopping 80 years have passed since the Holocaust, they sure still seem stuck in the Civil War era when it comes to understanding race in America (and for the record, Jim Crow laws ended only twenty years after the Holocaust, but Jews aren’t allowed to experience victimization in the American Leftist worldview).

Let’s be really clear here: I don’t think white Republican Americans want to bring back slavery or Jim Crow laws. Might many of them misunderstand some of the recent social justice movements in America? No doubt. Might many of them harbor latent hatred or ignorance on a racial basis? Yes — in the same way that every single Liberal person does, no matter how much they “DO👏THE👏FUCKING👏WORK!!👏” of “anti-racism” because as the Avenue Q song goes, “Everyone’s a little bit racist!”

Indeed, the very same Psychology Today also noted that racism is a fundamental human experience, owing to the universality of implicit bias in how the human brain has evolved to operate. But don’t tell that to your Liberal friends who insist that there “isn’t a racist bone in their bodies!” And guess what — implicit bias, the most consequential contributor to racist sentiments, also applies to other markers of identity, including class.

It is quite interesting that the “good” half of America is so content with eternally infantilizing the “right” victims of oppression, while dismissing the concerns and sociopolitical leanings of most of this country’s farmers as predominantly owing to them being “racists,” which is just another word for “evil.”

There are plenty of poor people who vote Liberal, but there’s also no denying the obvious fact that most rural areas of this country (which are disproportionately poor) are conservative. And there is no sense of empathy for these people among the high and noble Liberals. It’s easier to write them all off as “racists” (while literally surviving on their backs — unless of course they only shop local organic because they’re rich!), because that’s the kind of rhetoric that makes them “evil” and therefore worth not only dismissing, but potentially even killing or subduing.

Who is crazy?

Below is a smattering of headlines from “credible” journalistic sources, including science magazines, that may illustrate why the redder half of this country might struggle with finding credibility among the mainstream Liberal media:

But again, this incessant, divisive demonization has trickled down from mainstream media and onto the masses. I’m not going to deny that Trump supporters also can overlap with conspiracy theorists (like Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example) and QAnon (as have many Liberals). But Donald Trump gets blamed for this as if he invented the concept of hatred or division itself.

Newsflash: every ugly thing that you hate about Donald Trump, his supporters, and the things you’ve seen in this country since 2016 are mirror images of the things you hate about yourself. In the wise words of Arrested Development, you hate White Power Bill (that’s you!).

And that leads me to the frankly sad Facebook musings of a very textbook Boomer Liberal who I know. I met this woman, a devout Liberal above all else, in rural New Mexico. She and her sisters own ten-thousand acres of sacred Indigenous land, full of ancient artifacts and rock carvings; they routinely brag about the National Monument next door begging them to give up or extend access to some of their land.

This woman, a celebrated artist, also loves bragging about how Native workers who come to help out at her mansion often tell her that her art (which bears an uncanny resemblance to the local Native people’s art) is so good and so deeply spiritual, it’s clear she understands their spirituality more than most of their own people do. This woman is a proud Liberal, and an off-the-charts racist. Here is a smattering of things she has posted only in the last few days:

Wow! Look how evil conservatives are! You would think a post like this would possess some self-awareness pertaining to “promoting fear,” but alas…

Nothing like a Trump-Holocaust disinformation invocation when she has never said a word condemning October 7th or a peep about the exploding antisemitism in America! I’m sure she’s truly, very concerned about antisemitism though, right?

And there you have it, lamenting that Trump wasn’t destroyed in a devastating hurricane. Doesn’t get much creepier than that.

All of this to say: I understand why things are so divided right now. I have been a Democrat my whole life, and I am scared. I think many of us are rightfully afraid of the state of this country, and where we go from here.

But if you are willing to reduce and dismiss an entire half of a 330-million-person democratic country because you assume they are simply “evil,” then it is probably worth taking a good long look in the mirror, and asking yourself who is really acting like the fascist here?

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