Yesterday, after poll guru Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight posted a chart showing that Donald Trump could easily win the election if only men were allowed to vote, some Trump fans began wondering, with varying degrees of seriousness, if maybe it would be a good idea to repeal the pesky 19th Amendment that gave women in the US the vote in the first place.
Soon #RepealThe19th hashtag was trending on Twitter.
The good news is that most of the people using the hashtag were those who were appalled by the very idea of it. The Washington Post went through 1000 Tweets posted in the hashtag last night, and as best as they could tell, only about a tenth of the posts were from Trump supporters, and most of them weren’t serious about actually taking the vote away from women.
Indeed, some took it upon themselves to tell the world that #RepealThe19th was nothing more than a big goof.
https://twitter.com/jxn_w/status/786375859661737984
https://twitter.com/andeew2016/status/786342381964496896
Some even went so far as to claim that the hashtag was some kind of disinfo operation designed to make Trump supporters look bad:
https://twitter.com/commiesgohome/status/786441807492157440
But if this was all some big conspiracy against Trump supporters or the Alt-Right, someone forgot to tell this to the Alt-Righters who actually do want to roll back the 19th Amendment, some of whom had been using the hashtag already.
Consider, for example, Paul Ramsey (RAMZPAUL), the affable white supremacist YouTuber who’s been arguing publicly against women’s suffrage for at least as long as I’ve been running this blog (and probably a lot longer than that).
https://twitter.com/ramzpaul/status/786478584684830720
https://twitter.com/ramzpaul/status/786505386513854464
https://twitter.com/ramzpaul/status/786512496974626816
https://twitter.com/ramzpaul/status/786481791788060672
And apparently the female role involves a lot of not voting.
RAMZ is apparently unable to detect irony, because alongside all of these tweets he also posted this:
https://twitter.com/ramzpaul/status/786657673127272448
Then there is the woman known as Spacebunny, also known as Theodore “Vox Day” Beale’s apparently non-imaginary wife.
https://twitter.com/Spacebunnyday/status/786311866024734722
https://twitter.com/Spacebunnyday/status/784667107875229696
These guys seem, well, fairly sincere in their hatred of women voting as well:
https://twitter.com/RedPillScience/status/786392337328971776
https://twitter.com/RedPillScience/status/786389870901985280
https://twitter.com/huWhiteDaily/status/786362432692203520
More female control of government and taxation undermines marriage culture and family formation. pic.twitter.com/tAfNGHtOvU
— AnechoicMedia (@AnechoicMedia_) October 13, 2016
Only weak cucks think women should vote.
You aren't a weak cuck, are you?#RepealThe19th https://t.co/1UdA1lr9j9— Kali Yuga Wolf ⚡️⚡️ (@wolfofariosophy) October 13, 2016
Women say they won't vote for Trump due to locker room talk when THEY are NASTIER and DIRTIER about it. HYPOCRITES!! #RepealThe19th NOW!!!
— 👌Teutonic Plague 👌 (@AspieCapitalist) October 13, 2016
Women have been voting since 1920, and we all know how THAT turned out! #Repealthe19th, keep 'em out of polling places!
— 👌Teutonic Plague 👌 (@AspieCapitalist) October 13, 2016
#repealthe19th
Femenism = cancer pic.twitter.com/Xy5weiucTc— Aryan-American (@destory_marxism) October 13, 2016
#repealthe19th
Even most women think feminism is dumb. pic.twitter.com/rfklV7Tudc— Aryan-American (@destory_marxism) October 13, 2016
https://twitter.com/DinduReport/status/786334728408408064
But these days who knows who’s sincere or who’s trolling, or if there’s even a meaningful distinction between the two, at least when it comes to the most energetic shitposters in the Trump army.
Whether or not these guys really think women should be forbidden to vote, I feel fairly certain that they are really a bunch of hateful dicks.
@Penny Psmith
If you vote for someone whose platform is built on racism and misogyny then are you not actively participating in racism and misogyny? And if you’re actively participating in racism and misogyny do you not deserve some amount of hate for that act and what it says about you as a person?
No.
(Especially in a system like the US one, where you basically have to pick one of two options for president, rather than voting for a party that’ll be one part of a more diverse parliament, and that might represent your personal beliefs a little better, no matter who ends up as prime minister. Deciding on the wrong “lesser of two evils” doesn’t make you evil.)
I really hate the phrase “lesser of two evils” when talking about political opponents. We’re not talking about demons here, we’re talking about political candidates. Human beings. And we’re not talking about who they are at their core but how they’ll lead a country. So the question is not, “who is more evil?” but “who is better suited to lead a country?” and the answer should not be based on the content of their soul, which is unknowable, but their actions and their political platform.
In this case, these people you love think Trump has a better political platform and has demonstrated better leadership skills than Clinton. His platform is based on racism and misogyny. His leadership involves yelling “you’re fired” at people and losing nearly a billion dollars on casinos. You have to ask yourself what about that is appealing to your loved ones. You have to question what would be so much worse, what they’re so afraid of if Clinton takes office. And the answer might be along the lines of what Scott Adams and Roosh V are thinking – “brown people will kill us” and “gay men will be able to be president and rapists will be called rapists!”, respectively.
Maybe it’s a second-language issue, but I don’t think the meaning of ‘evil’ in that sentence is morally evil, as much as more generally bad (at least, the Hebrew version of this phrase means something like “the least bad”, and that’s what I was thinking about when I wrote it).
Again, when you have to pick one of two, you sometimes end up taking a choice that is… well, bad, at least in some ways. But you’re forced to make that choice, and you’re forced to decide what’s the tipping point on ‘bad’.
For example: Over here we have a bunch of parties in the parliament, which makes these choices a little bit easier, but in municipal elections you do directly elect the mayor. Some years ago, here in Jerusalem, the choice came down to either Nir Barkat (who is right-wing, with some troubling ties to settler organizations, and so on) or Meir Porosh, the ultraorthodox candidate. I voted for Barkat, because that tipping point, for me, is the secular/religious nature of the city. I really don’t like him as a mayor, but if I have to make the same choice again, I will grit my teeth and vote for him again (and hope my vote for city council can balance it somehow).
And similarly, imagine that the Democrat candidate were someone really despicable, but the Republican candidate was still someone you felt shouldn’t be president. Not using actual examples because I’m not familiar enough with American politics, but just try to imagine this as a hypothetical situation. Would you vote for the Republican? Or would you make some kind of rationalization that will let you overlook the despicble aspects of the Democrat candidate, in order to keep the balance of power on the Democrat side? It’s not always an easy choice to make.
And so we come to what you assume is the ‘tipping point’:
Which I feel is an incredibly simplistic way to view it. Also, in this specific case, very much wrong. That is not how they think, and I’m downright insulted that you think I would love someone who thinks that way. Which, since already this issue hits a rather emotional spot for me (as would happen, when people use terms like ‘deserve hatred’, I guess), is making me worried that I’m going a bit overboard in this argument.
Does it bother me that people might decide to overlook Trump’s racism and misogyny because they don’t want Clinton as president? Yes, it does. Because I see those things as big issues, and it bothers me that others might see them as something small, something that can be overlooked. Does it mean that those people agree in any way with such views? Hell no. People can have more complex value systems than that, to make them come to this decision. Even if I think it’s the wrong decision.
This election, some conservative people will grit their teeth and vote Trump, because they don’t want a liberal president. I think it’s the wrong choice – I think he’s terrible, and can’t see how anyone could swallow a frog this big. But some people see things differently. And some of them are smart, and kind, and good people. Don’t lump them up in the bucket of deplorables. And don’t say they deserve hatred.
@Penny
The entire Republican platform is extremely anti-women and very much racist, though. What exactly are the good reasons for voting for them that could possibly outweigh all of that?
It does drive it home that we’ve achieved a political system where people can be brought to vote for a serial criminal whose policies would lead to countless deaths, entirely against their own consciences, out of what is essentially brand loyalty.
@Starfury
Me too, actually. I was already solidly on board with feminism in general, but that particular article – for all its faults – happened to be the right place to make a penny or two drop and get me really tackling some of these issues.
I don’t know, I’m not Republican. As a lefty, I don’t see good reasons to vote for the right. But I can still respect people who do, even if I disagree with them.
(On a different note, how are you holding up with that storm? Sounds kinda scary.)
(Having just read Diptych’s comment, I’m afraid “brand loyalty” might be a good answer, or at least as good as we might get. :-/ )
@Penny
I’m sorry, but I hate your loved ones for wanting to throw me under the bus, regardless of their reasons for it. I’m not saying it says anything bad about you, btw, that you love these people. I also love people that have varying degrees of racist and misogynistic beliefs, and people who are republican and planning on voting for Trump. You can love someone and hate them and/or their actions at the same time.
The storm will arrive tonight, but in my area is forecasted to be about as bad as yesterday’s storm which took out the power in a few areas but was overall not that bad. On the coast and in the sound it’s going to get as high as 38 knots (closer to 20 here), so it could be worse for them but still not the hurricane force winds that were initially projected as worst case scenario. Here’s a cool map: https://www.windytv.com/47.604/-122.330?47.604,-122.907,9
@Penny
Feel free to ignore this ramble if ya want:
I don’t mean to dogpile on you. I’m actually fairly non confrontational as well. I can do it behind a screen, but it hurts me to do so to someone’s face.
If not voting for Trump, what is worthy of hatred? If voting to ban Muslims from this country is not, what is? If voting to have a political opponent jailed on Trumped up charges is not, what is? If voting to dismantle NATO on behalf of the Kremlin is not? If voting to forcibly deport 11m people without due process of law is not? If voting to bring back Law & Order (I hope you know what that means) is not? If voting to drain the social safety net is not? If voting to throw 30m people off health insurance is not? If voting to punish people who get abortions is not?
If you vote for Trump, you vote for all that and more. Representative democracy doesn’t shield one from the repercussions of one’s actions and voting is the action one takes in a democracy. You mentioned the tipping point. Yours is secularity, mine is inclusivity and tolerance (we both like each other’s, I’m sure). What is the tipping point of a Trump supporter. I can think of many. They fall into 2 categories. Bullshit and deplorable. Maybe there are good reasons to vote for him. Haven’t heard em yet. I’m not saying hatred is good, but, in the face of all this, it’s a very valid reaction
That’s all. Sorry again, Penny. Just had to get that one off the ol chest…
The Republican party has always had all manner of bigotries baked into it. Or at least it has since a Democrat passed the civil rights act and GOP went with the southern strategy. But they used dogwhistles and this allowed some Republican voters to convince themselves that the party wasn’t racist and sexist. Let’s face it, they always knew it was homophobic and transphobic because it was much more openly so and were perfectly fine with that. Trump has done away with that and stopped with the dogwhistles. There is no possible way it can be denied that they are voting for someone openly racist and sexist.
Hate may be a strong word, but I can never trust or truly respect anyone who votes for him. Never again. He thinks I’m subhuman for being a woman and I can’t imagine that anyone who tolerates this viewpoint doesn’t on some level agree with it.
On top of all of the bad reasons to not vote for Trump is the outright gall of his excuses. Nothing but arrogance and condescension.
TRUMP: i grab women by the pussy
A DOZEN WOMEN: yeah that’s true he did it to me
TRUMP: this is a global conspiracy
@ Diptych
Such a coincidence =)
@ scildfreja
I see a related phenomenon a lot with some criminal clients (and especially their families). They’ll make disparaging comments or more often noises about witnesses even if theyre saying something that’s not in dispute. It’s probably easier just to give an example:
Witness: “I met the defendant in the pub”
Client: *various derisory grunts and sneering*
Me: “But that’s what you said happened too!”
You’ll know better than I the psychology behind that.
@Penny Psmith
It’s not.
These categories are mutually exclusive. I don’t give half a fuck how nice they are to people they consider their ingroup, they are vile bigots who will receive nothing from me but contempt and loathing.
He is a fascist sympathizer. He is not a good person. Good people are not fascists.
He’ll get back from me what he gives. He’s voting to take away my health care, he’s voting to take away my hormones, he’s voting to let me be killed with no consequence, he is filth and I will treat him as such.
And I’m insulted that you’re here defending this peice of shit.
They fucking well are not. Every single piece of American conservatism is built on bigotry. All of it. There is nothing in conservatism that is not bigotry towards someone. There is no legitimate reason to support the Republican Party. They are the party of racism, misogny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and nationalism. They are the party of nothing else.
And it’s NOT FUCKING GOOD ENOUGH, because this is people fucking LIVES we’re talking about.
I’m reminded of a saying I heard a long time ago: “If someone is nice to you but rude to the waiter, they are not a nice person.” -William H Swanson
I was a kid when I first came across that and it struck a major chord with me.
@Penny
Come out as (possibly) trans to him and see if he still so ‘nice’ to you.
Personally I couldn’t care less what he thinks of Clinton, if he supports Trump then he is, by definition, a bigot, misogynist, transphobic, homophobic and racist. That’s what Trump is, and anyone who votes for him for whatever reason, is signalling their agreement of those “values”.
The ‘man you love’ supports someone who thinks women are sub-human. Personally I think alarm bells should be going off in your head.
@Penny:
I’m not going to dogpile. I understand entirely how you feel.
My grandfather was a kind, loving man who genuinely cared for his children and grandchildren, worked hard every day of his life, and loved both learning and laughing. Some of my favourite early memories are of venturing into his workshop and seeing the walls covered in lovingly-maintained and carefully-labelled tools. He will always be my model of what an engineer is like: stubborn at times, but always ready to listen, and with a deep love of an ingenious solution to a problem.
He also sincerely believed that allowing black South Africans to vote was a terrible mistake, and had belonged to groups which felt that the pro-Apartheid government was insufficiently racist.
One of the quirks of being privileged is that you can ignore those sides of people if you want to. It can be hard to reconcile those aspects of people with the sides that we see: we want to believe that awful people are universally awful and that we can tell. Nobody wants to believe that they can fall in love with an awful person.
My grandfather was an awful person. Did I love him? Yes, absolutely.
Sorry for the double post!
I was just wondering, how much of the ‘I hate Clinton so I’m voting for Trump’ rhetoric is really just code for ‘I agree with Trump but I’m too much of a coward to outright tell people that I think women, trans-people, gay/lesbian people and non-white people are sub-human?’
@imaginary Petal
I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels this way. Even counting the 3rd party candidates, Hillary Clinton is the only serious candidate in the race — Trump is Trump, Johnson doesn’t have a strong grasp on the issues, and Stein is way to quick to pander to anti-vaxxers and other anti-science people on the left and to label government organizations and media as corrupt– and the “both choices suck” people are either horribly misinformed/underinformed, people who wrongly think indifference makes them look smart, need to get over the fact that more people voted for Hillary than Bernie, and/or sexist
@Penny Psmith – I was thinking a bit about what you wrote here:
Personal anecdote, maybe similar: One of my dad’s former students comes from northern Nigeria, where there’s been a lot of violence between Muslims and Christians. The government of Quebec at the time wanted to make a ban on “conspicuous religious symbols” (mainly hijabs). At first he was in favour of this proposed law, knowing it was aimed at Muslims, because of his history coming from a Christian family in Nigeria. But other students at the college talked with him and said why they thought this thing was bad, and he decided he couldn’t reasonably support this as a black person or a Christian (as if Christians are a persecuted minority in Canada… but anyway.)
So people aren’t beyond convincing sometimes, but it’s not easy when they’re people in your family. A lot of times I don’t tackle bigoted things head-on – I just resort to joking. A few months ago, my mom switched the radio off because the show Vinyl Tap was playing Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl”. I knew why she shut it off, and I said in a mock-serious voice, “That song is disgusting.”
She said something like, “Yes, it is.” Not kidding.
I went on, “Because Katy Perry is like the Dementors in Harry Potter, and whenever she kisses anyone she sucks all the happy memories out of them. So it’s terrible to contemplate her kissing anybody.”
She told me I was being silly, which was true. Thing is, I don’t care what she thinks of some pop singer (love the singer, hate the sing?), but it upsets me personally that she thinks gay people are disgusting. (I’m about half gay, so maybe I’m only half disgusting?) It’s hard for me to talk about this seriously without getting angry/anxious, and that wouldn’t help.
…Personal rambles aside, I wouldn’t necessarily hate a person just because they support Trump, but I wouldn’t respect their decision. Like Dalillama said, it IS people’s lives we’re talking about. At least let them know how you think, if you can.
@Jesalin
All of it.
@Jesalin
I dunno. Probably plenty, but there’s a lot of people for whom there is no cowardice. ‘Say it loud, I’m a bigot and proud!’
You’ve inspired another question. How much of ‘Hillary Clinton is the most qualified person ever to run for President’ is people tryna convince themselves it’s OK to vote for a grrrrrl. Cos, like, she’s not the most qualified. Unless there’s some other understanding of what ‘qualified for the presidency’ means that I don’t know. Jefferson, van Buren, fuckin Taft was Chief Justice. Obama was rightly questioned on his lack of qualifications, but the ‘left’ didn’t mind. Why is this a thing for her and not him? I get more annoyed everytime I see/hear it
@Axe
You’re almost certainly right, that this is a huge motivation for that kind of talk. And it’s very, very, annoying.
He actually kind of campaign on the relative lack of political experience with the whole ‘Hope and Change’ routine. He ran on a variant of the ‘not a beltway insider’ bit that Trump keeps trying to pull, but it worked a lot better for him because he’s actually not a scion of generations of wealth and privilege like Trump is.
Well, Clinton doesn’t have the option of playing the ‘not part of the Establishment’ card because she’s been a politician/government official for decades. Which, on the face of it, puts her on par with the average Democratic presidential candidate and several rungs above the average Republican one (they’re more prone to run people like Trump, whose principal experience is ruining businesses, now and then). Beyond that, everyone has to make their own judgements about her qualifications, based on comparing what she has done with what they’d have liked to see done. Unfortunately, a lot of people are making the judgment based on her gender instead, which is why some supporters are pushing the ‘really extra super qualified’ meme to try to counteract background levels of misogyny.
@Dali
Yeah, but it was still a reasonable question. Especially when every other question was about whether or not Murica would immediately sink into the ocean if a black dude sat at the Oval Office desk
The fact that ‘Establishment’ is capitalized fills me with a mild sorta existential panic on behalf of political discourse
1 back and 2 forward, I suppose…