So I’m putting together a page (or possibly two) of anti-Trump resources, and I could use your help over the next few days. (No need think about any of this stuff today, obviously!)
I’m looking for a bunch of different things:
Information and graphics to help make the case that Trump’s victory is illegitimate, based on:
Hillary’s big win the popular vote; the ways in which the electoral college effectively overcounts the votes of rural whites and those in swing states and undercounts those of minorities; dirty tricks, from Russian hacking and wikileaks to the machinations of Comey and pro-Trump FBI agents (I’m especially interested in stuff talking about Trump’s connections to the dirty tricksters, as well as his public encouragement and exploitation of leaked emails and the like).
Information on protests and other anti-Trump activism:
Both local and national (and on the internet). Links to help people who want to get involved.
Information and resources to help people deal with Trump-related anxiety, etc.
Information on Trump’s massive conflicts of interest, and whether or not this could rise to the level of an impeachable offense
Information on his worldwide business dealings. Examples of the conflicts that have already become an issue even though he’s not yet in the White House. The issues raised by his plan to have his kids run his business — despite their continued involvement in the transition and their attendance at meetings with foreign leaders.
Information on Trump’s connections to white supremacists
The possibility that he engaged in “pay to play” for favorable coverage in Breitbart. Connections to far-right parties and activists in Europe. Examples of horrible stuff said and done by his white supremacist supporters. His refusal to clearly and specifically distance himself from these people — in person, on camera.
Trump’s compulsive lying; his vanity; his obsession with revenge; his encouragement of violence at his rallies; his flip-flops, mood swings, erratic behavior; his susceptibility to flattery; his promulgation of fake news and discredited claims
Trump’s racism and misogyny
Trump’s attacks on Muslims and Latinos. His record of discrimination against black tenants. His long history of misogyny. The accusations of sexual assault raised against him.
Historical parallels between Trump and fascist/authoritarian leaders in the past
Information about Trump’s unwillingness to follow traditional norms of presidential behavior and/or do his job
His massive ignorance about this country and the world and unwillingness/inability to learn. His attempts to dodge the press and threats against press freedom. His refusal to attend daily intelligence briefings. His refusal to make his tax returns public.
Trump’s terrible advisors and allies; the Russian connections
Further reading on Trump
Ranging from the terrible things he’s said about women, to his bankruptcies and sleazy business practices, to his embrace of assorted conspiracy theories over the years. I’m generally looking for longer articles here, but short primers on some issues are welcome as well.
Further reading on fascism. authoritarianism, right-wing movements and media
Information about Pence, particularly his anti-LGBT policies
Funny stuff
Recommended publications, writers, podcasters, etc to help make sense of Trump
Anything else you can think of that I’m forgetting
Thanks!
How dare you get annoyed with me for being a contrarian asshole? Contrarian asshole is just my personality!
@David Futrelle, I’ll second megalibrarygirl’s excellent offer; as an academic (like quite a few other mammotheers), I can access most stuff on Google Scholar and other databases for freesies so let me know if you need anything. We can be the database retrieval team 🙂
I’ve mentioned Sarah Kendzior before (probably several thousand times) but her Twitter feed is a constantly updated treasure trove on links, information, etc. She’s currently focused on the campaign to audit the vote. Apologies if you’re already well aware of her.
Finallies, slightly unrelated – Turning Point USA is compiling a list of academics that they have designated as too liberal/left-wing; they’re publishing names, photos, & locations of these people. They insist they simply want to raise awareness, not take action 😐
@Zumba
I’m tryna find the post of yours that wasn’t incredibly condescending. The one where you blame Trump’s win on us whining? Or the one where you assume that I must hold some sorta grudge against Glenn Greenwald? Or the one where you conflate me and the Democratic Party in order to chastise me for some moral failing? Or the one where you state your opinion, aimed at me in the form of a not question? Cos I really can’t figure which…
Also, the assumption that I only have a problem with you cos you don’t post often, and that it wouldn’t have mattered what you posted or how, is also rather condescending. But sure, I’m the asshole for not being actively helpful to you. Honestly, not even sure how I was meant to be helpful
@Mish
“We’re not doxxing these people who will be inevitably targeting by a barrage of hate, honest.” *sigh*
Doxxing needs to be something that comes with an actual penalty, not just something that people call the culprit out on.
Why are all trolls so fucking whiney? Ughhh. Boring, boring, boring.
@zumahzumah
Liar. You said it was “a Trump meeting”. as if it involved Trump himself. Which it didn’t. The ‘Just kidding! I was talking about his son’ act is transparent and quite frankly pathetic.
Also, you are a complete hypocrite for whining about being taken out of context when you took this quote:
out of context:
And yet, while claiming to have read the article, you insist “what’s the problem?”
Hmmm.
*ctrl+f*
“sexist”
*enter*
*enter*
*enter*
Hmmmmmmmmmm.
Oh wait are you that other guy who likes to pretend we called him things that we didn’t in order to play up his persecution complex?
Stop that. We have to eat shit either for the next four years or until the majority of Congress can agree he’s taken an action worthy of impeachment, and in the latter case we still have to deal with the simple malevolence of Pence. We have so much confirmable shit we don’t need to try to retroactively remove the electoral college. Yes, there was voter suppression. Yes, we need to undo that damage and sanction the people directly responsible. No, there is no apparatus that can restore those unfairly denied votes to the 2016 results without jeopardizing the legitimacy of the federal government.
Concerning the folks derailing this thread, ignore them.
Also; This is a great idea from David; Put together a big Anti-Trump resource so we can nip that big Annoying Orange in the bud before he does anything too heinous!
I can contribute this….
http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/
….It’s about reforming the Electoral College System so the Popular Vote is stronger. It may not be about repealing the E.C. but….baby steps.
Oddly enough; The very jerk we’re fighting is actually fine with this….despite the fact that this sort of thing would’ve made Hillary win if implemented across the country.
And if Trumpy’s been doing stupid things with Putin, then THAT REALLY NEEDS TO BE LOOKED INTO!
Seconding SpukiKitty: try to reform the electoral college, just not retroactively.
A list of pro-women, pro-immigrant, pro-Earth, anti-bigotry organizations that need your support
http://jezebel.com/a-list-of-pro-women-pro-immigrant-pro-earth-anti-big-1788752078
There are links for donations and volunteering.
I’m sure others can help more, but a couple of things spring to mind. I may have to do them in separate comments, so sorry in advance – I’m on mobile.
First: https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/meet-fancy-bear-the-russian-group-hacking-the-us-election?utm_term=.yhJnkJL31#.hq9pqwz5X
Yes, it’s buzzfeed. However, their long reads tend to be quite good, and it was this that convinced me maybe the whole Russian hacking stuff was worth taking seriously.
And for my second link: http://www.scotsman.com/news/woman-who-urinated-on-donald-trump-s-golf-course-to-sue-1-4222547
This has been all over Scottish news. It’s both quite funny, and an example of Trump being a dick more generally. Essentially, a woman had a wee on one of Trump’s golf courses, which frankly is the only good use for them. He filmed her (there’s some argument over whether it was security cameras or security guards, but either way, she didn’t give permission) and then got her charged with public indecency (helped by the fact that the somewhat corrupt Aberdeen council like him, unlike the rest of Aberdeen.) In retaliation, she is suing him for breach of privacy, and has become somewhat of a folk hero up here in the process.
Something more lighthearted: a small collection of Spy Magazine’s incessant ragging on tRump during the 80s.
http://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2015/08/spy-vs-trump-the-best-donald-trump-moments-from-spy-magazine-1986-98.html
David Futrelle,
You seem to have forgotten that Trump will also be really bad when it comes to science, and science policy as well. He, along with Mike Pence, have both embraced pseudoscientific nonsense, the latter, perhaps even more so. In addition, Trump is a conspiracy theorist.
I recommend that you read some of the things that Emil Karlsson has written on this subject.
What Will the Trump Presidency Mean for Scientific Skepticism?
https://debunkingdenialism.com/2016/11/09/what-will-the-trump-presidency-mean-for-scientific-skepticism/
Is Donald Trump Scientifically Illiterate?
https://debunkingdenialism.com/2014/04/02/is-donald-trump-scientifically-illiterate/
Why Scientific Skepticism Should Be Intellectually Global
https://debunkingdenialism.com/2016/11/10/why-scientific-skepticism-should-be-intellectually-global/
Was Trump’s Victory Just Backlash Against “Political Correctness”?
https://debunkingdenialism.com/2016/11/12/was-trumps-victory-just-backlash-against-political-correctness/
Note that Trump has backpedaled somewhat on climate change as Emil pointed out on a comment on the first link.
Donald Trump says he believes there is ‘some connectivity’ between humans and climate change in major U-turn
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/donald-trump-says-he-believes-there-is-some-connectivity-between-humans-and-climate-change-in-major-a7432671.html
The Snowden hate is one thing I’ve never understood. I mean, I get why Clinton and the current administration hate him; he made them look terrible. I’ve just never understood why actual citizens of the United States would hate him. In particular, I don’t get why people on the left have been expressing that hatred after this election.
The NSA (and other intelligence agencies) is watching this place. They’re reading our emails, our private digital documents, whatever they can get their sticky little fingers on. They watch the left more than they watch the right, in spite of the fact that there are far more terrorists coming from the right in the U.S. than the left. Why? Hippies.
No really, that’s why. The people at the top of these organizations were alive during the summer of love era, and they have never forgiven hippies for… existing, I suppose. When these people see the left, they see a bunch of hippies. And when these people see a hippie, they start punching.
These people fell on the peaceful OWS protestors like a ton of bricks, because hippies. These people funnel military hardware to local police forces, because hippies. These people have passed on their undying hatred the current generation of police officers, so that will use that hardware on peaceful protestors. Because hippies.
These people are (a big part of) the reason that I hacked off my long, long hair at just past 2 AM on November 9th, and in less than two months, these people will be Trump’s creatures. They are, no doubt, very pleased about this, because in many ways they are a secret police force just waiting for a tyrant to give the order they’ve longed to hear for more than half a century: Kill the hippies.
All Snowden did was give us a heads up about just how little intelligence agencies in this country have been reined in. And before anyone starts with “but he went to Russia, that’s the enemy,” I would point out that Moscow is pretty much the only place he could go if he wanted to survive.
A U.S. ally was out of the question; they’d turn him over immediately, and he’d likely “commit suicide” before his case got to trial. It had to be superpower, because only a superpower (or former superpower) would have the arsenal to dissuade drone strikes and the counter-intelligence apparatus to keep him from getting grabbed off the street. So Russia, or possibly China. China would probably turn him over, however, after they made sure they gotten everything out of him they could.
Russia though, will keep him alive and safe just to spit in the U.S.’s eye. Yes, they’re just using him. Yes, it’s unfortunate that they got intelligence from him, but sometimes doing evil shit comes back to bite you in the ass.
Most of what was revealed is purely about control, and the only reason it hasn’t been that big a deal yet (though it damn well should have been) is that the current administration isn’t completely terrible on human rights issues. But if a fascist demagogue were somehow to rise to power in this country, he wouldn’t even have to work at building up a secret police force. All the machinery is already in place. Bad news for the hippies.
That’s us, if anybody is confused on that point.
Private lives are exposed as WikiLeaks spills its secrets
Not sure if this has been posted. If it has been…ignore. On Trump’s lying and vanity, here are links to 4 articles and 2 videos of Tony Schwartz on writing The Art of the Deal. I’m not sure what you are looking for in credibility, so I brought a variety so you can choose. The 4 articles read pretty much the same. The first youtube is a MSNBC interview that also somewhat matches the articles, while the second video is over an hour, at Oxford Union, and after Tony Schwartz tells the same story in great detail there is a Q&A. (I haven’t watched the second video in its entirety… still working on it…)
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb2NHTka-gw
http://www.npr.org/2016/07/21/486924253/art-of-the-deal-ghostwriter-on-why-trump-should-not-be-president
http://fortune.com/2016/07/28/donald-trump-tony-schwartz/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/us/politics/trump-book-tony-schwartz.html
(This may have been posted previously on this blog.)
Trump’s vindictive streak extended to cutting off medical coverage to a grandnephew diagnosed with cerebral palsy.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/what-sort-of-man-is-donald-trump
Not to mention writing his brother’s family out their grandfather’s will.
A brief comment about the phrase “Not my president.” I don’t like it. He is our president. (Or will be soon.) I don’t like it any more than anyone else, but it’s a damn fact; that’s how democracy works. We just have to work to fight against the awful shit he’s going to do as our president. We can’t change the fact that he is going to be, in fact, the president of every person in the US.
In short, to me it feels like saying “Not my president” is a cop-out. We absolutely can’t just say, “oh, I didn’t vote for him” and wash our hands of the whole affair. That’s not ok, at least in my opinion.
Anyway, just my two cents.
A publication that has been following Trump closely is Talking Points Memo, particularly on the EdBlog. It’s planning on ramping up its capacity for investigative journalism in light of Trump’s victory. The site has already covered a lot of Trump’s conflicts of interest with foreign leaders.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/
Another publication that expects to do the same thing, except maybe a little more leisurely, is Washington Monthly.
http://washingtonmonthly.com/
Two more mainstream news sources I recommend are Charlie Pierce at Esquire…
http://www.esquire.com/author/7884/charles-p-pierce/
And New York Magazine’s Daily Intelligencer.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/
Rebecca Traister also writes for New York Magazine, but her reports are in The Cut, not Daily Intelligencer. She’s well worth reading.
@ Handsome “Punkle Stan” Jack
What Wikileaks did was despicable, but the only mention of Snowden in the article is the part where he suggested that Wikileaks shouldn’t be so careless. I may be wrong, but all of the releases in the article sound like they are from the diplomatic cable leaks, which, to my knowledge, was not Snowden’s doing. And it’s worth mentioning that, if this came from the data Snowden leaked, the surveillance organs of U.S. government should NOT have people’s medical records in the first place.
So again, Wikileaks is absolutely in the wrong, but I don’t think any of what they did came from the information supplied by Snowden. Again, I could be wrong about this, but I haven’t found anything in my admittedly hasty search to suggest that Snowden was a part of the diplomatic cable leaks, and it’s my understanding that he wasn’t a part of that.
I cannot help but I think this is a great project, David.
I CAN’T WORK UNDER THESE CONDITIONS!!!!!
@Vucodlak (how do you pronounce that?)
Nah, you got it. That was all wikileaks. Snowden’s leaks were entirely separate