I knew from the outset that Trump would win Kansas last night. So my vote really didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of who would carry the night. Only eight times since becoming a State in 1861 has Kansas not voted Republican: 1892 (James B. Weaver), 1896 (William Jennings Bryan), 1912 and 1916 (Woodrow Wilson), 1932 and 1936 (FDR), and 1964 and 1968 (LBJ).
So voting for Gary Johnson was more of a protest vote than anything else. And I joined my wife and almost 4 million people in the United States to vote for him. That along with the more than 1 million votes for Jill Stein shows that many are fed up with the Democrats and Republicans. And over 5 million of us were at least brave enough to cast our vote to say that.
But the Republicans being handed not just the White House with Donald Trump, but retaining the Senate and House shows that the American people have had enough of the Democrats. And not just the Democrats, but everything the left has come to represent. The people are just sick of it.
Identity politics has become front and center in the US. In 2008 we were told that if you didn’t vote for Obama, then you’re racist — I voted for McCain that year. In 2012 we were told the same — I voted for Gary Johnson. This year we were told that voting for Trump or supporting him made you a Nazi sympathizer, racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, sexist, and all other kinds of nasty labels that the left hoped would scare people away from voting for Trump and toward voting for Clinton. After all, you wouldn’t want to be known for being those things, right?
They forgot one key rule, though. The more you call someone those things, the less sting they have over time. You build up an immunity to it.
I’ve been called those things for years. Ever since Atheism+ first arrived on the scene over four years ago and lines were drawn in the sand within atheism’s supporters and activists. This was my first foray into social justice activism and my first encounters with social justice warriors. Seeing what that did to people who I initially considered rational and reasonable, I could see the poison eating away at everyone else.
Battle lines were drawn. Around race. Sexuality. Gender expression. Identities became more important than attitudes and actions. People who largely couldn’t care less about someone else’s race, sexuality, or gender expression found themselves caring simply because of those who made it a point to push that on us.
Like a battle-hardened physician who has seen diseases many of us wish never existed, many of us have seen what happens when social justice activism festers within communities. And when their opportunity came to put one of their own in the White House, we struck back.
The results of that occurred last night.
They forgot that the vast majority of people actually care about basic liberties. They want their freedom of speech to be unencumbered, even supporting the Supreme Court when they ruled in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church. They don’t like the idea of the government encroaching on gun rights the way that Hillary Clinton and her camp promised they would with their continual references to Australia.
They also forgot that many distrust the media to the point where they’d do their own fact checking. And that is where social justice activism goes to die.
Indeed social justice activists continually spread lies. I saw it in the atheist communities before they hit the general body politic at large. Victim politics became the name of the game, or as I’ve seen it described elsewhere, the “Oppression Olympics”. And while competing for the gold, trying to guilt and shame the rest of us into submitting to a reduction in rights by labeling as “hate speech” virtually anything we said that didn’t align with their beliefs.
Now that they have failed to get one of their own in the White House, many have threatened riots. Because infantile and immature people throw tantrums at not getting their way.
And to answer Van Jones in asking how to explain Trump’s victory to your children, it’s quite simple: you tell them the truth.
But telling them the truth requires you to accept the overwhelming lies that the left has been telling. Not just about Trump. Not just about Republicans. But about the People of the United States of America in general. The left has tried to spin a narrative wherein, in short, the United States has either had virtually no social progress since the 1950s, or has reverted back to the 1950s.
Polls were manipulated. The Democrat Party did everything within their power, regardless of whether it was within the boundaries of ethics or legality, to push the election the direction they wanted it to go. But the people wouldn’t bite.
So instead now the left will likely continue lying. They will write articles and opinion pieces about how the United States has basically reverted back to the 1950s. And how we’ve become like the Weimar Republic to paint Trump as basically America’s version of Adolf Hitler. Which has basically been their modus operandi for the least year or more.
They’ll continue to call the tens of millions of people who voted for Trump the various little words they’ve been employing since it became clear that Trump will be the Republican nominee. They’ll basically demonize half the country for not getting their way. And I don’t buy for a moment that the Huffington Post will “start [over] with a clean slate” in covering Trump.
The game has proven profitable for them with regard to political capital. And they’ll play it for as long as they still can.
What would actually surprise me is if all of that ends. If we all stop dehumanizing everyone else over petty things. If we all just live and let live.
