Yet somehow this isn’t hate speech?
Essayist Time Kreidel writes at The Week:
A vote cast for Trump is kind of like a murder; there may be context to consider — a disadvantaged background, extenuating circumstances, understandable motives — but the choice itself is binary and final, irrevocable. There’s a case to be made that it’s indefensible; that his supporters have forfeited any right to be respected or taken seriously. The conservatives of the heartland have lashed back against the coastal elites’ condescending, classist prejudices by defiantly confirming them: that they’re pathetically dumb and gullible, uncritical consumers of any disinformation that confirms their biases, easy dupes for any demagogue who promises to bring back the factories and keep the brown people down.
Ignorance and bigotry are actually the best possible motives for having voted for Trump — they are at least honest, if not honorable. But I don’t believe all Trump voters are ignorant, or bigoted; most of them are just evil — evil being defined not as anything so glamorous as beheading journalists or gunning down grade schoolers, but simply as not much caring about other people’s suffering.
Yeah, he wraps it up with some Rodney Kingesque “can’t we all just get along” verbiage but he says what he says.
He does say one thing that rang at least partly true. He says:
Half of the country seems to feel that this could be a utopia if only the other half were exterminated. It all feels less like the raucous squabble of a democracy than a war, in which the object is to win by any means necessary, our fellow citizens have become The Enemy, civility is appeasement and fairness is collaboration.
I believe that’s half true.
I believe the real divide in this country is not actually between black and white or red and blue states. It’s between the secular utopians and religious Christians. And I believe that many would rather see us dead. That’s why they’re constantly talking about how polls indicate that young people agree with them. They know they have to just wait us out. And what about our children? They don’t worry about them because they know that we’re such idiots that we’ll pay for the privilege of having college professors twist them against us.
The recent election was a setback for them, no doubt. But they believe that time is on their side. If only we’d just hurry up and die.
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