This morning, I was grieving, and I wanted to go, leave, go somewhere else, because I felt that it was clear that I'm simply not wanted here, that I'm unacceptable. That passed. This is my home. I am not leaving my home to these bigots, to these petty fools. This is my home. I'm here.
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.”
by Joanna Rothkopf on Jezebel, shared by Cheryl Eddy to io9
Donald Trump has been a vocal advocate of sexual assault, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and violent racism. Early Wednesday morning, America voted to elect him our president.
Tonight, we are genuinely scared. Deeply saddened.
Hard as it is for us all to believe, Donald Trump is our next president.
There are simply no words to capture the collective pain we feel right now. We’ve elected a racist, bigoted, sexist, predatory man with fascist tendencies and a huge temper.
Jake and I have spent every waking moment of the past five years working toward the mission of informing, inspiring and empowering our generation to change the world. We tried to channel the best ideas from our generation. And in the moment when our generation became the biggest voting bloc in American history, our voices fell silent.
We failed.
That hurts. We’ve asked so many friends to drop everything and join us. We’ve made promises to our community of millions of peers. We’ve obsessed over harnessing the power of ideas supercharged through our global networks. And yet tonight, in the face of the most damning threat to our future, we’ve hit rock bottom.
So what are we going to do about it?
1) We will empathize. Comfort your loved ones and stand with those who are immediately threatened. Our friends, siblings, parents and many loved ones could be affected by Trump’s draconian policies. There will be genuine fear, grief and even panic. Reach out to those you love.
2) We will report. We will shine a light on our generation’s brightest stars and best activists. We will create both physical and digital spaces for open dialogue that gives voice. We will stay focused and make our generation heard.
3) We will mobilize. Fight to defend our values, our principles and our basic tenets of democracy and human rights. We will deliberately and strategically insert ourselves in the political process to block Trump’s hurtful policies and force him to reckon with us. We will take up this fight head on and aim to minimize his damage at every turn.
We won’t fail again. We are ready to dig in. There will be no mass deportations under our watch. There will be no reversal of equality under the law. We will dedicate every minute of every day to ensure our voices are actually heard.
We will build this movement from the ground up, with the best ideas from everyone. We want to hear you. We want your feedback. We’re ready to build this together. Because this is #NotOurAmerica.
David Wong usually talks sense. I don't know that I'm in the mood, or the mind for this, but I figured I'd share it, in case it helps anyone.
I get that Trump supporters have good reasons for their anger, but I can't see, I won't see, how that excuses stepping on the necks of people more vulnerable than them.
hey all, i need to get real right now, because a friend filled me in on this only this morning. it feels like no one has heard this news, and that’s probably because no one is reporting it due to election overload. trump’s victim has dropped the charges. let me make this clear: she had 2 sworn eyewitnesses to the literal rape (do u know how rare that is?) so we know the case itself had some definite identifiable merit going in, and 2 days before dropping the charges jane doe was going to break her anonymity. it’s reported that she received so many death threats in the hours between announcing that action and holding the press conference to do so that her safety became a serious concern and the press conference was cancelled. later, on the 6th, she dropped the charges altogether. it’s not going to trial.
do i think this is a coincidence? no fucking way. do i think he’s a rapist? most definitely; i don’t need a trial to recognize the truth. but we do need to reflect on the fact that this is what rape culture looks like: a world in which a woman can’t get justice for her childhood sexual assaut, because it would mean suing the president-elect of the united states and would put her life in serious danger. the lawyers were unclear as to why she dropped the charges, but it’s my firm belief that, like many survivors of assault, the pressure of laying her story out in front of the world became overwhelming, especially with so much at stake. it’s scary enough to press charges against ur rapist if ur both average people. if he’s gonna be the president? hahahahaha fun.
i’ve been sending good thoughts her way, and i don’t want to be the bearer of bad news like this, but i’ve seen so many people already talking about organizing around this rape case and it’s not even happening, y’all. this is almost worse than his win, tbh. i’m in so much pain for all of us, especially jane doe and those of us who needed to see him stand trial for this.
Like it literally doesn’t matter if Trump can’t do any of the impossible, illegal things he’s promised. It doesn’t matter, because as soon as a platform built on hate is validated in this way, culture changes. Britain the morning after the Brexit vote was a different place. It wasn’t just the measurable rise in hate crimes and plummeting economy, it was people feeling free to say all the ugliest things they’d ever thought because they knew at least half the country was behind them.
In the coming days and months, please stay safe. Please never stop fighting for a better world. This won’t be forever.
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House Speaker Paul Ryan called for unity following the election of Donald Trump Wednesday morning, saying the Republican nominee “just earned a mandate.”
Donald Trump, it should be pointed out, won the election but lost the popular vote. President Barack Obama dominated the popular vote in both elections, handily crushing his two opponents.
But at no point during his tenure did so much as one Republican leader consider Obama to have a “mandate”; instead, they obstructed him at every turn, from the first year to the last, escalating finally into an anti-constitutional move to deny him a Supreme Court nominee for the last year of his term. Because they wanted to.
by Anna Merlan on The Slot, shared by Kate Dries to Jezebel
Hillary Clinton spoke Wednesday morning from the ballroom of the New Yorker Hotel in midtown Manhattan, where she calmly, graciously conceded to Donald Trump and urged her supporters to keep fighting for Democratic values. Clinton appeared before a crowd of staff and supporters, many of them looking stricken or openly crying. It was one of the saddest moments in American public life in a long, long time.
A quick note based on my post-Brexit experience in the UK – in the time period after the election, your biggest threat will not be Trump and his government. It will be your newly validated bigot neighbours. After Brexit, hate crime shot up by 60% in the UK nearly overnight and it still hasn’t returned to its pre-Brexit level. I imagine the same will happen in America. Be careful. No matter who they are, Trump voters are not your friends. Be safe. Your biggest enemy right now is the neighbour you went to church with and the people you pass on the street every day. Lock down. Go to ground if you have to. Look out for one another. Please, be careful.
Here's some good news: David Duke is not going to be a United States senator from Louisiana next year.
The former Ku Klux Klan leader and onetime Louisiana state representative was hoping the rise of Donald Trump could help him resurrect his political career and return to relevance. Instead, more than two decades after his quick rise and steep fall within the Republican party, he was little more than a punching bag. With 77 percent of precincts reporting, he had received 3.4 percent of the vote in a 24-candidate field, falling well short of the threshold to advance to the December runoff. State treasurer John Kennedy and Rep. Charles Boustany, both Republicans, were leading the field although the race had not yet been called.
Duke, a perennial candidate who had launched bids for the House, Senate, and presidency in the 1990s, was attempting to ride the coattails of Trump to new heights when he entered the crowded "jungle primary" last summer. It didn't happen—although he did, in a fluke, clear the five-percent threshold to appear at the one televised debate, at the historically black Dillard University, prompting massive student protests. (Duke used his brief moment in the spotlight to talk about "CNN Jews.") But maybe the most important thing about Duke's candidacy was that it happened at all. He had been humiliated in his final run for office in 1999, and eventually sent to prison for stealing money from his supporters. For much of the last decade he's been in a self-imposed exile, at one point taking up birding in Austria.
But in 2016, as Trump rode a wave of ethno-nationalism to the Republican nomination, Duke finally felt like it was safe to get back into politics. A lot of his fellow travelers felt the same way. As my colleagues have reported, Trump's campaign was backed forcefully by a contingent of Neo-Nazis and white supremacists who saw the Republican nominee as a vehicle for their worldview. The campaign avoided denouncing almost any of them. (Trump's refusal to disavow Duke, whom he had once criticized, would haunt him for the rest of the campaign.)
So Duke got crushed in Louisiana. But the zombies of the Republican Party's past came back to life in 2016, and Duke and his ilk may not go away any time soon.
I swear to god, Steven Colbert saved my life last night.
"By every metric, we are more divided than ever as a nation," a sober Stephen Colbert told his Showtime audience at the end of a televised election special on Tuesday night. "Both sides are terrified of the other side."
Colbert's whole moving monologue is worth watching from beginning to end—even though it was broadcast before the election had been officially called for Donald Trump early Wednesday morning—for its seemingly improvised portrait of a deeply partisan nation, and the comedian's plea for post-election harmony.
"They designed an election that was meant to confuse us and bore us a little bit," Colbert said, lamenting a time before social media seemed to divide friends and families along party lines. "But now politics is everywhere and that takes up precious brain space we could be using to remember all the things we actually have in common."
The he added: "Now, please. Get out there. Kiss a Democrat. Go hug a Republican."
I assert that I will employ the Art which is its gift in Life’s service alone, rejecting all other usages.
I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; and I will change no object or creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened.
To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so —
