The Donald Trump Thread

For those who cannot understand how people could vote for someone like Trump who speaks bluntly, watch this video which explains how free speech is under violent attack. Trump's popularity is in part a reaction to this. Trump voters consider his blunt speech to be a lesser evil than, or positive response to, liberal violence, and violent rhetoric. They see liberal logic as being twisted to the point of being insane and prefer Trump's style of plain speaking.


The distinction between speech and violence was a pivotal point in the development of civilization and it allows us to live in a society of law and order and safety. Many liberals who are ignorant of this believe that reversion to an uncivilized social order, where violence is an acceptable reaction to ideas they disagree with, is progress.

Read about it here:
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/0...-argument-against-free-speech-to-smithereens/

"Words you don't like deserve to be fought physically," the Daily Wire editor explained. "When I spoke at California State University LA, one professor threatened students who sponsored me by offering to fight them. He then posted a slogan on the door of his office stating, 'The best response to microaggression is macroaggression.'"

Along these lines, "protesters have all too often engage in physically violent disruption when they believe their identity group is under verbal attack by someone, usually conservative but not always."
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The notorious riots and violence at Middlebury College, UC Berkeley, and assaults on conservative students on campuses across America back up Shapiro's words.
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"Free speech is under assault because of a three-step argument made by advocates and justifiers of violence," Shapiro declared in his opening remarks. "The first step is they say that the validity or invalidity of an argument can be judged solely by the ethnic, sexual, racial, or cultural identity of the person making the argument."

This "intersectionality" argument — that society structurally oppresses people of ethnic, sexual, racial, or cultural identities and therefore only those who have been oppressed can speak about certain issues — is the ground of the "microaggression" culture stifling speech on campuses, the Daily Wire editor argued.

"The second step is they claim that those who say otherwise are engaged in what they call verbal violence," Sharipo added. "The final step is that they conclude that physical violence is sometimes justified in order to stop such verbal abuse."

In order to understand how college campuses shut down speech — often but not always conservative speech — Americans must understand the philosophy of "intersectionality." Shapiro argued that this philosophy dominates college campuses and "a large segment of today's Democratic Party."

Intersectionality "suggests that straight white Americans are inherently the beneficiaries of white privilege and therefore cannot speak on certain policies, since they have not experienced what it's like to be black or hispanic or gay or transgender or a woman."

This philosophy, Shapiro declared, "ranks the value of a view not based on the logic or merit of the view but on the level of victimization in American society experienced by the person espousing the view." An LGBT black woman is automatically considered more correct than a straight white male, before any speech exits either of their mouths.

"The next step is obvious: If a straight white male, or anyone else who ranks lower on the victimhood scale, says something contrary to the viewpoint of the higher ranking intersectionality identity, that person has engaged in a microaggression," the editor declared.
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The notorious riots and violence at Middlebury College, UC Berkeley, and assaults on conservative students on campuses across America back up Shapiro's words.

Last year, UC Berkeley students physically blocked white people from using a bridge.

Shapiro himself was physically blocked from speaking at the University of Wisconsin Madison last November when protesters stood on the stage to keep him from standing on it. Last week, UC Berkeley canceled a Shapiro speech scheduled for September on the grounds that the administration could not find a venue.

"Not only do some administrators look the other way ... actual crimes were committed and almost nobody has been arrested," Shapiro lamented.

He expressly condemned the "Heckler's veto" on free speech. This is "the notion that if you are physically violent enough, you can get administrators cow tow to you, to bow before you by canceling an event you disagree with altogether."

 
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Jim, that is some serious rationalizing of Trump to try and position him as some champion of "plain speech". I get your point, and largely agree with the broader social issue you raise, but Donald Trump isn't/wasn't the answer. Too many fatal flaws.
 
Jim, that is some serious rationalizing of Trump to try and position him as some champion of "plain speech". I get your point, and largely agree with the broader social issue you raise, but Donald Trump isn't/wasn't the answer. Too many fatal flaws.

It is not rationalization. It is how his supporters see him.
 
"Trump’s blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. “Directness is a working-class norm,” notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, “If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don’t like people who play these two-faced games.” Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being “a total wuss and a wimp,” an electronics technician told Lamont. Of course Trump appeals. Clinton’s clunky admission that she talks one way in public and another in private? Further proof she’s a two-faced phony."

https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-class
What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class
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Harvard Business Review
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Joan C. Williams
November 10, 2016
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One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.

Michèle Lamont, in The Dignity of Working Men, also found resentment of professionals — but not of the rich. “ can’t knock anyone for succeeding,” a laborer told her. “There’s a lot of people out there who are wealthy and I’m sure they worked darned hard for every cent they have,” chimed in a receiving clerk. Why the difference? For one thing, most blue-collar workers have little direct contact with the rich outside of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable — just with more money. “The main thing is to be independent and give your own orders and not have to take them from anybody else,” a machine operator told Lamont. Owning one’s own business — that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.

Trump’s blunt talk taps into another blue-collar value: straight talk. “Directness is a working-class norm,” notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, “If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don’t like people who play these two-faced games.” Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being “a total wuss and a wimp,” an electronics technician told Lamont. Of course Trump appeals. Clinton’s clunky admission that she talks one way in public and another in private? Further proof she’s a two-faced phony.
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The thing that really gets me is that Democrats try to offer policies (paid sick leave! minimum wage!) that would help the working class,” a friend just wrote me. A few days’ paid leave ain’t gonna support a family. Neither is minimum wage. WWC men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15 per hour instead of $9.50. What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don’t have a college degree.
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Remember when President Obama sold Obamacare by pointing out that it delivered health care to 20 million people? Just another program that taxed the middle class to help the poor, said the WWC, and in some cases that’s proved true: The poor got health insurance while some Americans just a notch richer saw their premiums rise.
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So my sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free child care for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn’t pay for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some of the kids’ moms did not work. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from Macy’s. My sister-in-law was livid.
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“The white working class is just so stupid. Don’t they realize Republicans just use them every four years, and then screw them?” I have heard some version of this over and over again, and it’s actually a sentiment the WWC agrees with, which is why they rejected the Republican establishment this year. But to them, the Democrats are no better.
 
It is not rationalization. It is how his supporters see him.
Its how some of his supporters see him I'm sure.

However, those that I know in my own relationship circles who support (or perhaps at this stage "supported") him indeed used this as a rationalization. It was weak then, IMO, and its indefensible now, IMO. We, as a democratic people, should demand more from the official in the highest office. He is a regular embarrassment, "plain speech" and all.
 
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