The 2016 Presidential Election Trainwreck

[Color Me Badd Fan]

If you have a free hour watch this- it's excellent.

The ol' White Supremacist Boogie Man.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16...l-crying-wolf/

I stick to my thesis from October 2015. There is no evidence that Donald Trump is more racist than any past Republican candidate (or any other 70 year old white guy, for that matter). All this stuff about how he’s “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up. It’s a catastrophic distraction from the dozens of other undeniable problems with Trump that could have convinced voters to abandon him. That it came to dominate the election cycle should be considered a horrifying indictment of our political discourse, in the same way that it would be a horrifying indictment of our political discourse if the entire Republican campaign had been based around the theory that Hillary Clinton was a secret Satanist. Yes, calling Romney a racist was crying wolf. But you are still crying wolf.

A rundown of some contrary talking points:

1. Is Trump getting a lot of his support from white supremacist organizations?

No, because there are not enough organized white supremacists to make up “a lot” of anyone’s support.

According to Wikipedia on KKK membership:
As of 2016, the Anti-Defamation League puts total Klan membership nationwide at around 3,000, while the Southern Poverty Law Center puts it at 6,000 members total
The KKK is really small. They could all stay in the same hotel with a bunch of free rooms left over. Or put another way: the entire membership of the KKK is less than the daily readership of this blog.

If you Google “trump KKK”, you get 14.8 million results. I know that Google’s list of results numbers isn’t very accurate. Yet even if they’re inflating the numbers by 1000x, and there were only about 14,000 news articles about the supposed Trump-KKK connection this election, there are still two to three articles about a Trump-KKK connection for every single Klansman in the world.

I don’t see any sign that there are other official white supremacy movements that are larger than the Klan, or even enough other small ones to substantially raise the estimate of people involved. David Duke called a big pan-white-supremacist meeting in New Orleans in 2005, and despite getting groups from across North America and Europe he was only able to muster 300 attendees (by comparison, NAACP conventions routinely get 10,000).

My guess is that the number of organized white supremacists in the country is in the very low five digits.

[myboynoah]

lol, just shut up already Krugman.

Embedded Tweet

[frank ryan]

The ol' White Supremacist Boogie Man.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16...l-crying-wolf/

Um, these people are a genuine and real problem. I'm using you didn't watch the video

[byu71]

They are in every state.

Yea and there are enough people who would have voted for Trump if he had tried harder to make him the popular vote getter.

Perhaps you can help me though. What is the point. That these people are basically lazy and want things handed to them unless they get to attend a protest?

[Color Me Badd Fan]

Um, these people are a genuine and real problem. I'm using you didn't watch the video

There's something like 3,000 klan members in the country.

That's the whole point of the link I posted, the number of white supremacists in this country is vanishingly small. The idea that they're some massive force for civil unrest is a joke.

[byu71]

The ol' White Supremacist Boogie Man.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16...l-crying-wolf/

It has a lot to do with perspective. This site is the first place in my life I have been accused of being a racist, homophobe or stupid. Well, I guess I have been called stupid before, but not with as much regularity.

A lot of people have a very low threshold for when we call people these names. In a way it is like fundamentalist mormons calling women in bikini's on billboards pornography.

I think they are sincere, but there definition is not mine.

[myboynoah]

It has a lot to do with perspective. This site is the first place in my life I have been accused of being a racist, homophobe or stupid.

Hey, me too!!!!

[Color Me Badd Fan]

nobody is here to crowd source your googling, dipshit

"Do you have a cite for that argument counsel?"

"No your honor, just take my word for it."

[Topper]

There's something like 3,000 klan members in the country.

That's the whole point of the link I posted, the number of white supremacists in this country is vanishingly small. The idea that they're some massive force for civil unrest is a joke.

That has been my impression that it is such an astonishingly small number that mentioning it actually increases their numbers. Because their activities are largely illegal, it is tough to gauge how many exist. Unless they are successful in running something illegal, there is no profit in it. In which case, unless there is something fun in it, such as being a gamer, I can't see the appeal. There has to be a catch for large numbers of these weirdos to exist, profit through illegal activity, something inherently fun like gaming, or something for which loners need to feel good about themselves.

[Copelius]

It has a lot to do with perspective. This site is the first place in my life I have been accused of being a racist, homophobe or stupid. Well, I guess I have been called stupid before, but not with as much regularity.

A lot of people have a very low threshold for when we call people these names. In a way it is like fundamentalist mormons calling women in bikini's on billboards pornography.

I think they are sincere, but there definition is not mine.

But they know it when they see it.

[Jeff Lebowski]

Yea and there are enough people who would have voted for Trump if he had tried harder to make him the popular vote getter.

Perhaps you can help me though. What is the point. That these people are basically lazy and want things handed to them unless they get to attend a protest?

The point of the article is to mock people who protest the election result when they are too stupid and/or lazy to vote in the first place. I am surprised that went over your head.

From the article:

For those who were eligible to vote but chose not to: Your opinion is bad. Voting is the price of admission for complaining about the results. Nothing’s stopping you from complaining, of course; the First Amendment protects complaints more than anything else, really. But don’t roll up to America and say “you made a bad choice” after not weighing in on that choice. It’s like showing up to dinner with a group of friends an hour in and complaining about what they ordered. Tough luck, man; eat your liver.

Next, I want to revisit this:

I thought Donald was pretty dumb tweating out he could have won the popular vote if he had campaigned in NY and California. Now the Post tries to prove they are just as dumb.

Aren't most of these non voting protestors in state Hillary won.

I was curious about the numbers and I also wanted to take another opportunity to mock your dumb post. Here are four states with narrowest margin of victory for Trump:

State Margin Electoral Votes
MI 0.3% 16
WI 0.9% 10
PA 1.0% 20
FL 1.3% 29

Trump ended up with 290 votes, just 20 above the 270 threshold. So yes, a relatively small number of people getting off their butts and voting could have changed the outcome.

[frank ryan]

There's something like 3,000 klan members in the country.

That's the whole point of the link I posted, the number of white supremacists in this country is vanishingly small. The idea that they're some massive force for civil unrest is a joke.

Yeah, I saw that guy's blog post you shared. You realize that official klan numbers aren't a great way to measure the strength or depth of the racist right? That's a poor way to estimate the size of group people don't like to disclose, or formally identify with.

One of the sources for the guy's ballpark estimate of klan numbers, the Southern Poverty Law Center, has reported a frightening amount of hate-related violence and intimidation. https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/...ation-election.

I expect you'll probably disregard the source or dismiss it, but you have to look at website traffic to places like Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and incidents of violence/intimidation to even start to grasp what's going on.

The Communist Party and Socialist Party are basically non-existent but that isn't a good measure of the number of people who adhere to those beliefs.

[frank ryan]

Here's another helpful article detailing the rise in hate groups during the previous year.

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-h...-and-extremism


"The 2015 hate group count almost certainly understates the true size of the American radical right. White supremacists are increasingly opting to operate mainly online, where the danger of public exposure and embarrassment is far lower, where younger people tend to gather, and where it requires virtually no effort or cost to join in the conversation. The major hate forum Stormfront now has more than 300,000 members, and the site has been adding about 25,000 registered users annually for several years — the size of a small city.

The milieu of the web is an ideal one for “lone wolves” — terrorists who operate on their own and are radicalized online. Dylann Roof is the perfect example. His journey began with absorbing propaganda about black-on-white crime from the website of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a hate group that enjoyed the attention of Republican lawmakers in the 1990s, and ended with the June massacre in Charleston. Like increasing numbers in white supremacist circles, Roof was convinced after drinking radical-right Kool-Aid on the Internet claiming that white people worldwide were the targets of genocide."

[Paperback Writer]

Next, I want to revisit this:

I was curious about the numbers and I also wanted to take another opportunity to mock your dumb post. Here are four states with narrowest margin of victory for Trump:

State Margin Electoral Votes
MI 0.3% 16
WI 0.9% 10
PA 1.0% 20
FL 1.3% 29

Trump ended up with 290 votes, just 20 above the 270 threshold. So yes, a relatively small number of people getting off their butts and voting could have changed the outcome.

You provided the percentages, The Washington Post reported the numbers:

PA: 68,236
WI: 27,527
MI: 11,837

"This election was effectively decided by 107,000 people in these three states. Trump won the popular vote there by that combined amount. That amounts to 0.09 percent of all votes cast in this election...That number of votes is about the same as the number of people who can pack into Michigan’s “Big House” stadium."

If Hillary had won those three state and their combined 46 electoral votes, she gets to 274 and is the next president.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graph...state-margins/

[byu71]

The point of the article is to mock people who protest the election result when they are too stupid and/or lazy to vote in the first place. I am surprised that went over your head.

From the article:



Next, I want to revisit this:



I was curious about the numbers and I also wanted to take another opportunity to mock your dumb post. Here are four states with narrowest margin of victory for Trump:

State Margin Electoral Votes
MI 0.3% 16
WI 0.9% 10
PA 1.0% 20
FL 1.3% 29

Trump ended up with 290 votes, just 20 above the 270 threshold. So yes, a relatively small number of people getting off their butts and voting could have changed the outcome.

Good post. I appreciate all the time and effort you put in to sering me straight or mocking me