America, We Need to Talk

For some reason in these past years the concept of ‘Reason’ and ‘Sense’ has departed your country, I’ve hissed, I’ve simmered, I’ve hit my head against the wall hoping that in the end IN THE END the collective mass of the American People will open their eyes, stop making excuses and realise that for 4 years, America has not become ‘Great Again’ I’ve resisted the urge to unload many a time, but news that Donald Trump is to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize is just too much, because this is literal horseshit. For some part it feels like they’re only trying it just so Republicans can force a rhetoric as if Trump did a better job than Obama - who won in 2009 for easing religious tensions, preventing Nuclear Weapons distribution and profiting, working towards fixing climate change and assisting with the UN - as people die of COVID, cities burn and violence against peaceful protests continue to ravage your country.

I have to say that again, Ravage, because I feel as though some people are blind to the matter at hand. Donald Trump will say something and his cult of followers will believe it, when someone disagrees and presents evidence it’s deemed irrelevant or forged, if a Democrat says something on the contrary they need a full powerpoint presentation to prove it, somehow this mentality has poisoned the American society when the louder people will say something in confidence only for the rest of the world to read and think it’s one of the dumbest shit they’ve ever read. This isn’t just coming from a Brit, this is coming from family in Chicago, a co-worker who moved out of America and worked in the army, Italians, Greeks and someone who was in Hong Kong during the riots. The people who believe in Democracy, Majority Vote, Free Healthcare, Fair Wage, Equal Rights AND international peace that doesn’t look towards World War Fucking Three look at your country in shame because the state of your leadership and how it’s been allowed to continue with ridiculously boneheaded and stubborn reluctance to see the truth. So let’s start with the boiling point shall we, a Nobel Peace Prize Nomination? Have you learned anything from the last year? Or has the far-right got the prize so by the balls that this nomination is used as a cheap add-on to coincidentally peacock the Trump administration in its build to an election. The nomination to Trump has been cited to be in favour of the following things; Israel-UAE relations (aka ‘Saving the Middle East), Serbia-Kosovo deal (aka ‘Saving the ‘Middle East’’), Inter-Korea relations and likely the support of Jerusalem and Hong Kong, and in face value that may sway the common person who knows nothing about these deals. But a simple amount of research cuts most of these at the legs. Let’s talk Serbia and Kosovo, since it’ll directly involve Israel, relations were tense but they have not been at war, they are peacefully not talking to each other. The media will have you think that Peace has been brokered by Trump only in this but in reality Serbia still refuses to recognize Kosovo’s independence, the tensions are still there you can just travel there now. This is an agreement that’s been build up since the economic and trade agreement in 2013. If that year isn’t surprising you that is 3 years before Trump was elected, when Barrack Obama was in office - Republican Public Enemy Hillary Clinton was at the forefront of that when she was Secretary of State. So no, Trump hasn’t saved the Middle East by this deal, mainly because Kosovo and Serbia are in Europe, they have been part of the EU for quite some time and the deal is already jeopardized since Serbia won’t build an embassy in Jerusalem if Israel recognize Kosovo as independent - which was part of the original deal. Also for all the Republicans’ use of ‘fear by Communism’ to slander their opponents they sure love to rub shoulders with countries also rubbing shoulders with Russia and China. So this segues into Israel-UAE, the Arab Nations have mainly been reluctant to recognize Israel as independent. On the 13th August a deal was struck called the Abraham agreement establishing Diplomatic Relations. Except, this was in the making since 2012 and only delayed to help progress Israeli-Palestine conflicts (which Trump’s actions with Israel led to Palestine cutting ties with the administration and his ‘Peace Plan’ falling apart 3 years after announcing it). UAE and Israel had been in conversation before Trump was signed in, but only made headway when the FDD - already funded by the UAE - took over. For 3 years USA did little for the relations, UAE and Israel doing it themselves, it’s only now do the US mediate a peace agreement, which meant that Trump didn’t really do much in terms of convincing both sides, he just made sure things didn’t get out of hand - which was never close to happening since there is little tensions. It was Kushner who requested the meeting and Mossad also had a huge part in it. Also I want to add that the US are only buddied with these two out of fear of Iran - you know, that country that Trump almost goaded into war in January after bombings and the death Assassination of General Soleimani who helped the US in the wake of 9/11 track and hunt down the Taliban, as well as fighting ISIS, how peaceful was that? The Middle East is still in Civil and Proxy Wars, no saving has been done there, the US just were there for Israel and UAE to confess that they’re friends. Which leads me to Korea. The Olympics helped more than Trump did, a shared effort where both countries had to travel and accommodate each other. Tensions may’ve eased in 2016 but they were far from resolved and in 2020 not much is better. Korea still antagonize one another and the North still antagonizes the US, any ‘peace’ the Trump Administration will claim to towards Korea faded quickly. And finally, Hong Kong, the US may be supportive and rightly so but this is again fear of Communism, it should’ve happened sooner but the US was hoping for that big and meaty trade deal with China. And this isn’t months I’m talking about it’s years, the proposal first took place after the Umbrella Movement...in 2014, it was annually brought up in Congress but postponed until the Senate decided to. And after Trump signed it he said he might veto it in favour of the China trade deal

“We have to stand with Hong Kong, but I'm also standing with President Xi: he's a friend of mine." - Donald Trump, November 2019

So really, this Nobel Peace Prize is the product and efforts of other people that set events in motion that Trump was there just to sign his name on. Meanwhile, in the country he is President of, the COVID Death toll has officially risen to 190 Thousand. 20% of COVID deaths are in the United States. Tear Gas/Pepper Spray - which is a recognized chemical weapon not allowed to be used in warfare - is used by Trump Supporters along with paintballs to attack peaceful protesters and Trump calls that peaceful because ‘Paint is not bullets’ - as someone who has been hit with Paintballs from safe range, they will hurt like a bitch and if you don’t wear protective gear they can do enough harm to crack and sometimes even break bone, the asthmatic co-worker I aforementioned that was in Hong Kong also notes that Tear Gas is awful, it may not kill you but it is far from peaceful. In the same breath Trump refuses to condemn a 16 year old carrying an AR and shooting someone in the head. He has also refused to condemn Epstein’s financier Ghislaine Maxwell and ‘hopes that she’s well’...the sex trafficker, but when you mention late Civil Rights leader John Lewis and his words are ‘can’t say one way or the other...he didn’t come to my inauguration’. This is your leader. The embodiment of the standards the country upholds itself to, it baffles me and many many others that the American People Chose a racist, bigoted, misogynistic, careless, self-important, naive, power-mad, severally-bankrupted, reality tv personality man-child, who is also intending to use US Taxpayers money to cover lawsuit fees against him alongside all his other golf trips. The man literally said that no other president has done more for Black People than he has, this is while he profusely condemned Kaepernick taking a knee to protest Police Brutality against Blacks and POC only for years later the world support it as BLM protests still happen because action has not been taken. We’ll also see what happens on the 14th regarding the Felony Hearing of the officers in Buffalo who pushed over Gugino and gave him a brain injury which he is still rehabilitating from after Trump tried to sell him as an Antifa member. Just in case you’re unaware, antifa stands for anti-fascist but Trump will paint that again in ‘Fear of Communism’. If you actually look up this stuff, the web of Trump’s lies unravel, and yet people just forget about. The man is a pro at gaslighting I’ll give him that, I mean leaking e-mails that condemned Clinton right at election time was some cutthroat stuff, but a man who needs to rely on preying on xenophobia, paranoia, fear, racism and invests mainly on smear tactics and dismantling, is not someone who can lead a country to prosperity, the amount of leeway this man gets from his supporters just hurts my head. So let me ask you America, truly, what is it that you want? Because it can’t be this, can it? Protests, Riots, people refusing to wear a simple face mask to limit the spread of a deadly virus because they think it’s a fake thing that the entire world decided to get in on with WHO just to spite Trump? Teenagers carrying guns? Refugees refused asylum and kept in cages? Do you want to keep spending your savings just to go to the doctors? or do you think that ‘Patriotism’ is blindly defending your country’s flaws and clinging to archaic and outdated thinking because centuries ago your country prospered in it? I’ll tell it to you straight: America is not the greatest country in the world, it hasn’t been for a long time. I don’t know what your history books tell you; that Native Americans were fine with slaughter, that the US won WW2 with the military might they always had, that Vietnam was a moral victory, but the present day should tell you that your country is a mess, and the man who has been at the helm for 4 years will not fix it in another 4. There’s only so much of Obama’s policies he can plagiarize as his own; he has left the UN, left the Paris Agreement for cleaner air and energy and all his original campaign members have been arrested, an alarming amount of people associated with him are facing criminal charges - is that not a red flag? Don’t let your thoughts that as a patriot you have to support your country no matter what, true patriotism is not just the love of your country but the hope and strive to better it because you can love it but accept that it has flaws. I mean even I’ll admit that the UK has a lot of its own shit to deal with, doesn’t mean I hate where I live I just know it can be better. If this were anyone else, hell if this were a Democrat the Republican party would be booking them a flight to the other side of the world with the stuff Trump has done and let to continue on with afterwards, through him you went from the United States to an Absolute State and the rest of the world wonder if this will either lead to World War 3 or a Second American Civil War You don’t have to like Joe Biden, but he clearly looks like the lesser of the two evils here, and at least in 4 years time America under him won’t be on fire. If you still don’t like him someone new could be elected after, but right now you are on a downward spiral and need someone who can put you back into a stable place, that man is not Donald Trump. The man who wants to intercept mail-in voting and outcry its ‘risk’ of tampering when he himself voted by mail is not a truthful leader, the man who tried to cancel the World Health Organization when they simply asked to not call COVID a racist name that incited xenophobia after decrying cancel culture is not a moral leader, and the man who said that COVID would peter out and suggested injecting disinfectant into the lungs to combat it only to now suddenly buy out all the experimental treatment so that they can try and engineer a cure in time for the election campaign, is not a wise leader. All the stuff you see in these coming months is just an attempt to win your vote, for the most part it’ll be Trump stamping his name on something other people worked on for years and claiming that he did all the work. So make sure you actually check the truth of these things, research and fact-check yourself with valid, neutral sources. Take off the blinders, take a breath and actually see the full picture. And please, as well as not letting this man have the Nobel Peace Prize Don’t give this guy have a Second Term

When Prejudices Become Partisan: What Also Happened Last November

One year ago today, our nation experienced a shift that we will be doomed to analyze and re-analyze and over-analyze until the end of time. Have you ever been a student in a history class examining particularly bizarre or frightening eras from our collective human past and wonder, “How the hell did they let that happen?” I feel I’m currently living in one of those eras and I understand it even less. I recently watched the documentary 11/8/16, which follows various Americans throughout the country on that fateful day, and I believe Anthony Ray Hinton, a man exonerated after 30 years on Death Row now voting for the first time since, put it best: “I’ve done stuff and woke up the next morning and said, ‘Man, what have I done?’ I don’t know when, I don’t know how long [it’s] gonna be, but the American people are gonna wake up and say, ‘What have we done?’”

Obviously Americans take many different stances on last year’s election, as did the subjects featured in said documentary. But nearly all of us agree that things were said during the course of last year’s election that were disrespectful, misogynistic, racist, and for lack of a better word, stupid. I had long hoped (if not assumed) that the majority of the American people would draw the line at such blatant bigotry. Well, the majority of Americans did draw that line, but still not nearly enough to stop said offender from ascending to the Oval Office. When the polls closed, I remember not so much being shocked at the results, but more heartbroken, as my worst fears about my country had just been confirmed. So how did we get to a place in our nation where bigotry is brushed off, if not all out accepted, by so much of the voting electorate?

I’m not speaking about the radicals and reactionaries who will always be among us. I’m speaking about the majority of the American public, who I’ll assume, for the sake of my sanity, to be morally decent and good. (Donald Trump is not among the majority I’m considering.) So forget the alt-right and the old-school Nazis. To be fair and balanced, I guess we can forget Antifa, if you even remembered them in the first place.

Partisanship is not a new phenomenon in this country. It’s as old as our constitution. For various reasons, our nation divided itself into a two-party nation, and despite two dominant parties rising and falling and shifting in ideology over time, there has always been two on top. Any vote for a third party ultimately only helps one and hinders the other, because surely it will always be one of the dominant two in the end. I have often claimed that this is far from ideal, but that’s the way it’s always been, and it leaves ample room for in-fighting about the platform of each party (yes, I see you, Bernie bros) while plenty of people feel they cannot solidly identify with either.

With that said, I’m still not sure exactly how and when our partisanship got to be this bad. Yet I do know that it’s worse than I’ve seen it in my lifetime. Despite the cries of many who insist it to be so, I maintain that this is not and never will be politics as usual. I also believe one of the reasons we got here is that many Americans have been fooled into thinking this is the case, and Donald Trump is not the only reason for this. I may not know why and how it came to this, and any reporter or analyzer is welcome to take up the study, but I can present examples of its existence and argue why it needs to be stopped before this country really does go off the rails into total self-destruction.

A prime example was given by Republican Tim Miller in a segment brilliantly pinned “The Cuck Zone” in a summer episode of Lovett or Leave It (one of the many brilliant podcasts from Crooked Media). He referenced back to the 2012 debates between President Obama and Mitt Romney, where the latter made reference to his “binders full of women.” Miller reminded us that in response to this off-hand remark, many liberals pounced on Romney and labelled him a sexist, despite the fact that he’s been married to a woman with whom he shared his first kiss at age 16 for nearly 50 years, and he actually wanted to hire these women. Looking back at the time, I very well may have gotten swept up in the rhetoric in the heat of the impending election and been more critical than necessary of Romney in that regard, but I don’t think I believed him to be genuinely sexist. He’s certainly not the most progressive candidate for women’s rights, but I think at the time the comment and the subsequent jokes it produced was more entertaining to me than disconcerting. (See below for an example.)

Yet come four years later, when the Republicans have on their ticket a man who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy, stood accused of sexual assault a dozen times over, claimed that hiring women costs his businesses too much money, and practically confirmed that he would bang his own daughter if she were not, you know, his daughter - then what good was our outrage if we had already overused and misplaced it in previous elections? We are so bitterly divided in this country along political lines that we the people failed to recognize an actual danger to our democracy. We’ve been crying political wolf for so long, that when an actual misogynistic prick is running for the highest office in the nation, those who identify with his “side” do not take the legitimate gripes of the opposition seriously. At this point, it’s just another partisan divide. Not a threat to our democracy, not a threat to many of our citizens, but just Democrats vs. Republicans as usual.

When Trump was finally chosen as the candidate the Republican party would have to run for president, I did find it a bit of glee in it. Not only was this a time when I naively believed the majority of Americans would see through his bullshit, but it seemed to be poetic justice for the Republican establishment of the past eight years. So much of their party’s platform had become all about blindly hating Obama and everything he did or tried to do, with and (more often) without their willingness to work with him. It was also not lost on me that many of this vitriolic hate came from a place of pure bigotry. There were plenty of people in this country and in our Congress that resented the fact that a black man with Muslim relations was in the White House. Never mind that he was one of the most decent and intelligent human beings to take up the job in my lifetime, never mind basic political differences of opinion; too many of the people that opposed him were ruled by prejudice.

For all that they had done and refused to do, I thought Trump was the candidate they deserved. For their party’s anti-LBGTQ, anti-women, and anti-immigrant agenda, a bigot at the head of the ranks made sense. Now, I am not saying that all Republicans are inherently bigots, yet I do believe the Republican Party of the past decade is less in line with traditional conservatism and more in step with white male prosperity. Nevertheless, the Republican establishment stood ready to reject Trump. How could they be so shocked when the majority of their constituents drank the poison they’d been feeding them for years?

So life-long Republicans who did reject Trump were forced to make a choice; vote for the bigoted bully your party was now all but required to endorse, or vote for Hillary Clinton. Yes, Hillary Clinton. The lightening rod for conservative hate, despite her largely centrist views that has also made her a lightening rod of hate for the far-left. I’m sure most of my fellow millennials saw this GIF going around on their Facebook:

My first reaction was “Dude, you spelled Hillary’s name wrong.” My second reaction was “Heh, that’s funny, I guess.” But my third and most passionate reaction was, “Wait, are you fucking kidding me?” How is Hillary Clinton on the same level as Donald Trump?! How can you not make that distinction?

“But what about her emails?” “What about Whitewater?” “What about her speech at Goldman Sachs?” At the time, I believed this to be complete and utter partisan bullshit. While I recognize the legitimacy of some these gripes back then as I do now, one year of a Donald Trump presidency has proven my initial instincts to be correct. Watching the Trump administration not only have scandals of the exact same nature (and worse) as anything Hillary was accused of during the election and watching the Republican establishment look the other way has validated my initial inclination. Yet what would the Democratic Party do if Hillary had insisted on a Muslim ban? I’d like to think we’d rebuke her, and I know Republicans would tear her apart just because they’d have the opportunity. But would we still endorse her? Would I still vote for her?

I had a couple friends in France that weren’t so thrilled with their final two choices in their most recent election. Because France has a run-off system, their final two choices came down to, as one acquaintance put it, “An inexperienced businessman and a racist.” Yet to me, that choice was obvious! Do not vote for the racist! Thank God 75% of the country took my advice. Perhaps they learned from our mistakes. Americans should have learned from Brexit if the majority of us paid any attention to international news.

What it came down to was that the majority of Trump voters either brushed aside or excused their candidates racism when they cast their ballot. There are plenty of bonafide racists in his constituency, and perhaps even more that aren’t even aware of how inherent racism and misogyny are in our system that they do not recognize it in themselves, but I don’t believe the majority to have had malicious intent. Yet at the very least, they ignored this maliciousness in favor of his policies which supposedly were more in line with their political beliefs.

But does it matter where your candidate stands on the economy if he’s actively mounting a racist campaign? Shouldn’t we, the American people, know where to draw the line between politics as usual and flat-out prejudice?

Unfortunately last year, the answer was no. But we need to learn.

Prejudice on partisan lines is not exactly new in this country, either. We literally fought a war amongst ourselves because one half of us refused to acknowledge the practice of maintaining other human beings was immoral. To this day people still try to make excuses for that, right up to the president’s Chief of Staff! They claim the Civil War was about more than slavery, but rather states’ rights (ahem, their rights to own slaves), economic opportunities (i.e. refusing to give up their slaves), and Southern oppression (because they were being forced to give up their slaves... you see where I’m going with this). Never mind that these statues of Confederate generals were erected decades later as yet another reminder to African-Americans that their lives matter less. And when there is finally some push-back against these symbols of oppression, we end up with Nazis marching in the street. Nazis which the president refused to condemn because he knows they are his constituents! This cannot and should not be acceptable. Even if you voted for Trump on an economic basis, good and decent cannot stand idly by and be complicit in this hatred.

I’m sure there are many who voted for Trump who are now having second thoughts. Probably many of them won’t be willing to admit it, but I’m sure they exist. I’m also sure many of them continue to be in denial, lying to themselves and coating these lies with their daily dose of Fox & Friends. People don’t want to admit they made a mistake. Our nation has made many of them and yet we still make excuses for ourselves rather than acknowledging them. Certainly we on the left are not and will not be so forgiving. I myself find it extremely hard to forgive anyone who voted for Trump, even though several of my loved ones are among them. They must have known what they were voting for, right? Yet so many people have become so tribal that it’s blinded their ability to think critically about their choices. This isn’t a new phenomenon either. Countless studies have shown that human beings will pick their tribe before they pick their beliefs, and then their beliefs will subsequently fall in line with the pack. We as Americans, let alone as people, have come a long way in shedding our more primitive, tribal roots. Yet we have a long way to go.

We on the left can be kinder to each other as well. The truth is that there is often great tribalism among minorities against other minorities. Far more often than necessary, we are compelled to attack ignorance where an attack is not merited. Not everyone is coming from a place of maliciousness. More often than not, people just don’t know. We have to open to hearing other people speak their truths, even if the opinions they’ve derived from their experiences clash with our own. This is the only way we can truly learn from each other and grow. Yet if those who are more “privileged” than us feel alienated from the conversation, they will feel alienated from the movement and more and more reluctant to stand with us as allies.

Maybe with the shock of the election and the disaster of a first year for Trump’s presidency, the winds are starting to shift. Yesterday’s election garnered much more hopeful results. While there is little hope to be placed on Republican leaders Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, there are still those in the party (though they won’t be there for long) willing to speak out. I don’t expect Sen. Jeff Flake or Sen. Bob Corker to start aligning themselves with Democrats on votes. They’re still Republicans and they have a different set of beliefs. Yet bigotry should never be a mainstay in any political party’s platform. It should be called out by all decent Americans, no matter where it comes from. Prejudice should not be a partisan issue. Let’s recognize that in our own personal politics and start voting only for the people who already do.