Thread by @frodofied

1/ One year ago from this moment it was becoming clear that the world was about to unravel, that reality had somehow shifted.

People have joked since that it felt as though we had been pushed into another reality's timeline.

I sympathize with such thoughts.

#BlackTuesday

2/ Because it's felt like opposite day everyday since.

It becomes even more stark when you actually say any of it out loud.

It's not even just that it feels wrong, but it looks and sounds wrong too.

All of it.

3/ What I remember most is a feeling of stupidity that was overwhelming.

All Tuesday there were news reports of long lines of people, mostly white, who were waiting hours to vote.

It was not within the realms of my imagination to assume that they would wait to vote for him.

4/ The lines gave me hope. The long lines of white people brought me to tears. I was proud of our country that day.

Except there was nothing to be proud of, not even close.

Though we now know Russia tilted this election it does not erase white guilt in 2016 and never will.

5/ In the end the numbers are stark & what they say about non-urban white America is unsettling.

Locating a white woman living in a state like Missouri who voted for Clinton would be a challenge in some counties, but finding a white male who did?

Good luck.

6/ As the distance between the two points of then and now grows I find my disappointment has turned into a very real anger. And a whole lot of shame. It makes me shiver in my own white skin.

7/ But I'm not just angry at the whites who voted for him I am just as angry at their political and media apologists who seem intent to erase what actually happened in 2015 and 2016.

Their attempts to re-write history even as it happens is dangerous and mortifying.

8/ It should shock no one that the proponents of these attempts to reshift the narrative are white men. And, shocker, most of them have something to lose if the truth becomes accepted history.

Bernie Sanders & Jon Stewart we're the first white defenders to publicly emerge.

9/ For Sanders the reasons behind his surprising defense of white Trump voters proves, on inspection, to be more about political expediency than ideology.

His entire campaign (and career), had been based upon the idea of economic disparity being the overriding concern of voters.

10/ If, as 2016 clearly proved, race and gender we're capable of overriding such concerns, then this fact would weaken his arguments immeasurably. It could also weaken any future attempts at a run for the Presidency and call into question the arguments of his desciples.

11/ Worse for Sanders, it would mean that most of his arguments against, & criticisms of, Hillary Clinton, & even many regarding the Democratic Party we're categorically false.

Which they were. Bernie Sanders got a lot wrong in 2015 & 2016, a fact that no one is taking about.

12/ Sanders brand has/had a lot riding on the American public believing two things:

1. Donald Trump won fairly.

2. He won because of an uprising of voters tired of the economic disparity eating up their communities, who felt alienated by Democrats and distrustful of Clinton.

13/ This became even more necessary when it became clear that Hillary Clinton had won almost three million more popular votes than her opponent and the supposed winner of the 2016 Presidential election.

Throughout the Primary, Sanders had argued Clinton was a weak candidate.

14/ In fact, this became a central theme of his campaign against her.
She was corrupt. She was weak. She made bad decisions. At one point he went so far as to claim that she was not qualified to be President.

It surprised no one when Donald Trump borrowed Sanders' tactics.

15/ Only days after the election he would also complain that Clinton's focus on identity politics (racial, gender issues, etc) had alienated working class white voters whose concerns, he claimed, Clinton had ignored. This he said, caused him great shame.

16/ How or why he would feel ashamed by anything the Democratic Party did, given he had never been one, not even while running to lead it, remains an unanswered question.

17/ Arguing that a candidate who received more votes than any other in American history, save one, is a weak candidate seems like it would be an uphill battle. Add that she got three million more votes than her opponent who "won" and it becomes a truly laughable assertion.

18/ The only avenue that Sanders & his supporters could travel was to claim that white Trump voters voted with their wallets and hearts. That they felt abandoned by the system & by our government.

But this is literally fake news, & this tactic straight out of Trump's playbook.

19/ Facts are tricky things, however, and the data shows that none of Sanders arguments are sustainable.

In fact, the data shows that voters in the lowest income brackets supported Clinton and the Democrats.

20/ His imagined disillusion with the Democratic Party and the Democratic dissatisfaction with Clinton as a candidate fail at many of these basic data tests.

21/ Further, Clinton's suggestion that there existed something she called a "Basket of Deplorables"at the core of Trump's support as well as her critique of Trump's approach to race are, in fact, backed up by the data.

22/ From Harvard to the University of Minnesota, researchers have found that voters who supported Trump did so out of concern for racial matters. In other words, they are racists. A full 12% admitted--to an actual pollster--that they sympathized or agreed with neo-Nazis.

23/ For Sanders' arguments to even be true would assume the following things:

1. Donald Trump had a finely tuned set of economic plans that he talked about regularly and we're widely discussed by him and his surrogates across a wide spectrum of media outlets.

24/ 2. That his plans were comparably better than his opponents and offered more to protect his supporters and their communities.

3. That the core of Trump's supporters are economically challenged or on the brink of being so.

25/ But none of these are true. Trump had few actual plans at all and those that he talked about regularly insofar as they could be considered economic in nature, were far more blatantly racist in nature.

From building a wall at the US/Mexican border to a Muslim travel ban to

26/ his promise of deportation for all undocumented person's caught residing in the US.

I watched hundreds of Trump speeches and the exploitation of racial tensions was always the central goal, if not theme, w/o exception.