As someone who trends progressive I am nonetheless discouraged at the complete painting of all Trump supporters with the white supremacist brush. I’m friends with several Trump supporters who are not racist, just as most Hillary supporters I know do NOT (I assume) support amnesty for financial industry criminals and drone bombing wedding parties. People supported Trump for a lot of reasons; lots of disgusted Bernie supporters voted for Trump, for instance. Norm Macdonald said it best: “A lot of Americans hated Hillary so much they voted for someone they hated even more, just to rub it in.”
Same with James Damore, the kid who wrote that Google memo. Did the people smearing him in this comment thread even read it? I did, and I found it quite Integral and trying to open a dialogue (whether the science it it was valid or not). To see him smeared by an increasingly intolerant Left as an MRA, or a white supremacist, his memo an “anti-diversity screed,” was quite a lesson to me in how astonishingly reactionary the Left has become. The clash between how he was portrayed and what he actually said, both in the memo and in interviews, forever cured me of my assumption that the Left was more tolerant than the Right.
Intolerance of dissenting ideas is quite rampant on both sides.
“You cannot defeat your enemies with hate. Only love can do that.” MLK’s advice would be a good place to start. If you want to help Trump supporters see the devil’s bargain they’ve made in supporting him, it might help to reach out with compassion and love, not contempt and hatred. And to acknowledge there were valid reasons to oppose Hillary other than misogyny and fake news from Russian bots.
