Here in Alabama, I’ve seen Trumpism firsthand. Three people I know were at the Madison rally yesterday for Trump. They sent me some snapchats of the event. they are all white kids under 25 voting for Trump (self-described conservatives). None of them like Obama.
But it’s what I’ve seen online, especially since Trayvon Martin, that has prepared me for the hellish political reality of Trump now. Since I am at work, this will be a bit of a drive-by diary, explored in detail at a later date.
Backstory, in brief: I took a break from dkos in 2009/10 for various reasons, and moved to reddit. Had multiple frontpage posts there, was active in r/politics, etc. Like all other sites, it became plagued by issues in proportion to increase of its popularity. Racism, sexism, trolling, spam, etc. But the amount of doxxing, vote manipulation, and organized brigading that took place during the Trayvon ordeal caught my attention. The renowned “liberalness” of reddit started fading. Normally downvoted comments about race started rising upwards in comment threads. Racist comments weren’t getting dozens of votes—they began getting hundreds. The debate tilted towards character assassination of Trayvon, while ironically ignoring Zimmerman’s checkered past. IT was illogical. The hivemind of Reddit seems, now, to have moved against Zimmerman, But only after he did a spate of other idiotic actions, and only after he posted a ton of racist things online.
And that’s the catch. that is the point of this diary. THE CHANGE. how ‘normal, liberal’ people online — as a large community, much larger than dkos and much younger- can be observed in its illogical shift against trayvon and back. But the Zimmerman support, which has not totally died down despite the eventual banning of white supremacist subreddits by Reddit, showed me something. It showed me how even a large ‘liberal’ or ‘moderate’ group can unite as a mob behind the wrong position, a racist position. I posted a clip from dave chappelle at that time, and wrote a post about how small-town America was breaking fast and that racial tensions would keep rising. I got brigaded by Zimmerman trolls, but also dismissed by suburban white liberals.
After the fact that so many Redditors casually and belatedly realized that Zimmerman was a true danger, they flip flopped somewhat away from him. We will see some of the same with Trump if he is elected— supporters falling off the bandwagon, themselves even unable to explain why they were under the Trumpism thrall. Some will deny even having been on the bandwagon much at all, and even begin believing their own lies.
americans waking up this year to the reality of trump's america are now what us internet-purveyors have seen for past 5 years. Ugly world out there, and racism in America has been on a big upswing as inequality worsened from 2008 through now.
Zimmerman supporters are Trump supporters. We were all surprised online to see how many Zimmerman supporters there were in ‘mainstream’ communities. Now those same people are Trumpies. In both cases, we are not surprised by the sentiment, but by the number of people sharing it. But this day has been coming for some time.