A lot has happened since the results of the US election were announced. I'm trying to think of where to start.
You know what, let's start with the protests. We've seen protests every single night, across the United States, since the results came in.
There have been hundreds of arrests. Some of these broke off into riots.
There's been a lot of people saying ‘They should do it.’ ‘They shouldn't do it.’ ‘It's professional protesters.’ ‘No, it's not.’ And personally, I think you can argue it's a mixed bag although to say that they are all professional protesters—that's a bit silly.
I know plenty of people—even if they were friends of friends of friends—that protested over the weekend. In general, my response to the protests is if you're one of these people, you're peaceful, you're preaching your First Amendment rights, I'm completely fine with that and I think people should have that freedom.
And I think that it's important to remember, if you're someone that's on the right right now that's going ‘Oh, this is what happens when you hand out participation trophies and they're just animals destroying their communities!’ To me, that is as close-minded as certain people on the left going ‘Everyone who supports Trump is a racist and a sexist!’ And I also think it's important here to recognize that there are a ton of peaceful protesters. There's video of them like thanking the cops, working with them.
And there are also assholes destroying stuff. If you're using the destructive rioters as an example of everyone that is angry, once again you're doing the same disservice some people on the left did when they said ‘Everyone that supports Trump is a racist, sexist asshole!’ There are people that fit that description on both sides, but when you label the entire group as that there's no conversation, there's no moving forward together.
It is very important we all look at ourselves and see if at any given point in our lives, if we are representing the things that we supposedly hate. It's the different version.
Now if you're part of the group that then decided to destroy property, you decided to start throwing road flares and bottles at police, go fuck yourself! You are part of the problem! I don't know how you can argue that Donald Trump and all these people they are are against you, they don't care about your communities or whether they thrive or not and then you destroy them.
Also, to the guy that was holding up the sign that said RAPE MELANIA and any protester that was like ‘Yeah, I'm fine with that.’, congratulations on hurting your cause.
So, when it comes to the protests and protesters, what do they want? It's a big group. There are several different things:
•Some are just stating that they are against him. They did not vote for him. They do not support him. They are going to fight him on things that they don't agree with when he makes those moves in the future.
•Some want him to denounce divisive things he said over the course of the election.
I want to reiterate that the fuel to the fire is that the popular vote is different than the electoral college.
And there are two things here that members on both sides are doing that I'm not a fan of: Millions of people at the time of me typing this article—4.3 million people—have signed a petition on change.org asking members of the electoral college to please not put in their votes for Donald Trump, but vote for Hillary Clinton.
Their argument is that the majority of the people that voted actually voted for Hillary Clinton—even though the electors in the electoral college are the ones who vote the next president in.
And to the best of my knowledge, there are many states (in the US) that don't require the electors in the electoral college to vote the way the people voted. So, to the people that signed this petition, I understand your frustration. To the people angry about the electoral college, I utterly understand your frustration. But, in my opinion, it has to be a change that we do moving forward.
You can't get a result you're not a fan of and assume that the system's broken so you can try to strip away the win from the person that won in that system with those rules. The country will implode!
And I also believe that there's an argument here that if the system had been built differently, we would've seen a much different Donald Trump during the election. And what I mean by that is in the current system of the United States, Donald Trump knew that he was going to lose New York. It wasn't going to be some sort of like ‘The Trump guy's got 40%, Hillary got 60%, we get some of the votes.’ In the current system, he just loses all of them. He pounded places like Wisconsin and Michigan with rally after rally after rally, while Hillary Clinton not really so much.
I think it's a reasonable argument that if the electoral college was different, in that the percentage of the votes that split up the electoral votes wasn't all win on all loss in all 50 states. Or it was just based on popular votes? Maybe Trump doesn't go to Wisconsin and Michigan and he goes to California—those conservative areas there—and tries to get a bigger piece of that 55 electoral vote pie. I mean, I personally believe that the way the electoral votes are counted should change nationwide.
It's a bit ridiculous that the Trump voters in California are not represented in the nationwide vote. It's ridiculous that the liberals in places like Texas are not represented in the nationwide vote. That's my frustration with a lot of liberal people I know. My frustration with a lot of conservative people is that they claim Trump won the popular vote.
You might have seen people on Twitter and Facebook or whatever posting that Donald Trump actually won by seven hundred thousand votes. That's actually a lie and fantastically representative of how many lies are spread as truth these days.
Those freaking fallacious numbers come from a post called FINAL ELECTION 2016 NUMBERS and it's a fake story from somebody's WordPress.
You won the electoral college, the current system now is in place, you have no need to lie. As I type this, Hillary Clinton's popular vote lead is actually up seven hundred thousand votes.
And here's the thing, liberal frustration is going to increase because over the weekend they said that they believe that there are seven million votes that still need to be counted! Best believe, four million of them are going to come from California—which is obviously going to lean towards Clinton—so we're talking about a difference that could be in the millions.
Also, really quick, while we're still talking about the voting part, I want to take a moment to address Colin Kaepernick.
Kaepernick of course, this (NFL) season has been protesting the US national anthem. He said he wasn't a big fan of this election. And yet in the presidential debates, it felt like you had two people that were evil trying to argue that one was less racist than the other.
Well, after the election, it came out that Colin Kaepernick did not vote. He told reporters:
Firstly, it sounds like Colin Kaepernick has a word-of-the-day calendar and the word today was
oppression.
And secondly, in my opinion, that is painfully ignorant.
I think it's very important to vote. Last I checked, Kaepernick lived in California. I don't know if he's registered to vote. But, as we talked about before the election, there was a lot more to vote on than just the president of the United States.
I know that Kaepernick's been taking knees and sitting out on the US national anthem, winning and now voting, but this is stupid. Sitting out the national anthem, not participating, is a choice. Not voting, is a vote in itself.
On top of voting for Hillary Clinton, California decided to keep the death penalty and also speed up the process. You didn't vote on that. You said ‘The whole system's broken!’ and then you didn't vote, but it's not on you 'cause you're just one vote—except that you weren't alone because the number of people who were eligible to vote and didn't vote was in the forties! That percentage will always baffle me.
So, final note on Kaepernick: I do believe that it is your right to stand out of the national anthem, I do believe that it is even your right to not vote, but that last one, I am also free to call you a big fucking idiot. On that note, you are part of and an example of the big problem we have in the United States.
And then let's jump to the sixty minutes interview with Donald Trump.
Here's a
link to the full video. I know it's called sixty minutes, but without commercials it's actually just under forty. So, you can watch the full thing, but here are a few highlights I want to point out:
•Whether or not he's going to pursue the Hillary Clinton email scandal, he said not right now.
•He talked about Supreme Court appointments and that the people that he will pick will be pro-life and pro-gun.
•And when asked if Roe v. Wade was overturned, what would happen, he said women would have to go to another state maybe. That abortion rights should be after the states.
•On what to do with Obamacare, he said he wants to keep the preexisting condition clause and the ability for people to stay on their parent's coverage for longer.
•On the topic of what he's actually going to do with illegal immigrants, he said that yes, he will be deporting two maybe even three million illegal immigrants. Saying:
•On the topic of the wall, he said, yes, we are going to build the wall and that he is open to certain areas just being fenced.
•In regards to the protesters, he still said he believe some of them to be professionals, but also adding “Don't be afraid.”
•In response to reports that some of his supporters have been using racial and ethnic slurs specifically against Muslims, African-Americans, Latinos, he said this: “I am so saddened to hear that and I say stop it…if it…if it helps. I will say this…and I'll say it right to the camera: STOP IT.”
•And finally, in regards to what he says on social media, he says he's going to be more restrained.
In all candor, I am now hopeful that he is actually going to be a good president. I am open, but at the very least, I can say I don't know if I believe him on this one. The interview was filmed Friday and aired on Sunday, but in just less than forty eight hours from the interview, (he) got into a feud with the New York Times. Trump tweeted:
That—if you look at the numbers—is not true. The decline that the New York Times and other outlets have felt is in print copies. But that's been more than offset by new digital-only subscriptions. In fact, since Trump started his campaign, digital subscriptions have gone up thirty five percent. And there have been reports that since Trump was elected president, those numbers have continued to increase at a better rate.
Then Trump tweeted:
I actually took the time to look through the letter he's talking about and I don't see what he's talking about. I think the distortion/confusion seems to be about this part of the sentence:
So, some took that sentence and they understood it as ‘Well, we've been biased, so now we wanna go back to being a good newspaper.’
They even say in the letter:
Kinda like saying ‘So, we were fair before, the election happened, we are rededicating ourselves now for the next four years.’
Then Trump tweeted:
So, on that one, if you look around, you can find some reports that are secondhand, but I believe most look to Trump having an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper where he said this: “Can I be honest with you? Maybe it's gonna hafta be time to change (the US policy)…we're better off if Japan protects itself against this maniac in North Korea…”
He also added that the United States would be better off as well if South Korea and Saudi Arabia should start protecting themselves too to which Cooper retorted: “You'd be fine with them having nuclear weapons?” Trump replied: “No, not nuclear weapons, but they have to protect themselves, or they have to pay off. Here's the thing, with Japan, they have to pay us, or we have to let them protect themselves.”
Trump also asserted that the aforementioned countries having nuclear weapons was an inevitable outcome, saying, “It's gonna happen anyway (2×). It's only a question of time. They're going to start having 'em, or we have to get rid of 'em entirely.”
And that's where a lot of people are butting heads because it sounded like ‘Hey, I think maybe the policy should change here.’ There's also a grey area as to when he hinted at doing away with all of the nukes.
And actually that's where I'm going to end this article and of course I'd love to know your thoughts on everything we talked about here today. Are you happy? Are you hopeful? Are you scared? What do you think about the specific things that have happened? I'd love to know your opinion and why.
There's a lot more to talk about with who's going to be in his administration, the key points, there's a lot happening, but there is no shortage of time to talk about it right now.
And remember, if you like this article, you like what I try and do with this blog, drop a comment in the comments section down below and don't forget to hit that share button.
