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  1. #1
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Trump Reflects White Male Fragility

    Trump Reflects White Male Fragility

    Charles M. Blow AUG. 4, 2016

    Reports of Donald Trump’s demise are an exaggeration, to paraphrase and repurpose Mark Twain.

    Yes, he can’t stop shooting off his mouth and shooting himself in the foot, and there are reports that his messy campaign is nearing the point of mutiny.

    Yes, he knows nearly nothing about world affairs and that becomes ever more apparent every time he stumbles through an interview. Sir, Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014, the same year you filmed your last installment of your reality game show “The Celebrity Apprentice.”

    Yes, his continued feud with the family of a fallen Muslim soldier may be the most ill advised and foolhardy folly in recent political memory (Trump keeps racking these up.) This is the same man who received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War, one for “bone spurs in his heels” according to The New York Times. While throngs of his contemporaries were fighting — and dying – in battle, Trump was being featured on the front page of The Times after he and his father were sued by the Department of Justice for anti-black bias in their rental properties.

    Three years later, The Times profiled him with a backhanded compliment of the nouveau riche: “He rides around town in a chauffeured silver Cadillac with his initials, DJT, on the plates. He dates slinky fashion models, belongs to the most elegant clubs and, at only 30 years of age, estimates that he is worth ‘more than $200 million.’”

    Yes, he doesn’t seem to know the difference between Tim Kaine, the Democratic Virginia senator whom Hillary Clinton tapped as her running mate, and Tom Kean, the Republican former governor of New Jersey who last held that office 26 years ago, the same year Trump boasted in his book “Surviving at the Top,” “I’ve never had any trouble in bed,” and counseled in Vanity Fair, “When a man leaves a woman, especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of ass — a good one! — there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left.”

    Yes, yes, yes.

    But Donald Trump is bigger than all of this, or shall I say, smaller.

    He appeals to something deeper, something baser: Fear. His whole campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is in fact an inverted admission of loss — lost primacy, lost privilege, lost prestige.

    And who feels that they have lost the most? White men.

    As the New York Times’ Upshot pointed out in July, “According to our estimates, Mrs. Clinton is doing better among basically every group of voters except for white men without a degree.” Put another way: “Hillary Clinton is largely performing as well or better than Barack Obama did in 2012, except among white men without a degree.”

    Indeed, a Monday report in The Times put it this way: “A New York Times/CBS News poll two weeks ago found that white men preferred her Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, to Mrs. Clinton almost two to one, 55 percent to 29 percent.”
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    These are the voters keeping Trump’s candidacy alive.

    He appeals to a regressive, patriarchal American whiteness in which white men prospered, in part because racial and ethnic minorities, to say nothing of women as a whole, were undervalued and underpaid, if not excluded altogether.

    White men reigned supreme in the idealized history, and all was good with the world. (It is curious that Trump never specifies a period when America was great in his view. Did it overlap with the women’s rights, civil rights or gay rights movements? For whom was it great?)

    Trump’s wall is not practical, but it is metaphor. Trump’s Muslim ban is not feasible, but it is metaphor. Trump’s huge deportation plan isn’t workable, but it is metaphor.

    There is a portion of the population that feels threatened by unrelenting change — immigration, globalization, terrorism, multiculturalism — and those people want someone to, metaphorically at least, build a wall around their cultural heritage, which they conflate in equal measure with American heritage.

    In their minds, whether explicitly or implicitly, America is white, Christian, straight and male-dominated. If you support Trump, you are on some level supporting his bigotry and racism. You don’t get to have a puppy and not pick up the poop.

    And acceptance of racism is an act of racism. You are convicted by your complicity.

    I am not accustomed to dancing around an issue; I prefer to call it what it is. I prefer to shine a bright light on it until it withers. Supporting Trump is indefensible and it makes you as much of a pariah as he is.

    As Toni Morrison once told Charlie Rose:

    “Don’t you understand that the people who do this thing, who practice racism, are bereft? There is something distorted about the psyche. It’s a huge waste, and it’s a corruption, and a distortion. Its like it’s a profound neurosis that nobody examines for what it is.”

    That stops here, today. For as long as racism and tribalism and xenophobia exist in this country, Trump’s foibles will not signal his ultimate failure. But let’s not let off the people who prop him up, claiming that they’re simply being party loyalists, or Hillary haters or having Supreme Court concerns.

    Trump is a mirror. He is a reflection of — indeed a revealing of — the ugliness that you harbor, only it is possible that you may have gone your life expressing it in ways that were more coded and politic. Trump is an unfiltered primal scream of the fragility and fear consuming white male America.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/op...lity.html?_r=0
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  2. #2
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Mr. Blow, you are a very smart individual, so why would you write such a stupid article? Is it because you're a Democrat and support Hillary Clinton but having nothing good to say about her so you want to attack Trump Supporters? I am a white woman, with a college degree, and I support Donald J Trump. I support him because of his policies to build a wall, deport illegal aliens, fix our bad trade deals, improve our infrastructure, lower income taxes, save Social Security, stay out of foreign wars, enforce the NATO treaty, make friends with Russia, and make our country great again.

    My support for Donald Trump has nothing to do with being white or a woman. It has only to do with being an American who for decades has watched our economy deplete as our industries leave for one free trade treason country after another, watched our schools, hospitals and work sites filling up with illegal aliens while Americans usually black Americans stand in unemployment lines and taxpayers see rising property taxes, higher sales taxes, and higher insurance premiums to pay for it, not to mention the soaring national debt underwriting the federal government's share of the cost of this disaster.

    Hillary Clinton can't fix our country. She can't put Americans back to work. She can't make peace in the world. She can't solve the debt problem. She can't secure our borders or keep our country safe. Clinton is as responsible as anyone in politics today for every problem we have. She has no knowledge that enables her and no experience that she can pull from to solve any of these problems. Her solutions: spend more government money and raise taxes. That doesn't work, that doesn't solve the border, trade, spending, security or debt problems.

    For example. She was in a little neck-tie factory in Denver, Knotty Tie Company, the other day making an ad and promoting that neck-ties are made in America and Donald Trump could have his neck-tie line made in America, therefore. Free-trade has plagued our country for decades. Knotty-Tie Company, the company Hillary visited in Denver, Colorado didn't even go into business until 2013, decades after the garment and textile industry left the United States. This year, the company grosses $1 million in sales. They make handmade custom ties and scarves, not production line scale. There is no way this company could handle the volume required by a major clothing item line. But Hillary doesn't have any manufacturing or business experience, so of course, she doesn't know anything about the garment and textile industry or any industry or business for that matter, so she didn't know that. So in her attempt to depict Donald Trump as a hypocrite, she exposed herself as a stupid person unqualified to solve our nation's economic problems.

    Furthermore, half of this company's employees are resettled refugees. It's why the company was formed in fact, with the social mission to hire resettled refugees from Iraq, the Congo, Ethiopia and Eritrea (?). Companies that are formed with a social mission to hire refugees are not helping American Workers. Thus, her knowledge of employment issues in the United States is so dim that she doesn't even understand that.

    To solve the economic problems of our country requires a reversal of the laws, treaties and policies that created this disaster to begin with, not phony staging of the issue at a little factory in Denver that hires refugees, to try to make your opponent look like a hypocrite when what you're suggesting is proven ludicrous in less than 3 minutes of a Google Search.

    Furthermore, black unemployment in the United States is at some of the highest levels we've seen in 50 years, so why would you be promoting business for a company that hires black refugees from the Congo, Ethiopia and other countries while black Americans stagnate in unemployment lines?! Hillary Clinton doesn't even understand the civil rights crisis in this country, which is not caused by fragile white men, it's caused entirely by the anti-American racist trade and immigration policies that cause unemployment and depressed wages among Latino and Black Americans first and foremost. These are the policies Donald Trump wants to change to eliminate this outrageous discrimination.

    You're a smart man, Mr. Blow. It would be nice if some day you wrote an article that reflected that.

    Maybe, next time you will.

    Knotty Tie

    Custom neckwear manufacturer Knotty Tie touts ethical production standards, with eco-friendly printing and the use of certified organic cotton fabrics. The company, founded in 2013, topped $1 million in sales last year. Looking ahead, the accessory company plans to expand into a newer, larger Denver headquarters and develop new apparel and accessory categories. Half of Knotty Tie’s team of employees is made up of resettled refugees from countries such as Iraq, Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia and Eritrea. / www.knottytie.com
    http://www.cobizmag.com/Companies/Ma...and-finalists/

    Knotty Tie Company

    Makers on a Mission

    built to create meaningful employment opportunities for resettled refugees
    https://www.knottytie.com/
    Last edited by Judy; 08-04-2016 at 01:28 PM.
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  3. #3
    Super Moderator Newmexican's Avatar
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    The NYT is really digging deep to come up with absolute trash to print about Trump. Did the NYT pick these "journalists" up in the Home Depot parking lot?

  4. #4
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Actually, Charles Blow is a full-time Op-Ed type Column writer for the New York Times. Go figure.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_M._Blow

    Charles M. Blow

    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    Charles M. Blow
    Born Charles McRay Blow
    August 11, 1970 (age 45)
    United States
    Occupation Journalist, columnist, writer

    Charles McRay Blow (born August 11, 1970) is an American journalist, and the current visual op-ed columnist for The New York Times.

    Contents

    1 Life and career
    2 Controversies
    3 References
    4 External links

    Life and career

    Blow grew up in Gibsland, Louisiana.[1] He graduated magna cum laude from Grambling State University, with a bachelor's degree in mass communication. He has worked as a graphics director and art director for the Times and National Geographic.

    In April 2008, he began publishing a column in the Times, featuring charts as a form of opinion journalism. His column originally appeared biweekly on Saturdays. In May 2009 it became a weekly feature, and twice weekly in December 2012. As of May 2014, it appears every Monday and Thursday. Increasingly it is an essay in text with no chart. Blow also wrote a blog entitled "By The Numbers" for the newspaper's website which was rarely updated and essentially discontinued in 2011.[2]

    Blow is a single father of three children. His eldest son attends Yale University[3] and his twins attend Middlebury College and Columbia University. They live in Brooklyn, NY.[4] In 2014, Blow came out publicly as bisexual.[5][6]

    He often appears on CNN and MSNBC.

    Controversies

    On February 22, 2012, in commenting on presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Blow apparently intended to insult Romney by using an anti-Mormon religious slur, "Let me just tell you this Mitt "Muddle Mouth": I'm a single parent and my kids are *amazing*! Stick that in your magic underwear."[7][8] Blow's use of the term "magic underwear" is an apparent reference to the Temple Garment, and Blow's specific usage of the term "magic underwear" is a known term of derision used against members of the Mormon faith. Two days after using this religious slur, Blow said that his comment was "inappropriate," and he expressed "regret," but he did not apologize to Romney or other persons of the Mormon faith.[9]
    _____________________________

    One can only wonder how writing stupid articles like this could render a big enough paycheck to put 3 kids through private universities like Yale and Columbia at the same time. That's got to be a pretty big "word fee" if you get my drift.
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  5. #5
    Super Moderator Newmexican's Avatar
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    Not impressed. He writes like every other run of the mill propagandist.

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    The beginning of the article offers some validity about Trump and how he has handled his campaign and understanding of issues. Where I vehemently disagree with the author is with the following statements that unfairly and without fact categorize and summarize Trump supporters the following way:

    If you support Trump, you are on some level supporting his bigotry and racism.

    And acceptance of racism is an act of racism. You are convicted by your complicity.

    Supporting Trump is indefensible and it makes you as much of a pariah as he is.


    While the author paints Trump supporters with the same color and same brush, he fails to account for the majority of supporters that are sick and tired of the establishment and the candidates that it offers to represent them. Trump supporters have been failed in this article to be represented in a way that shows they have been disenfranchised by the political system and asked to bear an unfair load of the detriments of unfair free trade and globalism that was sold to them as something good for them and their futures while proving to be disastrous and detrimental to their jobs.

    The author and many have diverse and negative opinions of Trump the candidate, but again fails to give credit to a group of people who understand their elected leaders have been bought and paid for. The laws and direction of the country that they support put these supporters beneath the agendas of the donors and there is no mention of this prudence by the Trump supporters that they have recognized finally that politicians have sold them out for decades.

    I am sure there are a handful (less than 10%) of Trump supporters that fit the authors description for this article , but the author has truly failed at exposing the real truth behind the Trump supporter (average American sick and tired of the establishment) and discredits himself for not accounting for the truth behind the majority.

  7. #7
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    NYT out & out anti-Trump - article after article.

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