← @mcclure111 Twitter archive

I have a text file I've been dumping thoughts into since Tuesday.

I would like to share three of those thoughts with you now, if that's ok.

11/10/2016, 8:00:47 PM

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I’ve been through or volunteered in a bunch of elections. I’ve been through multiple election nights before that Went Bad.

11/10/2016, 8:01:02 PM

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I’ve had the experience of being up late at night—reloading results pages to see if the numbers start changing—as dread and dispair sets in.

11/10/2016, 8:01:10 PM

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What was different Tuesday was instead of reloading vote tallies, I was watching social media pages to see if any friends had just died.

11/10/2016, 8:01:22 PM

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I had friends who were openly hinting at suicide, and I was reloading to see whether those people had kept posting or suddenly stopped.

11/10/2016, 8:01:29 PM

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This is not normal. This is not like other elections that ended badly. This is something new.

11/10/2016, 8:01:47 PM

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I had very little patience yesterday for people saying "it will be all right" "we will get through this".

Will “we”? Who will?

11/10/2016, 8:01:54 PM

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The most important thing Americans can do right now, I feel like, is refuse to accept what is happening right now as a new normal.

11/10/2016, 8:02:08 PM

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It’s important we not accept anyone trying to spin an explanation of Tuesday night that makes Trump voters retroactively right bc they won.

11/10/2016, 8:02:21 PM

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It's really important we not allow anyone to spin the lie the civil war was about something other than slavery.

11/10/2016, 8:02:32 PM

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It's really important we not allow anyone to spin the lie that Trump's victory was about anything other than white supremacy.

11/10/2016, 8:02:38 PM

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“Oh, but the civil war was about economics—“ It was about protecting an economic system whose foundation was slavery.

11/10/2016, 8:02:54 PM

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“Oh, but trump was about economic anxiety—“ Then why did exit polls say voters who cared most about economics voted for Clinton?

11/10/2016, 8:03:02 PM

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Why did those exit polls show Trump winning people who cared most about “immigration”? Why did they vote for someone with no economic plan?

11/10/2016, 8:03:10 PM

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The supposed rural white surge that carried trump— why didn't they *respond* to any economic argument that could have helped them, before?

11/10/2016, 8:03:17 PM

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Previous candidates have *had* economic arguments. This is not what cauterized Trump’s base. What did was a naked appeal to white supremacy.

11/10/2016, 8:03:23 PM

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Look at this. Look at this and *internalize* it. Think **very hard about what this election is ‘revenge’ for**.

11/10/2016, 8:03:43 PM

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Who was President Obama? A technocrat, ideologically mild in practice, who did nothing but make spurned overtures to the right for 8 years.

11/10/2016, 8:04:00 PM

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Obama never stopped reaching out a hand to the voters who sought "revenge" for his Presidency last night. He's *still* doing it, even today.

11/10/2016, 8:04:08 PM

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This election was "revenge" by white voters against the idea of feeling like a black man was above them. Nothing more, nothing less.

11/10/2016, 8:04:14 PM

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That, and "normal" Republicans confirming you can strip away their entire platform except favored status for whites & they'll still vote R.

11/10/2016, 8:04:21 PM

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Trump "won" despite fewer votes. This because we have a biased system literally designed for the express purpose of protecting slaveowners.

11/10/2016, 8:04:38 PM

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In 2012, more people voted for Democratic House candidates, but Rs got more seats; I haven’t seen 2016 numbers yet but have suspicions.

11/10/2016, 8:05:04 PM

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The Republican advantage-despite-vote-counts in the House is due to gerrymandering; gerrymandering also gives them control over state leg.s—

11/10/2016, 8:05:20 PM

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But even if the Republicans weren’t cheating at the Electoral College. Why do we *have* an Electoral College?

11/10/2016, 8:05:38 PM

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It’s not just a weird quirk. We have a very specific, crafted system and we have that system for a reason.

11/10/2016, 8:05:45 PM

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Our electoral system is designed to protect white supremacy.

This nation was founded by slaveholders. They wrote the constitution.

11/10/2016, 8:05:52 PM

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Our electoral system—the electoral college, the senate/house split, all of it—comes from a fear by slaveowners they could lose their slaves.

11/10/2016, 8:06:10 PM

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Some of the slaveowners who wrote our founding documents were *exclusively* slaveowners. They did nothing else with their lives.

11/10/2016, 8:06:17 PM

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Ben Franklin from New York had, like, y'know, a couple slaves, but it wasn't the foundation of his livelihood or whatever.

11/10/2016, 8:06:26 PM

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The ones whose entire economic livelihood depended on slaves were worried that over time, they'd be overpowered by states where people vote.

11/10/2016, 8:06:35 PM

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So because the slaveowners *expected* they'd lose fair national elections, they designed our elections to be biased toward the slaveowners.

11/10/2016, 8:06:44 PM

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The Senate, or the College, in theory exists to prevent large, populous states from being able to dominate small or unpopulous ones.

11/10/2016, 8:06:58 PM

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But the "dominated" states here were mostly not themselves *unpopulous* so much as the population was in large part slaves & couldn't vote.

11/10/2016, 8:07:30 PM

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So the Electoral College is designed to ensure you can't win elections just by having more people without drawing support from all regions—

11/10/2016, 8:07:48 PM

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—which is to say, you can’t win without having on board the region whose economy was based on enslaving humans based on their race.

11/10/2016, 8:07:55 PM

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So too the Senate was designed to give the south a 50% balance— and so we drew new state boundaries for decades to ensure that balance.

11/10/2016, 8:08:25 PM

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The very borders of our states are basically one huge gerrymander from the 1820s designed to ensure slaveowners held political power.

11/10/2016, 8:08:56 PM

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These compromises in our constitution exist to allow white supremacists to stop blacks from voting without giving up any power themselves.

11/10/2016, 8:08:59 PM

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200 years later, this system designed to benefit white supremacy in elections has just massively benefited white supremacy in an election.

11/10/2016, 8:09:10 PM

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This is what America was built to do. And we finally are going to have to admit that America was built *wrong*.

11/10/2016, 8:09:21 PM

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