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 🔗
Favs: 253
Retweets: 128
← @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 🔗
Favs: 253
Retweets: 128
- 1 -
11/10/2016, 8:00:55 PM 🔗
Favs: 11
Retweets: 2
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 🔗
Favs: 28
Retweets: 8
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 🔗
Favs: 27
Retweets: 9
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 🔗
Favs: 80
Retweets: 20
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 🔗
Favs: 53
Retweets: 14
This is not normal. This is not like other elections that ended badly. This is something new.
11/10/2016, 8:01:47 PM 🔗
Favs: 83
Retweets: 22
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 🔗
Favs: 111
Retweets: 27
- 2 -
11/10/2016, 8:02:01 PM 🔗
Favs: 8
Retweets: 2
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 🔗
Favs: 354
Retweets: 175
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 🔗
Favs: 156
Retweets: 66
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 🔗
Favs: 144
Retweets: 42
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 🔗
Favs: 185
Retweets: 68
“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 🔗
Favs: 130
Retweets: 26
“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 🔗
Favs: 135
Retweets: 36
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 🔗
Favs: 92
Retweets: 30
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 🔗
Favs: 72
Retweets: 19
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 🔗
Favs: 96
Retweets: 35
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 🔗
Favs: 192
Retweets: 132
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 🔗
Favs: 121
Retweets: 39
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 🔗
Favs: 136
Retweets: 42
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 🔗
Favs: 182
Retweets: 65
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 🔗
Favs: 132
Retweets: 55
- 3 -
11/10/2016, 8:04:28 PM 🔗
Favs: 12
Retweets: 2
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 🔗
Favs: 124
Retweets: 54
Clinton's popular vote lead is significant, larger than Gore’s by a factor of 2-4x. https://twitter.com/steveweinstein/status/796392248485154817
11/10/2016, 8:04:49 PM 🔗
Favs: 84
Retweets: 36
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 🔗
Favs: 60
Retweets: 16
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 🔗
Favs: 81
Retweets: 31
—gerrymandered control over state legislatures then lets them do *this*, winning them the electoral college. https://twitter.com/NYDailyNews/status/796478231398465536
11/10/2016, 8:05:29 PM 🔗
Favs: 84
Retweets: 40
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 🔗
Favs: 58
Retweets: 20
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 🔗
Favs: 43
Retweets: 16
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 🔗
Favs: 141
Retweets: 72
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 🔗
Favs: 90
Retweets: 48
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 🔗
Favs: 62
Retweets: 22
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 🔗
Favs: 39
Retweets: 13
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 🔗
Favs: 60
Retweets: 24
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 🔗
Favs: 76
Retweets: 32
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 🔗
Favs: 60
Retweets: 27
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 🔗
Favs: 51
Retweets: 26
(Although note blacks in the also-racist north *also* couldn’t vote— it’s just there weren’t many of them at first.) http://slavenorth.com/exclusion.htm
11/10/2016, 8:07:40 PM 🔗
Favs: 37
Retweets: 13
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 🔗
Favs: 57
Retweets: 35
—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 🔗
Favs: 68
Retweets: 30
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 🔗
Favs: 50
Retweets: 19
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 🔗
Favs: 100
Retweets: 49
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 🔗
Favs: 47
Retweets: 16
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 🔗
Favs: 136
Retweets: 86
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 🔗
Favs: 202
Retweets: 82