© Reuters
[Epistemic status: A reduction of a complicated issue to only 8000 words, because nobody would read it if it were longer. I think this is true but incomplete. I will try to discuss missing parts at more length later.]
I.
A New York Times article from last September that went viral only recently: Crying Wolf, Then Confronting Trump. It asks whether Democrats have "cried wolf" so many times that nobody believes them anymore. And so:
When "honorable and decent men" like McCain and Romney "are reflexively dubbed racists simply for opposing Democratic policies, the result is a G.O.P. electorate that doesn't listen to admonitions when the genuine article is in their midst".I have a different perspective. Back in October 2015, I wrote that the picture of Trump as "the white power candidate" and "the first openly white supremacist candidate to have a shot at the Presidency in the modern era" was overblown. I said that "the media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data", and predicted that:
If Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him.Now the votes are in, and Trump got greater support from minorities than Romney or McCain before him. You can read the Washington Post article, Trump Got More Votes From People Of Color Than Romney Did, or look at the raw data (source)
Comment: The mainstream media is also piling on in support of suppressing uncomfortable opinions.
Will alternative voices be demonized or banned following Trump's victory?