I think it's really important to be very careful about what media we're exposing ourselves to at this stage in the game. It's just getting to be too much sometimes, so I've been keeping mostly to the New York Times, Washington Post and Politico with a little CNN and NPR thrown in, and I've been refraining from Twitter or any of the other slippery corners of the internet.
I've got two articles that I think are worth checking out. Well, one article and a video.
The article is titled Debate Night With The Unswayables
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... 016-214376 )
by Julia Ioffe (I also follow her on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/juliaioffe ).
She watches the debate with a group of Trump voters in North Carolina. My sister and I read this article together and we were absolutely stunned. At one point she talks about how die-hard Trump supporters have their own set of facts that are removed from everyone elses, and this article really illustrates that.
Here's a quote:
Nearby Charlotte is a scary, urban specter of expensive, loose living and violence committed by people with strange names. “They have issues in Charlotte with people that do things that get in trouble, OK? And quite often they end up being illegals,” he said. “It doesn’t take long to get it into your head when you watch the news and you see that 10 people get in trouble, and half of them are of this ethnicity group, three of them are this ethnicity group, and two of them are this ethnicity group, it doesn’t take long for somebody to go, ‘There’s a problem here.’”
What are the three ethnicities, I asked?
“Oh, that’s on you to figure that one out,” he said, raising his eyebrows with meaning. “I’ll make it simple for you: A lot of times, you get the impression that there could be different ones in each group. You have one ethnicity that’s a lot more prominent than others, that seems to have a big problem with drugs. Now, I’m not saying that white people don’t do drugs, because Lord knows they do.” The explanation went on for a while—“there are African-American people, there are Jamaicans, there are real African-Africans”—and it seemed to be the response to an earlier statement Tallent made and had refused to clarify: that Trump resonates with people here “because he says a lot of things people want to say but can’t because they gotta have jobs.”
Honestly. How absurdly racist this is. I mean, everyone who beat me up in elementary school was a white boy, does that mean there's a problem with white guys? Or maybe it just means that I grew up in a predominantly white town and most of the bullies happened to be white. Come on.
Here's the second thing:
Last night there was an event called the Al Smith Dinner. It's an annual charity dinner put on by a Catholic Charity in New York City to raise money for poor kids and every four years they invite the presidential candidates and have a roast. It's supposed to be all in good fun. Last night Trump and Hillary showed up, and neither of them are exactly known for their humor.
Here's a 2 minute recap that's worth watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEdmiAe7uKM
Trump had one, maybe two good jokes, though I think I might have heard the one about Melania's speech before. Clinton had a lot more good jokes, but she went after Trump and the room wasn't feeling very much like laughing after booing Trump off the stage.
Oh. Right. Trump got booed off the stage. The audience started shouting at him to finish. So that happened...
I invite you to watch the full version if you've got the time too. I always think it's hilarious watching politicians and others who are so uncomfortable with comedy try to be funny. And Clinton has some great zingers. One of my favorites was something along the lines of "But tonight, let us put aside our differences and really focus on the things that bring us together...like ripping on Ted Cruz."
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