The other important aspect has been the evolution of the political divide. Right and Left, Republican and Democrat certainly don't mean the same as they did before the 2016 election. I won't bother giving a history of the two sides, but I'll at least give my perspective since when I got into politics. During the Bush administration, the political divide seemed to be about war and upholding traditional values for the Right and the reverse for the Left. During the Obama administration, the political divide seemed to be more economically based. The Right seemed to be more Libertarian -especially when it came to Healthcare and other entitlements- but was still very traditionally based fighting against gay marriage and LGBTQ+ issues whereas that practically defined the Left. While those issues still persist, with the election of Trump my suspicion of a nationalism versus globalism political divide seems to be confirmed. Of course this recent divide had a very confusing rise to prominence.
The Alt-Right
Milo Yiannopoulos, most famous for covering Gamergate and for being an infamous twitter troll, promulgated the Alt-Right. He is how I first heard of this movement and for the longest time thought that Milo defined them. While false, I believed as well as probably many others who identify as alt-right believed that the movement was simply anti-SJW. This meant they rejected the race-based politics and supported the notion that the US government should focus more on the US than the rest of the world. Breitbart and Donald Trump seemed to embrace this notion and the former even claimed to be an alt-right news network. Horrifyingly, the term alt-right was actually invented by a man named Richard Spencer who is best described as a white nationalist (not a supremacist as his Wikipedia article would have you believe). The true alt-right may be very against social justice warriors, but only because they support identity politics of white people rather than rejecting the notion of identity politics entirely.
This confusion regarding what the alt-right actually believes -I believe- is the source of a lot of the racist charges against the president and his supporters. Milo and Breitbart associated themselves with the alt-right and brought the alt-right to high prominence. The media was already very quick to sensationalize any comments made by then-candidate Trump that were remotely racist and this association only exasperated the issue. I still find it strange that I only found out about the alt-right's true origins until around late spring, early summer 2016. I blame this on the term 'racist' being diluted to the point of absurdity. No longer does 'racist' simply mean treating someone differently due to the color of their skin, but now it's just a "shut up" word meant to silence anyone on the right who disagrees with leftists or is unfairly used as a means to bully white people or any non-white Republicans. White nationalists are certainly racist but so are anyone else who supports race-based politics such as social justice warriors.
The Media
Trump may have said some dumb things, but to suggest he or the vast majority of his supporters are racist is just nonsense. Apologies for linking Vox, but here is a list of every racist thing that President Trump has supposedly committed. Vox lists the damning reasons of why they are justified in calling the President a racist, but read them for yourself. While some are troubling, many are not racist at all. The ones that are racist seem to be either unsubstantiated (he said, he said), or there is another plausible explanation. Regarding the section of Trump as a candidate, many of the instances are just patently false or severely misrepresented. Check out the embedded video. Trump did not call Mexican immigrants rapists. He simply pointed out that many illegal immigrants coming from the Mexican border are generally not good people. He even said that some may be good people. This example alone is why I don't take charges of racism seriously anymore. Even calling people Nazis doesn't mean anything anymore.
Fake News. A pejorative used famously by the president when referring to CNN was actually started by mainstream outlets like CNN when referring to news that served as apologists for Trump. I first heard this term shortly after a fake article was trending on Facebook regarding the Pope endorsing Trump. I can't find the actual article, but here's the Snopes article debunking it. Trump supporters were quick to turn this term against mainstream news against them. Every mistake the press made was exasperated as "fake news" for example the Russian-Trump dossier. Pushed by CNN and originating from Buzzfeed, once these documents were outed as fakes, CNN and Buzzfeed were instantly branded as Fake News much to their dismay. These lies among others from "anonymous sources" helped perpetuate the whole false Russian narrative that the government is still unfortunately wasting millions of tax dollars investigating.
Trump's Real Problem isn't the Media
Trump's real problem is alienating his potential political allies. I'm surprised no one I listen to minus Ben Shapiro even addresses this. While Trump's candidness and lack of political gravitas helped him win the Republican primary (people generally have a negative opinion of politicians), this simultaneously alienated a lot of his potential political allies on both sides of the political aisle. Very apparent now, even as a candidate I knew this would be my biggest concern for his success in the oval office. The reality is that the President is not nearly as powerful as people think he is. The only major thing the President has direct control over is foreign policy. Congress controls the money and the laws, and -of course- the Supreme Court will prevent the president from enacting any unconstitutional executive orders despite what Leftists fear. In other words, the President cannot build a wall, repeal Obamacare, or anything else to make America great again without support from the Congress. Obama and Hillary were able to mend fences after the 2008 election, but it is really bad on President Trump to continue insulting his political colleagues including those in his same party in a very public way.
Another problem with the Trump administration is that he still has Obama appointees in his administration. With all of the leaks, I'm amazed that this hasn't become a higher priority for him. There's no guarantee that this would solve everything because there are thousands of people working for the federal bureaucracy many of whom probably dislike the president for the same reasons I mentioned earlier. Despite my disbelief with conspiracy theories, a new term referred to as the Deep State effectively is serving as a conspiracy of sorts against the Trump administration. I doubt there is any real coordination within the government, but the Deep State refers to those in the government bureaucracy that function through different administrations particularly the intelligence agencies like the CIA, FBI, and NSA.
Recently, the President announced a ban on transgenders serving in the military over twitter. At the time, I had just received transgender training on President Obama's transgender policy that was supposed to take place on July 2017. Disregarding the merits of the transgender policy, there was no actual official policy created by President Trump when he made that twitter announcement. Naturally this created a lot of confusion among the ranks especially on an already very controversial issue.
While using twitter to prematurely announce new policy decisions is bad enough, it's his attacking his political colleagues and apparent "whining" on twitter that annoys me the most. One of my biggest criticisms of the Obama administration was him holding press conferences and making speeches about how bad Republicans were and why he couldn't get his policies implemented. If you are the President, you have more power than any single person on the planet. You don't get to whine and complain if you can't get something done. It means that you aren't trying hard enough. However, Obama didn't do this on twitter which means that Trump has the ability to be more compulsive with his complaints. Now I will admit that the media over blows Trump's tweets, but the truth is that the president's tweets are still in the public even though it may not feel like it.
The Most Underrated Aspect of the Trump Presidency
While I thought Penn Jillette's point was pretty funny, let's be honest here. While I will maintain that the globalist vs. nationalist ideologies is the new debate that will define the political spectrum, Trump won because his main political rival, Hillary Clinton, was truly despised by moderates. Trump was seen as a giant middle finger to the establishment, and Hillary Clinton became a symbol of the establishment that was seen as corrupt and above the law. Former FBI director James Comey's statement regarding Hillary's emails pretty much sealed her fate. In his statement, he made some BS statement about needing to have proven intent to mishandle classified information when that has never been the case in the past. Even worse he states, "To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences." That statement alone really ticked off people like me (who work with sensitive information) and other Americans who felt that Clinton committed treason. While we would prefer to see her in jail for her misconduct, seeing her not be president was a small consolation prize.
Nationalism vs. Globalism
While my commentary on the media and twitter had little to do with my original point, the reason I brought it up is because the nationalism vs. globalism debate isn't as apparent as it was when Trump was still a candidate. Nationalism has been conflated with racism. Social justice appears to be a smokescreen for globalism. None of this would have been possible without the aforementioned sections I commented on.
SJW's want Muslim refugees to integrate with America and Europe so that they too can enjoy the fruits of Western Civilization - a more globalist attitude. Another point of contention is representation in government. When Leftists see the racial or gender makeup in Congress, they see systemic racism and sexism instead of people being simply chosen by their geographical constituents. It would seem as though they are incapable of seeing borders of any sort except through race, gender, and sexual orientation. In fact, Leftists will refer to people who advocate for stronger borders and enforcement of immigration laws as racists. There is no nuance with them. Take the video I posted previously of Trump talking about Mexican immigration. Leftists will see racism whereas people like myself see him talking about the negative side effects of illegal immigration.
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| No Agenda refers to this divide as Dimension A vs Dimension B |
Why this is important is because the media exasperates this divide in a very unhealthy way. While I still think globalism versus nationalism is the underlying political divide, people literally believe that the President is a new Adolf Hitler and his supporters are Nazis. This is why you see such animosity within the federal bureaucracy and the media being besides themselves to make that connection. If you truly believe that your political opponents are Nazis, then you are likely to react violently against them which I believe explains groups like Antifa. The President alienating any potential political allies and publicly humiliating them on twitter only gives them an excuse to fan the flames of this hyperbolic vitriol. The political elite may not believe Trump is a Nazi, but why defend him if all he's done is humiliate and insult you? I may not be able to rationally explain the discrepancy in how people view current events, but the President's behavior is certainly not allowing any healing of the divide.
Maybe the Illuminati doesn't exist, but my fear is that this divide may seriously culminate into a civil war. We already have a failed political assassination of a Republican congressman. With Antifa violently attacking conservative speakers on college campuses and commentators on the Left defending them, it goes to show that all of the things I have mentioned may be culminating into a powder keg. The events in Charlottesville are only the beginning of my fears. While I certainly don't support white nationalists any more than social justice warriors, I certainly don't want to see either of them react violently towards each other. Instead of demagoguing the poor woman who was murdered by the man in the car, how about condemning all violence? Of course the president did that and that was lost on all in the media. My only hope is that by making people aware of this developing situation can we prevent a lot of people from dying.
