Member-only story
This past week I’ve been overwhelmed with various emotions over the election results. I keep coming back to the same themes of: propaganda, hatred, divisiveness. Why has this been such an effective strategy? Why are people so quick to hate?
Trump’s appeal to a population of individuals who feel disenfranchised is a tried and true trick from the capitalism playbook: distract the populace with divisive rhetoric so they don’t look at the people who are actually causing the problems.
With white supremacy as his main theme, Trump has convinced hundreds of millions of Americans that illegal immigrants are the cause of the majority of their problems. There’s no deep conversation there: no specifics of how exactly they’re the problem. It’s just “look at these disgusting brown people sullying our beautiful whiteness.”
Driven by famine, war and climate change, immigrants are coming to the United States in record numbers. Trump’s divisive rhetoric fires people up: they can’t wait for him to start deporting the brown people. There’s no thought to the long game, here. Who will build the homes? Pick the fruits and vegetables? Do all of the hard labor that Americans don’t want to do, for pennies on the dollar?
