Thread by @frodofied

1/ Two years ago from this moment I was blind tired. I had been awake for probably 50 hours by that point.

But I was exhilarated.

Today we were going to elect @HillaryClinton.

I was walking through downtown Chicago and asking my fellow Chicagoans to vote.

#BlackTuesday

2/ I remember taking some time near the Art Institute and sitting down for a moment to think about the previous eighteen months.

So much had happened, and while there were so many moments to hold on to and treasure, most of it had been awful.

God fucking awful.

3/ My mom had died only three months before and I was still turning into a puddle at the mere thought of her.

She'd come to love the campaign as much me and wanted to vote for Clinton so badly

The last real thing she said to me:

"I'm not going to get to vote for our girl."

4/ I sat reading an amazing piece @tomwatson had written. He had been kind enough to spend a small paragraph talking about me. I was so honored but wished above all else that my mom could have read it.

She would have been so proud.

So much more proud that is...

5/ I don't know how many people I had begged and pleaded with that day, and the previous few days, to vote, but it numbered in the many hundreds.

My phone banking efforts (well over 20,000 calls for Clinton) and my canvassing had kept me sane and focused for many months.

6/ As I contemplated life with no campaign to fight for I felt oddly lost and lonely.

Then I thought of the Inauguration to come.

Dear @neeratanden, to the approval of so many of our Twitter friends, promised they'd get me there.

I couldn't even imagine.

7/ I had decided to skip the events. I just wanted to get into PJs and watch the results pour in and wager with my two roommates about which network would call it for Hillary first and how early.

That was fake me though. The same me who was soon on Facebook reassuring everyone.

8/ For so many people in my life I had become inextricably linked w/ @HillaryClinton. I was a true believer & had been for almost a quarter of a century. Everyone I knew was looking to me for reassurance and I gave it as well as I could manage.

My phone would not stop.

9/ I call him the fake me because inside I was dying. No matter how hard I had tried I could not push down the feeling of dread that had crept in the Wednesday before.

It arrived w/ mountains of anger.

She was not going to win.
They were not going to let her.

I knew.

10/ That Friday I sat with tears flowing freely and tapped out the darkest, and the most negative thread of the entire campaign.

I did not hold back.

That thread, which I deleted the next day predicted almost everything that was to come.

Many of my followers were stunned.

11/ I most remember my friend @aiddya writing w/ worry and horror.

"You cannot do this to us," she counselled. And she was right.

If I had served any purpose during that long campaign it had been as the believer in chief.

I was Mr. SURE.
I was MR. WEGOTTHIS.

12/ I had a responsibility to them my friend said, and, again, she was right.

"I have a responsibility to myself too," I'd think later.

And to the campaign.
And to my mom.
To myself.

And to @HillaryClinton.

Hillary.

I wasn't a fucking psychic.

Pull yourself together man.

@HillaryClinton 13/ And I did.

The next day my friend @kphed checked in & I reassured him that I was fine.

Sleep depravation, I claimed, had me spinning.

"You had me worried."

@Kphed was one of the core members of my rather large, but tight knit group of Clinton supporters on Twitter.

14/ We were a unique group, us.

Turned out that we were a
damn good representation of the Clinton coalition. Every race, age, gender identity, sexual preference, religious affiliation was represented. And we had somehow found one another.

Most days it felt like a miracle.

15/ Sometimes it felt like it was us against the whole world.

Looking back, we now know that it kind of was.

Know this: It was not easy being a Clinton supporter in 2015/16. It was a constant battle.

But we were right.
She was right.

And we knew it.
Now more than ever.

16/ I am looking at the screen and I am nauseous. I have already wretched up everything I had ever consumed three times.

I should probably sit down because the world is spinning, but nothing is making sense and I am not sure if I even know how to do that. Sit? Sit.

OMFG.

17/ I am about to piss my pants but I cannot move. It is becoming clear that the world is about to unravel.

Reality has shifted.

People joked later that it felt as though we had been pushed onto another reality's timeline.

I sympathize.

Trump.

18/ I am staring at my screens. Five devices and a television. I always go overboard.

Hillary.

I try to imagine and I fucking can't.

I just-- won't.

I think to myself that she 's ignoring them too.

Ignoring the pleas & messages and probably an i told you so, or three.

19/ I feel responsible.

I know that's silly but I do.

"Why did I ask her to run?"

I ask it out loud, but I get no answer. My roommates went to bed hours ago. No one hears me.

Then I realize I'm crying and that I'm in my room. I collapse onto my bed and it hits.

20/ Maybe it was because I had already lost my mom and was now losing Hillary too.

I don't know.

Was it fear?
Was it exhaustion?
Wad it anger?

Maybe it was all of it.

Alll I know is that something in me broke.]

And it broke badly.

I cried. And cried.

And cried.

21/ It's felt like opposite day every single day since.

That feeling becomes even more stark when you actually say any of it out loud.

I mean out LOUD.

It's not even just that it feels wrong, but it looks and sounds wrong too.

All of it

Everyday.

Wrong.

22/ What I remember most is a feeling of stupidity that was overwhelming.

All Tuesday there were news reports of long lines of people, mostly white, who were waiting hours to vote.

It was not within the realms of my imagination to assume that they would wait to vote for him.

23/ They gave me hope. Those long lines of white people brought me to tears. I was proud of our country that day.

Ex1cept there was nothing to be proud of, not even close.

Though we now know the election was illegitimate it does not erase white guilt in 2016 and it never will.

24In the end the numbers are stark & what they say about non-urban white America is unsettling.

Locating a white woman living in a state like Missouri who voted for Clinton would be a challenge in some counties, but finding a white male who did?

Good luck.

25/ As the distance in time grows, I find my disappointment has turned into a very real anger.

And a whole lot of shame.

It makes me shiver in my own white skin. Outside of urban areas I don't look other white people in the eye anymore.

I don't want to know.

26/ But I'm not just angry at the whites who voted for him I am just as angry at their political and media apologists who seem intent to erase what actually happened in 2015 and 2016.

Their attempts to re-write history even as it happens is dangerous and mortifying.

27/ It should shock no one that the proponents of these attempts to reshift the narrative are white men.

And, shocker, most of them have something to lose if the truth becomes accepted history.

Bernie Sanders & Jon Stewart we're the first white defenders to publicly emerge.

28/ For Sanders the reasons behind his surprising defense of white Trump voters proves, on inspection, to be more about political expediency than ideology.

His entire campaign (career) had been based upon the belief that economic disparity is the overriding concern of voters.

29/ If, as 2016 clearly proved, race and gender we're capable of overriding economic concerns, then it would weaken his arguments immeasurably. It could also weaken any future attempts at a run for the Presidency and call into question the arguments of his desciples.

30/ Worse for Sanders, it would mean that most of his key arguments against, & criticisms of, Hillary Clinton and many regarding the Democratic Party we're categorically false.

Which they were.

Bernie Sanders got a lot wrong in 2015/16, a fact that too few talk about.

31/ Post election Sanders brand had a lot riding on the American public believing two things:

1. Trump won fairly.

2. He won because of an uprising of voters tired of the economic disparity eating up their communities, who felt alienated by Democrats and distrustful of Clinton.

32/ This became even more necessary when it was clear that @HillaryClinton had won almost three million more votes than Trump, the "winner" of the 2016 Presidential election.

Throughout the Democratic Primary, Sanders had argued repeatedly that Clinton was a weak candidate.

33/ In fact, this became a central theme of his campaign against her.

She was corrupt.
She was weak.
She made bad decisions.
At one point he went so far as to claim that she was not qualified to be President.

It surprised no one when Donald Trump borrowed Sanders' tactics.

34/ Sanders worst moment came days after the election. Sanders began complaining that Clinton's focus on identity politics (racial, gender issues, etc) had alienated working class white voters whose concerns, he claimed, Clinton had ignored. This he said, caused him great shame.

35/ How or why Bernie Sanders would feel ashamed by anything the Democratic Party did, given he had never been an actual Democrat, not even while running to lead the Democratic Party, remains an important, if unanswered, question.

36/ Many people have invested much in the idea that @HillaryClinton was a weak candidate.

Its formed the basis of almost every pre- and post- election narrative about her campaign.

It's bullshit.

It never made sense and, to this day, no major news outlet has apologized.

37/ Clinton won or tied the popular vote in every contest she entered

And to call a candidate who received more votes than any in American history, save one, weak, is ridiculous. Add that she got three million more votes than the "winner" and it becomes a laughable assertion.

38/ Donald Trump lost the POPULAR vote by more than any candidate in history, anywhere, yet his narrative since 2015 has been based on his being a political wunderkind who leads a huge and significant new political movement that topples all in its wake.

39/

40/ Yet Clinton, who led in almost every poll the entire length of both the primary and general elections and who had won two campaigns for the US Senate, lost the 2008 Democratic Primary by the thinnest margin in the history of either party, and...

41/ who had left the State Department as the most popular political figure in US politics, eclipsing even her boss, and who been voted the most admired woman in the nation over twenty times was written about as if she were no more popular than fucking tuberculosis.

42/ Illustrations of how toxic and singularly applied some of these Clinton rules are need not be sought only in the past.

Compare Gillum and O'Rourke's headlines after Tuesday to Clintons even in times of huge victories.

This:

https://twitter.com/HillaryWarnedUs/status/1060198530818756608?s=19

Back to our regularly scheduled program.

_____

43/ Sanders post election strategy seemed to be one of embarrassing Clinton while showing deference to, if not Trump, then certainly his voters. Sanders would claim Trump's supporters voted with their wallets & hearts.

Um, no.

44/ Facts are tricky things, however, and the data shows that none of Sanders arguments are sustainable.

In fact, the data shows that voters in the lowest income brackets did not support Trump or Sanders, but, supported Clinton in both the primary and general elections.

45/ So, if it wasn't really economic anxiety that brought so many whites to Trump's door, then what was it?

It's obvious really. It always was.

It had been obvious to anyone paying attention to his words or to what whipped his audience into a frenzy.

Race.

It was race.

46/ From Harvard University to the University of Minnesota, researchers have found that voters who supported Trump did so out of concern for racial matters. In other words, they are racists. A full 12% admitted--to an actual pollster--that they sympathized or agreed with neo-Nazi

47/ For Sanders' critique to be true you would need to assume the following things:

1. Donald Trump had a finely tuned set of economic plans that he talked about regularly and we're widely discussed by him and his surrogates across a wide spectrum of media outlets.

48/ 2. That his plans were comparably better than his opponents and offered more to protect his supporters and their communities.

3. That the core of Trump's supporters are economically challenged or on the brink of being so.

49/ But none of these are true. Trump had few actual plans. and those that he talked about regularly insofar as they could be considered economic in nature, were blatantly racist in nature.

From building a wall at the US/Mexican border to a Muslim travel ban to

50/ his promise of deportation for all undocumented person's caught residing in the US.

I watched hundreds of Trump speeches and the exploitation of racial tensions was always the central goal, if not theme, w/o exception.

Trump was dog whistling from sea to shiny sea..