yesterday's enthusiast

anexperimentallife:

solitarelee:

marauders4evr:

“Of course this is how tumblr reacts in an election.”

No, it’s not.

This isn’t even close to how tumblr reacts in an election.

How do I know?

Because I was here. I was right on this website in 2012, when we didn’t have messaging or replies, when the ‘t’ was different and the tea was different and we said “what is air” way too much.

I was eighteen, in my first semester of college, unable to vote because nobody told me how to register until it was too late.

And I saw the occasional posts. Tumblr is a pretty liberal website so you mostly had videos and photos of Obama doing adorable/cool things. A few of us laughed at Mitt Romney’s attempt to say that he was diverse because he picked a lot of women to be on his cabinet. There was some panic. There always is. 

But it was nowhere near this bad.

Now I’m 22, in my fifth year of college, and you have bloggers pleading to vote for a specific candidate because they don’t want to be deported. You have posts upon posts upon posts where people are freaking out because they won’t survive going to conversion therapy. You have posts from people wondering if they’re still going to be allowed to called their partner their husband/wife. You have post after post after post talking about the latest black/Muslim/Latinix/etc. person to be harassed or attacked by a Trump supporter. You have posts about people already committing voter fraud and people threatening to show up to the polls holding guns. What we went through in 2012 is nothing compared to what we’re going through now. Both on tumblr and in the nation.

The fact that tumblr is reacting this strongly to this election is terrifying in and of itself. Because I can tell you that this is not how tumblr has reacted to elections before. Not even close. Because we knew that Mitt Romney would have been a bad president but at least millions of lives weren’t going to be in danger, at least millions of families and homes weren’t going to be broken up, at least there would still be some positive aspects, at least we could make the best out of a bad situation. 

Tumblr’s posts are ugly right now because this election is ugly, one of the ugliest in history. 

4 years older and the 2008 election was also nothing like this one. We didn’t much like John McClain, but by and large we weren’t terrified of him. Stakes were slightly higher in the 2012 election… a lot of people (like my brother), were only receiving life-saving care thanks to ~Obamacare~ (the republicans will always regret starting that one lol), and there was fear in the air for us, specifically, that Romney would repeal it and we’d start dropping like flies again. 

But 2016? 2016 feels like a dream. A nightmare, specifically, some kind of shared fever dream with demon clowns (we’ve straight up got those) where no matter how fast you run you can’t get anywhere. 

In 2008 and to a lesser extent, 2012, the mood was hopeful. A little scared, in 2012, depending on who you were, but it definitely wasn’t widespread outside chronically ill circles, that I noticed. 2016 is completely different, on Tumblr, around the country, and around the world. It’s like a madness disease that’s catching, and there’s fear and hate in the air like I honestly haven’t seen since right after the 9/11 attacks. It’s fucked. 

I’ve been around since Kennedy, and I have never been this terrified leading up to an election. We have actual Holocaust survivors saying this is exactly how it went in the mod to late 1930s when the Nazis came into power, and Anne Frank’s stepsister, who survived a Nazi concentration camp, calling Trump “another Hitler.”

The next president will almost certainly get to appoint at least four Supreme Court Justices, and if Trump wins and the GOP keeps the Senate, it is not hyperbole to say that means the end of America as we know it.

Think it can’t happen here? I’ve done coursework in Holocaust Literature, and one thing that practically everyone interviewed (except the highest officials) said that at the time Hitler was rising to power, no one knew what they were in for. Supporters played down his anti-Semitism, claiming it was just a way to pander to the general low-key anti-Semitism of the German equivalent to country bumpkins.

Even when Jews, Romani, LGBTQ folks, liberals, and intellectuals were being herded onto cattle cars, the public was told right up until the last year of the war that they were simply being “relocated to the Southlands,” which “needed to be repopulated.”

So when Trump talks about “rounding people up, humanely,” you need to think about what that means, and what happened last time someone like that held sway over a world power.

Also, take into account that we had our own concentration camps in WWII, filled with Japanese-Americans, and this was under a president who was far to the left of Trump and his supporters.

The Germans in 1935 have the excuse of not knowing where it would lead. Americans in 2016 do not have that excuse. If you read Mein Kampf and update it for the 21st century, the biggest thing that differentiates the two is that Hitler claimed to be “defending Christianity.” But although Trump himself can’t get away with playing that card, his supporters on the religious right (including influential televangelist) fill in for that quite well.

I could go on for days, but the gist is this: Trump and his supporters are more evil and more vile than the worst and most sadistic Nazis. Because no one closes their eyes that hard against against reality and refuses so staunchly to learn from history unless they do indeed know exactly where this is going, but desperately want to pretend they don’t.