Let me be as candid and transparent as possible: I was a very strong supporter of Bernie Sanders, and until the past four weeks, held out great hope that he would become our next President. Over the course of the past month, I have had to do a great deal of reflecting and ask myself where does this seemingly irrational antipathy for Hillary Clinton come from? Why have I participated in it? After doing some research and looking hard at systemic misogyny, I have had to confront myself with the truth that I bought into a narrative about Hillary Clinton that has been produced, packaged, and perpetuated by mostly the GOP with the help of many democrats and independents.
This narrative is a 30-year-old vilification of a woman who is bright, independent, wealthy, and powerful — a woman who asks for what she wants and needs. How very dare you, Ms. Clinton? How dare you have a mind of your own? How dare you be bright and powerful? How dare you ask for what you want and need? Don’t you know these rights are still exclusively for white, Christian, cisgender, able-bodied, heterosexual men?
My research indicates that the reality — the facts (I realize facts are immaterial when talking to many Trump supporters) — are that Hillary Clinton is one of the most honest politicians tracked by the Pulitzer Prize winning fact-checking project Politifact.
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| I never tire of sharing this graphic. |
I truly believe that Hillary and her platform are beneficial to targeted communities: people of color, people in poverty, people with disabilities, veterans, LGBTQ people, and all of the intersecting identities thereof. She is a hard-working, fundamentally honest person for whom — as she so nicely framed it — “the service part has always come easier than the public part.”
This article is actually from the beginning of this month, but I thought it important enough to share with all of you this morning.
You see the thing that all of us who support Hillary have had to contend with is this deeply ingrained belief that Hillary is untrustworthy, a liar, a cheat, etc.
I actually came up against that with my own daughter who was adamant that Hillary was deeply, deeply flawed.
However when I asked her for examples she kept resorting to responses like "You just know by looking at her," or "You just feel it," and "Everything she says feels like a lie."
In the end she really could not provide any factual examples (Except the Bosnia sniper story. That really was bullshit.), in the end she had to admit that most of her "feelings" about Hillary's trustworthiness were the result of the opinions of her friends, and not really based on actual empirical evidence.
The thing that is so frustrating is that these opinions are baked into the narrative about Hillary Clinton.
And even after you reveal that the bakers were the folks at Fox News, or The Drudge Report, or Info Wars it is still a struggle to undo that perception and correct all of those lies.
Which of course is exactly what those bakers were counting on when they first fired up the ovens.
Source http://ift.tt/2bGAN7V
