Friday’s New York Times proved the paper still hasn’t processed Donald Trump’s win, unleashing three bitter articles accusing Trump and his supporters of sexism, racism, and hate crimes.
First up, Katharine Seelye and Claire Cain Miller wrote weepily about women whose dreams were crushed by sexist Trump supporters who couldn’t stand the idea of a woman president (paired with a decent article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg on women who supported Trump):
It was visceral. Women felt gutted, shocked, appalled, afraid. The prospect of celebrating the election of the nation’s first female president had been crushed by a man whom many women viewed as sexist.
In this liberal enclave, where Mrs. Clinton won 89.2 percent of the vote over Donald J. Trump, one of her strongest showings anywhere, Molly Hubner, 33, said she was having difficulty explaining the result to her 6-year-old daughter.
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Women began entering government in bigger numbers in the 1970s, but any rush has stalled. The number of women in Congress is about 19 percent. Research has shown that women are such a minority in government not because they are less likely to win -- they are just as likely, over all -- but because they are so much less likely to run in the first place.
Political scientists say this so-called ambition gap is because women are less likely to be encouraged or recruited to run, underestimate their own abilities, assume they need to be more qualified than men and view politics as sexist.
Now, Mrs. Clinton’s loss may lend credence to those doubts.
“Because there was general consensus on both sides of the aisle that she was the most qualified presidential candidate we’ve ever seen, and she lost, it reinforces the notion that maybe it’s not even enough to be twice as good to get half as far,” said Jennifer L. Lawless, a professor of government at American University who studies gender and political ambition.
Caroline Elkins, 47, a professor of history at Harvard, said she was profoundly disappointed and could not separate the outcome from Mrs. Clinton’s gender.
“To think that gender wasn’t a factor would be ludicrous,” she said. “You’d be hard-pressed to find someone more qualified than Hillary Clinton, in my view, and yet she was scrutinized above and beyond any male candidate we’ve ever seen.”
That Mrs. Clinton’s flaws were “thrown into a hyperbolic relief,” she said, suggests that being highly qualified for the job was not enough, that a woman still has to be “twice as good and half as threatening” as a man to succeed.
Ms. Friedman, the retired nurse in Berkeley, who made phone calls on behalf of Mrs. Clinton, was convinced that gender was a factor.
“I underestimated the level of misogyny in the country,” she said. “Which is surprising, because usually I see it where it’s not.” But during her calls, she was sometimes met with crude responses.
“I forget how much people hate women,” she said.
Reporter Liam Stack filed “Trump Win Seen as ‘Devastating Loss’ for Gay and Transgender People.” Never mind that Trump is the most pro-gay Republican president ever, Stack fed into the gay-left panic.
The election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency sent panic through much of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, which for the first time in eight years will face an administration hostile to its civil rights goals and a president-elect who has expressed a desire to reverse many of its political gains.
Caitlin Dickerson and Stephanie Saul rounded up unsubstantiated anecdotes of alleged hate crimes that have happened since Trump’s win: “Hostile Acts Against Minorities, Often Invoking Trump, Erupt Across U.S.”
The fliers depicting men in camouflage, wielding guns and an American flag, appeared in men’s restrooms throughout Texas State University: “Now that our man Trump is elected,” they said. “Time to organize tar and feather vigilante squads and go arrest and torture those deviant university leaders spouting off that diversity garbage.”
A year after students at campuses nationwide pushed for greater sensitivity toward cultural differences, the distribution of the Texas State fliers was just one of several episodes this week suggesting that the surprise election of Donald J. Trump is provoking a round of backlash on campuses.
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“A lot of Muslim students are scared,” said Abdalla Husain, 21, a linguistics major at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who is of Palestinian ancestry. He said some Muslim students on campus were afraid to go outside. “They’re scared that Trump has empowered people who have hate and would be hostile to them.”
At San Jose State University in California, a Muslim woman complained that she had been grabbed by her hijab and choked. The police are investigating.
At Wellesley College in Massachusetts, alma mater of Hillary Clinton, two male students from nearby Babson College drove through campus in a pickup truck adorned with a large Trump flag, parked outside a meeting house for black students, and spat at a black female student, according to campus black student organizations.
The Times belatedly hinted that not every “hate crime” posted on social media is genuine.
Racist episodes occur regularly at places throughout the United States, including college campuses. Mr. Trump’s election, though, seems to have worked as an accelerant.
But the police said that at least some reported incidents on campuses were fake. A Muslim student at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette who said she was attacked Wednesday by two men -- one wearing a Trump hat -- recanted her story on Thursday, admitting she had made it up, the police said.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason cast some doubt on the apparent epidemic of Trump-inspired violence. After noting that much of the vandalism and graffiti was happening in high schools and middle schools, which “does suggest a phenomenon driven by mean and immature kids rather than rogue bands of serious neo-Nazis.”
Brown continued:
And while all sorts of horrible incidents are being reported on Twitter and Facebook... well, anyone can say anything on Twitter and Facebook. The bulk of these stories are "friend of a friend" told me types. But if men were really going around pulling knives on Muslim women on public buses in Trump's name, there would at least be local or campus news reports of it. Same, too, for the alleged wave of transgender teen suicides which keep getting mentioned in media but for which no one can offer any evidence.
