One of our big problems now is that the liberal imagination does not have a place of honor for heterosexual white guys who are middle-aged and vote republican. They are somehow all the oppressor. They are all the enemy. They are the Other. They themselves don’t feel that way. They feel like they are always on the downside of everything—economically and culturally. They don’t know where to turn. But you never see the NAACP or the National Organization for Women or the Sierra Club or anybody else go and check on those guys. It would be almost laughable. And yet—somebody should have checked on those guys in the last ten or twenty or thirty years. And nobody did, but a guy named Donald Trump.
–Van Jones
Much of what has been coming out of the Left—particularly about race, law and order, islamophobia and terrorism—has had the moral clarity and intellectual honesty of the 1995 OJ Simpsons verdict. Which is to say none at all. Now, I perceive Donald Trump as a dangerous con man, but many people don’t. And many of those people probably voted for Trump out of sheer exasperation. They were sick of being called racists for not worrying about Halloween costumes on Ivy League campuses. Millions of these people—along with real racists—told all you whinging social justice warriors at Yale and Brown to go fuck yourselves. And can you really blame them? I mean… Safe spaces? Trigger warnings? New gender pronouns? Getting Muslim student groups to deplatform speakers like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Bill Maher? Was that the cause of your generation? That was the trench that you were willing to die in?
–Sam Harris