You Are Still Crying Wolf

However, the people who he surrounds himself with, are. This article makes no mention of Steve Bannon, who suggested too many Asian CEOs is a threat to civic society [0], and ran a website that peddled anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. Come January 20th, he'll be the chief strategist for the nation's highest office.

Nor does it mention Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State who has ties to white nationalist groups [1]. He's now on Trump's transition team.

I don't doubt Trump's intentions, but it's looking like the alt-right is using his campaign (and will use his administration) for their own ends.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bannon-flattered...

[1] https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/11/02/what%E2%80%99...

That was my biggest gripe with the article. Otherwise I thought it was refreshing to read such a well-presented argument, regardless of whether or not I agreed with his points.

Back to the issue: the kinds of people Trump seems to be surrounding himself with shows bad judgment, which is very concerning and should not be downplayed. We have many reasons to be wary of his presidency but maybe they're not the ones people shout loudest about.

This question is not meant to be facetious, I would like to hear from you what effect you hope to have by raising them and who you hope to influence.

I have seen many many people raise points like this over and over again and have come to the conclusion that it seems mostly to be tailored towards people who already think such point raised are 'bad' and so it's of limited effect on those who might support Bad Thing regardless.

But I may well be wrong.

I'm aiming to come across as non-combative here and am interested in hearing how you or others who raise point like this hope them to influence others.

Perhaps you don't intend for them to do so and are just sharing an opinion? I have seen lots of people share this sort of thing e.g 'He's not X but others near him are X so I imply you shouldn't support him'.

That might not be your intent, but if it is, can you expand on how you think this would be effective?

And again, this isn't meant to be singling you out, I'm interested in the conceptual argument of how we influence others.

"Show me your friends and I'll tell you who you are"

It's absolutely pertinent to the discussion what kind of people Trump willingly choses to put into positions of influence.

As for why people are responding... I don't understand. The premise of the article is Trump's attitudes (and therefore possible actions) towards people of other races. If we disagree with the article, isn't this the place to discuss it?

But to answer your four questions, none of those things are racist. Two of them are discriminatory, one is addressed directly in the article and the last one is plain and simply concerning, but it's not racist.

Again, not defending them, just recontextualizing. You're doing exactly what the OP is calling out: Painting everything as racist rather than attack the actual issues. This is how we got in this mess.

I'm interested in how what we share hopes to influence others of a different viewpoint.

So to you:

"It's absolutely pertinent to the discussion what kind of people Trump willingly choses to put into positions of influence."

To someone else it wouldn't be, so I'm interested in, for example, how you'd go about influencing/debating with someone who didn't share that viewpoint?

The GP post does something I've seen a lot and raises a point with an implication that because they find that point to bad, it obviously is bad and no further persuasion is needed.

For instance:

"I don't doubt Trump's intentions, but it's looking like the alt-right is using his campaign (and will use his administration) for their own ends."

That's reads as an implication that this is a bad thing, perhaps because alt-right is bad.

I'm interested to hear how the poster would hope to influence someone of the opposing view (that alt-right is good). To me, it would seem that raising a point that someone else thinks is actually good wouldn't be a way to change their mind, but I see almost everyone in this and other debates do it.

So I guess I'm just trying to understand what/how raising points like this (one the poster holds self-evident if holding their viewpoint but otherwise unpersuasive) could hope to persuade someone who thought the point raised was actually good.

I'm also trying to avoid sounding like a dick over this. I don't know everything so my view that this sort of point raising might not work may be wrong, so I'm trying to ask about the actual process of influencing others who share different views.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trum...

It is against all principles that America is founded on. It is utter bigotry and yet it is happening.

That, however, does not preclude wilfully pandering to & profiting from the racial prejudices of others - "acting racist" as compared to "being racist", if you will. And I believe he's far less innocent on that count.

For a good illustrative example, consider the historical incident where the DoJ sued him & his company for refusing to rent to black people[0]. I see no need to assume he did that out of any personal dislike of ethnic minorities - far more plausible, IMO, is that his motivation was the (arguably accurate, if distastefully cynical) notion that it was more profitable to discriminate: a combination of factors (eg, "white flight", and the generally-worse employment prospects for black people - ie, consequences of past institutional discrimination & of the prejudices of others) would have meant that renting to black people could be bad for the bottom line.

Or take his final campaign advert, with its ominous talk of a "global power structure" who "control the levers of power" over grained-up photographs of influential Jews[1] - again, I very much doubt Trump himself is personally anti-semitic; but I find it hard to argue with the interpretation (shared by the ADL, among others) that it was designed to pander to the anti-semitic sentiments that some parts of the electorate hold. And if reports from inside his campaign[2] are to be believed, Trump insisted on editorial oversight on every TV ad - so it's not like that could be passed off as, say, Bannon running that message without his knowledge.

That particular case does cause me to take exception to the article's somewhat histrionic passage about anti-Trump people crying "globalists? that means jews!": they're pointing out the anti-semitic euphemisms, not coining them - the author's shooting the messenger a bit there. That said, I do take his point that it could lead people who do earnestly blame "globalists" for their problems, with no prejudiced intent, into the arms of those who use the term in its anti-semitic sense.

Regardless, all-in-all, it's an interesting and thought-provoking essay - even if I don't agree with all of it.

[0] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/06/se...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/us/politics/donald-trump-p... (subheading "I'm Going to Win")

At the core of these issues you'll find people who are being sold solutions to a problem they personally have, regardless of the problem being valid. Labeling those issues and people as racist does nothing to help, and it's certainly not a solution. Especially when the labeling is wrong - I know a lot of trump supporters who want nothing to do with any of the discriminatory bullshit, yet people call them racist as soon as they speak out. This is a real problem, it's not something that's happening to a couple of guys out of 300 millions.

That isn't the point. If someone believes that the alt-right is good, it is very difficult to convince them otherwise, and this isn't anywhere near an argument towards that end.

Instead, this is an argument for people like me, who are unsure of Trump's intentions and who are looking at the article's arguments that Trump is not leaning in unsavory directions.

The idea is that, even if Trump is no worse than any traditional Republican, he is surrounding himself with people who are.

There is room for such arguments, of course, but not every discussion needs to be framed as winning over the Alt-right.

In this case, I think what people are trying to achieve is to say to those who are generally liberal: "No! Don't normalize Trump and his allies' behavior. Don't say that everything is ok when it is not. Because then you start to ignore it when it becomes true in way that are subtler than you expected, like banning Muslims without using a scary-sounding "Muslim Registry" [1]"

The normalization of this president is part of what allowed so many people to sit out the election. See also https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/15/dangerous-fa...

[1] http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/16/13649764/t...

I was just interested in kicking off a more on-topic discussion about 'influence' and how one might do that, and less about the specific politics.

Not that it matters much as the post has been flagged now anyway.

Did you find the point important/did it have an effect on your pre-existing opinion?

How is discrimination based on race not racist?

Interestingly, an earlier version of the article did contain a defense of Bannon, concluding that the accusations that Bannon is anti-semitic suffer from the same issues as the accusations of Trump's racism. I can't find it online any more, but it included the sentence: I feel like a non-wolf-crying person might reserve “anti-Semitic” for the sort of people who don’t even have longstanding Orthodox Jewish friends/employees with degrees in Jewish Studies who are willing to write long defences of them.

The reference is to this recent article by Joel Pollak, who claims that 'Steve is a friend of the Jewish people and a defender of Israel': http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/11/14/stephen-k....

Separately, Alan Dershowitz also says that accusing Bannon of anti-Semitism "demeans the term": http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/nov/16/alan-dershow...

I don't know if Alexander removed this section because he came across new information, or because he thought it was a distraction from the main theme of the article. Personally, I have no knowledge of Bannon other than what's been recently reported in the media. But without defending Bannon's other views, there does seem to be evidence that 'anti-semitic' may not be an entirely accurate accusation.

And while we focus on all of this dog-whistle, he's secretly a racist BS, we lose focus on the the true ways that he's a bad president.

I don't he would have won the election if the focus had been on "is Trump a good president" instead of "is Trump a racist".

Students house-sharing at universities.

Online dating.

Both New Yorkers and businessmen have been racist before, and race based discrimination has been a not-infrequent source of legal troubles for Trump.

And that's not even considering campaign rhetoric.