“It’s like we have our own tea party now,” Bill Maher said during the “Real Time” season premiere.
Maher made the remark in response to the success of the Women’s March, which set many unofficial national records for crowd size. Political activism in the Divided States of America is higher than most of us can ever recall, and never collectively been this “woke.”
The time for fence-sitting and apathy is long dead. The price is way too high as a President who won just 27% of the electorate, and lost the popular vote by 2,864,974 votes is in charge. The leader guiding his way, from inside the White House, is a legitimate white supremacist and purveyor of bigotry, hatred and intolerance.
#TheResistance grows stronger by the day, and the term Snowflakes becomes less a pejorative and more a designation of virtue by the day. That’s important because this is truly a calling all cars, all hands on deck time for our democracy. Forget the hackneyed “stick to sports” cliche- that’s long dead.
Just ask Super Bowl champion Martellus Bennett. Or the growing by the day list of key NBA figures speaking out against our nation’s slow moving fascist coup.
The rise of Steve Bannon, the Alt-Right and the white nationalist movement is something we all need to be very concerned about and it’s something we all must come together and immediately suppress. While you can debate with legitimate political conservatives and true Republicans, you cannot hold a productive discourse with the Alt-Right. Hatred is not a legitimate political position, intolerance is not a “stance on the issues.”
You’ll never reason with anybody who marks his or her self with the symbols of bigotry and prejudice. So here’s how to spot them, what they use to classify us, what we’re doing about it, and why eventually we will win.
Deplorables, the American Flag, MAGA
“Make America Great Again!” That sounds innocent and well intentioned enough. It’s got enough vanilla and banality to appeal to everybody. We all love America.
Unfortunately, in actuality it’s manifesting itself as make America whiter again. Make America the 1950s again, when it was great mostly for white males, not so great for everybody else.
You’ll find that the #MAGA crowd is very active on message boards and social media. They often identify themselves with the word “deplorable” at the start of their Twitter handle. Ex: “Deplorable Bill” or “Deplorable Jill.” They take Hillary Clinton’s infamous remark and wear it as a badge of honor. Their other primary symbols are of course the red MAGA baseball caps, and Pepe the Frog.
When the medium doesn’t facilitate Pepe drawings, they use a simple frog emoji, or the American flag.
Trumpians, Trumpsters, Trumpkins, whatever you want to call the people who voted for him not for the tax cuts, but for the Muslim ban and the wall, are trying to corner the market on patriotism. Good luck with that, because there’s no way that’s ever going to work.
No political party, and no extremist offshoot of a political party will ever successfully claim Old Glory and the bald eagle as their very own.
The Alt-Right is legitimately neo-Nazi and many of them make allusion to the numbers 14 and 88 in Nazi context. One of their main leaders is Richard Spencer, and we covered him, his getting punched in the face and their movement in more detail over at this link.
Snowflakes, Safety Pins (Paper Clips) and The Resistance
Today, snowflakes are used to describe a people perceived as overly sensitive and fragile, often in a mocking way. Hence, you’re supposedly “melting” like snowflakes.
The irony here is delicious because Trump and his Press Secretary Sean Spicer are the biggest snowflakes you’ll ever come across. Both are notorious for being thin-skinned. Even the extremely polished, almost never breaking character Kellyanne Conway is now even starting to show signs of cracking here and there.
whomever just unfollowed me – show yourself you coward
— Sean Spicer (@seanspicer) February 11, 2013
Donald Trump Has Twitter Tantrum Over the Cast of Hamilton Being "Mean" to Mike Pence https://t.co/5E96O6od0t pic.twitter.com/7G0WUkP1QE
— Cosmopolitan (@Cosmopolitan) November 19, 2016
Like “deplorables,” some of those having the Snowflakes label applied to them are now embracing it and wearing the label with pride.
As for “The Resistance,” well that’s self-explanatory and you can join up over at this link.
If you’re wondering about the paper clips and safety pins meaning, this excerpt from an article on Forward.com offers up an explanation:
In Slate, the also-wonderful Michelle Goldberg makes the case for the protest safety pin. In the piece, Goldberg explains, “I’m not usually an adopter of memes; I’m suspicious of virtue signaling and hardly ever change my Facebook avatar.” But following Brexit, with acts of racism on the rise, some white people wished to label themselves as… whatever the human equivalent is of a safe space, I suppose: “It was a quick, easy way to show immigrants that you weren’t one of those who despise them and to show everyone else that you wouldn’t tolerate xenophobic abuse.”
? Snowflake ??
? Snowstorm ????
? Avalanche ????????????
CREVASSE!!!
Sure, call me Snowflake.
Need a rope???? ? pic.twitter.com/3JQljlDmMt
— ? Jillian Hurley (@JillianMHurley) February 1, 2017
Symbols are extremely important for mobilization, so that’s what Maher actually meant when he said “now we have our own tea party.” While the country itself is divided, we, the so-called snowflakes, the paper clip and safety pin wearing members of The Resistance are united in strength.
#WeWillWin
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, partnered with FOX Sports Engage Network. and News Now. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, Bold and the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye publication, appears regularly as a guest on CGTN America, WGN CLTV News and KOZN.
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