Deplorables

I was never a Hillary Clinton fan.  While I think that she was the smarter of the Clintons, and I thought that she would have been a good President, I never liked the arrogance of the Clintons when it came to power.  I'm actually an equal opportunity political junkie.  I tell it like it is.  With that in mind, today I wanted to talk about the "deplorables." Hillary took a lot of flack for using that term to describe a group of people during her campaign.  While Clinton quickly apologized for putting the number of Trump supporters who were deplorable at half, one has to wonder what the actual number was/is.  If one uses the fact that 63 million Americans voted for Trump, then the number of deplorables would be around 31 million.  That would essentially represent 10% of the population. Is that possible?

Today, I had an experience that makes me wonder.  I took the initiative to try to share a balanced, objective opinion on the impeachment process in response to a friend's FB post.  The post was positive towards Trump, which I'm certainly ok with, and I decided to take the chance to reply in a very respectful manner.  While his response was very respectful, we caught some collateral damage from one of his FB friends.  This person responded with racist language aimed at President Obama.  Needless to say, I immediately blocked someone on FB for the first time in a long time.  I have no choice but to put this person in the deplorable category.  It made me think about how many people there are who are like this in the United States.

Looking at social media, it isn't hard to find people who are clearly racist and lack in any sort of social tolerance.  Do these people represent 10% of the U.S. population?  I don't know, but I don't find it hard to believe that might be pretty close.  This is a country that had segregation when I was born.  I'm sixty years old, so there are plenty of people in the United States who were supportive of segregation who are still alive today.  Not to mention neo-nazi's, skin heads, etc. I'd even have to list the former governor of Kentucky on this list, and I'm not so sure that their aren't Republicans who might agree with me.  Deplorables exist in the United States.  Hillary Clinton was being honest, and she was correct. It was, politically speaking,  a huge mistake. But it was true.  I continue to be concerned that the worst outcome emanating from Trump is that his behavior seems to empower the deplorables.  I stand by that opinion.