> And ignoring for a second the assumption that a better informed populus would have naturally voted Clinton...
Exactly. There are a bunch of people who knew all about Trump's lies, distortions of reality, character flaws, and so on, and voted for him anyway. Why is that?
Hillary was a deeply flawed candidate. First, she was the establishment candidate. This wasn't a good election to be wearing that mantle. Next, she gave off the vibe that she felt she was entitled to the presidency. There were more than two decades of scandals (never mind how much actual fire there was; after two decades of smoke surrounding her, people were sick of it). Her email servers were a very bad look; it gave the impression that she wanted to hide stuff so it wouldn't come back to haunt her during her presidential run, and it also gave the impression that she thought rules were for other people. The allegations of pay for play with the Clinton Foundation was a continuation of the corruption allegations, but it was very fresh. And for the working class, their financial position mostly got worse under Obama, and Clinton was viewed as a continuation of that.
But sure, blame people voting for Trump on fake news.
(For the record, I'm a conservative who could not in good conscience vote either for Trump or Hillary, but who was cheering for Hillary on election night because I viewed Trump as more dangerous.)
The line you quoted was written because I wanted to focus on a different part of a faulty reasoning chain. I wanted to step over it entirely without agreeing or disagreeing.
For what it's worth, I think it's a massively erroneous assumption. But it's also one I'm not particularly interested in discussing in the context of this thread.
Exactly. There are a bunch of people who knew all about Trump's lies, distortions of reality, character flaws, and so on, and voted for him anyway. Why is that?
Hillary was a deeply flawed candidate. First, she was the establishment candidate. This wasn't a good election to be wearing that mantle. Next, she gave off the vibe that she felt she was entitled to the presidency. There were more than two decades of scandals (never mind how much actual fire there was; after two decades of smoke surrounding her, people were sick of it). Her email servers were a very bad look; it gave the impression that she wanted to hide stuff so it wouldn't come back to haunt her during her presidential run, and it also gave the impression that she thought rules were for other people. The allegations of pay for play with the Clinton Foundation was a continuation of the corruption allegations, but it was very fresh. And for the working class, their financial position mostly got worse under Obama, and Clinton was viewed as a continuation of that.
But sure, blame people voting for Trump on fake news.
(For the record, I'm a conservative who could not in good conscience vote either for Trump or Hillary, but who was cheering for Hillary on election night because I viewed Trump as more dangerous.)