This has been a depraved and depressing election, and its results have left many terrorized and deeply mistrustful of their fellow citizens' character and intentions. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to spread divisive propaganda of racial antagonism, and it has had an impact. From small children in tears to reports of transgender youth committing suicide, the media is awash in terrifying accounts of the distress of minorities and legal immigrants in the aftermath of the election. But all these terror victims are the obvious and utterly foreseeable results of a cynical campaign strategy to manipulate and win votes. No w that the election is over, you might imagine the campaigns would disband and put away their megaphones. This is not entirely the case, because now the divisive and deceitful propaganda is being used to deflect from the real causes of Trump's election to protect those responsible both for the election result and the terror bordering on mass hysteria among their most gullible followers.

The Clinton campaign has a lot to answer for, but true to form, they are only pointing fingers at others, blaming the Russians, the KKK, the FBI, the voters, the electoral college and the media, in alternating rounds of hypocritical delusion that has become laughably transparent to virtually everyone outside their self-righteous bubble of entitled denial. And because so many major media orifices are demonstrably complicit in the campaign, they continue to collude in the post-election terror propaganda campaign, presumably for free this time.

But if you've read this far, you probably know all that. It is more interesting to consider the longer-term effects of a campaign to make people feel that a huge proportion of the population is misogynist and racist and anti-muslim, that, particularly outside of major coastal cities, America is hostile and violent to minorities, and that the concepts of racism have just seized political power. While there is no denying the existence of racism and nativist inclinations in the US, all the evidence from polls and exit polls shows that this was not the predominant factor in the election.

So why did the Clinton campaign spent so much to portray so many or our neighbors as deplorable racists and misogynists? Why did they basically drop policy discussion from the campaign and turned to pure identity politics and personal attacks on Trump? Because they had no choice. While both sides had the advantage of an opponent who was hugely unpopular and untrusted, according to virtually all the polling, and both sides tried to drive their opponents numbers down, the democrats had to rely on their traditional constituencies (minorities), minus labor unions, who had been decimated by years of the type of neoliberal bipartisan policy that the Clintons championed and continue to represent. In addition, the decision was made to try to appeal to 'moderate' republicans, particularly women, who could also be scared/offended away from voting for Trump. Apparently the calculation was that these groups could be scared to the polls. This may have been a valid decision, since 8-years of Obama had not done much to help inner cities or reduce deportations. This disillusionment was already visible in comparisons of 2008 and 2012 turnout. So it should have been apparent to the campaign that the standard tactic of vapid promises from someone openly running as Obama's 3rd term would be in trouble. They needed a more powerful drug. They needed pure, terror-induced adrenaline. The campaign colluded with the media first to focus attention on Trump, giving him enough free air time to win the GOP primary, then they colluded to paint trump as 'openly white supremacist' by ignoring his statements and and repeating their baseless claims literally ad nauseum.

Scott Alexander posted a relatively thorough review of the numerous distortions of Trump's statements as YOU ARE STILL CRYING WOLF. The whole piece is a Must Read.
After a powerful dissection of 16 separate categories of distortions about Trump, and an excellent list of plausible predictions he issues the following plea:

Stop fearmongering. Somewhere in America, there are still like three or four people who believe the media, and those people are cowering in their houses waiting for the death squads.

Stop crying wolf. God forbid, one day we might have somebody who doesn’t give speeches about how diversity makes this country great and how he wants to fight for minorities, who doesn’t pose holding a rainbow flag and state that he proudly supports transgender people, who doesn’t outperform his party among minority voters, who wasn’t the leader of the Salute to Israel Parade, and who doesn’t offer minorities major cabinet positions. And we won’t be able to call that guy an “openly white supremacist Nazi homophobe”, because we already wasted all those terms this year.

Stop talking about dog whistles. The kabbalistic similarities between “dog-whistling” and “wolf-crying” are too obvious to ignore.

Stop writing articles breathlessly following everything the KKK says. Stop writing several times more articles about the KKK than there are actual Klansmen. Remember that thing where Trump started out as a random joke, and then the media covered him way more than any other candidate because he was so outrageous, and gave him what was essentially free advertising, and then he became President-elect of the United States? Is the lesson you learned from this experience that you need 24-7 coverage of the Ku Klux Klan?

Stop using the words “white nationalist” to describe Trump. When you describe someone as a white nationalist, and then they win, people start thinking white nationalism won. People like winners. This was entirely an own-goal and the perception that white nationalism is now the winning team has 1% to do with Trump and 99% to do with his critics.

Stop responding to everyone who worries about Wall Street or globalism or the elite with “I THINK YOU MEAN JEWS. BECAUSE JEWS ARE THE ELITES. ALL ELITES AND GLOBALISTS ARE JEWS. IF YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT THE ELITE, IT’S DEFINITELY JEWS YOU SHOULD BE WORRIED ABOUT. IF YOU FEEL SCREWED BY WALL STREET, THEN THE PEOPLE WHO SCREWED YOU WERE THE JEWS. IT’S THE JEWS WHO ARE DOING ALL THIS, MAKE SURE TO REMEMBER THAT. DEFINITELY TRANSLATE YOUR HATRED TOWARDS A VAGUE ESTABLISHMENT INTO HATRED OF JEWS, BECAUSE THEY’RE TOTALLY THE ONES YOU’RE THINKING OF.” This means you, Vox. Someday those three or four people who still believe the media are going to read this stuff and immediately join the Nazi Party, and nobody will be able to blame them.

Stop saying that being against crime is a dog whistle for racism. Have you ever met a crime victim? They don’t like crime. I work with people from a poor area, and a lot of them have been raped, or permanently disabled, or had people close to them murdered. You know what these people have in common? They don’t like crime When you say “the only reason someone could talk about law and order is that they secretly hate black people, because, y’know, all criminals are black”, not only are you an idiot, you’re a racist. Also, I judge you for not having read the polls saying that nonwhites are way more concerned about crime than white people are.

Stop turning everything into identity politics. The only thing the media has been able to do for the last five years is shout “IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS!” at everything, and then when the right wing finally says “Um, i…den-tity….poli-tics?” you freak out and figure that the only way they could have possibly learned that phrase is from the KKK.

Stop calling Trump voters racist. A metaphor: we have freedom of speech not because all speech is good, but because the temptation to ban speech is so great that, unless given a blanket prohibition, it would slide into universal censorship of any unpopular opinion. Likewise, I would recommend you stop calling Trump voters racist – not because none of them are, but because as soon as you give yourself that opportunity, it’s a slippery slope down to “anyone who disagrees with me on anything does so entirely out of raw seething hatred, and my entire outgroup is secret members of the KKK and so I am justified in considering them worthless human trash”. I’m not saying you’re teetering on the edge of that slope. I’m saying you’re way at the bottom, covered by dozens of feet of fallen rocks and snow. Also, I hear that accusing people of racism constantly for no reason is the best way to get them to vote for your candidate next time around. Assuming there is a next time.

Stop centering criticism of Donald Trump around this sort of stuff, and switch to literally anything else. Here is an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country, whose philosophy of governance basically boils down to “I’m going to win and not lose, details to be filled in later”, and all you can do is repeat, again and again, how he seems popular among weird Internet teenagers who post frog memes. In the middle of an emotionally incontinent reality TV show host getting his hand on the nuclear button, your chief complaint is that in the middle of a few dozen denunciations of the KKK, he once delayed denouncing the KKK for an entire 24 hours before going back to denouncing it again. When a guy who says outright that he won’t respect elections unless he wins them does, somehow, win an election, the headlines are how he once said he didn’t like globalists which means he must be anti-Semitic.

Stop making people suicidal. Stop telling people they’re going to be killed. Stop terrifying children. Stop giving racism free advertising. Stop trying to convince Americans that all the other Americans hate them. Stop. Stop. Stop.