This Election Year, Leave Your Troll Farm Training Behind

In 2016, Russian Troll Farms helped Americans hone our unfortunate skills of hating women and people of color (and our/their pesky “identity politics”) to undermine our election and support straight white male supremacy on both the right and the left, including efforts to suppress the African American vote overall. (https://www.npr.org/2018/02/22/587921536/how-a-russian-troll-factory-waged-an-aggressive-campaign-to-disrupt-the-u-s-elec) I’ll stop writing about 2016 someday, but not until its influence is over.

Here in 2018, we’re seeing a lot of progress despite the ongoing fascism at the top. We have so many more female candidates, LGBT candidates, and candidates of color to root and cheer and canvass for. But as much as those candidates will have our support, as much as I believe in the Blue Wave and the Rainbow Wave and all of the other against-evil signs that I see in our near future, it saddens and angers me that all of the inspired candidates entering into or persisting in our political sphere will face the misogyny, homophobia, racism, and white male entitlement of Trump’s/Sanders’s/Putin’s well-trained army of commenters.

As Bernie’s adherents turn their Hillary-hatred toward Kamala Harris and Corey Booker, heaping them with comment-contempt and demonizing all Democrats as shills, will that hurt the Blue Wave and end up (maybe unintentionally) supporting Trump’s agenda? Will the Left’s version of white male supremacy end up supporting the Right’s? I hope not. I know the White Male Supremacist Left is louder than it is pervasive (That’s why they don’t get, you know, THE VOTES.) but I still think reclaiming the government in November is going to take extra badass efforts on the part of all intersectional feminists and our allies.

While the misogynist Troll Farm mentality is concentrated in the MAGA/Our Revolution camps, our training in abusive commenting bleeds into everything. Last year when the Al Franken story broke, my misery at being triggered by that gross picture was made worse by the fact that many of the members of the Marching Onward Facebook Group (Which has previously felt like a marvelously comforting group of Hillary supporters to me.) refused to acknowledge Franken’s misconduct, preferring to gaslight, debase, and undermine his victims. I hear that they have since moved on to trashing Kirsten Gillibrand for daring to speak out about Bill Clinton’s abuse of power.

Misogyny, abuse, voter suppression, racism, and cultural gaslighting are not just the product of some right-wing “other”—they are everyone’s problem, everyone’s fault, and EVERYONE’S responsibility to change.

I live in a very liberal neighborhood, but since 2016 I’ve been learning more and more about its general Get Outness. I’ve learned over and over that the label of “liberal” does not translate to “not-misogynist” or “not white supremacist.” But still, it usually seems like things are getting better. As we gear up for the primary election, we are lucky enough to have a choice between two Democrats of color for State Representative; an incumbent guy with lots of charisma and all the best endorsements, and a lady challenger who is very vocal in opposing the NRA but about whom it can be hard to find other information. I’m likely to vote for the incumbent because he seems more vocally supportive of LGBT rights, but I feel protective of the female candidate, for good reason.

The other day, on our neighborhood Facebook group, a neighbor asked a perfectly straightforward question about the female candidate’s endorsements. Her question seemed to trip some sort of Manchurian Candidate wire in many neighbors’’ heads. They saw this innocuous question as a chance to show contempt for the female candidate, dismiss her accomplishments, and denigrate Democrats in general. I just Googled the male candidate to make sure and yep, he’s a Democrat too, but for ladies, it’s for some reason a sin to have the benefit of belonging to a party.  It was a thread of very low-key misogyny, but it let me know that Troll Farm mentality is still in effect, and I pushed back and then turned off notifications.

I’ve been suspicious of calls for civility ever since I realized they most often come from conservative white people, so I won’t ask for civility here. But since I can’t go back in the political TARDIS to 2016 and get my Bernieful neighbors to respect women’s accomplishments and help us save America from Trump, I can ask them for that respect now. Stop erasing women’s accomplishments, and stop pretending that misogyny is anybody’s revolution, that it does anything but support the status quo. For America to prosper, to get all of the freedom and inclusiveness our country is supposed to stand for, you have to stop using the comment section as a way to put women in our place. Nobody signed up for Troll Farm Hate Training, it was forced upon us. It is way past time to let that training go.