On November 8th, 2016, Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States. Along with a Republican House and Senate majority, to boot.

The world around me is still hurting and reeling from the shock.

Make no mistake, I am scared. I am scared of the policies and executive orders and legal decisions to come that may strip away many civil rights and send the environment down a worse track faster than anyone expected, and I’m barely in any of the groups that have the most to lose. I have no idea what it’s like to go through this as any of you. I am sorry.

But I am also scared that this fear is driving my friends and my community away from talking to the people we need to talk to if we want to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

I’ve heard a lot of people vilify Trump and Trump supporters. Anecdotally, so have others. It’s an understandable reaction, but a fragile one. 60 million people voted for Trump. Quoting Wait But Why, “[P]eople with kids and parents and jobs and dogs and calendars on their wall with piano lessons and doctors appointments and birthday parties written in the squares. Full, three-dimensional people who voted for what they hope will be a better future for themselves and their family.”

People voted for Trump. Why?

Here’s FiveThirtyEight profiling a few blue-collar voters. The Washington Post interviewing an author who spent a lot of time in rural Wisconsin. The New York Times on women. If the articles’ reasons for voting Trump could be summarized in one word, it would certainly be “economy”.

But then FiveThirtyEight tempers it a little bit with this reminder that Trump’s supporters are on average more well-off than others. Here’s The New Yorker visiting a bunch of Trump rallies. SupChina discusses first-generation Chinese immigrants supporting Trump and racism is a bullet point there, but apparently it’s partly rallied around rap lyrics about robbery that advise to “find a Chinese neighborhood” to steal from, so…? I am not going to go any deeper into this rabbit hole. Then here’s Mother Jones arguing against the economy being a big factor at all, and Vox saying it is about racial resentment. Here’s Bloomberg on the Clinton campaign’s failure to persuade and The Federalist on “hyper-liberal late-night comedy” and The Washington Times on Trump’s optimism. I could find hundreds more out there just by Googling, and so could you; and chances are if you’re enough of a voracious reader to be reading my humble blog, you’ve already read some of these.

It’s complicated.

This post’s topic might be the most controversial thing I’ve posted here ever. I hope the points I want to make aren’t.

One of the excuses for not blogging I came up with and then deleted while rambling about not blogging was that I’m getting more feelings about real-world real-person issues, things that people take heated positions on — it’s not topics like what food I ate or what games I’m playing in fourth grade any more — and my identity is pretty public here, so who knows what’ll happen. Oh well. I’m probably just paranoid.

It’s also delayed, as the articles I’m talking about are old; the latest two news items are the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and then the police shooting at the Dallas rally. That was also really sad, but I don’t think I have anything insightful to say about it. Let me point you to the MIT Admissions post, “Black Lives Matter”, and then for something a bit more optimistic out of a huge range of possible choices, this Medium article.

Although after I started writing this post, the story about a Muslim man preventing an ISIS suicide bomber came out, so now this is mildly relevant again. Anyway, I guess the delay is no different from how I put up life posts weeks after the life event happens. So today, I bring you two old news articles about Islam that my friends shared and discussed:

• Green: Is Islam Responsible For The Orlando Nightclub Shooting?
• King: ISIS terrorists aren’t Muslims — they’re just evil men hell-bent on carnage and destruction

The second one first, whose argument is, to be frank, weak. I think this piece from The Atlantic by Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants”, is a better-researched overview of ISIS while still being pretty readable. One caveat is that it’s somewhat old. But its central claim is quite the opposite: