Why I’m #StillWithHer, and You Should Be Too
Trump could drown a kitten and never draw the tsunami of seething hatred Clinton earns for just speaking her mind.
Hillary’s book What Happened is about to come out, and the result is entirely predictable. Hillary will be called a loser and told to go home and shut up. She will be accused of “tearing apart the party” for criticizing the left, being “petty” and “unable to let go of a grudge” for criticizing the right, and “whining” about a loss that “is no one’s fault but her own” for criticizing the actors who cost her the election. The media will gleefully trot out her 30% approval rating, dig up old conspiracies for one last round of the slander game, and pat themselves on the back for what a great job they do of trashing Hillary Clinton. The main narrative will be “graceless Hillary, unable to put the election behind her, writes petty screed to try to blame anyone but herself for her loss.” It’s so easy to write that many pundits didn’t even need to read the book before offering their opinions.
There’s a determined effort by Hillary’s adversaries to push the false story that her loss was entirely her fault for being such a loathsome candidate. It’s easy to write Hillary off as a loser, and even many of her own supporters have said they wish she would just sit down, shut up and accept the slander. I refuse to surrender to this insanity. Hillary is as far from a loser as you can get. No politician in history has dealt with the adversity she’s dealt with, the monstrous unfairness and horrifying cruelty she’s been subjected to, and persevered through it all to rise to such great heights. Now she’s suffered the greatest defeat of her career, and you want to abandon her? Hillary has every right to defend herself, to push back against the false stories and conspiracies, to put in writing what really happened. If you think Hillary is a whiny loser, you must not have a full appreciation for all she’s endured, for her whole story.
Right-wing media, including Fox News and right-wing talk radio such as the Rush Limbaugh Show, saw its birth in the mid-90s as a weapon against the Clinton administration. Their favorite target, though, was not Bill but Hillary. She was called ugly, stupid, shrill, Godless, and all manner of misogynistic names like bitch, cunt, whore, and so on. She was assaulted daily by an avalanche of false accusations and conspiracy theories. Many were just downright disgusting, like the accusations she was a lesbian (and accompanying explicit speculation about her sexual practices) or that Chelsea was the product of her cheating on Bill.
Perhaps the most disgusting of all was the Vince Foster case. A good friend from early in Hillary’s career, Foster joined the administration only to be tortured mercilessly by the right-wing media. The emotional stress took its toll, and he ended up committing suicide. In his suicide note, he blamed such treatment, saying
“I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.”
The right-wing media’s appropriate reaction was to blame Hillary for Foster’s death, speculating that she must have killed him for “knowing the truth” about her evil deeds. Imagine if your best friend committed suicide and the media was saturated with stories that you killed him. What kind of emotional toll would that take on you? Such media crucifixion was too much for Foster to handle, yet Hillary has for decades persevered with grace and poise.
I could go on all day about the loathsome treatment Hillary has suffered over her long career, treatment that no other politician in history has had to endure. I could take you through the Lewinsky saga, her Senate career, her first run, Benghazi, and so on. But let’s fast-foward to the election, where we saw even more of these cruel, false allegations. Stories about Hillary murdering those about to “expose” her, being on her deathbed and replaced with a body double, and running a child sex ring reached mainstream credibility.
What was unique this time around was that the conspiratorial hatred came not just from the right, as it always had, but from the left too. While a certain segment of the far left had always loathed the Clintons for their third-way politics, the rabid, seething, widespread hatred of 2016 was entirely new. An unholy alliance of Russian political operatives, Bernie Sanders and his mob, clickbait media outlets like The Young Turks, and fake news profiteers came together to pick up where Hannity and Limbaugh had left off. They didn’t just hit her with political conspiracies, such as Bernie’s accusation that she was secretly bought and paid for by big banks or the anti-war left’s favorite, that she was personally responsible for thousands of deaths in the middle east. They also degraded her appearance, mocked her voice and habits, threatened and attacked her daughter, labeled her husband a serial rapist, and accused her of sleeping with her female assistant.
The unholy alliance was so strong that discussion on left-wing groups began to resemble the comments sections of right-wing YouTube videos. Everyone who supported Clinton on the internet during 2016 shares a familiar experience: We’d try to post pro-Hillary articles, or at least discuss her policies, in left-wing spaces, only to be met by horrifying comments like “she’s so ugly Bill must have impregnated her with a syringe”, or impossibly disingenuous talking points like “I will never vote for that mass-murderer, the dead children of Libya would never forgive me”, or threats against us and our friends, families, and careers, simply for supporting her. After twenty years, the great dream of right-wing media had been achieved: Hillary hatred had blanketed the globe.
Clinton’s strength endured and this unholy alliance was not enough to defeat her. Neither was a witch-hunt within the FBI, aggressively pushed by a slobbering, obsessed media that talked about her e-mails more than all her policies combined. The fifth-column alliance of Bernie’s mob and the Green Party, which worked tirelessly to convince progressives not to vote (although they’ll today deny it) was also not enough. Even a massive operation by our greatest foreign enemy to disrupt the election and destroy her was not enough. In the end, Hillary Clinton won more votes than her opponent, but was defeated by that 200-year-old adversary of democracy, the electoral college.
This is the true story of the election, the true story of why Hillary lost. It’s so insane to me that people think Hillary is a “loser”, or that she has no right to complain or defend herself. What she lost was in no way a fair fight. Her opponent openly allied himself with a hostile foreign government. The “objective” media repeated Republican propaganda as fact on-air. Her policies were ignored and her protests criticized as weakness. Her supporters were mercilessly, viciously harassed and bullied into silence (I still endure this today for writing these articles). Trump got to label the media “fake news” for simply saying “Trump said this” or “Trump did that”, but Hillary was told to sit down and shut up while the media speculated whether she was secretly dying, whether she was a puppet for Goldman Sachs… what kind of election was this?
It would be easy to accept the talking point pushed by the right, the left, and the mainstream media, that Hillary’s loss was entirely due to her own failings and she should have nothing to say other than “accepting responsibility for her loss”, which she apparently needs to do over and over again until the day she dies. It would be easy to just let go, to sacrifice Hillary’s story and her legacy to the hostile media’s determined effort to rewrite history. But I’m not going to lie down and accept defeat. I’ll speak the truth even if I’m the only one left. I’m #StillWithHer.
