Donald Trump is the man who has filled newsfeeds throughout the year and provided new stories for the media almost every day, by doing just one thing- talking.
Trump is arguably the worst President elect in U.S history. He has insulted almost every minority group on his road to the White House, from homosexuals to African Americans and most of all, Muslims, Mexicans and women.
His campaign in this race has been based around the public’s fears and how to best play on them to gain support.
In the beginning he played on the fears of the increasing poverty line in the US by blaming the Mexicans and other immigrants for coming into the country and taking jobs that he believed belonged to American citizens.
He then moved on from this and began to speak about the increased threat of terror within the country and labelled Muslims as a direct threat to US safety.
Finally, and most recently, Trump was the centre of slurs aimed towards and deemed slanderous in nature to women.
“I just start kissing them. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they just let you do it.” This is just one of the spine tingling, creepy things Trump is taped saying in a leaked video by the Washington post.
He has also been questioned on tweets in which he calls women ‘fat pigs’ and other things that are, in general, degrading to women.
How has he got away with this? He has played the ‘Freedom of Speech’ card and attacked political correctness.
But while completely and wholeheartedly disagreeing with almost everything he has said and done on his path to the Oval office, this is one issue where ‘the Donald’ is correct and is in actual fact helping society as a whole.
Political correctness is a culture within itself. The main outlook of people who abide by its laws is that you should not say anything that offends a person, a group, a person’s beliefs etc..
In general this theory sounds fair. After all, nobody should feel hated or afraid because they’re gay or they believe in a certain God.
However, those who take political correctness to the far left and believe hate speech should be banned, books with slanderous terms in them should be outlawed and people like Donald Trump should not be allowed airtime are actually not the left-wing liberal, forward thinking people they believe themselves to be. In actual fact they’re the opposite.
By banning these books, or stopping these people from expressing their views you are actually pathing a way for anybody doing it, depending on what they are offended by. Offense is not a societal feeling, it’s subjective to each individual.
In the late 1960s right through to the early 1990s activists campaigned for equal rights for women, human rights for blacks and an ending of inequality, which for a large part of the populous at the time would have been seen as offensive to the ‘conservative society’.
Therefore, you have to question what would have happened if they had banned ‘hate speech’ or banned certain books that caused offense.
Instead of sheltering ourselves from these people we as a collective should be standing up and highlighting their absurdity, arguing with them and educating them.
Donald Trump is the best example of how this works better than censorship. There has never been a campaign against a presidential candidate like the one against Trump and this is due in large part to his Freedom of Speech.
Instead of banning Trump from saying all the insane things he has said or sitting back and getting offended, people should have come together, as a collective and highlighted his absurd nature.
Although some of them are, not all of them are and that is something we must accept. But, instead of calling racist, sexist and homophobic and labelling them all the same, we should have argued with them and showed them Trump was wrong.
Who is ever convinced of your argument after you insult them?
We, who live in an age where there are so many platforms to express ourselves did nothing to stop Trump being elected. We shared and liked videos from anti-Trump pages but did we educate the pro-Trump pages? No. We blocked them.
We block those we disagree with. This is one of the biggest dangers of the world we now live in. We can instantly choose not to see views that we disagree with.
We can instantly censor views that does not go along with the status quo and now we go through life believing one thing. We’re right, we’re always right, and anyone who says otherwise can stay off our newsfeed.
What is the result of this mindset? Donald Trump is now the President Elect of the United States of America.
Enda Coll
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