I regret voting for Hillary

Voting for Hillary Clinton was the dumbest thing I ever did. Here's why:

1. She's every bit as morally questionable as the New God Donald Trump or Saint Bernie Sanders. There's a reason people keep bringing up Benghazi and email with her. Bill Clinton is still creepy and she constantly defended him.
2. Very few straight men would admit to voting for her unless they supported Bernie first. Hillary is a gay icon. She may be the ultimate gay icon. Voting for Hillary is up there with having sex with a man or watching Glee as the gayest thing a man can do. I don't have anything against gay people, but I'm straight. I don't want to be mistaken for gay. Especially not in a very conservative area. The only men I knew who supported Hillary over both Bernie and Trump were gay men, and I only knew one gay man who didn't support her. Thank God that I had a girlfriend then. This is also why I'm against Oprah running for president. If you can imagine people saying "Yas slay queen!" to a candidate, that person will not win straight men over.
3. I'm not a feminist. I like traditional gender roles. I'm attracted to very sweet, very feminine women. Women like that do not vote for Hillary. Female Hillary fans are loud, obnoxious, pushy, and outright mean. They're the kind of women who think it's okay to beat up men. I'm single again. I don't want to date a Hillary fan. I still think Trump sucks, but I like his fans better. Voting for Hillary means siding with Lena Dunham and Leslie Jones and other repulsive women. Nice women don't vote for Benghazi Email. They may vote for the New God, they may vote for St. Bernie Christ, but they don't vote for Benghazi Email.
4. Her fans, who have "come out" (pardon the pun) after the election, are just as obnoxious as Bernie fans. The Democrats split into two factions - the feminist/gay side represented by Hillary and the populist/secular side represented by Bernie. A lot of moderates who hated Trump supported the radical leftist Saint Bernie Christ because they were straight men, or even straight women who weren't total jerks, who could sense that Hillary Benghazi Email wasn't for their kind. You might argue there's also the racial minority side, but they're locked into voting for whoever the Democrats put up because a lot of Republicans hate racial minorities. Which brings me to this:
5. I am in the most conservative demographic in the country. When people hate and bash Republicans, they hate and bash me, no matter who I vote for. A lot of people on the left hate my guts and wish I would die. I'm locked into voting for Republicans for the same reason a lot of black people are locked into voting for Democrats: A lot of Democrats hate rural white Southerners, especially if we're male, working-class, and religious. A lot of my problem with Bernie was he rallied a lot of the people who hate me the most, but my people overwhelmingly hate Hillary. Frankly her fans are no better. A lot of them think I'm an overprivileged patriarchal oppressor who needs to be castrated. I don't want to vote for a party that hates me. 
6. I think "Christians for Trump" are retarded. But I think liberal atheists are even more retarded. I'm fine with atheists as long as they aren't leftists. If I was atheist I would support Trump. I'm still in a super-conservative demographic anyway. Republicans look out for me and my kind. At this point, Democrats don't.
7. I thought a lot of Republicans would cross over and vote for Hillary, like David Brooks did. However, David Brooks is an old rich New Yorker who doesn't have to deal with a vote damaging his reputation or his sense of self. Turns out a lot of Democrats, especially Bernie fans, crossed over and voted for Trump. A lot of them were straight men who didn't want to have sex with a man in the voting booth. Very few Republicans voted for Hillary because she's Benghazi Email. She's been their Public Enemy #1 for decades.

I've started reading libertarian stuff, like from fee.org. I don't agree with libertarians 100% of the time, but they're the least worst thing I know of in the US. They're about the only group I don't sort of hate. They're the only group who accepts everyone. That means a lot to me. I still don't like Trump. I can't support him because of my Christian faith. Democrats are completely off limits to me for the reasons I outlined above. However, Libertarians will accept me. It's a nice way for me to be against Trump without becoming a liberal.

If you restrict it to the two main (dumb) parties, Republicans are more accepting than Democrats. A Republican atheist wrote about how Republican groups were much more open to her than atheist groups were, since most atheist groups are run by secular humanist idiots who can't handle that some people aren't left-wing. And likewise, the Democrats are becoming less and less accepting. Sojourners, long known as a group of "progressive evangelicals", have started bashing white evangelicals in their articles. I can't even read Sojourners any more. It's as bad as any secular leftist site now. They used to try to get people like me, now they hate me too.

"Evangelical" is a hate term at this point for me and my kind. It doesn't matter if I don't consider myself one. After Trump killed Jesus won the election, a secular friend of mine who supported St. Bernie Christ went off on me about how "evangelicals" ruined everything. This same friend always gets mad when I complain about how the left doesn't like me. That's like if I was a black John McCain voter in 2008, and a white friend of mine went off to me about how "colored people"* ruined everything by voting for Obama, and that same friend got mad whenever I complained about experiencing racism. It HURTS. Those people don't like me and my kind. It also hurt when another friend of mine was stunned I attended church, because he'd always assumed I was atheist or agnostic because I wasn't a Republican. At that point, I realized I needed to never bash Trump in public again without also bashing Democrats.

There's a brilliant article called "Why Trump could murder someone and people would still support him" by an author going by David Hume. His main point is that identity means everything and character means nothing. I'd go further and say that the actual policies mean nothing either. Republicans and Democrats have mutually switched sides on issues and everyone went with what their party said. If I could do it all over again I'd vote for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian. Partly because I like some of his ideas, but mainly because it's better for my identity. Identity is important. I hate it but it's true. And for the vast majority of Americans, there aren't a lot of voting options that go with their identity. I actually wonder if I would have switched over to Democrats if I was female, or gay, or lived in a large city outside the South, or whatever. It doesn't matter. I am who I am and I can't change it.

By the way, yes, I do read secular conservative blogs. I still can't stand people conflating Jesus and Trump, or bashing Jesus because they don't like Trump, but if you take Jesus out of the equation I'm fine with people supporting Trump.

* I still can't bring myself to type the N-word, even as an example

Red Tribe and Blue Tribe

Read this (very long) post from Scott Alexander, I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, and its (very long) sequel, Five Case Studies on Politicization, and you'll understand most of the problems with the world.

There's definitely a "red tribe" and a "blue tribe". Red tribe is cultural conservatives and blue tribe is cultural liberals. And I fit in with the red tribe almost to a tee. I'm from rural Mississippi, I'm Christian, I was homeschooled, I'm a teetotaler, etc. I'm probably the most conservative demographic in America. And each tribe has an outgroup: the red tribe has both the blue tribe and outsiders, but somehow the blue tribe made the red tribe the only outgroup. His eventual conclusion is that liberals think conservatives are worse than ISIS at a gut level. Sadly, this is a lot of why I'm not liberal any more. I don't want to hang out with a crowd that thinks I'm worse than ISIS. And unfortunately, a lot of the left looks down on me because I'm from the wrong part of the country, I have the wrong accent, I go to the wrong church, I do the wrong things that the wrong people enjoy. No matter how liberal my political views were, they still saw that I was the wrong kind of person. Being a white evangelical homeschooled Mississippian on the left is like being a gay Muslim Mexican on the right.

The absolute worst thing for Christianity is for it to be identified with the red tribe. It's almost impossible to evangelize to blue tribe people. For this reason, I'd consider people like Nadia Bolz-Weber to be very important - she's a Christian pastor and about as blue tribe as they come. Meanwhile, the red tribe people are already sure they're Christian because they were born into the right family or they had a religious experience once when they were younger. It doesn't matter how they act. Most of my blue tribe Christian friends have quit the faith. They don't act very different from secular blue tribe people and there's not much incentive for them to stay if they live in a blue tribe bubble. If they want to stay in religion, they tend to go to more blue tribe-friendly religions like Wicca.

It's also horrible, like I mentioned above, for liberals trying to explain their views to people like me. There are some who accept me and don't look down on me, and I respect them a lot. But in my experience, most of them do look down on me and everything I love. I don't want to live in a big city, I don't want to eat organic everything, I don't want to see Hamilton, etc. And as I'll go into detail in the future, I hate snark.

One of the worst things about this election is that my red tribe, the people who think and act like me, went almost wholesale for Donald "Antichrist" Trump. If I was part of the blue tribe it wouldn't hurt so bad. I wish the red tribe got the sensible candidate and the blue tribe got the complete moron, like if it had been Marco Rubio vs. Bernie Sanders. Of course, most blue tribe people I know wanted Bernie anyway. Ironically they're the same people who wouldn't shut up about Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump all the time. And they were mad about having to vote for uncool Hillary instead of cool edgy Bernie.

Seriously, Scott Alexander's posts put a lot of my thoughts into words way better than I could. He comes from a completely different perspective but he comes to the same conclusions. Read them if you have the time, I don't know how to summarize them.