On This Day in History: November 3

Nixon and the "Silent Majority"

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November 3, 2020 was fucking tense, and it stayed tense for another four days before the U.S. presidential election results were confirmed. It was the same day Trumpanzees thought the “silent majority” was gonna rise up and vote en masse to keep the apricot assmonkey in power so he could usher in the apocalypse. Interestingly, exactly 51 years before, the term silent majority was popularized by another shitty president.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: November

Prior to the 2016 election, when the fascist fuckwipe began holding his racist rallies, many held up signs saying, “The silent majority stands with Trump.” This was prompted by Trump saying at one such rally in the summer of 2015, “The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take our country back.” Turns out, those alabaster assholes were right. There were more of them than we knew, and dastardly Donnie became president by a margin of negative three million votes. Fucking Electoral College bullshit.

On November 3, 1969, the term came into popular usage when President Nixon was giving a live television address asking for support for his actions regarding the war in Vietnam. He said, “to you, the great silent majority of Americans, I ask for your support.” It was a not-so-subtle way of speaking directly to the “patriotic” Americans who weren’t currently protesting the shit out of the war. It was painting the anti-war crowd as unpatriotic, being purposely divisive to rally his right-wing base. It was classic divide and conquer.

The term refers to those who hold certain beliefs but do not express them publicly. With his speech Nixon alleged that most people did support him and his actions regarding Vietnam, and that the anti-war group was just a loud minority and we should just ignore those traitors. And that’s what Trumpers believed: those traitors who vilified their orangutan Jesus were but small in number, and most were silently supportive and going to deliver him a landslide victory.

Considering all the gun-totin’, truck-drivin’, horn-honkin’, slur-spewin’, traffic-blockin’, dictionary definition of “loud and obnoxious” brainless invertebrates we witnessed, I’m taking issue with their use of the word “silent.”

Over and over since Nixon first said it the term has been used by right-wing politicians to convince people to ignore dissent, to make their critics seem a deranged and vocal minority that don’t represent the “true” beliefs of the majority. I’ve seen it from the bootlicking Trump-lovers invading my social media pages. The term silent majority was frequently referenced to proclaim Trump’s impending victory. It’s a continuation of the divide and conquer that, sadly, has often been very effective. Nixon was reelected in 1972 in a landslide.

But Trump’s supporters weren’t right in 2020. People voted as if their lives depended on it, and Biden/Harris won the popular vote 51.3% to 46.9% and took the Electoral College 306 to 232. Alas, the Trumpers were just as obnoxious in defeat.

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