All white people are white supremacists. All Mexicans are illegal. All Asians are bad drivers. All women belong in the kitchen.

Ouch.

Any of those ring a bell? Maybe spark some anger?

How do you think Donald Trump supporters feel when people do the same thing to them?
All Trump supporters are stupid, racists, bigots, muslim-haters, wall-building, self-righteous idiots.

Ouch.

We absolutely must end this ridiculous political double-standard and immediately start tolerating the people we expect to be tolerant of others.
“I have been in several situations where I have mentioned a conservative idea or made a positive remark about President Trump, and been attacked because of it,” said California Lutheran Univeristy’s College Republicans Executive Director Hannah Nandor in an email interview.

It seems that in 2017, everyone should love everyone—everyone should tolerate everyone else—but what if you have the wrong opinion? Then it’s totally acceptable to ridicule, openly criticize and even discriminate against that person.
How can that be fair? It’s not.

We wouldn’t ostracize a queer person because they voted “no” on Prop 8. We wouldn’t openly mock a woman who voted to fund Planned Parenthood. And we certainly wouldn’t shun an African American who voted for Barack Obama.

Okay, so Trump may be a volatile, inexperienced and a potentially racist president who has said some horrendous things about Hispanics and Muslims, but one thing needs to be set straight: you are NOT the politician you voted for. Voting for a candidate does not mean that you have to believe everything that that candidate believes.

I voted for Hillary Clinton, but do I think the U.S. should raise the minimum wage as she proposed? No. But I still voted for her. Not because I agreed with every little thing she stood for, but because I definitely did not agree with Trump, and I, personally, believed voting for a third party would have been a throw-away vote.

“[Some people] don’t really stop and think that there’s a whole variety of different opinions within the Republican Party,” said Stone Hagman-Lawson, vice president of College Republicans at Cal Lutheran. “And that they shouldn’t be generalized just because of what the president is doing.”

According to an article titled, “Why did people vote for Donald Trump? Voters Explain” posted on The Guardian, Trump voters said that they chose him on Election Day because
“Trump is exactly what you get, with Hillary you can’t know what’s real,” and they did not want the Clinton legacy to continue in the White House.”

One American voter, quoted in that same article, said she cried when she left the polls because she strongly dislikes Trump, but she voted for him because they shared similar values.

Maybe the population interviewed here was a little small, but none of these people seem to be white supremacists waiting to build a wall in order to keep immigrants out.
These people, along with so many other Trump supporters, are not terrible people-they just voted for a man who many view as a terrible person.
They want a lower minimum wage, they want a businessman to run the country, they want tighter immigration laws to dig this nation out of its 20 trillion dollar debt (and counting).

“We are students just like everyone else,” said Nandor in an email interview. “We are normal people who study, have jobs, hang out on the weekends and have fun. Our political beliefs should not cause us to be looked at as hard-hearted people, or objects of hatred.”
Sure, some Trump supporters are racists, but the same can be said for certain Clinton supporters, too. Don’t assume something about a person just because of their political views. It’s time to move forward,  to agree to disagree on who should or should not have been president, because conflict does not drive this nation forward.

Rachael Balcom
Reporter