Hate me if you want. Troll me if you must. History has its eyes on you (thank you, Lin-Manuel Miranda), and future generations will not accept your feeble excuses. I would like to tell you some reasons why.

You claim you are not misogynist*, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, or xenophobic, and you don’t approve of lots of things he has said, but:

1. You actually believed he would bring back manufacturing jobs.

He wouldn’t even if he could, and he can’t. Democrats and immigrants didn’t take your jobs. Technology and globalization did, and they will continue to. Also, look at his business record. He is no friend to the worker or the small business owner. He doesn’t care about you. If you did not know these things, you allowed yourself to be uninformed to a degree unacceptable in a citizen of a democracy. This falls into the category of Things You Knew Or Should Have Known, hereafter abbreviated as TYKOSHK.

2. You feel very strongly about a particular issue, such as abortion, and you voted purely based on the candidates’ current professed stances on that issue.

I sympathize. I probably don’t agree with you on that issue, but I respect your position. Nevertheless, you have chosen to prioritize that issue over the lives of your fellow citizens in the USA and civilians in other countries. If you really believe that whatever Hillary Clinton might have allowed to happen is worse than hate crimes and war crimes, both of which Donald Trump has implicitly and often explicitly supported, then I suppose you can still be proud of yourself, but history won’t be.

3. Hillary Clinton is corrupt.

Hillary Clinton is no more corrupt than the average politician, and less corrupt than many you find perfectly acceptable. You have fallen for hysterical propaganda. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is extremely corrupt, certainly more than anyone else who has ever been elected President of the United States. You did not bother to find that out, and/or did not believe it when people, including Republicans, even conservative Republicans, told you so. Again, TYKOSHK.

4. You didn’t believe he really meant those things, or you “just don’t like” Hillary Clinton.

These are just stupid. How old are you?

To my fellow liberals who are wringing their hands about our failure of empathy for the white blue-collar worker, stop it. I certainly care about them, as do the vast majority of us, but I care about other people too. I am sorry it is getting harder and harder to find decent paying jobs, and I believe we can and should do more about that than we have been doing, but their jobs are not more important than other people’s lives. President Obama has tried to help them. Hillary Clinton would have tried to help them. The fact that they do not believe that does not justify their putting this abomination into the White House. Just stop.

*I intentionally put “misogynist” first, because it is so often put last, or not included at all. Misogynists hate more people than any of the others on the list do, with the possible exception of the most extreme xenophobes. I think they deserve to be acknowledged first.

I wrote this while furious, as a stream of consciousness rant, but I have just reread it, and I stand by every word. I am posting it.