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It still makes my blood boil.

I was in my conservative-leaning club Young Americans for Freedom at Utah State University. We were discussing project assignments for group members as part of an activism event on campus. One of the assignments was baking cupcakes.

I think it would be better if the girls take care of that, said the male vice president of our group. Thats more of a lady thing anyway.

Really? Baking cupcakes is only for ladies? I respected the vice president, and we agreed on many things, but his remarks demonstrate a pervasive problem on our side of the political spectrum.

Misogyny continues to be prevalent in conservative spaces, and its presence is preventing women from feeling welcomed in those circles. Unfortunately, people on the right may be waking up to this too late.

During the 2018 midterms, The Hill, a center-right news organization, hosted pollsters Anna Greenberg and Dan Cox. Both warned that Republicans are losing young women to the Democratic party permanently. Hardly a feminist, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, too, warned his fellow Republicans in 2016 that they had a suburban women problem.

According to a 2019 Pew Research survey, only 45% of Americans think or personally hope the U.S. will have a woman president in their lifetime. The percentage gap widens by party. Only 26% of Republican women and 22% of Republican men say they hope to see a woman in the Oval Office. Nearly 70% of Democratic women hope for the same.

During the 2016 presidential race, when the country faced the possibility of having Hillary Clinton as chief executive, reporters asked supporters of Donald Trump how they felt about a woman president. I dont believe there should be a woman president, one female Trump supporter said in an interview. I believe in Christianity.

A female has more hormones; she could start a war in 10 seconds another woman said. Whenever I think of president, I think of man, its a mans job.

According to Utah Women and Leadership Project director Susan Madsen, these comments arent surprising at all. In Europe and the United States, when people are asked to draw a picture of an ideal leader, 75% of participants draw a tall, white man, she told me in an interview. As a result, she added, women struggle with seeing other women move up the ladder in leadership positions.

Even women already in leadership positions seem to have this problem. Conservative commentator Ann Coulter has long held the position that women shouldnt be able to vote. Rising conservative star Candace Owens asked in 2018, Do you guys think something bio-chemically happens to women who dont marry and/or have children? Responses ranged from those women will be miserable to they are crazy.

Matt Walsh, a Daily Wire host, has made similar disparaging comments about women in the past. He has said married women who choose not to have children are selfish, and women who stay single will die lonely and miserable.

Walsh also had an interesting viewpoint about President-elect Joe Bidens decision to have an all-female communications team: Every press release is going to be 95 sentences longer than it needs to be and include dozens of details that have nothing to do with the point.

We cannot say we want to appeal to women when we hold these opinions. We cannot prop up women while simultaneously tearing them down.

Conservatives are losing women to the other side. If we dont change our tone, we will lose an essential part of our voting bloc permanently.

Thats bad for women. Thats bad for Republicans. Thats bad for us all.

Taylor Cripe is a senior at Utah State University majoring in political science and journalism.

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Guest opinion: The GOP is losing women and needs to change its tone - Deseret News

Mike Cazalas|Northwest Florida Daily News

Leslie Martin Tucker's "time to move on" letter is boilerplate Democrat gaslighting drivel with boring dictionary citations, the obligatory non sequitur comparing Trump to Hitler, and the admonition to Trump supporters, her political opponents, to move on.

Putting the letter into context, if just ONE Obama-Biden-Clinton supporter can provide ONE single reference to ONE single time they moved on after Trumps election, well take her outreach as genuine and worth the digital newspaper on which it was printed.

Its been reported as factthat president Obama was briefed on efforts to infiltrate Trumps campaign using The FBIs massive and powerful resources; liberals label this a debunked conspiracy theory.

Gaslighting at its best.

Its been reported as fact, that FISA warrants to snoop on members of Trumps inner circle were secured with FALSE evidence to provide probable cause.

Fired FBI director Jim J. Edgar Comey laughingly told a friendly audience how he infiltrated Trumps inner circle, placing two agents in a room with the incoming national security advisor Mike Flynn to set a perjury trap.

This was Comeys attempt at accepting the elections outcome, right?

Fifty-six witnesses testified under oath, behind closed doors, in classified sessions, that none of them had any evidence that Trump colluded with Russia.

Many of those same people then went on panels every night telling whoever was listening that the evidence OF collusion was hiding in plain sight, for all to see.

More liberal, democrat gaslighting, with nobody ever put on those same panels to APOLOGIZE and move on.

As recently as Fall of 2019, Hillary Clinton said, Trump knows hes an illegitimate president.

Shes the living example of moving on, isnt she?

Seventy-four million of Ms. Tuckers fellow Americans will NOT move on, will NOT be muzzled, will NOT take this daily rhythm of abuse forever.

William J. Roberts, Fort Walton Beach

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LETTER: Democrats supported their candidates to the end - The Northwest Florida Daily News

The Silicon Valley exodus is real.

Since the onset of the pandemic, billionaires, venture capitalists, and even major tech firms like HP and Oracle have started to flee the Bay Area. What at first seemed like a one-off response to our new remote-work reality has become a trend: Tech's elite are leaving, and they're citing a mixture of high taxes, state regulations, and a homogenous, liberal culture as their reasons for decamping to Texas, Colorado, or Florida.

While the departures of Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and Keith Rabois are new, the reasons that seem to have nudged them out the door date back years. The pandemic may have spurred a migration away from the West Coast, but the writing has been on the wall as far back as 2017.

Now, as we approach 2021, it seems that a long-simmering culture clash is finally coming to a head.

Read more: The tech elite are abandoning Silicon Valley in droves because of 'monoculture' and high taxes here's where they're headed

While it's likely that facets of Silicon Valley's culture had been starting to splinter for several years prior to 2017, the most public instance of a culture clash coincides, roughly, with the beginning of President Donald Trump's presidency.

In September 2016, Palmer Luckey, then the 24-year-old millionaire cofounder of virtual reality company Oculus, was discovered to be the main benefactor behind an anti-Hillary Clinton meme group. By that point, Luckey had already sold Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion and launched the Oculus Rift, the company's first major product.

According to reporting by The Daily Beast, Luckey had been financing a group called Nimble America, which described itself online as having proven "that s---posting is powerful and meme magic is real." The group had put up a billboard in Pittsburgh with Clinton's face that read "Too big to jail."

Luckey told The Daily Beast at the time that funding the group "sounded like a real jolly good time."

After the report came out, several female employees resigned from Facebook in protest and Luckey stayed out of the spotlight at Oculus events. By March 2017, he left Facebook in subsequent interviews, Luckey has said he was fired.

Luckey's departure was viewed, by some, as a politically motivated firing. In 2018, Sen. Ted Cruz asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during a Senate hearing why Luckey was fired, implying it was over his politics, which Zuckerberg denied.

While that was the first and most public instance of ideological differences becoming a sticking point in Silicon Valley, it wasn't the last.

The same year, Google engineer James Damore made headlines for writing an anti-diversity manifesto that spread like wildfire through Google's ranks. Damore argued that the search giant shouldn't be aiming to increase racial and gender diversity among its employees, but should instead aim for "ideological diversity." Damore also argued that the gender gap in tech is due to biological difference between men and women, not sexism.

The memo resulted in Damore's firing, but it also sparked a groundswell of support among white, male engineers at Google who felt that conversations about diversity were offensive to white men and conservatives. Around the same time, far-right communities online began revealing the identities of Google employees who identified as part of the LGBTQ community. Damore then sued Google, alleging the company discriminated against white, conservative males (Damore later dropped the suit.)

Both Luckey and Damore ended up without a job. But the reactions to their situations and the support they both received highlighted that there was a growing population of tech workers fed up with the region's culture. At the time, Business Insider's Steve Kovach argued that Silicon Valley's "liberal bubble" had burst and that the culture wars had begun.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Patrick Pleul/picture alliance via Getty Images

More than three years later, it seems as though that undercurrent of dissatisfaction is coinciding with the secondary effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

In years past, those who felt disgruntled, overruled, or otherwise disenfranchised by Silicon Valley's predominately liberal culture had few options. They could leave, of course, but the tech world was still firmly rooted in the Bay Area. Those who wanted a career in tech still felt like they needed to put up with skyrocketing rents and hours-long commutes.

But when offices shut down and major tech companies asked their employees to work remotely, there was no longer as strong a tether to the Bay Area. Some companies, like Twitter and Slack, freed their workers to live wherever they wanted with no expectation to ever return to their San Francisco offices. Others, like Facebook, have said employees may work remotely forever with manager approval.

Read more: An inside look at how Slack is planning to readjust salaries and retrain managers so it can let employees work from home forever

These decisions seem to have encouraged a larger shift among Silicon Valley's elite.

Palantir has moved its headquarters to Colorado and HP and Oracle moved to Texas. Palantir CEO Alex Karp told Axios in May that the company wanted to move away from the West Coast and described what he saw as an "increasing intolerance and monoculture" in the tech industry. Karp, for his part, had been living in New Hampshire for much of the pandemic.

Since then, venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have moved to Austin Lonsdale tweeted that the region was "more tolerant of ideological diversity," and Musk made the move after warring with California over the state's coronavirus lockdown measures.

Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison has left the region for Lanai, the island he mostly owns in Hawaii, and investor Keith Rabois is decamping for Miami, citing high taxes in San Francisco and a political culture he abhors as his reasons for leaving.

And of course, all of these moves follow venture capitalist and PayPal founder Peter Thiel's famous departure for Los Angeles in 2018, a move seemingly spurred by his dislike of Silicon Valley's liberal ideology.

Notably, Lonsdale, Musk, Rabois, and Karp all have ties to Thiel and PayPal, and Ellison is close friends with Musk and sits on Tesla's board.

So while the wave of departures from arguably the most famous tech hub in the world are, for better or worse, being spurred by the pandemic, the exodus didn't being out of the blue it's a direct result of political and ideological differences that have been building just below the surface for years.

Originally posted here:
How the Silicon Valley exodus relates to ongoing culture wars - Business Insider - Business Insider

In congratulating president-elect Joe Biden on Monday, former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton publicly called for the Electoral College to be abolished and advocated for the presidential election to be decided by the popular vote.

"I believe we should abolish the Electoral College and select our president by the winner of the popular vote, same as every other office," Clinton tweeted Monday. "But while it still exists, I was proud to cast my vote in New York for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris."

The Electoral College upheld Biden's victory over President Donald Trump on Tuesday, as he received the expected 306 electoral votes he won in the 2020 election. Clinton served as one of the 29 electors from the state of New York who cast their vote for Biden on Monday.

Trump defeated Clinton in the 2016 presidential election by winning 306 electoral votes to Clinton's 232. However, Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes.

Clinton ran up vote totals in liberal-leaning states like New York and California but narrowly lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a total of about 100,000 votes.

Since 2000, Democrats have won the popular vote in five of six presidential elections. But in that span, the Democratic candidate has only won three times.

The growing political divide in the electoral college has prompted some Democrats to call for an end to the electoral college and allow the president to be elected by popular vote.

President is the only political office in the United States where the winner was not determined by popular vote. Up until 1913, U.S. senators were chosen by state legislatures, but that changed with the ratification of the 17th Amendment.

In order to abolish the Electoral College, Democrats could pursue a Constitutional amendment similar to the 17th Amendment, though it would require the ratification of two-thirds of state legislatures a tall task, considering that Republicans control most state governments.

Some Democrats have also floated "packing" the Supreme Court with liberal justices and attempting to pass legislation that would abolish the Electoral College a Constitutional but norm-shattering option, and a scenario that would still require appointed justice's approval.

However, a number of states have already signed on to a third option the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). It's a coalition of states who have promised to award Electoral College delegates to the winner of the electoral colleges only on the condition that enough states sign on to the agreement so that their electoral value reaches 270. It's a legal option, considering the Constitution says states are free to award their delegates as they see fit and wouldn't need approval from Congress or the Supreme Court.

So far, 15 states and D.C. have agreed to the NPVIC. However, those states' Electoral votes only total 196, meaning they need several states to come aboard before it could be enacted.

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Hillary Clinton calls for Electoral College to be abolished - The Denver Channel

Former Democratic presidentialnomineeHillary ClintonHillary Diane Rodham ClintonBiden's choice and the left's response GOP leaders pinched by pro-Trump bid to reverse election outcome Mormon church congratulates Biden after Electoral College vote MORE lambasted Republicans who have givencredence to President TrumpDonald TrumpTop Trump aide Derek Lyons to leave White House this month Judge rules Trump Org must turn over documents to NY AG as part of probe Longtime GOP strategist Steve Schmidt announces he's registering Democrat MORE's unfounded claims of voter fraud, accusing them of weakness and disrespect for democracy.

"The election was not close. There was no evidence of fraud. The states have certified the results," Clinton said in a tweet on Thursday. "Yet Trump continues to try to overturn the election at the expense of our democracy."

"The emperor has no clothes," she added. "Republican electeds who continue to humor him have no spines."

The election was not close. There was no evidence of fraud. The states have certified the results.

Yet Trump continues to try to overturn the election at the expense of our democracy.

The emperor has no clothes.

Republican electeds who continue to humor him have no spines.

Since President-elect Joe BidenJoe BidenDeVos urges Education Dept. staff to 'resist' when Biden takes office LGBTQ groups celebrate Buttigieg pick for Transportation secretary Biden administration needs bipartisan solutions for older Americans, lawmakers say MORE was projected as the winner of November's election, Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill and in state legislatures have alleged that widespread voter fraud tipped the race in Biden's favor.

The Trump campaign has sued in several states Biden won, cases that have largely been tossed out by judges based on a lack of evidence or merit.

Still, some Republicans in states Trump won have pressed on with legal challenges to the election's outcome. In Texas,state officials have sued other states that have already certified election results.

Atleast one Republican in the House has also talkedabout contesting theElectoral College's vote once Congress meets after the first of the year to formally certify it.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, in which Trump defeated Clinton, the real estate mogul expressed concern that election would be "rigged" against him as well.

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Hillary Clinton: Republicans that 'humor' Trump election claims 'have no spines' | TheHill - The Hill