The Students' Tribune Politics Staff

It is often said that, in 2016, it might be harder to come out as a Republican than to come out as gay on most college campuses. College students who hold right-wing viewpoints, especially ones that pertain to hot-buttoned issues such as illegal immigration, gun control, carbon tax, or social issues, are branded as hateful bigots, ignorant racists, raging homophobes, and the dreaded label of "low-information voters" (essentially to shame us into voting for the "right side of history"). Conservatives on college campuses are ostracized, discriminated against, and sometimes publicly humiliated. Under Obama's America, in the era of "fundamental transformation," those of us who came of age in the post 9/11 era has been so throughly socially conditioned and indoctrinated by pop culture and the elitist media that anything less than the most dogmatic liberal set of values is dismissed as retrograde, anti-progress, and reductionist.

Indeed, liberal propaganda permeates almost every important institution of our society. Since the first day of kindergarten, we have been unwittingly being brainwashed by teachers who belong to public school unions. Then we go to college, where our social science professors are, by and large, card-carrying radicals who insinuated to us that in order to be considered a serious scholar, one must be a Democrat. Even student-based news sources jump on the media lynch mob bandwagon to influence our thought process by regurgitating the mainstream media's narrative in the most titillating way and further redefine what is acceptable, what is mainstream, and what it means to be an American. All of this is nothing new, but what is truly disturbing is the prevalence of Hollywood celebrities and professional athletes meddling in our political discourse.

Prior to Barack Obama's historic election 2008, arguably the most celebrity-driven affair in American history, celebrities and professional athletes rarely get involved in political campaigns. In a move that is now widely condemned by the mainstream media, Michael Jordan once famously refused to endorse a Democratic senate candidate in 1990. Since 2008, President Barack Obama has continued to enlist celebrities, artists, and professional athletes to further his political agenda. That's all fine and dandy as long as GOP-leaning celebrities are afforded the same freedom to vocally support who they want without backlash, repercussions, and threats of boycott. That is unfortunately not the case.

Perhaps one of the unintended byproducts of our current celebrity-driven political culture is the grave danger public figures encounter when endorsing a Republican candidate for public office due to the vindictive nature of the media-savvy left. Anyone with a profitable brand or with something to lose would not risk endorsing a GOP candidate out of fear of alienating the "social justice warriors." But no such danger would befall them if they endorse a Democrat. In fact, they may very well received some favorable press for being on the "right side of history." And we wonder where all the Donald Trump supporters are....Take, for example, the case of Tom Brady. Brady has a longstanding friendship with Trump and the fact that he supports his friend is completely understandable even if he doesn't agree with Trump's political positions one-hundred percent (who does?). Yet Sports Illustrated ran a hit piece that not only smeared Trump as a "xenophobe," (when he was specifically referring to illegal immigrants in his speech) "misogynist," (when he had promoted/hired plenty of female executives and his daughter Ivanka is arguably the second most important person in his real estate empire) and "Islamophobe" (what does that even mean?) but attacked Brady as sort of a guilt by association. Brady was later forced to walk back on his endorsement, yet the media has continued to pester him over his perceived support for Trump and his refusal to publicly denounce his friend.

Or take the case of former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, who was unceremoniously fired and subsequently blacklisted by tech industry in Silicon Valley thus depriving him of the chance to make a livelihood. His crime? Donating money to fight against gay marriage in 2008 in a ballot initiative that successfully banned gay marriage in California (at least before it was overturned by court). At the time, Barack Obama himself believed marriage should be between a man and a woman. Obama himself also once famously said in 2004, "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America — there's the United States of America." Yet the political climate under his leadership is anything but a united, cohesive America. Taken all of this together, something potentially dangerous might be slowly happening, a sort of "liberal fascism" that not only refuses to tolerate dissent but seeks to financially destroy those who hold different ideologies. Under such a restrictive political climate, it is perhaps no surprise that, as supposedly enlightened Millennials pursuing our college degrees, we are taught to hate someone who exemplifies a throwback, Mad Men-era alpha male leadership, someone like Donald Trump.

What sets Trump apart from your average run-of-the-mill GOP politician (and truly terrifying to the liberal establishment) is that while he might not be the suavest operator in public relations, he understands the rules of the game (or, in his words, "The Art of the Deal") as he himself dabbled in the entertainment industry and hobnobbed with Hollywood celebrities and kingmakers. In more ways than one, he perfectly embodies the devolution of political discourse under Obama, who famously called Mitt Romney a "bullshitter," and Republican's answer to the excesses of Obama's presidency.

Trump undoubtedly would've capitulated a long time ago if his company were publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. We might never know how big of a financial hit he has taken from Macy's, ESPN, Univision (most of these companies have long ago stopped pretending to be non-partisan), among others since he announced his presidential run. What I do know is that every time the man most famous for uttering "You're fired!" on his reality show loses a sponsor, the more sympathetic I am to someone I used to regard as a mere caricature. Every time the media misrepresents Trump's steadfast stance against illegal immigration as racism against Mexicans or calls him a fascist (it's funny how Bernie Sanders' questionable past is completely swept under a rug when he's a lot more out of mainstream than Trump and hardly anyone has called him out as a communist despite his cozy ties and apparent admiration for the Soviet Union before its collapse and people who have are accused of smearing him), the more likely I'll vote for him. It's not because I am naive enough to think he will really "make America great again" (none of the candidates will). It's not because I'm a contrarian who go out of his way to cast protest votes. It's because I'm sick and tired of political correctness and liberal elites lecturing us that we're just too stupid to understand the big picture. Rather than follow through on his message of unity and take heed from former Democrat President Bill Clinton's adherence of "Third Way", Obama has, since day one, hedged his entire legacy on the politics of grievance by catering to special interests and using wedge issues, such as gay marriage, War on Women, race-baiting after police shooting, politicizing mass shootings to push for gun control, to divide us into Two Americas to the point that we will never see anything like the landslide and unity of the 1984 presidential election in our lifetime. (In fairness, Republicans have done their fair share of pandering and race-baiting.) If you subscribe to the theory that history is cyclical rather than linear, then a conservative backlash is inevitable and political correctness might have already reached its peak. In this regard, Trump is merely taking a page out of Obama's "grievance" playbook, just with a different sales pitch targeting different demographics.

Martin Luther King Jr. once famously said, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." Yet we now live in a country where race-based affirmative action that benefits African-Americans and Hispanics at the expense of white and Asian-Americans is not only legal but those who espouse MLK's idealism are branded as unapologetic racists. We live in a country where millionaire celebrities and elites who happen to be African-Americans are now seemingly demanding a quota system for the Academy Awards. We live in a country where slavery reparations are being advocated. We live in a country where wanting to attract the best and the brightest from all over the world to immigrate here instead of giving low-skilled illegals a pathway to citizenship is somehow wrong. We live in a country that has shown an increase intolerance for political dissent, a brave new world where the fringe has rapidly out-maneuverered the mainstream, where Europe-style hate speech blasphemy law that would curtail freedom of speech is being openly discussed and promoted by the media, where a sorority recruitment video is enough to get the liberal media up in arms, where one of the leading contenders of the presidency is blatantly being disrespected by foreign countries yet a large segment of his fellow citizens are cheering them on, where even social media, video games and sports are designed to push the radical liberal agenda.

In perhaps one of the most memorable scenes of Mad Men, Don Draper candidly explained the power of nostalgia. And therein lies the genius of Donald Trump's rallying cry, "Make America Great Again."

Whether we like to admit or not, there's a small part in each and every single one of us, no matter how young or old, how rich or poor, that rues for an arbitrary time in the distant or not-so-distant past when things seemed easier and simpler, when the world seemed kinder, less complicated, and more binary, where there was more love and moral clarity and less political calculation and backstabbing. Whether your version of the American way of life consists of a bustling metropolis in New England, a small town in Iowa, or a beach in Southern California, whether your quintessential American hero is George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, General Patton, Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Joe DiMaggio, John Wayne, Elvis Presley, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Eminem, Taylor Swift, or Kim Kardashian, most of us will never vote based on policies and our own self-interests. We vote based on emotion and ultimately how we see ourselves. Trump might not be the best messenger for this, but by refusing to specify what era he is referring to with his nostalgic campaign theme, Trump allows us to define and interpret it in a way that is the most palatable to our own unique experience.