Many outlets are reporting today that a map showing how the election would end if only women voted (Hillary would win) prompted Trump fans on Twitter to start the #RepealThe19th hashtag. The 19th Amendment, you'll recall, gave American women the right to vote. While it may be true that more Trump supporters than usual today used the hashtag to wish women would shut up, it started picking up steam way back when Trump did.
If you look at the hashtag now, it's almost completely outraged liberals. This is probably seen as a huge success by trolls, but who cares? Indeed, there's a lot to be angry about from today alone.
Instead of freaking out, let's get specific about who they are and what this means. This is the alt-right, which you've probably heard of by now. It's another word for "white supremacist." They are incredibly sexist, and they're even more racist. They've also been using this hashtag for a looooooong time. It's really exploded since Trump began imploding after the conventions.
That they view women as inferior is obvious, but many couch their sexism in racist terms. The problem with women voting, to them, is that you can't trust them to be racist enough. Women will vote to help the poor, accept refugees, and advocate tolerance. (Sometimes they will claim they're not really serious, but it's been 18 months and they haven't broken character once.)
This neatly matches with the other part of their conspiracies: that "savages" are taking advantage of the openness and tolerance they blame women for to infiltrate and subvert. In other words (their words), "diversity = white genocide." They're neo-Nazis, and we've been forced to listen to their garbage all election thanks to the Trump campaign's open embrace.
Clearly, the #RepealThe19th is not new, although it did pick up steam as Trump began to collapse, but it's been used pretty constantly every day in 2016.
It really starts to pick up speed in August of 2015. Once Trump starts winning debates, it becomes a near-daily phenomenon. (A few of these are people joking—in particular Jay Caruso, whom this writer had a heated exchange with, but is definitely not an alt-right neo-Nazi and was making an admittedly bad joke.))
Many of these are trolls. Some are bad jokes. Some are serious. Yet at every turn so far, Trump has caught up to his trolls, forcing them to go führer and führer out there:
But despair not. As Mr. Rogers said, "When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'"