UPDATE 11/10/2016: Well, Donald Trump is the next President of the United States. With that in mind, this list is even more pertinent.
With election day now only 15 days away, the Republican Party is likely 16 days away from a post-mortem which will attempt to diagnose how it got stuck with Donald Trump as its nominee. While the GOP was responsible for a large part of the issues, Trump is largely only a figurehead for a larger shift in American culture and politics. Below are five events which helped to ignite the rise of Trump.
1. Release of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
Tucker Max was one of the first people to successfully use the internet to create a marketable persona. In his blog, Max explained his drunken conquests, forming the beginning of the image we know today as a “bro.” Though he began his blog in 2000, he released a compilation of his best stories in a book in 2006. That book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, became a New York Times #1 bestseller and has sold over a million copies worldwide.
His success led him to tour college campuses, where he received massive backlash from women’s groups. As it turns out, Max and his marketing team were behind many of those protests. Nonetheless, this helped to begin and legitimize the modern “social justice warrior” movement, which decries “rape culture.” Over the last ten years, this has evolved into colleges where “free speech zones” and “safe spaces” exist, raising the ire of older generations and more conservative-minded Americans. Needless to say, this then gave rise to “anti-PC” activists who wished to strike back against such thin-skinned students.
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