Welcome to the December Reno News & Review!
In this month’s cover story, Nevada activists and others weigh in on some of the damage the incoming Trump administration’s policies could cause in areas such as education, public health and LGBTQ+ rights.
Given the subject, it seems like a good time to revisit the RN&R’s stance on partisanship.
It’s not Donald Trump’s party affiliation that bothers me. (And I acknowledge that he ushered in some helpful policies. The First Step Act of 2018 released 5,000 people, 91% of them Black men, from prison, undoing a 1994 act that Joe Biden had pushed eagerly, punishing crack users far more harshly than cocaine users. Same substance; different price point.)
My concerns are more about the 34 felony convictions, the track record of disparaging and assaulting women, and the ways in which Trump has exaggerated and often flat-out lied in order to villainize immigrants, transgender people and others who are now at risk of becoming collateral damage in 2025.
This month’s cover story is indeed critical of Trump’s policy positions because of the likely effects on people in our region. We don’t claim to be neutral, and we will continue to be the progressive voice of Northern Nevada. But that doesn’t mean we want to shut down productive discourse—and it doesn’t mean we’ve taken the polarization bait.
The bait is coming from both sides of the aisle. The logical fallacy memes are ubiquitous. A particularly egregious one from the left: “It’s really something to watch the party whose supporters poop on the floor in the Capitol and wipe their feces on the wall tell us which bathrooms to use.”
Seriously, we all need to stop that.
I want to assure my Trump-voting neighbors that when we talk about how good your garden looks, and my Trump-voting relatives that when we fawn over holiday dessert recipes together, I am not lumping you in with Jan. 6 vandals. That does nothing but squirt an extra quart of lighter fluid on an already raging fire.