Month: January 2019

It doesn’t take much effort to find a leftist or a Democrat raging about President Donald Trump and his supporters all being racists. It doesn’t matter how much of a stretch it has to be. If Trump and his supporters can be painted as racist, it shall be done.

It’s a common accusation among the anti-Trump crowd, especially in light of the border wall fight that has ground some parts of the government to a stop. Apparently, it’s racist to want secure borders and improved national security.

Here’s the problem: There’s overwhelming data that suggests otherwise.

The latest bit of data that disproves that Trump supporters are racist comes from Grinell College.

A fascinating November poll conducted by the liberal arts college in Iowa showed that people who want improved immigration measures and security are hardly the racist stereotype being peddled by the left.

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As Alan Tonelson, an American Research Fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council Educational Foundation, astutely points out, a Grinell poll should hardly be accepted as the final verdict. But Tonelson also notes that allegations of racism against “immigration realists looks weaker than ever.”

To be fair, an immigration realist may not necessarily support Trump, as there are the rarest of Democrats who actually believe in border security. But Trump’s stunning 2016 election win was carried in no small part by massive promises of immigration reform and border security. Not every immigration realist may be a Trump supporter, but an overwhelming majority of Trump supporters are immigration realists.

Given that, the Grinnell College poll may not obliterate the narrative that Trump supporters are racist, but it certainly takes a mighty big hatchet to it.

Starting at page 80 of the poll, the raw data paints a telling picture.

Take, for example, the responses of Trump voters and Hillary Clinton voters when asked if they would like to see increased, decreased or the same amount of immigration from Mexico.

Eleven percent of Trump voters wanted an increase compared to 36 percent for Clinton voters. Comparatively, 40 percent of Trump voters and 8 percent of Clinton voters wanted a decrease. Forty-six percent of Trump voters compared to 54 percent of Clinton voters wanted Mexican immigration to remain the same.

Compare those numbers to how Trump and Clinton voters felt about immigrants from a predominantly white Europe. Thirteen percent of Trump voters want more European immigrants, 18 percent of them wanted fewer European immigrants and 64 percent wanted the same. Meanwhile, 23 percent of Clinton voters wanted an increase, 5 percent wanted a decrease and 66 percent wanted the same.

A glance at the numbers in regards to Africa paints a familiar picture. Ten percent of Trump supporters want an increase of African immigrants, 24 percent want a decrease and 60 percent want the same. Thirty-five percent of Clinton voters want an increase, 3 percent want a decrease and 58 percent want the same.

Those numbers generally carry across all regions and countries that are part of the poll. Overall, most Trump voters seem fine with the same amount of immigration, fewer of them want immigration decreases, and even fewer of them want immigration increases.

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Color of skin and the region people hail from has nothing to do with it.

If Trump voters were motivated by racism, they would be in favor of higher immigration from white areas of the world and demanding cuts in immigration from other regions. The poll shows that’s not happening. What is happening is that Trump voters simply want less rampant immigration, or at the very least, want immigration to stay where it is.

Most of all — and Americans don’t need any polls to tell them this by now — Trump voters want immigration that’s operated in accordance with the rule of law.

That’s something Democrats spent the eight years of the Obama administration flouting, and the two years of the Trump administration actively fighting.

Leftists will likely find some way to twist that into allegations of racism, but the truth of the matter is that using immigrant acceptance as a proxy for racism is inherently absurd.

It’s possible to believe that all people, regardless of skin color or religion, are created equal and deserve to be treated as such, while still wanting improved border security and immigration reform.

Unfortunately, we’re dealing with facts and not feelings, so that will probably be lost on leftists.

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Here’s an outside-the-box — not to say crazy (are you allowed to say crazy anymore?) — suggestion for the gang at the American Psychology Association: If you’re going to issue what Washington Post columnist Monica Hess calls an “an indictment … of rigid, traditional masculinity,” you might want to talk to some “traditional” men first.

That way, you won’t be blindsided when some folks think your research belongs under the scientific classification of “crap.”

The APA’s new Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Men and Boys says that men have all kinds of problems at rates women don’t have. Why? “One cause,” Hess explains, is “‘Traditional masculinity’ itself — the term refers to a Western concept of manliness that relies — and sometimes over-relies — on stoicism, dominance, aggression and competitiveness.”

“Traditional masculinity?” That’s kinda general. You want to lay suicide and bad grades on men behaving like men, as men have behaved for thousands or tens of thousands of years? Might get some pushback there …

But, according to Hess, former APA president Ronald Levant is “shocked” that the Guidelines have drawn criticism. Hess also cites Matt Englar-Carlson, director of something called the Center for Boys and Men at California State University at Fullerton. Englar-Carlson worked on the Guidelines too, and he’s mystified that people think the point is “that men were bad, or even that many forms of masculinity were.” He tells Hess:

“The guidelines are about, how do we help men live healthier lives?” he says. “How do we help men live lives that aren’t trapped in straitjackets of gender expectations?”

Well, try not saying things like “straitjackets of gender expectations.” It’ll likely put off any man with more testosterone than PajamaBoy.

Englar-Carlson tells Hess he’s being accused of “not liking” traditional men. His answer is “I do like them! That’s why I don’t want them to suffer!” But it seems a lot of old fashioned guys don’t feel like parsing the APA Guidelines to figure out which part of our personalities need to be medicated or chatted away.

Silly men. There’s nothing really controversial about the APA’s assertions, but Hess deigns to explain what the mouth-breathers are on about:

What’s difficult about the APA’s guidelines is that they ask us to wrestle with a complicated idea: that in a society in which gender roles have historically been rigid — and that rigidity has placed the lion’s share of power in the hands of one of the genders — it’s possible for the rulers to be harmed right along with the ruled. But that’s what bad systems do. They mess up everyone.

Rulers and the ruled. Hess thinks social organization and the relationship between the sexes is a zero-sum power game. And if you’ve spent your time at Bryn Mawr and the Washington Post, who could blame you? (One recent Hess column was titled, I swear, “Take your sons to see the new Ruth Bader Ginsburg movie — to show them how a powerful man can be a partner.”) Heck, she doesn’t even write for a serious part of the paper (stop laughing!). Her piece on the Guidelines appears in the Post’s “Style” section, which is obviously hurting for content these days without Michelle Obama’s arms around to worship.

But like the APA guys, Hess might want to get out and meet an actual traditional male. It seems she had a grandfather who was a “soldier, then a bait-shop owner, then a garbage collector,” and in her telling an admirable bad*ass who never complained. But the only living, breathing guys she mentions she encountered at a “men’s rights activist conference.” They “had flown to a Detroit suburb to talk about how they felt men were under attack. Worse, they said, nobody was paying attention to their suffering.”

So that’s a representative sample right there.

“These able-bodied straight white men were, as a group, the most privileged class in America — the Founding Fathers demographic — but they were convinced they were oppressed.” They also were “desperate, begging, for someone to pay attention and find a solution.”

They don’t sound very “stoic” or “dominant” or even “competitive.” Quite the opposite. It’s not that they don’t have a point. Think about the reaction to the APA Guidelines: Single mothers raising sons is one of the biggest contributors to violence and lawlessness in huge swaths of society, but we’re not allowed to stigmatize out-of-wedlock birth or suggest boys need fathers. Meanwhile the elites eschew the religion that has traditionally tempered and helped tame masculinity, while they celebrate homosexuality and the other 31derful flavors of sexuality popular this week.

But griping about the world and feeling sorry for yourself isn’t on anyone’s list of prototypical male characteristics. So here’s a question: does Hess include these whiners because she’s confused about actual traditional male traits, or does she mean to equate them with everyone who’s not ready to roll over and allow the APA to classify 5,000 years of civilizational order as a malady? Probably both.

As for that cool old grandfather of hers, Hess says she “wanted everyone in the world to be like my grandfather. But I also wanted everyone to know they have the option not to be.” Mission accomplished. She loves him, but she shows that she’s incapable of understanding him: “[O]ur family stories centered on him being a good provider and a good man. But … I couldn’t remember anyone asking my grandfather how he felt about that.”