Democrats' Diminishing Brand

Donald Trump has record disapproval ratings for a president early in his first term. Congressional Democrats and mainstream media tell us so repeatedly, reporting little else but alleged collusion with Russians. Yet his congressional candidates keep winning special elections despite being vastly outspent.

They cannot understand it. Trump is their antithesis. He enrages both, fears neither, but voters like that. Do Congress and mainstream media not realize they have approval ratings lower than Trump’s?

Trump can be crude, egotistical. He bragged about grabbing women. He stretches truth to look good, yet voters accept him warts and all. They know a lot of guys just like him. Every corner bar has them. They can be tiresome but they’re harmless, and deep down most are nice guys. Tell them they’re full of sh** and they laugh, because they know they often are. They don’t take themselves too seriously, unlike hysterical Democrats and solemn talking heads who claim leaving the Paris climate change treaty will destroy the world and repealing Obamacare will kill thousands of Americans.

Voters detest Congress and loathe mainstream media. It’s the pomposity, the political correctness, the condescension to anyone who doesn’t think as they do. Voters don’t believe a man is a woman just because he says he is. They don’t want to call him “her” or her “him” as media do, and they don’t want to be forced to by government either. New York City has a civil statute requiring it. Last week, Canada passed a law making it a “hate crime” to refuse. And they don’t like their kids learning about transgenders in kindergarten.

Voters like borders around their country and they want them enforced. They don’t like being called bigots because they want American citizenship to mean something. They want people to work for a living if they’re able and they resent supporting deadbeats. Despite Democrat media denials, they know they’re paying for lots of them because some are neighbors and relatives. They know many illegal immigrants are on welfare and working under the table too. They know this pushes their wages down and their taxes up no matter what Democrats media claim.

When the majority of the FBI’s most wanted terrorist are Muslim, they know there’s a connection with Islam. They don’t like Democrat media calling them racist for saying it. They don’t understand why, but they detect some kind of solicitous interdependence between radical Islam and Democrat media. When someone shouts “Allahu Akbar!” while killing people here or in Europe, voters know immediately it’s a Muslim terrorist — even though media claim for days or weeks — or even years to be puzzled about motive.

They know it can be a sacrifice to raise children but it’s wrong to kill them in the womb. They know that’s what abortion does no matter what Democrat media claim. They don’t like being accused of a “war on women” for saying it either. They know Planned Parenthood is all about abortion (330,000 per year) and doing pap tests (380,000 a year) helps mask that. They don’t believe Democrat media insistence their tax money isn’t spent on abortions.

They know being called “non-college-educated-white-men” is a put down. They believe Hillary spoke for most Democrats and media when she called them “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.” They believe media think them deplorable, bitterly clinging to guns and religion as Barack Obama claimed. They’re not fooled when racism is called Affirmative Action. When blacks, Hispanics, and women are given preference, they know it’s white men who are sent to the back of the bus. It’s especially galling when after nearly three generations of “Affirmative Action,” they’re called “privileged” and told to “renounce” it.

They know women vastly outnumber men in colleges and universities, which are almost all controlled by the leftists who support Democrats and media. They know professors teach that dead white men are responsible for bad things in history. They see white men habitually depicted as dumb, oafish, nasty, or cruel by television and Hollywood. It’s almost a hate crime when any other group is thus portrayed, but not when it’s white men — the universal scapegoats of our age.

When Democrats and media hit Trump he hits back — and voters love that. Some Democrats like Ohio Representative Tim Ryan are starting to get it: “I think, in part, we try to slice the electorate up. And we try to say, ‘You’re black, you’re brown, you’re gay, you’re straight, you’re a woman, you’re a man.’ The reality of it is there’s no juice in that kind of campaign,” he said.

Will Democrat leaders listen? Will their media partners? Maybe they will if they keep losing.

Calloused Americans

Look! A working class white guy!

After a few hours of writing on my laptop, I need to get up, change my clothes, and do another kind of work that involves more than my brain and my fingers on a keyboard. I have to use tools invented and manufactured in previous centuries — tools like saws, hammers, drills, chainsaws, tape measures, rulers, squares, scrapers, and the like. I have to think and work in three dimensions. I have to feel my tools and materials, and smell things like earth, sawn wood, or paint. I have to move my body, lift things, climb ladders, set up saw horses — either fix something or build it.

There are callouses on my hands and I own a pickup truck. That makes me different from most Americans on the east or west coast. That I’m also a heterosexual, white guy (HWG) makes it very likely that I voted for Trump. When the uncalloused try to analyze what happened last November 8th, they refer to us as “non-college-educated white men.” It’s ill-concealed condescension, but if called out on it, the uncalloused hastily add a Seinfeldesque: “…not that there’s anything wrong with that” as a further effort to camouflage contempt.

They were the ones laughing last September 9th in New York City when a smug Hillary Clinton put half of Trump supporters into a “basket of deplorables.” We’re not nearly as sophisticated as she and her audience. We’re calloused, deplorable, HWGs. We’re “irredeemable” because we can never be as smart as they are — even though we’re the ones they call when something doesn’t work and they cannot figure out why, or something breaks and they don’t know how to fix it. They think our intelligence is limited, but we know it’s the other way around. We know more about their world than they know about ours, but they never suspect that.

NBC Pajama Boy in shock

We were the ones laughing on November 9th — at the shocked faces of the uncalloused sophisticates on NBC, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, as well as the tearful faces on college campuses. We’re still chuckling at pussyhat marches and the rest of the protests.

Non-college-educated white men didn't borrow against their future to spend years being inculcated with progressive pap. They don’t have to spend still more years learning that what they purchased with those tens of thousands of dollars was worthless, or that it could all have been picked it all up just be reading a few books here and there. We respect the college-educated who studied the hard sciences: physics, engineering, biology, chemistry, nursing, IT, and so forth. That kind of college is worth something. It’s grounded in the real world, unlike: sociology, education, art history, journalism, or any of the “studies” — like “ethnic studies”; “queer studies”; “women’s studies”; “gender studies”; and so forth.

In the interest of full disclosure, I had to get some degrees because they were necessary for a teaching certificate, thought they shouldn’t have been. They didn’t teach me to teach. To do that, one must know the subject matter, and then be able to impart it to others. There’s no need for college “education departments.” I endured dozens of worthless courses before I could get into a classroom, but I wasn’t brainwashed by them: I worked full-time in the real world throughout the process and stayed grounded. I knew academic baloney when I heard it, and that was more than forty years ago. It’s exponentially worse now. There was a gulf between academia and reality back then, but it’s an ocean today. The 21st century college campus is La-La Land, and you won’t find anyTrump voters there. You might be escorted off campus if you even utter his name without first issuing a trigger warning. Trump voters exist only in the real world.

"Black Bloc" leftist thugs

Leftists dressed in black and wearing masks are attacking people pro-Trump rallies and conservatives on college campuses with fists, clubs, and pepper spray. Last Saturday, however, they got their butts kicked in Berkeley, California. Videos indicate the butt-kickers belong to a demographic that might be described as non-college-educated, white men with callouses. Will the left escalate beyond fists and clubs next time? Let’s hope not, but as David French writes in National Review: 

We are now teetering on the edge of a truly terrifying incident, one trigger-pull away from a slaughter. Campus and urban progressives have a choice to make. Is this a nation of laws? If it is, then it’s time to grow a backbone, protect free speech, punish rioters, and expel those who disrupt the educational environment regardless of ideology.

Okay, enough of writing. Time to go outside and move my body — do something in three dimensions, stay grounded.