2020 Election: Not Yesterday’s Enterprise

(note: I began this before others made similar points, but decided to clear the cache. I like the two analogies.)

Ever hear of Paul Wylie?

Like most Americans, I only ever watch winter sports during the Winter Olympics, and only then when Americans have a shot at a medal. Which means watching figure skating, mostly.  American men have only won 15 of 75 Olympic figure skating medals, and they were concentrated during two periods. 40% of that haul came from 1948-56 (the Buttons era). Since 1984, just five American men have won medals, 60% of them gold, and 60% from 1984-1992. One last 60% number–that’s how many of the five are straight. Yes, a majority of the US male figure skaters who won Olympic medals the past 40 years are straight. 100% of the British male figure skater medallists are gay (that’s a grand total of 2). But I digress. What was my point? Oh, yes, Wylie.

Paul Wylie’s Alberville medal is one of the greatest Olympic stories in any sport. Long considered a highly talented skater with a life outside skating, Wylie spent over a decade in the top tier of US skaters and five years in the top 3, but he was famous for folding under pressure and never placed higher than ninth in international competition. After graduating from Harvard, he decided to give the nationals one more try, narrowly qualifying for the Olympic team in 92 by a tenth of a point, despite skating quite poorly. The US team coaches regretted his placement, wishing they could give younger fourth place finisher Mark Mitchell some international experience. Wylie had already been dumped from the Worlds, a few weeks after the Olympics, in favor of Mitchell.  Todd Eldredge and Christopher Bowman, the other two Americans, had both been US national champions,  and the heavy gold medal favorites were Canadian and Russian.

But in Alberville, all the favorites fell. Kurt Browning, the greatest skater never to medal at the Olympics, Bowman the Showman, Todd Eldredge, Victor Petrenko, they all had catastrophic errors during their short programs. Everyone except Wylie. For the first time in his skating career, he nailed the short program during a competition. Then in the free skate, with a shot at bronze, his nerves didn’t fail him and he skated the only clean program of the final night. Most people who watched felt he should have gotten the gold, but Olympic judges, always iffy, were apparently determined to give Petrenko Russia’s first gold medal in figure skating. And so Wylie became the oldest figure skating medalist in 60 years by taking silver.

It didn’t matter. Not to Wylie, who would have been ecstatic with a bronze. Not to the people who watched his performance, who knew he’d won in any fair comparison. Not to Scott Hamilton, the 1984 gold medal winner who was mocked for plugging Wylie’s chances after the short. Certainly not to me; the Wylie medal is in my top five great Olympic moments (second only to the 1984 4×200 men’s relay when Bruce Hayes held off the Albatross.)

Donald Trump is not Paul Wylie. But I like this little history for more than its proof that I value second place finishes as extraordinary achievements, often superior to the winner’s. Paul Wylie reminds me that for better or worse, expert opinion has no impact on outcomes. All of us, given the right circumstances, can ignore the naysayers, execute, and achieve far beyond what anyone predicted. So trust me when I say that short of a Trump win, I’m not just pleased with his finish. I’m ecstatic.

At right is just a sample of the conventional wisdom served up by pundits who hadn’t learned a thing in 4 years.

He wasn’t expanding his base. His approval numbers were horrible (based on polls, of course). He wasn’t president to all the people. He was focusing on the hard right “extremist” wing of his voters.

And they were wrong.

Trump grew his voter support in absolute numbers by 16%. This increase registered in every demographic except white males, if we are to trust exit polls. Dramatically. He got the highest percentage of non-white voters of any Republican candidate since 1960.

Understand, of course, he did this with less money. With active media hostility and lies. With a conservative intellectual class at best halfheartedly behind him. With some conservative media outlets and of course, the Never Trump movement, actively agitating against him. With the polls showing him losing  by historic margins in every battleground state.

Trump ignored that and played his game. He did it on his own, with only one real assist: the massive GOP registration effort.

It’s customary to call Trump vain and weak. A weaker guy would have folded. He would have given off flop sweat. Loser fumes. The media mocked him endlessly. Poll analyst Nate Silver, who angrily told people after the election to fuck off if they thought the polls were bad, called the Trafalgar results “crazy” beforehand. David Wasserman nattered about how the private district results showed a wipeout.

The media did everything it could to depress Trump turnout by telling the world it was all over. Biden by a wipeout.

Result: Trump got more votes than any Republican or Democratic candidate ever.

Except–alas–Joe Biden.

We can trust counted votes. Maybe. Here’s the growth in Trump vote, by state. Purple bars are battleground states.

I wrote once about the invisible Trump voters, the blue state voters The west coast ones came out in force. California is still counting votes and Trump is still up nearly 33%. Washington’s nearly at 30%. Oregon and New Mexico increased by over 20%. Fifty percent more Hawaiians voted for Trump. The east coast blue states are still counting absentee ballots, but all gave Trump between 10 and 20%  more votes.

As I’ve tweeted hundreds of times, in 2016 California gave Trump more than any state but Florida and Texas. I’ll have to update that: in 2020, California gave Trump more votes than any other state, full stop. Sum up the votes in the 15 least populated states Trump won, and they’re just barely ahead of California. Who knows, the state might even catch up when they find that last vote coming in on the mail boat from Kathmandu.

In the battleground states, his vote count increased an average of 16%, with a high of 33% growth….in Arizona. With Nevada just behind at 30%.

As the jubilant press corps reminds us daily, Trump’s going to be one of just four single-term presidents since 1900. But take a look at his re-election numbers compared to other presidents since Eisenhower.

Nixon’s huge numbers were because of George Wallace’s relatively successful third party run in 1968. And hey, Clinton is the only Democrat president who got more votes in his second run.

I found only one president who improved on his re-election numbers yet lost the election: Grover Cleveland.

We’ll have to wait four years to see if Trump has has anything more in common with Cleveland than increased votes and a much younger wife.

Great stuff. But.

Biden improved on Hillary’s numbers by far more in the battleground states, with an average increase of 24% and a high of 44% growth….in Arizona. So he won.

“It was rather the moment that the American people surgically removed an unhinged leader and re-endorsed the gist of his politics. “–Andrew Sullivan…and a host of other anti-Trump, anti-woke folks saying the equivalent of “the voters removed Trump with admirable surgical precision”.

No. Not with these numbers. This was a blow out election on both sides. There’s nothing surgical or precise about 2020. Biden held on in the right states in much the way this Joplin hospital held on in the tornado:

A shift in 100K votes and Trump wins. Of course Biden got more votes. I wonder if that will be true from here on in, regardless of the winner. Something we once viewed as an anomaly will become the norm. But in the right places, Trump almost matched Biden’s growth.

Almost.

I wish just a few more Trump voters had gotten out there. Or I wish the absentee ballot fraud were less. Take your pick. I am neutral lean fraud on that issue.

I actually know relatives and friends who flatly disbelieve millions more voters came out for Biden. I was a bit shocked. I’m supposed to be the cynical one, but I totally expected a blue wave. I was just delighted there was a matching red one.

Still, do I think it’s possible there was a coordinated Dem effort to manufacture millions of absentee ballots? Sure. The most likely rationale they’d use for the fraud was conviction that Biden had this locked up, but a massive blowout that totally repudiated Trump would be so much better, right? Wipe out the GOP fear of Trump voters, make them see the light and bend over to more immigration, more transgender nonsense, more government health care, blah blah blah. So why not create more votes? It’s not like we’re changing the election, or anything. Biden’s going to win.

Those who follow me on Twitter know that I think voter registration fraud is a much bigger issue than voter fraud, and much easier to work out ahead of time. The Dems’ concerted push to increase mail-in voting, lower the standards for counting, and fight for extended delivery is all in keeping with this. But hey, it’s not like they were changing the results, or anything. Biden’s going to win, right? The polls all say so. This is just beating down Trump voters, making them look fringe.

And then the stunner: Trump voters come out en masse, and Biden might lose. Stop the counting! And then got to the cities, where Trump did pretty well, and ask them to manufacture just enough votes. City machines are totally up with that sort of thing.

Do I think this happened? Eh. I don’t know. I’m just as willing to believe it was authentically that close, with the usual marginal fraud in cities.

I do know that Megan McArdle and any other media figure who castigates reasonable skepticism “immoral” can whistle disapproval in swing time for all I care. Swim in outrage until they’re pruny. Dunk their faces in smarmy self-righteousness while eating shit. I don’t care.

Because here’s what I’m absolutely certain of: if any “journalist” learned of an effort to rig the election for Biden, he or she would not expose such efforts but instead ask, “How can I help?”

And that’s why so many Trump voters are convinced there’s fraud. Fuck you all, media folk. You are the ones who have discredited America. You aren’t speaking for America. You’re entertainers, shucking and jiving for the people who pay. Once again, you got your hats handed to you with the enormity of Trump’s vote count. Biden win or not.

I wish Trump had less slimy advocates, but then I always wish that. Because of Trump, other GOP pols will see the advantage in being and getting better advocates.

Back in the early days of Trump’s presidency, I wrote:

The first Star Trek “reboot”  took the bold act of altering the past in a famous fictional timeline. The new movies have the freedom to reinvent, while we watch the movies, fully aware what “really” happened. This got taken to extremes for “Into the Darkness”, when the last half hour echoed word for word the greatest Star Trek movie ever made with a character swap, but it’s still pretty clever.

Ever since Trump won in November, I’ve felt like we’re all living through an alternate timeline. Like Tom Hanks’ “Doug” said in that sublime Black Jeopardy skit, “Come on, they already decided who wins even before it happens”. Everyone of any importance knew Hillary would win.  Jobs were accepted. Plans were made.

But while I see it as a reboot, an opportunity to rewrite the future, all the people with any voice or influence think of the election as Yesterday’s Enterprise. Just as the Enterprise C slipped through the temporal rift and forestalled the truce between the Klingons and the Federation, so too did a whole bunch of voters escape the notice of the Deep State.

…….

The media wants to change the world back to way it was.  What’s happening now is all wrong, they’re not supposed to be here, they have to  fix it.  If they can just keep the pressure on and play for time, someone who “wasn’t supposed to be here” will drag the wounded Enterprise C back a hundred years to be destroyed.  The timeline can be restored.

Sure, I’d have rather Trump won. But  Trump ended his presidency with numbers that force the GOP to accept the reboot. There’s no shoving the voters and Trump into the rift to fix the timeline. Republicans have been worried about their “demographic destiny” for years. Trump’s showed them a way forward. (Something I predicted more than once, incidentally.)

History will, I think, be kinder to Trump than the current moment, but I wonder if they will understand his greatest achievement.

Trump faced down media and elite howls of disapproval and outrage. He didn’t apologize. He ruthlessly attacked anyone who insulted him for his views. By refusing to back down, he  showed all Americans how much the media, intellectual class, and even our political parties were throttling American policy by narrowly defining boundaries of acceptable opinions and proposals to their own political demands. He restored balance to American discourse almost singlehandedly. In doing so, Trump gave all Americans a real choice.

I was grateful back in 2016. I’m grateful now.

2020 Election: Political What Ifs and Other Gasbaggery

First, thanks to Kyle Smith for writing part I of my planned article.

If the polls are right, Biden wins. All the endless nattering about “Trump’s window closing“…no, wait, that’s from 2016, this month the meme is “Trump’s running out of time”, is so much idiocy. The polls are either right and Biden wins in a landslide, or they’re wrong in Trump’s favor and he’s got a shot. The point is, he’s got a shot if the polls are wrong, not if he takes whatever sage wisdom various conservative pundits dish out about constructing a good closing story.

Political analysts are always retrofitting their reality post-hoc. The night that Trump won, I remember Steve Kornacki and Bill Hemmer talking about the staggering numbers they were seeing out of rural towns and counties in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. They had just never anticipated that kind of outpouring and it clearly helped Trump win. But after the fact, no one ever mentions this; instead, “Trump won over the most disliked candidate in Democratic history” (who somehow, despite being epic-ally unpopular, got more votes).

So. If the polls are correct, it’s a blowout. If the polls are right, Biden will win Arizona and Georgia, to say nothing of the original Blue Wall states. He might pull out Texas. If the polls are right, Joe Biden will win a higher percentage of the white vote than any Dem candidate since Jimmy Carter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Really?

 

So this next part isn’t for Dems. You Dems do what you do, I grok that. This part is for anyone who was even thinking of voting for Trump or who voted for Trump in 2016, the people who are responsible for the plummeting support for Black Lives Matter looting, the people who get utterly squicked out by feeding 8 year olds hormones to change their gender whether or not the parents approve. The people who support fracking and affordable gas prices and think trying to fix climate change is not worth destroying our country. The people who don’t want the virtual open borders and fake asylum claims and amnesty, much less refugees dumped on states without consent, who loathe antifa, who can’t believe that colleges are ending admissions tests.  The people who don’t want to spend young lives fighting pointless, endless wars in the middle east, who think the 1619 Project is bullshit, who are privately appalled at the media open hostility to Republicans. The people who think unisex bathrooms are a horrible idea, who don’t want the courts stacked, don’t want statehood for Puerto Rico, DC, and Guam. The people who are terrified that cancel culture has gone too far, that free speech is disappearing in America.

But are voting for Biden anyway.

If the polls are correct, and “Trump lost the suburbs” and suburban women in particular, who supported Trump last time, then they are all looking at the city riots and antifa street-blocking and Democrats defunding police and Biden always avoiding answering straight up that he won’t support this until a desperate media pushes him to say something and saying yeah, that’s my guy.

 

 

 

 

 

Really?

 

 

You’re….tired of Trump? It’s just always so much….struggle? You find him embarrassing? You think someone else would handle covid19 better? You just don’t like him? You want someone the French and English will respect?

 

Jaysus. The question is, of course, how many of you are out there. To all those potential Trump voters who just got tired of the chaos and plan to or have voted Biden:  you’re kidding yourself. And if you are so numerous that the polls are correct, you’re going to regret what comes. Worse than the lukewarm Obama voters of 2008 and 2012 regretted it when they patted themselves on voting for the first black President and then  realized holy crap, he’s a leftist and sent the Dems scooting, two midterms in a row. Except this will be worse because the Democrat left is ascendant and the pressure on moderates to go along or be cancelled is already unbearable. Let’s hope you have the opportunity to reverse yourself and undo the damage.

A few Ricochet podcasts ago, Rob Long blew up at James Lileks and Peter Robinson for doing what I just did, in chastising people for switching to Biden. It’s Trump’s fault, he said. Politics is persuasion. Trump doesn’t persuade. He doesn’t understand what it’s about. First, I understand the point. I just cry bullshit. Voters have their own responsibilities. Anyone who holds even some of the views I outline above and votes for Biden will get it, good and hard, and screw them for dragging the rest of us down with them. Again, Dems: not you. You do what you do.

So that’s for if the polls are right. Which, again, they might be.

The polls didn’t move. Not through the insane BLM riots, the mad, uncontrolled cities. The crazy violence and highway blockings. That’s when I began to wonder. In 2016, I accepted the polls.  I saw what Trump was trying to do and hoped like hell the state polls were wrong, but until election night it was a pipe dream. This year, I am really forcing myself to accept the state polls, but my basic stance is doubt.  The national polls I think are realistic. But anyone who thinks an even 10% national lead spells a definite Biden rout is delusional. I’ve been pointing out for four years that every Republican in California, New York, Illinois, Colorado, and New Jersey could stay home and make no difference at all to the electoral outcome while creating a popular vote massacre.

Understand, even though every logical bone in my body doubts those polls, I try really hard to believe them and emotionally, I am totally prepared for a Biden blowout.

Is it possible that all this organic support for Trump, the car caravans and boat parades could represent a huge percentage of Trump voters, rather than the tip of the iceberg? Is it possible that untold gazillions of people who never make a political remark show up and vote Biden, crushing the louder opposition?

Oh, hell to the yeah.

But here’s the thing: that’s what everyone thought last time. That’s what keeps on running through my mind, all the parallels. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll see me do the “Four Year Check” every time some media pundit makes a triumphalist comment: Bill Kristol cackling in glee, Republicans cutting Trump loose, white women hate Trump, Amy Walters confidently predicting a Trump loss, shock that Trump is only 5-7 points up in Kansas, Biden/Clinton lead insurmountable, Megan McArdle mocking the poll unskewers, Dave Wasserman talking of Trump’s utter meltdown, and there’s thousands more. It all feels exactly the same.

But it’s different, they assure me.

 

OK.

 

Here’s what reassures me: win or lose, Trump goes out fighting. It’s widely reported that he didn’t expect to win in 2016. You never saw him say so. The media not only loathes Trump but actively works as campaign hacks for Biden, but there are no Trump equivalent stories to the Bush family reunion in the 2016 South Carolina primary or the desperation in the last weeks of the McCain campaign. Trump didn’t spend the last weeks of October sitting around the fire reading Hemingway short stories, and not only because he’d probably have trouble identifying one. The media may hate him, but they’re scared he might win, and you’ll never know otherwise from Trump. The man doesn’t do flop sweat.

Similarly, I have no fear that all the idiotic pollster prattle will dissuade GOP voters. I worry maybe the weather will do a terrible thing, but have no fears that Bud and Mary will say “Jeeze, Nate Silver says Donald Trump only has a 10% chance to win and Dave Wasserman says he’s almost seen enough, so let’s order pizza and do some premature mourning.” No, if Trump loses it’s because not enough people in the right states want him to be President, not because any supporter didn’t bother to show up.  His supporters will come out, from the homeliest hamlet to the many usually invisible Trump voters in blue states (they’ve been having some fun with their rallies this time round). And that’s comforting. The media might be trying to use certainty to depress the Trump vote. They’ll fail.

I have disliked the media and “experts” generally since 2008, but at this point I just hate them all. Boundless contempt, I have. What comforts me is that I’m not alone. The media can still cancel. The media still has influence with corporations, with employers, public and private. But they have no influence over public opinion.  The middlebrows who look to elites exist, but only on the Dem side, and it’s a vanishingly small group. The rest of us think the media are hacks or honest activists, with the only question being whose side they’re shilling for. If Trump doesn’t win, it won’t be because of a single thing the media wrote or didn’t write.

Which brings up another point I’ve been mulling for a while: GOP voters need new media. The National Review couldn’t even bring itself to endorse Trump, and published another vile diatribe by Kevin Williamson, who loathes America so much he’s moving to Switzerland, which he finds much more civilized.  If I want to read articles overflowing with disdain for the white working class, I’d read Twitter bluechecks.  The editors couldn’t bring themselves to endorse Trump and gave a voice to one formal yes, one formal no, and one formal who knows–but that’s in addition to Kevin Williamson, Richard Brookhiser, and Jay Nordlinger all saying they wouldn’t vote for him.

The Federalist has generally gone pro-Trump. Washington Examiner, with the single best reporter on the conservative beat, nonetheless has Tim Carney bragging he won’t vote and begging people not to hate people just because they voted for Trump.

Never mind The Dispatch and The Bulwark and the other Never Trump folks just slavering to throw out those plebe Trump supporters. I listen to lot of podcasts, most of them by conservative media folks, and they spend their time bitching about Trump, endlessly. Then occasionally they’ll bitch about Biden and the media and the left, but does that make them say Trump’s better? Oh, hell no. Back to bitching about Trump.

Guys, he won without your help once. If he wins without your help twice, who needs you? And if he doesn’t win, and you didn’t fight for him–again, who needs you?

But the sad truth is that we Trump voters still read National Review, still read Jonah Goldberg’s GFile, still talk about Ross Douthat, still call Bill Kristol a conservative and still support their various efforts to some degree because who else is there? They treat Trump voters like crap because they can.

OK, end bitching about media.

What if it’s not a Biden blowout? What if the polls are wrong, at least in part?

Well, then, we have a narrow Biden win or a narrow Trump win.

Narrow Biden win:

1. Trump keeps Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia. Biden takes the blue wall states.
2. Trump keeps Florida, Arizona, Pennsylvania, North Carolina. Biden takes the rest of the blue wall and….Georgia.

Narrow Trump win:

1. Trump keeps Georgia, Pennsylvania, Florida, and North Carolina. Biden takes the rest of the blue wall and…Arizona.
2. Trump loses Georgia but picks up Michigan in addition to the rest.

(as you can see, I have no truck with those single elector places. Assume they go to Biden.)

I naturally want Trump to win, but a narrow Biden victory will give serious pause to the plans to rework the GOP, particularly if Trump gets record numbers of blacks and Hispanics. Jim Geraghty hopes that a Trump loss will convince the GOP to be less “Trumpy”, but a GOP that loses white suburbs while gaining with blacks and Hispanics is a GOP in a lot better shape than the free trade, no entitlements anti-affirmative action party that Geraghty dreams about, when he isn’t having covid19 nightmares.

And as bad as a Biden presidency would be, a narrow win would set the media back on its heels, particularly if it was accompanied by an increased black and Hispanic vote.

If Trump wins, well, it’s a great day.

One last election thought, on the Senate: if the Dems tie  the Senate–or even if they don’t–Mitch McConnell should have a heart to heart with Joe Manchin and Jon Tester. Both of them will face endless attacks by their own party if they don’t go woke. And neither of them is woke. Both probably want to be re-elected, which will be increasingly difficult if the Democrats win the Senate. McConnell could probably promise them various committee chairs, right?

Everyone remembers that Jim Jeffords switched parties. But fewer people remember that Richard Shelby, senior senator from Alabama, did it back in 1994. He’s still around.

And maybe that will give ideas to moderate Dem representatives, too.

Worth a shot, anyway. Let’s start that realignment early!

If you haven’t made up your mind: vote Trump.

Why Not Move to Where the Jobs Are?

 

“Americans aren’t getting up and going where the jobs are, anymore.”–Charles Murray, Conversations with Bill Kristol

“If you want to live, get out of Garbutt.”–Kevin Williamson

To explain why Americans aren’t moving to where the jobs are, look no further than The Newcomers, an excellent book about a year in the life of South High School’s ELL program, peopled by refugees and illegal immigrants from every pocket of the world.

Let me tell you how good Thorpe’s book is: she believes that we should bring in millions, or at least hundreds of thousands,  of refugees every year. She inserts herself constantly into the story, bleating platitudes about the magical qualities of people who simply happen to come from another country.   A truly admirable African family of ten move themselves off subsidies in a matter of months, while their two high school kids RFEP-ed  in less than a year. An almost certainly mentally ill Iraqi woman turns down or loses most of the jobs she’s offered, buys two cars when she still can’t make the rent, and barely parents her two daughters who skip school every week, until she nearly kills one of them in an at-fault wreck in one of the cars she couldn’t afford–but hey, that’s ok, because, you know, Medicaid will spend millions on the daughter’s recovery.

But to Thorpe, these families are equally adequate for the real purpose of the refugee program:

[Mark and I] did agree on one central thing: that to live in comfort in the developed world and ignore the suffering of strangers who had survived catastrophes on other parts of the globe was to turn away from one’s own humanity. In spending time with refugees, Mark found a kind of salvation, and I experienced something similar while mingling with the kids.They affected all of us this way….The students and their families saved each of us from becoming jaded or calloused or closed-hearted. They opened us up emotionally to the joy of our interconnectedness with the rest of the world.

At some point while writing this piece, I saw a comment characterizing the romantic, narcissistic mindset driving the left on immigration.  (edit: thanks to my own commenters who pointed me to the source)

Immigrants are sacred not because they save us, but because their presence gives us the chance to show how we can save them.

We are the agents; they are helpless and can do nothing without our grace.

That captures Thorpe’s mindset beautifully.

So I’m recommending Thorpe’s book despite vehement disagreement with her savior-complex political and philosophical values, despite the relentless shilling of a refugee and immigration policy I find extremely harmful.

Thorpe is irritating, but thorough. Her rhapsodies on the mystical value of shared culture is as easily parodied as Wordsworth is on spades, but deeply reported narratives here and abroad, the vivid classroom descriptions, and (most importantly), the in-depth look at the expensive and relentless support the refugees received are worth the near-epileptic eye-rolls her misty-eyed romances induce.’

Moreover, Thorpe does a better than average job at classroom action. She nails the details of an ELL class. Like the teacher in her story, I had a class suddenly explode in size (from six to eighteen in less than six weeks). My students ranged from highly motivated to utterly disengaged. Some barely showing up? Check. Others making almost unimaginable progress in a year? Check. Not really teaching English, just giving them enrichment while they absorb the language from their environment? Check. Students who are tagged as English learners when in fact they have sub-90 IQs and have acquired as much English as they’re going to? Check. ELL classroom actually the entire community, as the students are insulated from the rest of the school? Check. She really captures the essential nature of ELL classrooms.

But classroom narratives are incidental to Thorpe’s primary mission of selling her readers on the Great Good Work the refugee program accomplishes.  She doesn’t shrink from revealing just how much time, money, resources, and boatloads of free stuff are lavished on uneducated refugees with huge families of varying motivation who just show up here and qualify for incredible bounty.

Before the bell rang for their next class, Mr. Williams beckoned to his seven teens and asked them to follow him into a large walk-in closet on the far side of the room. Inside, neatly arranged on wire shelving, the students beheld pasta, rice, lentils, beans, cans of vegetables, boxes of cereal, and individually wrapped protein bars. …Although their own daughter had graduated the previous spring, Jaclyn Yelich and Greg Theilen had nonetheless spent the past several days stocking these shelves….

“This is the food bank,’ Mr. Williams announced. “You can come here on Friday afternoon and take home bags of food.”….As he prepared to go home himself, Mr. Williams saw his students line up and wait their turn…They walked out of his room carrying recycled plastic bags bulging with beans, lentils, rice, all the staples.

A few chapters later, Jaclyn “proudly reported” that they were now giving grocery bags to sixty students, and by the next calendar year they were serving eighty families per week, and had moved from just beans and lentils to fresh produce and toiletries, including feminine products.

Thorpe also reveals, perhaps less consciously, how many liberal jobs are dependent on an abundant flow of refugees–while giving detailed accounts of the refugee swag bag:

 Troy was a caseworker with the African Community Center, a local nonprofit that was part of a national refugee resettlement agency known as the Ethiopian Community Development Council–one of the nine agencies that partners with the federal government to resettle refugees in the United States…Troy had found this particular assignment more perplexing than most because the family was large and were processed as three separate cases…. [The two oldest children] Gideon and Timote had “aged out” of the original application….

Right away, Troy handed [all four adults] each a $20 bill. This was pocket money, to use as they liked…..The following day, Troy would visit the family to check on them….and then he would hand every adult another $100 in cash. …Refugees were given a one-time cash grant from the federal government upon arrival of slightly more than $1000 per person, administered by the resettlement agency. They could also qualify for any assistance program open to a legal resident of the United States, depending on their income level. But they were expected to become self-sufficient within a short time. …By the time a refugee family walked into their new home, a case worker had to have secured appropriate housing, arranged for bedding [which must be new] and furniture, provided basic cooking utensils, cleaning supplies, and groceries, and prepared a warm meal of food that the family would find familiar.

Then Troy explained to the new family that they’d qualify for TANF, foodstamps, and Medicaid. Some would receive funds from another refugee cash assistance program. Troy had already expedited the benefits, so they’d get the money in seven days. He then spent hours with the parents explaining how rent worked, how food stamps worked, how TANF payments would come onto the same card as food stamps and how to go get a money order using the card.

Thorpe clearly implies that Trump’s victory will start economic hard times for the non-profits:

Over at the African Community Center, frustrated staff members, including Troy Cox, confronted something they had almost never seen: an empty bulletin board–no more Arrivals Notifications. Trump had suspended the entire refugee resettlement program for 120 and capped the number of refugees…

The only Republican other than Trump making an appearance is an evangelical Christian named Mark:

It struck me as notable that my liberal friends who planned to vote for Hillary Clinton and thought they were pro-refugee were not logging many volunteer hours with [refugee] families–but Mark was, every single week.

Liberals like Troy get paid by government grants to help refugees. Conservative Christians  like Mark volunteer for free.

Oh, that’s not fair. There were plenty of free services offered by liberals: in-class therapy, Goodwill teacher aides, and the aforementioned foodbanks. All tax-deductible, of course, and often covered by federal grants.

Eager to see the dismal lives her beloved pet refugees led before salvation, Thorpe visits a Ugandan refugee primary school with 1,606 children in eleven rooms. The school’s one redeeming virtue is it’s free, unlike the rare Ugandan secondary schools, which cost a great deal of money most can’t afford.

Thorpe goes through the numbers: The camp has 2 doctors who see 2,183 patients a month. Women get raped at the rate of about one a day. Where refugees live in homes with “no electricity, no appliances, no running water, no heating, no light switches, no glass windowpanes, and no doorknobs.” Where houses are made of dark mud.  She does not call the refugee camp a “hellhole”, but she thinks it very loudly.

She eagerly seeks out relatives of the African refugee family of Methusella (the star achiever in her tale). After finding a family uncle, she finally goes to a crowded refugee high school with an indifferent administrator who, with prompting, produces Stivin, Methusella’s cousin and close friend. But her stint at interconnectedness doesn’t go as planned.

I took out my iPhone to show him the same pictures…His face clouded as I described how well his relatives were doing in the United States….The American classrooms in my photographs had wall-to-wall carpeting,glass windows, colorful chairs, shelves of books, and carts filled with laptop computers. The classrooms at his school had concrete floors, no lights, and no windows. There were no books and no computers. I was showing Stivin a glimpse of a paradise to which he had not been invited.

I told him that his cousin Methusella said hello.

…”Tell him to work hard and send me money for a school uniform!” Stivin replied, in a slightly bitter tone.

Silly Stivin. Didn’t he realize his responsibility in this conversation? He was to be awed and grateful to the generous American who came all this way to show him how much her country was doing for Methusella. He was supposed to thank Thorpe for caring enough to seek him out, show him the wonderful life that people like Helen have insisted that America provide for a lucky few of the millions wanting a different life. Poor Helen. All the way to Uganda and no warm fuzzies for her effort.

Thorpe calls her behavior careless. I call her behavior devastating, unthinking, and cruel.

Mark Krikorian and others suggest that it’s cheaper and much more equitable to help refugees where they are. I’m all for that, even given the likelihood that much of the money will end up as bribes and graft. But when refugee programs combine with the “family unification” program, we end up “resettling” hundreds of thousands more.  Perhaps we should simply stop giving refugees the idea that leaving their own country and sitting in camps for years on end might possibly lead to the equivalent of a lottery win, and force them to stop hoping for a rescue to unimaginable luxury. Maybe they’ll stop trying to escape and start the horrible, painful process of fixing their own countries.

Besides, we have our own people to help.

So before I finish connecting the book review to the title of this piece, let me forestall an inevitable rejoinder from immigration romantics. I grew up outside the US.  My education, employment (both in technology and teaching), and community has been in  wildly diverse environments.  I have only lived one year of my life in a town that was over 50% white, and have spent many of the past 30 years in towns that more than 50% Asian.   In my life as a tech consultant, easily 50% of my co-workers over the years were immigrants.  With the exception of my ed school, which was about 70% white, I have attended and taught at schools that were 30% white or less, one that was 70% Hispanic. I’ve liked it fine. I’m so unused to being in a room full of whites that I double take and get nervous.

Thorpe, who was First Lady of Colorado for several years, grew up in a white suburb of New Jersey. When she married her now ex-husband John Hickenlooper, they eschewed the governor’s mansion, sticking to their Park Hill home,  in an area not particularly affluent and particularly African American–the kind of place that prides itself for being diverse but really isn’t. Her innocent awe suggests she isn’t experienced enough to categorize immigrants by ethnicity.  She’s an accurate reporter, but just a visitor. If I’m cynical about romantic vapors about immigrants and refugees in particular, I’ve earned the right. And not for nothing, but I’ve personally helped one hell of a lot more immigrants, refugees and otherwise, than Thorpe ever has visiting immigrants when she gets book deals for doing so.

As a group, would be immigrants have only one universal shortcoming: they aren’t American.  We owe our fellow Americans the resources, staffing, and opportunities we lavish on immigrants, refugee or otherwise.

While Thorpe goes into considerable detail about the cost of relocating and settling refugees, she never mentions the fortune we spend educating  all these first and second generation immigrants–some of whom become exceptional, most of whom need welfare just like mom and dad do.

Scratch the surface of every happy story report of a region that welcomed immigrants, refugees or otherwise, to “revitalize” its economic doldrums, and you’ll see a mention of the tremendous cost of educating new refugees. Immigrants cost much more to educate than native English speakers. They have smaller classes. They have lots of teacher’s aides, often hired from the immigrant community–another jobs program.  Sometimes, immigrant parents become unhappy with the local schools so they use public dollars to set up an immigrants only charters, or perhaps they’ll attend one of the many public schools using tax dollars to run ESL-only schools.

Thorpe describes the refugees’ work: dishwashers, factory jobs, meatpacking plants. She sees it as a selling point: look, the refugees are working, providing for themselves. Without refugees filling these jobs, perhaps the employers would be forced to pay more.  I’m certain rents would be much lower. Perhaps natives–black, white, Asian, Hispanic–would be able to take the jobs as dishwashers and meatpackers and make a living with additional government aid. If every immigrant job was automated away with no net improvement in citizen employment, we’d still be saving a fortune in education and Medicaid from the refugees that don’t become self-sufficient and their descendants.

In another piece on these undeserving American poor, Kevin Williamson suggests that housing policy would encourage the worthy to relocate. While it’s certainly true that Americans are reluctant to relocate to expensive cities, Williamson neglects to mention that immigrants resettling to cities to provide cheap labor are driving up housing costs. And the immigrants’ housing is cushioned by support organizations hunting down the apartments, furnishing them, and handing out ready cash.

To say nothing of the fact that  employers in high-immigration areas use network hiring,  create immigrant “job ghettos”, and are actively biased in favor of immigrants over citizens.. Then, of course, refugees come over with their entire families, all of whom are unemployed with no work history. American citizen families are more complex. Fathers might not want to leave their children after a divorce, or a girlfriend might have a good job that a move would put at risk.

But these circumstances and their increased risk could be mitigated by organizations reaching out to depressed areas of the US, finding jobs, helping entire family systems to move. Who not use all these funds to encourage Americans to relocate?¹ Start some government programs to find apartments and give some cash to help out workers relocating from Kentucky or Compton or Detroit. Even if Americans had the same failure rate, same welfare use, they’d be cheaper to educate than immigrants.

Alas, Thorpe could only find salvation in getting a hefty advance for writing a book about low-born immigrants who grovel at her proxied generosity. Troy can only find joy helping people he sees as helpless and entirely ignorant of American ways, so they can thrive under his tutelage. The progressives volunteering in foodbanks are well-meaning only so long as they feel like Great White Saviors.

The entire script of sacred immigration is based on uplift. The only way to save America’s soul is to pay to transport thousands of uneducated immigrants, those “huddled masses”, send them to American schools at taxpayer expense, find them living quarters that increases the demand for housing and drives up costs, spend thousands of hours helping them find and, best case, keep low-paying American jobs. That last bit, of course, is why business has become so relentlessly progressive, or as Ross Douthat puts it, signed on for the Peace of Palo Alto.

When Charles Murray, Kevin Williamson, and others wonder why the hell American workers don’t move, why not instead ask why the hell we spend so much time and resources importing unskilled workers with scores of children who cost a fortune to educate, when we could be spending that money supporting American workers to relocate?

Helen Thorpe’s book answers Murray and Williamson’s questions posed at the beginning of this piece. Americans don’t move to where the jobs are because immigrants, refugees or otherwise, get there first. Immigrants aren’t better than Americans. They’re just more sympathetic to elites with a savior fetish and more affordable to employers who want cheap labor. And so they benefit from  entire public and private infrastructure that uses taxpayer dollars to help those immigrants provide cheap labor and burden our educational system while locking out Americans who need a second, fourth, or eighth chance.

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¹I looked for such programs and couldn’t find any. Maybe some exist. If so, we need more.

The Invisible Trump Voters

According to Google, only  Steve Sailer and  Alexander Navaryan have pointed out that Bret Stephens’ call for  mass deportation of Americans was actually a diatribe against blacks and Hispanics.

But just imagine trying to point that out in a public venue:

“You’re denying you were calling for blacks and Hispanics to be deported? Why would anyone believe you were referring to white people? They don’t have the highest illegitimacy rates, the highest incarceration rates, the worst test scores….”

As Steve pointed out a few years ago, noticing things is a problem. In this particular case, noticing Bret Stephens’ callous provincialism would cause far too many problems. Anyone who dared point out the obvious, if unintended, target of the slur would be risking media outrage–all the more so because the media wouldn’t want anyone wondering why they hadn’t noticed the attack on African American and Latino honor. That’s probably why Navaryan hastened to add that most of the outrage seemed to be from media outlets popular with “right-leaning whites”.

A Damon Knight intro to a 1967 Robert Heinlein collection that’s often proved illustrative:

People are still people: they read Time magazine, smoke Luckies, fight with their wives.

Knight, one of the great science fiction editors, wrote this essay  two years before his wife Kate Wilhelm became one of the first female Nebula winners. Knight and Wilhelm led widely acclaimed writer’s workshops for years. (The great Kate is still writing and running workshops. Bow down.)

In short, Knight wasn’t particularly sexist. But   when he wrote “people”, he meant “men”.

Bret Stephens and most of the mainstream media aren’t particularly racist. But when Bret wrote about deporting “Americans” and  “people”, everyone read “whites”.

So this whole episode reminded me of the invisible Trump voter. Not the ones people usually mean, like the ones discussed in this  article on journalism’s efforts to find Trump voters.  Everyone talks about the downscale white voters, but they aren’t invisible anymore. Those white voters, many of them recently Democrats, finally turned on the party and put Trump over the top. I’m talking about the Trump voters still unseen.

Consider the Republican primary results by county:

That’s a lot of counties Trump won. New York and New Jersey went for Trump, as did Virginia and Massachussetts. He won California with 75% of the vote, after Kasich and Cruz had withdrawn but were still on the ballot.  (Trump also had a commanding lead in the polls, for what they’re worth, when the race was still in play.)

Trump did very well in high immigration states during the primaries. At a time when Never Trumpers were attempting a convention coup, Californians could have given them ammunition by supporting Kasich or Cruz with a protest vote.  Arnold Schwarzenegger put it about he was voting for Kasich. No dice. Trump won every county.

All these states that ultimately went commandingly blue, of course. But Trump voters are white voters. Hillary Clinton won thirteen of the states that had exit polls, but only won the white vote in four of them:

Clinton state, Trump won white voters	Clinton state, Clinton won white voters
Virginia (59%)	Washington (51%)
Nevada (56%)	California (50%)
New Jersey (54%)	Oregon (49%)
Minnesota (53%)	Maine (47%)
Illinois (52%)
New York (51%)
New Hampshire (48%)
Colorado (47%)
New Mexico (47%)

These are the Clinton states that didn’t have exit polls, with her percentage of the votes and the state’s percentage of white non-Hispanics (not the percentage of white votes, which isn’t available):

State	%	NHW
Hawaii	63%	26%
Maryland	60%	44%
Massachusetts	60%	74%
Vermont	57%	practically everybody
Rhode Island	54%	76%
Connecticut	54%	71%
Delaware	53%	65%

Hard to see how Trump lost the white vote in Maryland, Connecticut, or Delaware. But if you give her all seven, she still only won the white vote in eleven states total. A more realistic guess is eight or nine. And for a liberal bastion, California’s white vote was surprisingly close. California has fewer working class whites than New York and New Jersey, but  California’s white voters supported Romney in 2012 and Bush in 2004. Perhaps a lot of Republican voters stayed home rather than vote for Trump.

Why so much support? Well,  in September 2016, a California poll showed whites were almost split on immigration–only 52% saying immigrants were a boon, 41% saying they were a drain on public services. I looked for similar polls for other blue states and couldn’t find any. But that’d certainly be an avenue to explore.

These are big states, and 30% of big states is a big ol’ number of voters. The LA Times observed that only Florida and Texas gave Trump more votes than California. Nearly a million people voted for Trump in Chicago and the “collar counties”, as many as the entire state of Okalama,  The San Francisco Bay Area counties and Los Angeles County contributed roughly 600,000 each, slightly less than Kansas gave Trump or the combined Trump votes of Montana and Idaho. New York City counties kicked in close to half a million, slightly more than the combined vote of the Dakotas.

Consider, too, that these voters knew full well that their vote wouldn’t matter and they went out and voted for Trump anyway. If every Trump voter in California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois had simply stayed home, he’d still be President, most of the local races would have unchanged results, and Hillary’s popular vote margin would be four or five million more.

These voters pay too much rent to be hillbillies.  They live in some of the most expensive real estate in America, so they’re not likely to be poor or unsuccessful. Vox’s condescending tripe about the home-town losers voting for Trump because they’re racist, sexist losers afraid of change doesn’t  explain the millions of voters in high immigration areas who voted for Trump. Emily Ekins typology of Trump voters doesn’t seem to cover these voters, either. Why would Staunch Conservatives who could afford the high rents of blue states continue to live in places so at odds with their values? Free Marketers wouldn’t have voted so enthusiastically for Trump in the first place.  I suspect Ekins has defined American Preservationists too narrowly.

How can anyone argue that Trump’s support in Deep Blue land is racist? Huge chunks of white Trump voters in blue states work, live, send their kids to school with a range of diversity in culture, race, and economics that elites like Bret Stephens can’t even begin to comprehend. They often live cheek and jowl with people who speak no English at allwho speak no English at all, and have to handle endless cultural issues that arise from having Russian, Chinese, Syrian, or/and Congolese neighbors, usually uninterested in assimilating and often with no visible means of support.  They see schools struggling with policies designed for a much simpler bi- or tri-racial country, policies designed with the expectation that most students would be Americans. They see immigrants qualifying for tremendous educational expenditures, guaranteed by law, supported by a court that shrugged off the cost   of guaranteeing all immigrants access to public schools. They see the maternity tourism that will allow yet anothe generation of Chinese  natives gaining access to public universities while not speaking any English.

They see immigrants voting by race, supporting Democrats despite a generally tepid lack interest in most progressive causes,  simply to assure themselves the ability to bring in relatives (or sell access through marriage or birth certificate fraud). They’re used to white progressives imposing near total rule on the government using the immigrant citizens voting strength to enact policies that the immigrants themselves will ignore or be unaffected by, but the white citizens, in particular, will pay for.  These Trump voters watch immigrant enclaves form and slowly gather enough voters to vote in politicians by race and religion.  They might worry that white progressive rule will give way to a future of a parliamentary style political system in which various immigrant political forces who don’t consider themselves American, but only citizens, combine to vote not for progressive or conservative values, but some form of values genuinely alien to Americans.

They think it’s hilarious, but not in a good way, when reporters earnestly reassure their readers that immigrants don’t qualify for benefits, or that non-citizens aren’t voting. They see tremendous fraud and illegal behavior go unpunished. They know of huge cash only malls run by immigrants, and know the authorities will never investigate. Fortunately, the authorities do find and prosecute all sorts of immigrant fraud rings, but that only makes them wonder why we bring in so many immigrants to begin with.

I suspect that between thirty and fifty percent of white people living in high immigration regions voted for Trump. But if they see the worst of intensive immigration, they also haven’t chosen to leave it. They don’t say “people” and mean “whites”, like Bret Stephens.

Ironically, Bret Stephens is furious at the downscale “losers” who voted for Trump–the voters who don’t usually vote Republican, or even vote at all. He’s too ignorant, too blind to realize he’d also have to deport millions of invisible Trump voters, the voters he might grudgingly concede are successful, who pay more in taxes than they cost the government, who start successful businesses, who have children they can support. The voters who have been voting Republican a long time without any real enthusiasm, who have always been less than enthused about the values he arrogantly assumes are universally held by Republicans. The white voters whose existence he doesn’t understand enough to write about.

These invisible Trump voters have a lot to risk by going public. But reporters should seek them out. How many of the Trump voters in Deep Blue Land, the ones making it in the high-rent, high-immigration, highly educated regions, how many made him their first choice? And why?

So c’mon into Blue Land, Salena, Chris. Talk to some of the invisible Trump voters that haven’t really been considered yet. Let them add to the story.

 

 

The Trump Effect: Reboot or Yesterdays Enterprise?

The first Star Trek “reboot”  took the bold act of altering the past in a famous fictional timeline. The new movies have the freedom to reinvent, while we watch the movies, fully aware what “really” happened. This got taken to extremes for “Into the Darkness”, when the last half hour echoed word for word the greatest Star Trek movie ever made with a character swap, but it’s still pretty clever.

Ever since Trump won in November, I’ve felt like we’re all living through an alternate timeline. Like Tom Hanks’ “Doug” said in that sublime Black Jeopardy skit, “Come on, they already decided who wins even before it happens”. Everyone of any importance knew Hillary would win.  Jobs were accepted. Plans were made.

But while I see it as a reboot, an opportunity to rewrite the future, all the people with any voice or influence think of the election as Yesterday’s Enterprise. Just as the Enterprise C slipped through the temporal rift and forestalled the truce between the Klingons and the Federation, so too did a whole bunch of voters escape the notice of the Deep State. Which is a good thing, because otherwise the Deep State have taken action before the election . Trump would have been doped up and stuck in bed with a dead transgender Muslim and a live boy peeing on him. Not that this would have cost him the election, but at least they’d have grounds for an arrest.

Instead, most of the elite institutions were stunned by the actual voters making a choice that defied all their warnings, their  manifest horror at Trump’s candidacy, never mind his primary triumph. They haven’t stopped trying to convince us of our mistake.

A couple weeks ago, I was really upset at the many corners of the media openly and excitedly debating whether it’d be better to use impeachment or the 25th Amendment to rid themselves of this meddlesome Trump–where even the opponents to the idea concurred that Trump was a witless boob, inept and obviously unfit, that impeachment was reasonable or that the fish rots from the head.

When I realized that the feeling was….familiar. Flashback to a year earlier, back in March and April, when anti-Trump elite GOPs were debating the best way to rig the convention,  gleefully mocking Trump and his voters as Cruz stole his delegates,  happily contemplating a Kasich-Cruz alliance.  Deep in the stunning beauty of central Idaho, I was struggling to enjoy spring break because I knew, beyond any doubt, that the media and institutional powers of the conservative movement would do anything within their power to deny the voters’ choice.

At some point, I realized the idiocy of letting this nonsense get to me and went hiking. Well, walking around a mountain and going up a few hundred feet. It felt like hiking.

But  Trump triumphed.  We got to mock Nate Silver’s open dismissal of Paul Manafort’s prediction of locking up the nomination as “delusional” when in fact the job got done earlier than expected. We had the fun of watching the delegates boo Ted Cruz. We all enjoy reminding Jonah Goldberg that he followed Bill Mitchell on Election Day “for kicks”,confidently expecting to retweet Bill’s pained realization of Trump’s obliteration.

Despite all those earlier outrageous, determined efforts,  here we are on what, the fifth catastrophe that the media predicted will wipe out Trump’s presidency? Shrug. They’ll find something else. Why get angry? It didn’t work last time. So I let go of the anger, and enjoyed the drama queen Comey telling his tale.

I don’t understand those who are disappointed in Trump’s achievements. Bush 43 had near total control of Congress and got No Child Left Behind. After 2002 he had full control of Congress and passed Medicare Part D. From 2005-2007, he did everything possible, including race-shaming, to pass “comprehensive” immigration reform. A few days after 9/11, he arranged a photo op with Muslims to make sure no one had Bad Thoughts.

Meanwhile, Trump is appointing judges, deporting illegal aliens, and building the wall.He’s letting the military take it to ISIS and Syria.  He’s rolling back environmental policies and stepped out of the Paris Accords. He’s ringing employment to the industrial regions that supported him–maybe not as much as they need, but more than they had. I don’t like Betsy much, but at least she’s doing some interesting evasions on IDEA and special ed.

How much virtual ink has been spilled on the deportations, on Paris, on the environmental policies? How many politicians before Trump wouldn’t risk media disapproval? He’s shown what can be done. That’s an invaluable service.

Much of the rest is noise.  Turns out  many important people aren’t really concerned about what a president does, so long as he only has one scoop of ice cream at dinner while he carefully discusses his hopes for Michael Flynn’s future. Whatever charge the media flings, there’s a countercharge about a prior presidency.  If I am too cynical about Washington, if there is a measurable difference between Trump and his predecessors in terms of the venal opportunism found in his government officials,  you’ll forgive me if I’m unconvinced by the assurance of those “experts” who called for impeaching Bill Clinton, invading Iraq or Afghanistan, and/or electing the incompetent naif Barack Obama on the country.

Is Trump suited to be President? Beats me. Should he be hiring more people? Maybe. Is he upsetting European leaders? I certainly hope so. I don’t see him as a bully or a dictator. I’ve never been convinced by those who do.

Do I want more? Sure.  Like most of his immigration restrictionist supporters, I’m unhappy that he’s still approving DACA waivers and extensions.  I hope his daughter and son-in-law go back to New York. Would I like less tweeting, more thoughtfulness? Yes.  Do I wish his cabinet didn’t look like the Goldman Sachs retirement weekend? Absolutely. Less emphasis on tax breaks and other GOP wishlist items? Indeed.  But as far as hard asks go, just one: cease and desist any talk of firing Jeff Sessions.

Still,  if Trump were note-perfect, he’d still be facing a huge, hostile force. Of  all the institutional wisdom that Trump showed up as canard, the media’s power took the biggest hit. Trump showed conclusively that the media is only speaking to half the country (usually the left). No other conclusion is possible. The media has no influence over the people; it’s just preaching to its believers. Worse, the people now know that the media didn’t change a single mind.  Profits are up, because their half of the country is enraged and active. But they’ll never again be able to pretend their reporting speaks to the entire country, or that they influence public opinion. They keep trying–the sob stories about the deportees, the stenography of various government leakers, the outright fake news (tells us again how Trump was under investigation, guys!). But the whole of the public remains curiously unmoved, despite the hype.

The media wants to change the world back to way it was.  What’s happening now is all wrong, they’re not supposed to be here, they have to  fix it.  If they can just keep the pressure on and play for time, someone who “wasn’t supposed to be here” will drag the wounded Enterprise C back a hundred years to be destroyed.  The timeline can be restored.

So it’s  ungrateful and even a bit stupid to demand Trump alter every personality trait that got him this far.  Trump has the perfect characteristics for moving America in spite of  media outrage.  He’s sublimely unconcerned about how things are done, comfortable with violating norms. Crass. Obnoxious. Unflinching. Self-absorbed. They might not be comfortable qualities in a roommate, but they’ll do nicely to protect him during the onslaught.

Because it’s going to get time to get everyone accepting the reboot. Note that political pundits still fixate on approval numbers. You know, the kind that comes from polls. Like the polls that predicted Hillary would win.  Paul Ryan and other respectable Republicans are still trying to figure out how they can win media approval, win support from moderates, and improve their polling numbers.

They should take a page from Mitch McConnell’s book. Back when Ryan was playing Hamlet, McConnell quietly told his senators to do whatever they needed to do, and held on like grim death to that empty Supreme Court seat. These days, McConnell refuses to be gobsmacked by the intemperate Trump. Sure, he’d like less drama. But in the meantime, he’s getting it done.

I wish everyone in GOPVille would do the same.  What I want, of course, are more people  following Trump’s example. The first one to violate expectations had to be a billionaire who didn’t need donors with a willful desire to offend people. But with time, others will be able to build on his first steps. Others might be equally willing to brave disapproval but, dare I say, more temperamentally suited to government. Many of Trump’s policies have already become  accepted–if not respectable, at least not reviled.  Over time, more will.  That’s my hope–that others build on his success, the knowledge that his policies have tremendous support.  Embrace the alternate timeline.

That’s the best way of ensuring the changes will hold, that calls to end Trump’s presidency fade.  Sure, the pendulum will swing back. I’m just hoping for more changes that permanently alter the landscape. Don’t let the media win and enforce the pretense that the alternate timeline didn’t ever happen. Let this be a genuine reboot where Christopher Pike gets a better death, rather than a temporary odd happenstance that had no effect once Enterprise C went back.

Of course, this advice could be coming from a Klingon who’d rather achieve  total victory over the Federation than a treaty in which both sides move forward in peace.   You takes your chances.

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In case you’re new and missed my other political pieces (I usually do education):

Note from a Trump Supporter: It’s the Immigration, Stupid!

Citizens, Not Americans

This Great Election

Celebrating Trump in a Deep Blue Land

(destiny quote from R. Stevens, dieselsweeties.com)

 

Understanding the 2016 Election, High School Edition

So my new “year” has started with the onset of the new semester. I am, oddly, teaching only 50% math. My school couldn’t find a new English teacher (note, again, the pain point for principals is hiring, not firing). Since I was already teaching a full schedule with no prep, the entire math department schedule had to be revamped to get someone to cover one of my trig classes.  So ELL, Trig, US History, Trig. Busy.

Anyway, I have kicked off my planned US History curriculum and on one day’s experience, it’s going gangbusters. I decided the students would best grasp the significance of the electoral college if we began with the recent election–give them a frame of reference as we then look back.

First, I gave them a copy of Article II, section 1 and the Twelfth Amendment, explaining that the elections we’d be reviewing would use both the original and amended text. But the big takeaway I wanted them to get for the first go-round was:  Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector.

This was new information–well, more accurately, it was relevant information, something they’d clearly been wondering about. When we got to the text about the electors meeting to elect the president, I played that Martin Sheen et al video.

“These actors were trying to change the electors’ minds. As we just read, if no candidate receives more than half the electoral vote, the House of Representatives elects the president. So you can see they didn’t have to change everyone’s minds, just enough to push the vote below the halfway mark.”

“And they’re Democrats?”

“No. The House is controlled by Republicans. I have to say I never quite understood the logic of this effort.”

“Why do they keep repeating everything?” Elian asked.

“They must think we’re stupid.” Bart observed.

“I think they did it for artistic effect. But let’s move on. That’s how the president is actually elected. So now lets see how many electors each state gets. Who knows how many Senators we have?”

The guesses were all over the place until I asked for the names of our senators. Then they all figured out it was two.

“Right. Two for each state. Each state, no matter how big or small, gets two senators. And since we have 50 states, we have a total of…..” (I always wait. Are they paying attention? I get 100 back pretty quickly.) “House of Representatives works differently. The House, for reasons we’ll discuss later, assigns representatives based on population. But about a century ago, Congress froze the number of seats at 435.”

“Why?”

“Good question. We’ll explore that later. For now, I just want you guys to get an understanding of the rules on the ground.”

“So every state gets two electors, no matter what, right?” asks Pippa. “Because they have two Senators.”

“Yes, good. They actually get three, no matter what. They elected two senators and one representative, so three electoral votes.”

“That sucks,” Eddie observed. “They only get three people to represent the state.”

“Actually, that three is a good deal. Let’s just take two states: Montana, with a population of about a million, and New York, with a population of 20 million. So New York is twenty times bigger than Montana. Montana gets 3 electoral votes. Any guesses as to how many New York gets?”

“Well, if it’s twenty times bigger, they should get sixty.” Anita.

“That can’t be right, though,” observed Priya.  “New York isn’t the biggest state, and if it has 60, then how many does Texas or California have?”

“Very good.” and I passed out the worksheet I’d cobbled up. One side was an image of the country with electoral votes by state,  the other was a table looking something like this.

“Wait. New York only has 29 electoral votes? Holy crap.”

“Yeah. Now you’re starting to see. New York only gets nine times as many electoral votes, despite having twenty times as many people.”

“That’s not fair to the big states!”

“It might feel that way. However, there was a lot of reasoning that went into that decision. We’ll be talking about it later, and you can judge. For now, here’s a simple task. I want you to mark the map with the winners, as many as you remember or want to guess. Then, on the back, put your guess and then the electoral vote total in each column. I don’t expect everyone to know all of them. I just think it will be a good discussion, get you seeing how much you know or remember. Then I’ll help you fill it in.”

I was pleased to see kids filled in a good bit of the map based on their own knowledge. Many knew the South was mostly Republican. They all, without exception, called Florida for Trump. A cheering number was aware that the Rust Belt states had flipped. After ten minutes or so, I brought up the same map on my Promethean and marked it up with their results, correcting for reality as needed. During the conversation, I added in some tidbits–what the polls in each state had showed, what states Hillary never saw coming, demographic voting patterns, DC’s three electoral votes, and so on.

When we finished marking the map up, Kevin mused, “Jesus. Trump won a lot of states.”

“He did indeed.”

On instinct, I went to a browser and brought up the 2016 electoral results map.

It was a good instinct. The class literally gasped.

“Holy sh**! He won all those states?” Eduardo was aghast.

“Huh.” Eddie, as dedicated a Trump hater as ever existed, had bitterly snarked about borders in an inequalities lesson immediately after the election. I’m hoping he’ll  feel less hardly done by in the future.

Here is something I learned: the kids had been told many times that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. They understood what that meant. But not until this moment had they ever genuinely grasped the visuals of Trump’s win. What Trump’s win looked like. The map was a huge reveal. Minds weren’t changed, but perspectives were.

“Our Constitution gives voice to all citizens, but through the states. It’s a balance. It’s not always perfect. But it exists for a reason. Maybe this map gives you a sense of why.”

I had an extra fifteen minutes, so again on impulse, I brought up the classic youtube compilation of famous and influential people saying, with confidence, that Donald Trump could never win. I pointed out the lesser known ones, but they got the drift and loved it. I will note they were shocked (and not in a good way) at Seth Meyers’ disrespect. Loud applause at the end. I hit pause and got their attention.

“Here’s what I want you to know: not a single person in that compilation lost their jobs. Well. Except Obama, but his term was up. Every person on TV, acting as an expert. Every comedian. Every politician. You just saw pretty much every famous person in America laughing hysterically at the very idea that Trump might win. And none of them were held accountable. None of the media people who confidently predicted Trump had no chance of winning got fired. If you supported Hillary Clinton, you could easily have assumed you could stay home. Why bother voting? Trump couldn’t win. And when Trump won, these same media folk were all aghast. Then they ran all these stories about  devastated people, heartbroken by Trump’s victory. Rarely did you see stories on people who voted for Trump, who were thrilled at his win.”

Silence.

“I want you to go home tonight, turn on cable news–well, except Fox–and you’ll see all those people you just saw and more, talking about the demonstrations against Trump’s new immigration policy. Trump’s naming a new justice, maybe there’ll be more demonstrations. All the people on TV, many of them who are newspaper reporters talking about their own print stories, will talk about how big the demonstrations are, how meaningful they are, how important they are, how the people are speaking.”

“And when they sound certain. When they sound like experts. When they talk to experts who sound certain. I want you to remember that video. Because then it might not come as much of a shock to learn that 49% of Americans polled support Trump’s immigration EO.”

“Yeah. I get it.” Omar nodded. “It’s like the media only shows people who agree with them.”

“It’s like they don’t even realize people don’t agree with them.” said Amy.

” So if all the cool people hating on Trump, maybe no one will want to, you know, be a d*** who likes Trump.”

“But I do hate Trump!” said Eddie.

“Well, I’d like you to think about using a different word than ‘hate’. But sure. LOTS of people disagreed with Trump. More people voted who wanted Clinton, remember? That’s where we started. ”

“It’s like, don’t be fooled. Don’t think that just because all the famous people think the way you do, that everyone does.” Omar again.

” If you surround yourself with people who think just like you do and never associate with people who don’t, you might lose track of what’s normal. It’s called ‘living in a bubble’.”

“You know,” observed Pippa, “I’ve always thought it was kind of cool that Trump won.”

“WHAT???” Eddie, outraged.

“No, I hate him. I mean, I disagree with him. But now that I see that video, I think it’s even cooler. All these famous people were laughing at him.”

“Yeah, mocking him. Nasty stuff.” agreed Lennie.

“And he went out there and ignored them and took his ideas to the people. And won!”

“I swear to you, Pippa, that’s exactly what I love about this election. I said that verbatim to my advisory. I truly believe that only in America, only with our rules, could someone go out and speak to the country and get the votes needed to win the presidency.”

The bell rang.

Good first day.

Letter to Betsy (#2): Drop Out.

Hey, Bets.

Well, I did say in my last note that you hadn’t shown  much capacity for original thought, that your primary contribution to ed reform were your contributions. I didn’t expect you to prove it so completely in your first at-bat.

Let’s avert our eyes from the tonedeaf response on guns at schools. I’m agnostic on the issue, but you should know that grizzlies aren’t a reason this is a tier-1 conflict. That bespeaks an ignorance I find…unsettling. I accept that you don’t care much about preschool, but what sort of conservative Republican would you be if  you thought universal pre-K was effective? Accountability, on the other hand, is a word you’ve heard before, so your constant evasions were seen–correctly–as attempts to avoid answering that you don’t think charters should be accountable to the same degree that public schools are. (No. Charters aren’t public schools.)

All of these could be explained away, or at least considered tertiary issues. You could say you hadn’t been properly briefed. And in fairness, you did have a nice moment with Bernie Sanders on college tuition: “free college” is indeed a misnomer.

But on two points, you displayed ignorance so profound that Republicans should vote against you.

First, you had no idea that IDEA and other federal legislation requires that states pay for absurd and often useless interventions for a wide range of disabilities, including many mild learning disabilities for which no meaningful interventions exist.

Less than a week before you went to Congress, the Supreme Court heard arguments as to whether or not a school district should provide an autistic kid with private school if the educational benefit the school could provide was “only trivial”.

Left unmentioned was the fact that on any given day, mainstream kids aren’t given this right.   I don’t often get infuriated at education reporters, many of whom do a pretty good job, but  not a single one has pointed out the absurd unfairness of a law that gives a select group of kids the right to sue for the private education of their choice on the grounds that they aren’t benefiting from the education their school provides.

I know many people will snicker–yeah, if all kids could sue their schools, teachers would hate it! Unlikely. I’d expect a lot of kids suing over disruptive classrooms, which would give schools cover to expel troublemakers. I’d expect others to demand the right to be taught what they don’t yet know.  Right now, my Algebra 2 junior who counts on her fingers can’t demand to be taught at a school that will instruct her in ratios and basic math, just as a sophomore with fifth grade reading skills can’t sue his district demanding the right to attend a school that won’t insist on pretending he can understand Antigone or Romeo & Juliet. Of course, no such school exists because they aren’t allowed to. Few teachers  would oppose safer schools or appropriate curriculum.

Once people figure out that giving all kids the right to sue wouldn’t work out as expected, they’ll look at removing the privilege from that select group. I wrote an entire article promoting the repeal of IDEA. I’m very much in favor of special ed being returned to the states and giving voters a say in what priorities special education receives compared to the wide range of needs that schools and their students have.

Betsy, I would have loved to see you  boldly call for an end to federal intervention in special education, to leave these decisions to the states. But you didn’t even know that the responsibility had to be returned! Of course, if you had known what the law was, you’d have burped  up (ladylike, I’m sure) a bromide, followed by a platitude and everyone would have patted themselves on the back for caring about disabled kids.

That leads to the second of your gross errors, about which I have less passion but is far more revealing.  Growth versus proficiency is something that teachers themselves have been talking about for decades, but education reformers have only really stumbled onto in the past few years, as the need arose when  charters didn’t attain the proficiency numbers they expected.  But you should know that. This is right in the ballpark of the field you fund so generously. And you were clueless. Franken was right to interrupt and dismiss your answer. (He was wrong to meander off into gay rights, a matter of trivial interest in public education. Put that in the “Why Trump Won” category.)

If  fifteen or more years actively supporting charters hasn’t brought you up to speed on the fundamental issues determining their success,  then how can we assume you have the capacity to learn about anything less central to your interests?

Bernie Sanders asked the right question. And you proved the correct answer was “No.”  A better woman would have said “I was almost certainly selected because I’m a billionaire who has given money to causes. But I also have a real interest in making life better for poor children.  That’s why I’m here.” That, at least, would be honest.

Better you should go back to writing checks.

Unlike most of the people opposing you, I accept that the incoming SecEd will be someone I disagree with, someone who openly snorts derisively at my profession, while protesting he does no such thing. I’m fine with that. I’d just like someone…smarter. Someone who really does know the research. Someone who, ideally, has been around the block with education reform. Someone who knows it’s more than the platitudes that typical conservatives spill, that “fixing schools” as they envision it hasn’t yet worked out.

My pick, and I’ve thought about this for a while, is Checker Finn. He’s old enough not to worry about his next job (which is why I eliminated Michael Petrilli and Rick Hess from consideration). He’s cranky and willing to offend. He’s wrong, of course, but then all education reformers are.  But when he’s not shilling the reform spiel, he’s knowledgeable on many different aspects of education. And he’s canny. Apart from yours truly, he’s the only person to observe that Trump voters aren’t exactly the target audience for talk of vouchers and charters. He has also recently observed that the era of education reform is over, and wondered whether Trump should even bother with a SecEd, given the restrictions that ESSA has put on the feds. (yay!). This suggests an appropriate level of humility for a long-term reformer, one who understands that 25 years of getting what he wanted in reform hasn’t fixed the achievement gap, that  reformers’ grand scheme of killing ed schools with the 1998 Higher Education Act failed miserably.  Checker Finn understands full well that Common Core was rejected; he argued in favor of them because he hoped they would result in less federal oversight.

Checker was Never Trump and, as mentioned, pro-Common Core, which is two strikes against him in Trumpland. But Betsy, if you decide to take my advice, I hope you put a word in for Checker with your not-to-be boss.

But since you’ll probably ignore me, see you next letter.

2016: Five Years On….and then Trump

Having done three posts in a week–no small task for this slow writer–I was going to abandon a retrospective post this year. My traffic is down, and while I’m not concerned, I thought eh, no reason to write about it.

But I’ve written a retrospective every year. I started this blog on January 1, 2012 as a New Year’s Resolution, and when the anniversy went by I instantly felt a nagging sense of guilt and duty–and so, a retrospection. But not really on my blog.

For the first thirty years of my  working life, I played mostly at the edges of occupations. A friend once introduced me as someone who does “obscure technical things” and that was when I worked at a large corporation. For many years, I made a decent living doing things few people cared about, or thought you could make a living at like, say, tutoring. Teaching is a mainstream, non-niche profession if ever there was one, but I was reminded that my opinions are still niche when I tried to write about my career.  Getting any publication interested in my experiences or observations was a total non-starter. I occasionally got nibbles, but the intersection between what I could write about in 750 words and what someone was interested in publishing was almost non-existent–and I gave up trying rather easily.

And so the blog, with this resolution. I could focus on what interested me, not what was fashionable, and build an audience writing on topics as they occurred to me, not on what was timely. I could maybe start getting my audience to look at education as I did, or find like-minded folks, or both. I achieved more success than I ever dreamed in the first year and every year since has been better.

Then this year, this year that so many in the media rather provincially declare a gruesome annus horribilis, because they’re a bunch of narcissistic puppies who demand we share their misery. But I had a simply splendid time and for reasons directly related to the biography above.

I love politics, but as a spectator sport. My life is as niche as my careers are (custodial divorced parent, first generation college graduate, low six figure income, white, English major working in technology OR teaching math–pick three and you still have trouble forming a club,  much less a political action committee. Heads of households who make too much for the Child Tax Credit: not a big interest group.)

So since I never expected politicians to speak to my interests, I became very interested in determining who politicians were talking to, which eventually led me to realize that politicians were weren’t talking to. Broadly, I realized that politicians were flatly ignoring an important interest group: working people making less than, say, mid-six figures. Note I said “interest group”. Many vote ideology, just as I do, despite their income level and best economic interests. Politicians seemed to be taking this for granted. They were running on issues largely ideological terms, both left and right. But they were ignoring areas that clearly affected and interested wide swathes of the electorate.

I came to this realization via immigration and education, two areas that I’ve been watching and reading about for thirty years. I was unaware of the depth of disaster done by China to manufacturing in this country, but it plays to the same failure to speak to the public’s interests.

So even before Sean Trende pointed it out, I was wondering why no one was making a play for white voters. This realization is one of the issues that led me to notice the great Steve Sailer in the early oughts. Like Steve, I’m not a white nationalist–in fact, I believe that implementing the “Sailer Strategy” would ultimately result in more blacks and Hispanics coming to the GOP. But white voters were a large enough group to make zeitgeist defiance a worthwhile risk. From there, it’s a short step to understanding that the GOP was just giving lip service to immigration and cultural issues because, in part, the conservative elites shared the same values as the media and liberal elites and had no plans to change anything.

Like many others, I’ve long believed elites were engaging in an effort to shut down opposition to these key values. The left and right both brought about political or economic doom for those who went against the grain–no donors to run for office,  shaming, job loss,  whatever was needed to achieve an apology or social and economic obliteration. That’s….not how our country is supposed to work. I have a close friend who said, years ago, that the only person who could break through would be a really rich person who didn’t give a damn about winning approval. I went further than that: I was certain that many in the country were deeply disgusted with the media’s enforcement of the canon, whether or not they called it The Cathedral, and were longing to see someone take them on–and that person, yes, would have to be really rich and already famous.

Enter Trump, but this isn’t about the election. It’s All About Me.

Instead of playing my usual role disengaged but passionate political observer, I was watching a neophyte politician with a genius for stagecraft promoting exactly the ideas that I thought were necessary to win disaffected white voters, using exactly the unapologetic, flagrant violation of media expectations I thought it would take. I had skin in this game. I wanted Trump to win the GOP nomination. I hoped he would win the presidency.

Not only was I fully engaged, but I had genuine understanding and insight into the forces driving the greatest and most shocking presidential campaign in our history. No longer niche, baby.

This mattered to no one but me. My Twitter engagement numbers exploded, but as mentioned, my blog traffic was down. Moreover, I’m not a predictor. I didn’t make any Ann Coulter or Scott Adams calls early on, didn’t go out there like Bill Mitchell and confidently call the election. I’m all about if-then. In fact, while I expected Trump, my hope for his victory was an if-then:

Not faking. If Trump wins despite these polls, it's because they wrongly profiled the voting pool. Which you know, Mr. Demographics. https://t.co/diWf8lkzL7

— EdReal (@Ed_Realist) November 7, 2016

What I valued about the experience isn’t increased fame or respect (“strange new” or otherwise). I cherished the opportunity to really participate in an earthshaking event. When you’ve spent your life in niche issues, reading about politics but not caring terribly who wins or loses,  playing on the main stage, even as one member of a huge choir, is exhilarating.

I watched the whole thing happen. Unlike the vast majority of conventional thinkers that populate the airwaves and web, I understood most of the events. I understood Trump’s popularity. I understood why the media’s anger and outrage only helped him. I understood why he didn’t apologize, didn’t back down, struck hard when attacked. I understood why his voters wanted this.

Thanks to Twitter, I got to voice my disdain of the experts (who often answered, if only to block me), as well as my considerable outrage that cable TV, in particular, gave little time to Trump voters, while over-representing Never Trumpers. (My concern was not for equal time, but for the very real probability, early on, that the Never Trump folks would undo the primary results without giving the opposition a fair hearing. Fortunately, polls intervened.)

Best of all, I found kindred spirits, people who were watching the election with very similar insights and hopes. Ed Asante and David Pinsen were , like me, were  “ordinary” people who happened to support Trump (often referred to as “sane Trump Twitter supporters”), and I thoroughly enjoyed agreeing with them throughout the year.  Media folks Mickey Kaus, Michael Goodwin, and Mark Krikorian also viewed the election through the same lens of media skepticism and enthusiasm for the ideas of Trump, if not necessarily the imperfect vessel himself.

I don’t know if I can adequately convey how much sheer fun I had actively participating, being “on point”to others  unless you, too, are an introvert whose concerns, professional and personal, are usually shared by perhaps a dozen people. Maybe a thousand or so nataionwide. And suddenly, the single biggest issue in my interest area was shared by millions.

I even learned something. While I still believe immigration won Trump the primary, I’m leaning towards the notion that trade was essential to putting him over the top. If it’s true that many Obama voters in the Big 4 (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio) voted for Trump this time round, then that has to be trade, not immigration that moved them. However, Trump couldn’t (and can’t) back down on immigration, because he can’t let down the GOP base.

The campaign period was not without difficulties, but they were all the struggles of any Trump voter: reading your favorite writers express utter disdain for you, never mind Trump, getting blocked early on by conservative writers who simply couldn’t grasp what was happening to their beloved party, feeling outraged at the media’s utterly unhinged misrepresentations and open bias. Nothing to dim the joy I felt.

I don’t know if I’m going to feel more vested in political events going forward. I’m going to enjoy finding out.

So. That is my retrospective on the year.

Blogwise: traffic was down, but I still had more “big” pieces than 2014, which is still my highest traffic year. I’m down from 2015, when I had 11 pieces over 1500, this year I had only 5. The midlists were off–I had no essays with 2000 pageviews, and a ton of work that usually hit 1000 plus views didn’t make it that far. I’ve been looking at the quality and topic of the pieces, and don’t see a huge difference. Given the disconnect between my twitter growth and my blog page views fall-off, I’m thinking it might be a falloff in my teacher readers. I hope not.

But it might just be that haven’t been promoting my work as vigorously. I’ll try to do better.

I set my sights on 48 essays. Hahahahaha. I did make 37, one more than last year! I shall try again for 4 essays a month.

Essays written this year with over 1500 page views:

Title	Date	Views
Notes from a Trump Supporter: It’s the Immigration, Stupid!	01/31/2016	5,147
Defining the Alt Right	09/05/2016	3,499
Citizens, Not Americans	06/16/2016	3,264
The Many Failings of Value-Added Modeling	05/20/2016	1,968
The SAT is Corrupt: Reuters Version	03/29/2016	1,903

Pieces I think are quite good:

Happy Teacher Stories–I think you need to be a skeptical cynic to really deliver in this genre, so I’m born for it:

• Citizens, Not Americans (above), is one of my favorite pieces ever; I was pleased to see it do well. I have a good friend who is a highly-esteemed professor of education, who was devastated by Trump’s win. When we go to lunch, he asks about Dwayne, Chuy, and Omar. And if you want to know how they felt about Trump’s win, check out Celebrating Trump in a Deep Blue Land.
• Graduating My Geometry Class: I taught roughly 75% of my school’s class of 2016, including a group of freshmen four years ago in the first class of my (and their) first year.
• A Clarifying Moment: a student comes back to visit. By the way, Hui brought me some insanely amazing baked goods for Christmas.

Classroom Action

• The Things I Teach: in this case, ELL.
• Realizing Radians–six and a little bit!
• Great Moments in Teaching: The Third Dimension and part 2

Pedagogy

• Negatives, Not Subtraction–important concept that I made great strides on this year
• The Sum of a Parabola and a Line is another parabola, of course, but if you think of it that way, you can easily find the vertex with a series of steps, instead of an algorithm.
• Teaching History in the Trump Era

Teaching Issues–you know, these are all interesting aspects of teaching that most people don’t think about and got little traffic, so pass them on.

• Teaching Oddness #1: Teacher’s Aides, HS Version
• Teaching Oddness #2: Teach More, Get Paid More
• Teaching Oddness #3: What Happens When We’re Absent
• Teaching Oddness #4: Student Teachers
• In Which Ed Explains Induction
• Curriculum Development: Not Work for Hire

Education Policy:

• Vocational Ed: Advancing the Debate
• Vocational Ed and the Elephant
• End of Education Reform?
• White Elephant Students and Charters: A Proposal (written on last day of 2015)

Finally, one piece that may become more viewed in the Trump era: Arizona’s Experience and the Tale It Tells, about the Wall Street Journal’s report on Arizona’s illegal immigration law.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Letter to Betsy (#1): Dance with the Ones Who Brung Him

Hey, Bets.

Before I start: My parents loved Amway products and I still think SA8, LOC, Pursue, and Trizyme are the awesome. Please give my best to your father-in-law. Now, to business.

Congrats on being a relatively uncontroversial Trump cabinet pick. You have been subjected to all sorts of advice, I know. But I have some qualifications that are not often found in combination.  I am the only college graduate in my family. I teach three subjects at a Title I high school.  I voted for Trump. You’re 0 for 3 thus far.

Plus, while I have no money, fame, or influence, I’m an original thinker.  You…aren’t. I’ve reviewed a number of interviews you’ve given before your nomination. I’ve read your quotes on education. Every comment you’ve made was said by others first. You’re not unintelligent. It’s just that up to now, your primary task hasn’t involved thinking, but rather signing. The education policy field is comprised of the occasional thinker, ideologically-driven funders, and far too many hacks grovelling for  whatever notion gets them the check. You’re the one in the middle.

So your contribution to education has been, literally, contributions, the checks you’ve written to further your conservative values through education reform, and therein lies a potential problem. Education reform was born out of the conservative movement, and education reform, traditional conservatives and the neo-liberals, went all in on Never Trump.  I mean, y’all didn’t even try to be nice. But then Trump won, and wow, talk about a lucky break: education is one of the areas that Trump doesn’t care about, so is happy to give out jobs to conservatives like kibble to puppies.

But precisely because Trump doesn’t care much about education, because he picked someone without giving much thought to policy, you could get into trouble. Remember that feeling all you traditional conservatives had during the primaries? The horrible, stomach-turning realization that most of the GOP didn’t give a damn about all your dearest principles? The realization that GOP voters had shrugged and voted for your candidates because they didn’t have any other choice? Except now they did?

Bets, you need to remember that feeling and hold onto it for dear life. You live in that traditional conservative bubble, the one that sees black kids getting shot by white cops and blames bad (white female) teachers.  Technically, education reform focuses on improving education, but the reason they get funding is conservative belief that decimating union clout in traditionally blue states, thus disrupting a faithful, powerful Democrat lobby, will make the world a better place.

What, you think I’m cynical? In the metric ton of writing Rick Hess does every year the words “West Virginia” rarely, if ever, appear. (I thought I’d found an example but  it turned out to be a guest blogger.) Michael Petrilli is equally uncaring about the Mountain State, and mentions Detroit often, Michigan rarely or never. Go through the list of education reform organizations and see how often they worry about those isolated Wyoming schools, or whether or not the children of those Syrian refugees Hamdi  Ulukaya brings into Idaho because apparently no native workers want employment in his Chobani yogurt factories.

Reformers might be conservative, but they target blue states and blue voters. Take a look at the school district with the greatest charter penetration  as of 2015:

Hey, that map looks familiar. Oh, yeah, it looks like this county by county election map for 2016:

Except it’s a weird mismatch, isn’t it? Conservative reformers have had their greatest strengths in  Democrat strongholds. Even the ones found in Trump territory are in majority-blue areas.

Here’s what the reformers never tell you while asking for funds: Charter support requires unhappy parents. But most parents are quite pleased with their schools, and most parents understand, despite years of attempts to convince them otherwise, that native ability and peers matter more than teachers and curriculum. Changing innate ability levels is tough, so selling charters means finding parents who are unhappy with their childrens’ peer groups. Put another way, all parents want their kids away from Those Kids. Charters are attractive to parents who can’t use geography to achieve that aim.

Practically, this means selling charters primarily to two groups of parents: 1) highly motivated but poor black and Hispanic parents in schools overwhelmed with low ability, low motivated kids (the KIPP sell) 2) white suburban professional parents in schools that are either too brown or too competitive for their students, but who aren’t rich enough for private school or a house in a less diverse district (the Summit sell, or the progressive suburban charter). These are very blue groups.

Understanding the charter constituency explains the discrepancies between the charter and election map, and why the discrepancies go mostly in one direction–that is, why are there blue spots on the map that don’t have significant charter penetration?

In overwhelmingly white districts, parents aren’t buying. Vermont, an all-white state, doesn’t even have a charter law, last I checked, despite being so progressive that networks called the state the minute the polls closed. The California Bay Area doesn’t have the battalion of charters you see in Los Angeles–and many of the ones that do exist are in Oakland, the only place in the Bay Area with enough blacks to support urban charters. The Bay Area and other wealthy suburbs with lots of Hispanics do get some limited support for progressive charters like Summit, in part because Hispanics aren’t easily districted out in the suburbs without inviting lawsuits and in part because suburban comprehensive high schools can be very competitive and some parents would prefer a softer environment for their snowflakes.

In dominant red states,  charters aren’t selling. Not a lot of charters in rural Mississippi and Alabama, despite the pockets of black voters, because teachers unions are historically weak in the South. Nothing of interest to conservatives. (See? Told you it wasn’t about making education better.)

Chinese, Korean, and Indian immigrants tend to build ethnic cocoons which create Asian majorities in public schools. Increased Asian presence in schools drive out whites, who find their approach to education….unattractive, giving a whole new meaning to the term white flight.  Asian immigrants are much better than whites at crafting race-segregated environments, and they aren’t terribly tolerant of blacks or Hispanics. Hence, not much need for charters. We’ll see how this all plays out when we get to third or fourth generation Asian American in significant numbers. When they don’t have enough numbers to create an enclave, Asian charter selection most closely mirrors whites–they like progressive charters or better yet, competitive ones.

None of this should be news. Michael Petrilli has been desperately trying to convince the suburbs that charters matter to them because their schools suck. Such a compelling message.

So charters, the only real success of the reform effort, have seen  their efforts pay off with quasi-private schools for people who aren’t going to be voting Republican any time soon.   GOP voters, those faithless bastards who voted in Trump, aren’t terribly interested in reform. Education Next surveys the public on those values traditional conservatives hold dear. You can see all the 10-year trends at this link, but I thought I’d pick out GOP and general public trends on a few select–and somewhat damning–questions:

First up: support for charters, unions and merit pay. GOP responses first, general public second. You can click to see the enlarged version, but  you can clearly see that two of them have flatlined and one of them is increasing slightly.

 

The increasing trendline? Union support. Yes, Bets, GOP belief that teacher unions are a net positive for schools is on  the rise. Charters and merit pay? Decreasing slightly, but look at them over time. No movement. Needle’s stopped. Public opinion, same.

I grant you, of course, that GOP voters still like unions less than Democrat ones. But I think you can agree these trendlines are all resistant to happy talk.

Next up: support for vouchers, both low income and universal.

Whoa, serious tanking there. Isn’t that your primary issue, Betsy? I’m assuming Trump hasn’t seen these numbers, or he’d wonder why he’s hiring a fool who’s gotten nothing for her money all these years. How the hell can education reformers demand merit pay when they’ve failed so miserably at their own assignments?

Reformers haven’t changed public opinion about the overall suckiness of teachers and unions or the fabulosity of vouchers.  Yeah, you’ve got more charters but not dramatically more public support for them–and the people who want and get charters aren’t grateful GOP voters. At least charters provide dramatically better academic outcomes. Oh, wait.

Where was I?

Oh. Yeah. Look. You didn’t get Trump here. The epic wave that gave Trump the win didn’t start or end with education reform. You gotta dance with the people who did get him the job. Your policies aren’t popular. Try to remember that. Try to act like that. Try to care about actually making education better, not enacting reforms that have already failed and don’t have popular support.

That doesn’t mean ignoring black and Hispanic kids.

It means coming up with education “reforms” that speak to all schools, all students. I’ll have some suggestions. I promise they won’t involve spending more money.  You won’t have to write a single check!

And remember: education reform has not traditionally been a friendly place for women in charge. Voters and parents have found them wanting. And the bosses haven’t shown much sympathy. Just ask Michelle Rhee and Cami Anderson. You don’t want Trump to suddenly start caring about education for the wrong reasons, y’know?

Happy New Year.

Celebrating Trump in a Deep Blue Land

Rick Hess and Checker Finn complain about the schools and  teachers  who are encouraging their students to be fearful and angry at a Trump victory.

I agree, but as long as media outlets are determined to make this about teachers and students, I see two narratives missing. First, somewhere in  Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania, is a high school in which students are ecstatic over a Trump win. Where they’re saying “Wow, I had lost all hope! The media was so sure he was going to lose!” and consoling the despondent Hillary-voting teacher, “Don’t worry. Trump’s going to be great! This is how my uncle felt when Obama won.”

Also missing are any examples of GOP-voting teachers talking to students about the election, particularly that unicorn Trump-supporting teacher living in a blue state.

Hey. I can help there.  (Note: this this piece gives some additional context to some conversations below.)

Wednesday morning I came into work with maybe two hours sleep and some mild trepidation  layered over the euphoria. It’s one thing to be a cheerful loser while students view you as a curiosity, secretly somewhat impressed that their teacher is a defiant non-comformist. Quite another to be the only Trump voter in the school after Hillary’s catastrophic, wholly unexpected loss.

My ELL class, immigrants all, was buzzing at the results. Charlotte was upset. “Hillary wanted to make life better for us.”

“But so does Trump.”

“No,” Charlotte sighed.

“Yes.  Donald Trump wants to make life better for all Americans, just like Hillary does. ”

“But  Hillary wanted to make it so more people could come in to America.”

“Not everyone wants that,” said Julian. “I think many Americans don’t want that.”

We watched Hillary’s concession speech. CNN reprinted lines on the screen, and I pointed them out, repeating key words.

“Why ‘not lose heart’?” asked Marshall, confused.

“Heart. Passion. Ganas?”

“Ah!”

“She is telling her supporters to not give up. To keep in their hearts their ideas, to continue to working for their beliefs. That’s what you all should do. That’s what America offers, right?”

I was walking from my ELL classroom to my regular class when I ran into Chuy, whose support had remained steadfast despite his activist girlfriend.

“I TOLD YOU!”

Chuy had, in fact, told me Tuesday morning he was sure Trump would win. I had smiled, told him I hoped he was right, secretly thinking I’d be pleased if he kept it close. “I doubted. You called it.” We bumped fists. “I’ll stop by later,” he promised.

In my brief advisory class,  Sasha the drama queen, who the gods have granted me as a student three times, flounced in with a pout.

“I can’t BELIEVE you voted for Trump!” she announced.

“Hey, I’m a Republican. It’s kind of what we do—you know, vote for Republicans.”

“But Trump is EVIL!”

“You were fine with me voting for him yesterday, when you thought he’d lose.”

I suddenly noticed another student, Marjorie, who just saw me in this once-a-week class, realize the import of our conversation–realize that I’d  voted for Trump. What I remember most is the purity of her shock. Maybe later she’d be disgusted or angry, but for now the dominant factor in her reaction was that never once had Marjorie considered, for a single moment, that she might know a otherwise totally normal person–a teacher, no less–who voted for the orange demon.

Devon said, “Remember the first advisory day? You told us that Trump would probably lose, but that it was weird how close it was.”

“Yeah, I told my dad you said that,” said Jesus. “My dad said Hillary was a bad candidate.”

“I don’t think candidate quality matters these days,” I said. ” We only get two choices. Hillary couldn’t openly appeal to Trump voters without risking the loss of media approval. At the same time, she couldn’t do more to appeal to win enthusiasm for young voters by making promises that would lead to criticism.”

“Yeah, but Trump didn’t care about making everyone happy. I guess that’s the difference.”

I laughed, genuinely surprised. “Yes. That’s right. He didn’t care.  OK, you’re right. She was a terrible candidate.”

I ran into Abdul in between second and third block.

“Hey! You still American?”

“God, don’t depress me! But at least I’m a citizen. We’ve been ragging on Omar, nyah, nyah, Trump’s going to deport you!”

You know how they say smiles fade? Mine was wiped clean. “Hey. That’s not even funny. Is Omar worried about that?”

“Well, you know what Trump says about Syrian refugees.”

“Yes, but that’s about reducing future refugees. Omar’s here now. Look, is he worried? Is his family worried?”

“Naw, we’re just giving him sh**. They won’t kick anyone out, right? If they’re legal?”

“Right. Tell Omar to stop by, ok?”

All those stories about students  teasing immigrants–did anyone ask if in some instances, the kids teasing were also immigrants, razzing their friends goodnaturedly? Oh, don’t be silly, Ed. The media wouldn’t distort a story like that. (Omar did stop by, to ask me if I’d write him a letter of recommendation and edit his application essay about the pressures his parents were forced to put on him and how he’d developed a tremendous facility for languages. He seemed fine.)

Many snickers in my algebra 2 class as I explained how to test regions for  systems of inequalities , which took me a while to figure out.

“…so you test. Is (0,0)  on the true side of the border or the false side?”

“Ask Trump,” Eddie snarked.

“Yeah, ask Trump whether I’m born on the right side of the border,” said Elian, more seriously.

“I’m sorry if you’re worried, Elian. And to anyone else worried. But I think things will turn out well. Now, let’s focus.”

“I can’t focus. Trump’s gonna kick me out of the country.”

“You don’t focus, Eddie, I’m gonna kick you out of the classroom.”

“See, already you’re marginalizing me!” Eddie does deadpan hysteria very well.

“It’s true. I’m marginalizing Eddie’s fears that he’s faking because he’s a citizen. SAD! ” Eddie grinned.

After I’d released them to work, Mark ambled up. “So what do you think Trump will do?”

“I hope he appoints a good judge, and rolls back some of the executive orders. Past that, I don’t know.”

Peter came up to me quietly. “You voted for Trump, right?”

“Yep.”

“I think the anti-Trump demonstrations are….idiotic. Totally insane.” I nodded.

“Oh, hell yeah,” said Mark. ” I didn’t want him to win either, but it can’t be that bad. Those people are crazy, wasting time, whiners.”

In pre-calc, class began with an announcement reminding students that a walkout would result in a zero grade.

“Total waste of time,” Antonio said.

“It’s so depressing,” sighed Janelle. “We could have had a female president!”

“Not for me,” said Teng. “I won $500 betting on Trump!”

I commiserated. “I only ever voted for one other president who won.”

“Bush?”

“No. Hillary’s husband.” Pause as they absorbed this.

“And cheer up. You’ve lived through an amazing moment in history. Every powerful institution in this country wanted Trump to lose. The leaders of academia, almost every owner of a media publication, television or print, our political leaders. Business largely rejected Trump. Even most Republicans in the media rejected him. Most politicians kept their distance. He had few advisers. Trump’s supporters were insulted and mocked–or at best presented as….”

“Total losers living in little white towns with meth addicts and hillbillies” finished Morgan.

“Exactly.  Last night I was tired.  I hadn’t voted yet. Trump was going to lose my state anyway. Everyone was saying the exit polls were showing a huge Clinton win. So why bother voting? It wouldn’t make a difference. But I literally…I mean this,  I literally thought ‘I want my vote to count.’  So I went and voted.”

Leah, always imaginative, spoke up. “It’s like….all the other Trump people did that too. Instead of staying home.”

“So Hillary voters didn’t care as much,” Kenny said.

“Trump convinced voters to care. He screwed up in a million ways, he was rude and obnoxious and you can’t really take anything he says literally,  but he never backed down when all the cool people on TV, in the movies, in the media, in the universities were laughing at him, mocking him. It made him angry, he often responded in infantile ways, but their hatred never stopped him from understanding what his voters cared about. He went everywhere and asked for votes.”

“People are treating it like an earthquake. ” argued Inez.

“Yeah, but an earthquake is a natural event. A powerful one. We are living through an epic moment, where ordinary people created an earthquake, defied the will of the media and most of our leaders, simply by showing up and voting. What you should take away most of all from this is that earthquakes are possible in politics. You’ve now seen one.”

“I’ve spent a lot more time than you guys have, feeling sad my candidate lost. You focus on the good where you find it. So Hillary lost. Feel sad about that. But feel good that elections aren’t all about turnout and commercials and interest groups. Sometimes, every so often, an election turns on ideas. No one in the media, in academia, or our businesses really liked Trump’s ideas. They tried to  shut them down. And they failed. Because people came out and voted for Trump’s ideas.”

“So sometimes ideas really do win.” mused Teng.

“Yeah,” Adriana agreed. “It’s really…epic.”

“Epic?” snorted Gita. “Hillary won more votes! Trump’s a racist!”

“Yeah, well, no one said epic was perfect, yknow?  So let’s look at inverse functions and turn our thoughts away from epic wins.”

The Thursday after the election, I was standing in front of my trig class, explaining angular velocity, when I suddenly stopped and said “There he is.” Hustled across the room to the left door, opened it, and hollered.

“DWAYNE!!”

The beefy senior had just strolled past, and turned. “What? I’m not out of class, I have a pass.”

“That’s not the point. It’s TWO DAYS and you don’t stop by to celebrate? I’m pissed.”

He grinned, came back towards me. “My mom called me in sick yesterday because I stayed up all night watching returns! Can you believe it?”

“I really can’t.”

Last weekend, I was in a different, equally blue, state for my grandson’s first birthday party.   A successful salesman in a roofing and windows company, my son has only Trump co-workers and only Clinton friends and family (save me). A colleague showed up in his MAGA cap, and  my son steered him over to me for safety and celebration.

“I’m a gambler, you know? And when Florida’s returns were nearly done , when you could see Michigan and Wisconsin ahead, North Carolina won, it was like a $100,000 hit on 20:1 odds. That’s how good it was.”

Yes. That’s how good it was.