{"id":73108,"date":"2015-08-26T12:53:14","date_gmt":"2015-08-26T20:53:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=73108"},"modified":"2015-08-26T12:53:37","modified_gmt":"2015-08-26T20:53:37","slug":"new-yorker-on-donald-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=73108","title":{"rendered":"New Yorker On Donald Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jared Taylor writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/em> has just published a 7,500-word article about Donald Trump, except it\u2019s not really about Donald Trump<\/a>. Two thirds of it is about Mr. Trump\u2019s supporters–including me–and that\u2019s what explains the title: \u201cThe Fearful and the Frustrated\u201d<\/em><\/a> [August 31, 015]. New Yorker<\/em> readers can feel smug without even reading the article; Mr. Trump appeals to losers, just as they have always thought.<\/p>\n

The author Evan Osnos<\/a>, [Email him<\/a>] is a veteran journalist and has been with the New Yorker<\/em> for seven years. After weeks of following Mr. Trump around and talking to his fans, he announces that Mr. Trump is \u201cexpanding the discourse of hate,\u201d that his core supporters are \u201cthe portion of the electorate that is drifting deeper into unreality,\u201d that he could unleash \u201canti-democratic politics,\u201d and that he appeals directly to \u201cthe crude tribalism that Richard Hofstadter<\/a> named \u2018the paranoid style\u2019<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

What a monster! New Yorker <\/em>readers can feel delightfully superior not only to Mr. Trump but to the unhinged primitives who might actually vote for him–that is to say, the 55 percent of white men<\/a> who say that would back him over Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n

The article is a perfect example of blinkered, self-congratulatory journalism. It makes no effort actually to understand <\/em>anything. Mr. Osnos does quote one or two key ideas of Mr. Trump\u2019s supporters but he pees on them from a very great height rather than try to refute them.<\/p>\n

In June, when Mr. Osnos first asked to interview me he wrote to say that he was working on \u201ca piece about race, in the wake of the Charleston event.\u201d I thought this was an important subject<\/a> so I invited him to my house. We spoke for two hours about Dylann Roof and what might have motivated him<\/a>: race differences<\/a>, immigration<\/a>, and what demographic change<\/a> means for America. Mr. Osnos assured me that he was \u201ctrying very hard to understand\u201d dissident thinking<\/a>, so I arranged for him come back to my house and meet several other racial dissidents.<\/p>\n

At some point, though, like everyone else, Mr. Osnos appears to have been dazzled by the Trump juggernaut. He dropped his original angle, and focused instead on discrediting Mr. Trump by digging up the most hair-raising and off-beat supporters he could find. He now claims to have found the one Trump supporter who reportedly watched the Republican debate while sipping coffee from a cup with a swastika on it.<\/p>\n

As part of this project, Mr. Osnos trotted out the Daily Stormer,<\/em> Stormfront, the League of the South<\/a>, National Policy Institute<\/a>, VDARE.COM<\/a>, the Traditional Youth Network<\/a>, and American Renaissance<\/a>, apparently to thrill his fellow liberals with the news that people associated with what the SPLC<\/a> calls \u201chate groups<\/a>\u201d are paying attention to Donald Trump<\/a>. When Mr. Osnos wrote that the Federation for American Immigration Reform<\/a> has called<\/a> Mr. Trump\u2019s immigration plan the \u201cAmerican Workers\u2019 Bill of Rights,\u201d he was careful to add that FAIR, too, \u201cis classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center<\/a>.\u201d This is what passes for journalism these days, but is as meaningless as digging up the seven remaining American Stalinists<\/a> and recording their praise for Bernie Sanders<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Despite his hours and hours of conversations with racially conscious whites, Mr. Osnos avoided conveying almost any of their central arguments, but he let one slip through.<\/p>\n

He quoted Richard Spencer of the National Policy Institute<\/a> on the \u201cunconscious vision that white people have–that their grandchildren might be a hated minority in their own country.\u201d<\/p>\n

He quoted Hunter Wallace of the League of the South<\/a> pointing out that the reaction of Southerners to the removal of the Confederate battle flag<\/a> justifies \u201cfears that people have about what happens when we become a minority.\u201d<\/p>\n

He quoted me asking, \u201cWhy are whites supposed to be happy about being reduced to a minority?\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a pattern here. At least some people who take an interest in Mr. Trump don\u2019t want whites to become a minority. President Trump would slow that process. But the questions of what a non-white America will be like and why anyone might not want that don\u2019t get one word from Mr. Osnos. Apparently it is \u201chate\u201d merely to ask. But simply to brush the matter aside is not the work of someone who is \u201ctrying very hard to understand\u201d anything.<\/p>\n

Only once did Mr. Osnos actually try to examine a Trump-related grievance. He quoted Matthew Heimbach of the Traditional Youth Network as saying, \u201c[W]e are going to be the first generation in American history to be living worse than our parents<\/a>.\u201d Mr. Osnos notes that Mr. Heimbach lives in Cincinnati, works as a landscaper<\/a>, and rents part of a house. He concedes that with \u201cthe decline of manual labor . . . nobody has been hit harder than low-skilled, poorly educated men<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words: \u201cIt\u2019s just as you thought, dear New Yorker <\/em>reader. The people who like Trump are the yokels in fly-over country.\u201d Mr. Osnos went to Harvard, drives a late model Mercedes, and works in Washington, DC.<\/p>\n

But even more surprising is Mr. Osnos\u2019s factual sleight of hand. He quotes what Mr. Trump said about Mexican criminals when he announced his candidacy and then sniffs that \u201cthe crime rate<\/a> among first-generation immigrants is lower than that for native-born Americans–but Trump takes an expansive view of reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

First of all, a country should be able to choose its immigrants, and letting in even one criminal is a failure. Second, although our government makes it very hard<\/a> to find out true rates of immigrant crime<\/a>, the Center for Immigration Studies<\/a> estimates the following incarceration rates per 1,000 for men aged 18 to 40:<\/p>\n