I hope to start rolling out the essays promised in yesterday’s blog tomorrow (we will see where students are in their final exam and discussion forum). But a recent poll has come to my attention and I want to say a few things about it on Freedom and Reason.
On June 6, the Pew Research Center published the report Cultural Issues and the 2024 Election which covers among other things gender identity, immigration, and racial diversity (see the full report). I begin with gender identity. Everybody is obsessed with this topic. What the results find is that, at least on a matter where nearly everybody is intimate with the truth (for how long should concern you), the organized propaganda machine can confuse and manipulate the public for only so long before people find their way back to it.
“The share of voters who say that sex at birth determines whether someone is a man or a woman has increased since 2017, and this increase has occurred within both parties.” Not that you need public opinion to know that gender is a natural historical fact. This is established by hard science. But it is important politically for the public to come around to that fact—if we are to push back the ideology that is confusing so many young people and the medical practice that are destroying so many young lives. “In 2017, 53% of voters said sex assigned at birth determines gender; 65% express this view today.”
That 35 percent still believe that gender is “assigned at birth,” a charm that double-functions as neo-religious slogan and medical industry marketing, is very troubling. How so many millions of people could get something so simple so wrong is an indictment of our educational system, especially in light of the fact that the system itself is what partly explains the distortion of what otherwise would be common knowledge. It was for millennia.
Looking at the cross tabs, we see that the greatest progress has been made among Republican and Republican-leaning voters, who say that “sex at birth determines gender identity” has grown from 79 percent in 2017 to 91 percent today. We might understand this in this way: Republican and Republican-leaning voters are inoculated against the neo-religion of queer theory because of their firm roots in Christianity, which provides an alternative faith-based system that functions as a bulwark against gender ideology. The faith is moreover rooted in heteronormativity and child safeguarding.
The share of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters who say agree with the statement has also increased during this period, from 30 percent to 39 percent. This means that a majority of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters believe in that gender is “assigned at birth.” While the tenets of faith in Christianity are nonfalsifiable, gender identity is easily falsified, since gender is determined by reproductive anatomy and gamete size. We should note that while 61 percent of Democrats believe gender is assigned at birth, only 34 percent of black Democrats agree with this statement. Seventy-two percent of white Democrats believe gender is assigned at birth.
Really, this isn’t surprising. It’s well known that Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters are prone to expressing bizarre beliefs, illustrated by a Franklin Templeton-Gallup study in December 2020 that found that 41 percent of Democrats believed that half or more of all people infected with COVID-19 were hospitalized, a jaw-dropping level of ignorance. But it gets worse. Combined with those who believed that between 20-49 percent of those infected by the virus were hospitalized, the total number exceeds 68 percent. This is roughly the proportion of white Democrats who believe gender is assigned at birth.
Democrats pride themselves on being more informed than the mouth breathers in the Republican Party But believing that COVID-19 produced extraordinarily high hospitalization rates that were easily debunked by a few minutes on the CDC website is truly embarrassing. It means the people who were masked and jabbed thought a coronavirus was as bad as ebola. As we learned earlier, they also believe that one of the most fundamental fact about animals and plants is “assigned.”
On some other numbers, it’s heartening to see a majority of Republicans agreeing that religion should be separate from government policies, that the gains women have made have not come at the expense of men, and that slavery, abolished over 160 years ago, does not significantly affect black Americans in today’s society (79 percent of Democrats believe this).
The poll also shows that Americans have become far more likely to say that undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States should not be allowed to stay in the country legally. Two-thirds of Republicans and those who lean Republican agree with deporting those illegally in the country. Working class Americans are feeling the effects of globalization.
I will close by sharing the findings of a story concerning the number of unarmed black men killed by police in 2019. In a year where estimates ranged from 12 (the Washington Post database) and 27 (the Mapping Police Violence database), over 31 percent of those identifying as “very liberal” (i.e., progressive), thought that police killed about a 1,000 unarmed black men. A thousand is around the number the police kill in total in a year (most of whom are white). Nearly 27 percent of those identifying as “liberal” also think the number is about 1,000. Compare that to those on the right, where roughly half of those identifying as “conservative ”and “very conservative” come close to accurately estimating the number of unarmed black men killed by the police. The Post says it’s 12. The conservative says ten.
freedom and reason 