American Idols, Trumpification, Statistics and Keeping America Safe

So I’ve been thinking it through, and I’ve decided that maybe it’s time for me to make a total reversal of my political views. It’s time to get extreme. Donald Trump has a point. These are trying times. We must be willing to make the tough choices. While yes, it is true that the vast majority of Muslim people are peace loving and harmless, we can’t ignore the fact that each and every one of us Americans have a 1 in 20,000,000 chance of being killed by a terrorist. The risks are just too great. So as painful as it is, maybe we do need to keep muslims out of this country. The problems is, it turns out only 6% of terrorists are Muslim. Furthermore, there are a lot of things way more likely to kill us than terrorists…. like bumblebees(1 in 71,623) and bathtubs(1 in 818,015). So, clearly what Trump is calling for isn’t enough. In all the hubbub about the San Bernardino shooting last week, we’ve gotten so wrapped up in the threat of muslim terror that we’ve forgotten about the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooting five days before. Yes, I know, it really is very convenient to hate on brown people, but this isn’t about our favorite American pastime of racism. This is about keeping America safe!

It turns out that Robert Lewis Dear, the Planned Parenthood shooter, was a militant Christian member of an organization called “the Army of God.” He was in pretty much every possible way, a radical religious terrorist. And he was a Christian. The news has made a big deal of the fact that there has been more than one mass shooting a day in the US this year. Everyone agrees that this is too high! And the vast majority of them are by self-avowed Christians! And so today, I take a bold step…

I hereby call for the immediate internment of all Christians in America!

Did you know that 59% of the nation’s prison inmates self-identify as Christian of some kind?¹ That’s more than ten times as many as Muslims(5.5%). Donald Trump wants to keep additional Muslims from entering the country. And maybe he has a point. But there are already more than 225million Christians here!!!! 71% of the American population. There could be a Christian standing next to you right now! They’re everywhere!

Sure, most of them are probably harmless. But how do we know?!?!?!? Won’t someone think of the children? (Actually, about 11% of murders in the US are perpetrated by children under the age of 18. So maybe we should lock them all up next.)

I mean, I’m not saying we need to lock them up permanently. I’m not heartless. Some of my best friends are Christians! I’m just saying that for the safety of America, we need to lock all of you away until we can vet you one by one. It’s not personal. You understand, right? This will be time consuming and expensive, sure. But is any price to great to pay to keep our nation safe? And statistics don’t lie!²

I said before that I think the brilliance of Trump is that he’s appealing to a set of Americans that are notoriously underrepresented in the polls, the DudeBros, and that the thing that made him most dangerous is that everyone assumes that’s not good enough to win, so no one takes him seriously. Now people are starting to take him seriously, and they’re astounded that he’s doing so well. Paul Ryan officially denounced Trump this afternoon and said that his remarks weren’t “true conservatives”. After that, The White House issued a statement saying that his remarks should disqualify him from being president. And of course the entire media is turning on him. And yet, he still has his supporters. Why, because frankly, Americans are racist, sexist and xenophobic as fuck! Every time, he says something ridiculous, I see people clamoring, “How can anyone like this guy?” The answer is, he’s not that ridiculous. He’s American. Specifically, he’s an American Idol!

Have you ever watched American Idol? Have you ever noticed how well country music singers do on that show? And then whenever they do all the pop and rock fans are like “who the fuck is voting them through?” That’s because there are a fuckton of country music fans in America. Pop fans just like to ignore them and pretend they don’t exist. It’s the same way with politics. Have you ever read the comments on a political news story, particularly anything that has to do with a prejudicial issue? It’s constant xenophobic hatred and bile. It doesn’t matter if it’s about gay marriage, cops shooting black teenagers or Syrian refugees coming to America. People fear the unknown. Even among the most liberal communities, this happens. Try being the one person arguing for polyamorous marriage in a pro-gay marriage chatroom. Try arguing for arguing for recreational heroin on a weed legalization website.  Hell, try getting equal support for Wicca, Paganism, or Scientology in most Christian or Jewish social network communities. Things do not go well for you.

Most reasonable people don’t deal with it. We see a bunch of idiots on the internet saying “You know why the terrists keep attakin? Its cuz we den done lected that ferner nigger mooslim as president! He’s lettin ’em all in!”  and we just say “fuck, more trolls” and we ignore them and move on our way. But if you really look, in a lot of places many if not MOST of the commenters are “trolls.” Only they aren’t trolls. They never were. They are legitimate American citizens. And they’re tired of being ignored. Donald Trump is the man that took them seriously. He told them he would build a wall. He told them he would keep out the Muslims. He told them he knows that the  ferner nigger moo slim president wasn’t born here. He told them what they wanted to hear. And their vote counts just as much as yours does. And if I know the internet…. there’s a lot of them.

And maybe, just maybe… we’re among them too. Because the thing about mass shootings is they make good TV. But they make even better TV when you can demonize the shooter as an outsider, an other… the mentally ill, a Muslim. When something horrible happens, we like to find some way to separate ourselves as reasonable and good people, away from the monster who did it. The more easily identifiable the differences that other the attacker, the easier it is to do this. The reason my proposal to jail all Christians sounds ridiculous is because even though most criminals in America are Christians, so are most Americans. They’re also both mostly white. That doesn’t work so well. But it’s really easy to separate other out the brown guys with funny accents, names and hats, who worship a slightly different version of unlikely mythological miracles than most of us do. It’s so easy that it makes us feel way better to think about Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik shooting 31 people — 15.5 each — than it is to think about a Christian white guy named Robert Dear who shot 12, all by himself, four days earlier. It’s way easier than thinking about the 17 people who were shot in New Orleans five days earlier by some unknown person that we’ve never caught. And it’s a fuck of a lot easier than thinking about Chris Harper-Mercer or Dylan Roof, who admit it… you don’t even remember specifically who they are, without googling, do you?

Footnotes

1. Hermant Mehta of Patheos.com was nice enough to request the breakdowns and make them available through the freedom of Information Act. He even made the raw data available as a spreadsheet so I was able to add up all the Christian denominations. Technically, if you count Mormons and Rastafarians as non-Christians, the number drops to 57%. But I figured, better safe than sorry.
2. When doing research for this article I also happened upon the interesting statistic that your odds of dating a supermodel are a pretty good 1 in 88,000! Statistically, way better than the chances of being killed by a terrorist. I also happen to know that Olivia Culpo, 2012 Miss Universe, recent dumped devout Christian quarterback and perennial virgin Tim Tebow, allegedly because he wouldn’t fuck her. Looking at Donald Trump’s dating and marriage track record, it would appear that being batshit crazy in matters like these actually raises your chances dramatically, and since, under my administration Tebow will be incarcerated for a while anyway, I’m just saying… you know…. Olivia, call me!

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