#ScienceFact: White Nationalism Drives Support for Trump

Why do Republicans stick with Trump? New study explores the role of white nationalism

It’s been clear to all us Trump and MAGA watchers that the attraction to Trump is based on white nationalism. Now, there is scientific evidence to confirm the careful observations and claims made on Ye Olde Blogge and other liberal social media accounts. Count yourselves validated, siblings!

A study conducted way back in May 2022 linked white nationalism with support for Trump. If it is so old, why is it only being reported now? Because it was only recently published in  The British Journal of Criminology (But don’t worry is was conducted by good ol’ red-white-and-blue pointy headed socialist commie academic types right here in the “We’re #1 US of A. Melissa M Sloan, from the University of South Florida, was the lead researcher so it was Ron DeSatan approved, right?). The study was summarized in PsyPost, which is good because all but the abstract is firewalled, so you know this is a summary of a summary, although I did get what I could from the abstract.

The data was gathered before it could be sullied by the United States House Select Committee’s investigation of the 6 January Insurrection or any of the other sullying politicized Democrat-led investigations into the bumbling felonious orange crime-bot, I2I4 or I guess that should be C1I3 for convicted once and indicted three times or maybe C34C80+ for convicted on 34 felony counts and charged with 80+ more?

“Our experiment suggests that for a non-trivial number of Americans, the desire to keep the United States a ‘white nation’ appears to be stronger than their desire to ensure that the country is led by a law-abiding president,” the researchers concluded.

Why do Republicans stick with Trump? New study explores the role of white nationalism in PsyPost by Eric W. Dolan on 6 June 2024

So, how did they tease out all of the white nationalist fervor from all the other cognitive dissonance-driven delusions of Trump supporters? They asked them. Yep. They literally just asked them.

The White Nationalism of Trump Supporters Empirically Revealed

Here, let’s dive a bit deeper into the organization of the study so you can judge for yourself.

The Experimental Design

First, they got themselves a representative sample of the country. A representative sample is one matched to the demographics of the population you are studying. For this study, you had to be of voting age, though. They don’t mention how they accounted for the unreachable segment of the population, you know, the ones that won’t answer online polls or phone calls, that kind of thing. They used YouGov to find their participants, though, and YouGov is considered a reliable professional organization, so there’s that.

Then, they randomly assigned their 1300 participants to one of three groups. Each group were asked to imagine that the Select Committee had completed its investigation and released its report. The report would have found:

• NO EVIDENCE, NO CHARGES: The report would’ve said that there was no evidence found of criminal wrongdoing found, so no charges were recommended to be brought against Trump.
• EMAIL EVIDENCE, CHARGES RECOMMENDED: The report would’ve found email evidence of Trump urging the Proud Boys et al. to stop stop their standing back and standing by and get in there and do something for god’s sake because that’s about all the organizational skill that Trump has. This is the fellow who couldn’t get himself to the scene of his own insurrection to ensure that it was actually successful, for fuck’s sake.
• NATIONAL GUARD EVIDENCE, CHARGES: In this version, the committee would’ve found evidence that Trump had prevented the national guard from assisting at the Capitol that day.

The participants were assessed at this point:

• AGREE OR DISAGREE: They were asked how much they agreed or disagreed with the Committee’s findings and recommendations, using a standard Likert scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree.
• POLITICAL VIEWS were assessed.
• RACIAL ATTITUDES were assessed by asking questions like, We need to keep the United States a mostly white nation, which is what God meant it to be.
• DEMOGRAPHIC DATA was collected as a hedge against other confounding factors.

The Findings Based on White Nationalism

After tossing all this data into the statistical cauldron and giving it a good stir, one resounding revelation emerged: Americans who endorse white nationalism and those who hold right-wing political views are more likely to oppose criminal charges against Trump under any circumstances.

• NO EVIDENCE: 82% of the conservative white nationalists agreed with the report and 34% of the non-white nationalists agreeing with the report finding no evidence of criminality.
• EVIDENCE & CHARGES: Support dropped to 35% & 39%, although it is unclear which sets of evidence were supported and whether it is a statistically significant difference. Compare that to 76% and 80% of the non-white nationalists supporting the charging recommendations.

Before you mutter, I told you so! there’s more! Apparently, the lefty white nationalists still weren’t convinced that Trump shouldn’t be criminally charged no matter what evidence was found, it took a combination both having a right-wing political orientation and being a white nationalist to produce these responses:

Of course, there were no liberal white nationalists because that is not a thing. The two are not compatible without lethal amounts of cognitive dissonance involved. However, there were right wing non-white nationalists involved, and the combination of conservative political belief and white nationalism highly correlated with the Trump-supporting reaction to the three “reports” to the point where we can conclude that white nationalist are over represented on the conservative end of the spectrum.

Even though all us smarmy smarty smarties knew this all along, studies like these are important to verify our conclusions and give empirical support to our snarky, sarcasticky, and profaney remarks. Remember, Aristotle believed that that heavier objects fell faster than lighter objects of a similar shape. It wasn’t until Galileo tested it out that we found out different.

Image Attribution

This image was generated using Poe’s Playground – v2.5 bot using the prompt, An image showing white lab rats, labelled Trump supporters, running a maze, and all exiting the hole on the right side, but not on the left.