It's a Numbers Game: The Numbers Behind American Pride & Patriotism 🇺🇸

an ambulance. So I encourage everybody, if you're celebrating with some fireworks and you're celebrating your nation's birthday by blowing part of it up, to act responsibly. Gallup had a new pull out regarding how many Americans how Americans feel about their country. Only fifty eight percent so that they were either very or extremely proud to be American. It is the lowest number since Galup started asking the question back in two thousand and one. There was a stark

difference based on political ideology. However, ninety two percent of Republicans reported to be very or extremely proud of their country. This is a greater percentage than in two thousand and one. Following the nine to eleven attacks. The number of Independents, however, fell to an all time low of fifty three percent, down from fifty eight percent the year prior. Democrats, however, are not so in love with America right now. Only thirty six percent of Democrats that they were either very

or extremely proud to be an American. That's down from sixty percent the year prior. Now, obviously that's all to do with politics, right, I mean, we all know what happened last year. Donald Trump was like to president and forty two percent of the people and there was a big drop down right from Biden's presidency to Trump's presidency. We all kind of see the writing on the wall. It's all political. Republicans' feelings towards the country is less wavering,

though depending on who's president than Democrats. The first year of Obama's presidency, ninety two percent of Republicans said they were extremely proud to be an American. In the last year of his presidency was eighty nine nine percent, and in the first year of Biden's presidency was eighty seven percent. There was a stark decline because of COVID, and then you know, it bounced back up. Republicans This is crazy,

this number that I pulled out from here. Republicans were more proud of their country during every year of Obama and Biden's presidencies than Democrats. And there is a general trajectory for Democrats right it is continually declining. And that's partially because of an age difference. Right as Silent Generation and Baby Boomers are getting older and starting to die off and Gen Z is coming of age, this age

difference is even more illuminating. Only forty one percent of Gen Z reports that they are proud to be an American, and the same issue for only fifty eight percent of millennials, compared to seventy one percent of Gen xers and seventy five percent of Baby Boomers. For the Silent Generation, it's eighty three percent. That's the Joe Biden age demographic. Once again, though, there's a stark difference between people based on their politics.

Eighty seven percent of millennials who are Republicans say they are proud to be proud to be an American, proud of this country. Only forty four percent of millennial Democrats say the same. Sixty five percent of Gen Z Republicans say they're proud to be, you know, an American compared

to twenty four percent of Gen Z Democrats. These people, and I try really hard in this podcast not to be super narrative and to just give a lot of fact based ideas, but I have to give a narrative on this thing, on this topic, specifically, as we're getting close to the fourth of July. These people, these democrats, especially in Gen Z and Millennials, my generation, they are so steeped in self hatred to a level that it

shows their own ignorance. Do you not realize how you are to be in this country at this time, a time of relative peace and immense prosperity. Your sons aren't being drafted, You're not being drafted. You can become a millionaire by having a social media page. And you know, yes, there's a lot of turbulence on the horizon, but no different and actually quite a bit less than most other

times in the history of our world. This episode's gonna be a hodgepodge of different topics today because there's a lot to really cover and there's no singular theme like I try to do it. It's there's a lot of data I want to nerd out about. For a second. But I would be remiss to sit there and not spend a second and say why I'm proud to be an American. Through the course of human events, never has there been a place which foundational principles are based on order, liberty,

and prosperity through human freedom. I know critics of this country love to point out that we're not perfect, as if we invented all the evils of the world. But if you take a step back from the focoing in view of post structuralism, you would realize that no civilization in history has freed the lives of more people. Not only through the chains of slavery we be able to have to talk about every forty five seconds, but from the iron curtain of communism, from disease, from famine, from

civil war, from fascism. Even at times when it wasn't completely altruistic, we did it. Americans were the ones who did it in the last twenty years alone. George W. Bush, who I am no fan of right, I don't like most of his presidency, but his policies alone on prefar save twenty five million people from dying of AIDS in Africa. Twenty five million people from one country from one president who did one thing, and that is a footnote on America.

That's just that's literally a footnote on all the things we have done. It's our scientists who discovered cures for polio and advanced treatments for cancer, and groundbreaking research on everything from Parkinson's to Alzheimer's. Ailing people across the globe have a spark of hope because an American is working to save their lives, even though they'll never know them.

In the last century, it was American men who died on beaches and in jungles and in deserts of foreign land with the hopes of giving freedom from either fascism or communism or Islamic tyranny to people who were too ungrateful, too often to even understand their sacrifice. It's our institutions that I have only created groundbreaking art and music, but our beautiful institutions that have preserved shreds of human achievement in all those fields for each generation to enjoy. Yeah,

it's not perfect, but who said it has to be. People, especially progressives, think that peace and prosperity is the starting point of the human experience, That if it's the baseline, that if we got rid of all the things that made us American, we would still be peaceful and prosperous. But we are the exception to the rule. Human history is built on failing governments and unimaginable levels of poverty and instability. The horrors of history is the baseline, and

we are the exception. America, to me is the pinnacle of Western civilization. All the roads that started in Athens and Greece, and Rome and Jerusalem, they took us through the ages of the enlightenment and reason, have led us to this place. And it is only because of the tireless work of American men to build these institutions, to defend this place, to build this country from a wild continent, that we have a shred of what we enjoy that

oftentimes we don't deserve. This country wasn't built on slavery, or by immigrants, or by or for an elite few. It was built on the backs of Western men. And is about time that we acted grateful for what they did and did our part to preserve it. And it's about time we had an ounce of self respect for what we have achieved as a people. We have done more for the world than any other people in history.

So many people like to point out how different we are and how you know, diverse we are, and we have no shared ancestry, and we're just an idea, which is like the thing that drives me crazy. We're just as melting potful of ideas. And that's true to a point,

but it's an important point. As of twenty ten, according to ancestry dot com, sixty percent of the American population could trace their ancestry back to COLONIALUS in the Revolution one of their ancestors, not all of them, but one hundred and eighty three million Americans alive today or as of twenty ten, had at least one ancestor living in this place two hundred and forty nine years ago when this country was born. We have more in common than people like to believe. And it's not just on the

ideas of our shared American experiences. And even for those of us with no link to the past, people who fully chose to be part of this country, to have part of our share experience to become an American. We

are united by our greatness as a people. We are all the descendants of Washington and Lincoln and Roosevelt and Bell and Edwards and Jobs and Sulk and Latimer and Oppenheimer of Boone and Lindenberg and Armstrong and Presley and Jackson and Dylan, and the great artists and engineers and scientists and leaders and generals who built the foundation the world lives on today. We are Americans, and we have

to start acting like it. We are destined for greatness because we are a great country, and the only thing that can stop us is our own gluttony and greed and envy. But every one of you should be proud to be an American, proud of this country. And I hope to live a life deserving of the sacrifices of all the men and women who came before me. I know that's a rand. I don't like to go on rants, but I needed to say it. We'll be back with numbers for the numbers game that is not a narrative

right after this message. Stay tuned. So these two things I want to talk about for the rest of the show their immigration slash demographic related. So first, after Zoron Mandani won the Democratic primary, a number of conservative commentators noted that it was time to put a moratorium on immigration. After all the capitalist hating anti Semitic nominee for the Democratic Party is an immigrant from Uganda, and he received the support of many immigrants in New York City, especially

in the Asian and Muslim community. Well, Charlie Kirk said something to the effect of, you know, we need to stop. We need a moratorium and immigration. And then Franklins, the Republican polster, who hasn't been right on anything since New York was a prairie, came out with a tweet spouting that forty six percent of Fortune five hundred company founders were either immigrants or the kids of immigrants, So that

would like include Donald Trump. His company's not a Fortune five hundred, but that would include him because his mother, Mary was born in Scotland. And just as long as we're all keeping track, well, I looked it up because that seems startling to me, and then I thought, I wonder what countries they come from, right, because there's this trope about from people who are critical, sorry, people who

are supportive of mass immigration. They lobby it against people who are critical of just endless supplies of people, and they use the term immigrant like it's like a bag of oranges, right, if you want one you got to get them all. You can't select which ones you want. You can only you can't choose the one ripe one, even if you need it for a recipe. You got to get forty of them. You can't get the one

you need for the recipe. So the study that Frank cited comes from the American Immigration Council, which is basically an organication that promotes open borders. Conveniently, not only do they not list the nations of origin from these immigrants, they don't even give you the list of immigrant and the children immigrants who are the founders. They haven't done that since two thousand and eleven, so I had to

go back to the two thousand and eleven list. It includes people like Jeff Bezos, who has two American born parents, but he has a Cuban stepfather, So I mean they he's counted as a son of an immigrant because his mom remarried a Cuban man. That seems like a stretch to me from people trying to make a point, trying to, you know, create a narrative. Other people listed in this list of immigrants and children immigrants include Alexander Graham Bell,

who immigrated to the States in eighteen seventy one. Well, that doesn't seem remotely like it's related to anything to do with our current immigration system, does it? In fact, in the twenty eleven list, I looked at the top twenty two fortune five hundred company founders. Sixteen of them were born before the year nineteen hundred, some of them born in countries that don't even exist anymore. Why would you list that? Like, what does that have to do

at all with our current immigration system? Like? What on earth does it matter that Walt Disney had a father born in Canada who immigrated in eighteen seventy six to look for gold in California. It matters. It's completely irrelevant to the conversation immigration. It's just to write a headline, to make a narrative to attack anybody who supports any

restrictions on immigration at all. What about living founders? Right, because obviously the list that Frank cited, which he believed without even doing any research whatsoever, what at living founders? In twenty eighteen, Forbes wrote an article that fifty five percent a billion dollars start had one immigrant co founder, and they actually listed them. It was from a study

from the National Foundation of American policy. Well, the billion dollar co founders of these companies came from twenty five countries. Can you guess what countries? Well, here it goes in order of how many billionaire founders they produced. These are the list of countries. Canada and Israel they both have

nine co founders as of twenty eighteen. Then India, the United Kingdom, China, Germany, France, Ireland, Russia, Australia, Ukraine, Armenia, Azabaijan, Bulgaria, Denmark, Iraq, Italy, Lebanon, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa. You can guess who that one was. It was Beekistan and Vietnam. Well, how did those countries reflect in America's overall immigration numbers?

I plugged it into rock and examining the average number of immigrants that came to this US to the US overlast four years from those countries, they represent just thirty percent of immigrants national origin. Right, So those thirty So the thirty percent, all those billionaires would represent the immigrant population from thirty percent of all immigrants. And that's actually if you take out China and India, which I mean you wouldn't, but China and India represent twenty of that

thirty percent, which would make sense. They're the two largest countries in the world by population. So our immigration system that brings over billionaire entrepreneurs and tech giants and you know, future founders of Google, doesn't represent are doesn't represent you know,

our immigrations from at all. Our immigrations some overall, brings in people that will never not only never co found a billion dollar business, but no one from their nation of origin will co found a billion dollar business, right I mean, I don't mean I don't dislike any people from any specific country just because they're from that country.

Everyone has good and bad people, YadA, YadA, YadA. But as far as the idea of creating billion dollar companies, you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning several times in a row and then winning lottery than you do of some people from that country creating a billion dollar business. It is just a fact. So with the exception of Uzbekistan, Iraq, and Lebanon, which all had one billionaire co founder, all these immigrants come from Europe,

East Asia, and India, and that is not surprising. There is a book called The Hive Mind by economist professor Garrett Jones, who I invite on this podcast and he turned me down. It's okay, I'm not better. He is brilliant and he doesn't have to like me for me to respect him anyway. He wrote in the book Hive

Mind that nations have SAT scores. Basically, if a country has a state history that is a formal state history, like they formed a government, that's the S. An agricultural history that's the A, and a technological history that's the that matches where the most advanced societies were in the years zero, one thousand and fifteen hundred. Those countries will overwhelmingly produce high performing immigrants. They will have they will

invent more, they will save more. They're high producing, high functioning, high IQ societies. You know, basically, what our ancestors did a thousand years ago or several hundred years ago details kind of how we're going to perform today, you know. And he also says in the book, you are better being a dumb person in a smart country than a

smart person in a dumb country. And when enough people from high IQ countries high SAT score countries move to other regions, they tend to improve their overall economies and many times become economic dominant minorities. Getting back to Lunce, he repeated a lie about open from an open borders group because he wanted to believe it was true. He wanted the lie perpetuated by neoliberals to be true, so when it was not, and did not do a shred of thinking about it and say this seems odd? Is

this true? When were these immigrants coming here? Where did they come from? And furthermore, people say immigrants do all these fabulous things. I think it's worth saying where did they come from? Because the idea that is perpetuated by the diversity delusion that every person, whether they come from Haiti or hal Effects, is equally likely to generate the same level of economic output isn't true. It's just it's not a fact, and we are going to get thrown

that out there. And I think that if you are somebody who's more on the immigration restriction aside like I am, it's worth having that answer pointed out and ready when it goes just sit there and say what country do that immigrant come from? Where do all these immigrants come from? If they're all coming from three specific regions of the world, why aren't almost all of our immigrants coming from three specific regions of the world. Okay, next point, and I

want to make this quickly. The census data came out, came out and found that during the last year of Trump's presidency and the four years of Biden's presidency, the Native white population shranked by three million people, including about two hundred and fifty thousand people last year. Now, a lot of that can be contributed to COVID deaths. Back in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, you know, a lot of people did pass away, a lot of older people.

There was also a spike in the number of people reclassifying themselves as being Native American during the Floyd Riots. You know, it was not it's not politically, economically, or culturally wonderful to be a white person during that time.

And there's something called fleeing from whiteness where people discover their one eighth Native American and now they're Cherokee, and they can re change all of their documentation to make sure their kid gets a scholarship from a college, or gets into a college, or gets a job, or gets a government grant. All of the major institutions at the time, although some of them are starting to change because of the Supreme Court case absolutely put their thumb on the

scale against specifically white men. But there was also a general decline because of low birth rates, which has been below replacement levels for decades. Remember, you need two point one children on average per woman to sustain a population

from one generation to the next. Now, even though the white population dec overall shrank, it did grow in seventeen states, three that voted for Kamala Harris, New Hampshire, Maine, and Delaware, and fourteen that voted for Trump Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, Arkansas, Missouri, and the Carolinas,

both north and south. On my substack, I broke down county by county where you could see the white population whether it increased, and how it voted in the twenty twenty four election. And what you see when you look at the entire map of all the counties is they mostly moved to red counties or they had a higher birth rate in red counties, but they fled, especially from urban areas where crime was extremely high during the Floyd Riots. The only states that saw the white population decline in

every county was Illinois and Rhode Island. But the biggest takeaway, the several biggest takeaways, the biggest takeaways is one Rural America, especially in the Rust Belt, Appalachia and the Prairie states, are dying. They're just there. The economies are collapsed and the populations are declining with them substantially. People, white Americans especially are fleeing from big blue states like Illinois, California,

and New York in droves. But rather than just picking up and going to red cities or says cities in red states, and it's happening in a few places like Nashville, Miami, they are choosing to live in smaller cities and excerpts of major metropolitan areas. The white population of the city of Atlanta grew a little bit, but in the suburbs it shrunk as well. The egxerbs is where it exploded.

They chose to live in exxerb communities that are more politically like them, probably more racially like them, have more values like they do. There is a realignment going on where people are choosing to move. It will eventually have, you know, changes within the congressional lines over time. I guess maybe, well, maybe not, because immigrants do replace they are having immigrants replace Americans in those cities for those populations, but it will it will have a point specifically with voting,

for sure at some point. There have also been pockets of rural Americas that did see some level population growth for white Americans because of a high concentration of highly religious people. These include Orthodox Jews in Rockland County, Latin Mass Catholics in Patawami and Newca Counties. Kansas. Seriously, Kansas, you could make that easier for me. I spoke at your damn convention, and Amish people in Holmes County, Ohio,

and Lagrange and Adams Counties in Indiana. I say this just to say that there's a lot of online conversation about something called the Great Replacement theory, the idea that Western governments are purposely replacing their native white populations with immigrants.

Now there is, you know, an insane level of adoration for mass immigration on the part of Western nations that you don't see in other parts of the world, like in the Far East, where birth rates are declining, in populations are declining, there's still a demand to keep their culture intact, which is not the same in Western nations. In most parts of Western nations, but what's really causing the mass decline of native white populations is that you

don't have enough children. If anyone choosing to be replaced, it's the decision by white Americans to not have kids. Granted there's a big difference between progressive whites and conservative whites. Progressive whites have an extremely low birth rate. But to anyone complaining, which is mostly right wingers, about a great replacement, my first question to you, because I hate complainers, my first question to you is how many kids do you have?

Because if the answer is three or less, I don't really want to hear you talk about or sorry, if it's less than three, If it's maybe two, I was even think two. If it's under two, I don't want to hear you talk about being replaced. I just don't want to have a conversation. If you're like my grandma and you had eleven kids and you want to talk

about it, I'll hear your complaint. But if you have no kids and you just live online to complain, maybe go on a date, maybe talk to a girl, maybe have a little experiment of having a life outside being online that might do something. I know. It's a strange set of topics today. It's kind of a michmash. We're in summer, it's not an election this week, so I thought I bring you some interesting numbers that are out there. You're listening to It's a numbers game with Ryan Gradsky.

We'll be right back now for the Ask Me Anything segment of the show. I have to to tell you. I used to get so few questions that I would text friends and like family members and my employees and be like, I don't have any questions, Send me a question. Now I have so many questions in the backlog, which I appreciate beyond belief that Monday's episode is going to be a full ask Me Anything segment because I gotta

get through some of these questions. I promise my listeners I will answer all their questions, and we are going to be waiting until Christmas to get me through September if I don't start doing a full episode based on it. So I'm very excited if you have questions that you would like me to answer and they Ask Me Anything segment of the show. Email me Ryan at Numbers Gamepodcast dot com. That's Ryan at numbers Plural Numbers gamepodcast dot com.

And I will answer your questions either through one on one email or I will answer them on the show. Today's question comes from Kyle Carson. He writes, Ryan, I appreciated your podcast our Jay Homan. I think he raises some excellent points. However, in light of the OBB that's the big beautiful bill passing in the Senate inclusion for greater ICE funding, I am skeptical that we simply can throw money at the issue to actually fulfill mass deportations.

I support increasing ICE and it will certainly allow for more deportations. However, I do not think we can achieve mass deportation unless the White House use its full power and Red states get involved. It should have supported chip Roy's amendment to significantly drag on deportations in the courts. Left wing interest groups are forcing the White House to do deportations one by one because illegal aliens are suing under Article three. Trump should invoke section eight of the

US Code eleven eleven three, Section A ten. This would allow for street level immigration enforcement by state and local police. Basically, every local police department with the consent of the chief, and the city would now be an ICE officer and can do effective immigration arrests on their own. DISANTUS four for this provision in Florida and wants to force every

Florida police department to follow it. Question or what are your thoughts on Trump's plan to do to facto amnesty to Farm's Best Kyle, Okay, Kyle, thank you so much, great question. All right, first point, yes, I agree that it's not possible for ICE just simply do fifteen to twenty million deportations of illegal aliens, especially with the way the courts are right now, it takes months and sometimes years.

There are, however, over a million illegal aliens in our country today who have already had their full legal proceedings done and were issued war issued notices that they had to leave the country, and then they stayed. Those people can go immediately if they are upon being arrested. They don't have to have more court cases. They've had a million court cases. But how we entice illegal aliens leave our country is you do self deportation. I mean it's

cheaper and it's faster. The Bureau for Labor Statistics stated that a million non citizens. About a million have already dropped out of the workforce. There's no telling whether or not they went to their home country, but they're no longer showing up for work. A migration policy paper found that and estimated five thousand migrants self deported in the first three months of the Trump presidency, and immigration judges have granted voluntary deportation for almost nine hundred illegal immigrants

in the month of May alone. Now there's a lot of stories in places like the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times about people self deporting, but it's hard to get real numbers about how effective it is because they're not It's just, you know, stories about this crying mother and how her life is so hard to just go back to I don't know, Dominican Republic or whatever, or Mexico. But as far as real numbers goes, it's very,

very difficult to actually get hard numbers. Given that no one is coming through our southern border and that illegal immigration is at a record low, we are definitely seeing overall net illegal immigration population in this country declining every month. It seems obvious as far as the farm raiders go, this was originally a plan brought on by Agricultural Secretary Brook Rollins. I covered it on my podcast with Marco

Corean a couple of weeks ago. The plan was proposed, but according to the New York Times, it was almost immediately reversed and rates on farms have continued. So that's all the information I have on that. I haven't seen anywhere that Trump has actually gone back again and changed his mind. Great questions. I agree though, that we need to do more to fix this system and get rid of our illegal alien population and restructure our illegal immigration system.

I think those two ideas that you put out there are very very smart. So we'll see what happens and maybe I'll get some hard numbers to report for you. Anyway, thank you. Come back again Monday whole episode of Ask Me Anything Questions. Looking forward to it. Please like and subscribe on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever gets your podcast. I'll see you guys on Monday, and Happy Independence Day.