I am having a good laugh at Eric Kaufmann of the National Review who is grappling with some really bleak numbers about dating in a September 2020 survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Specifically, “a sample of nearly 1,500 female Ivy League students was asked whether they would date a Trump supporter, only 6 percent said yes.” When all non-Trump supporting female college students are included, “fully 87 percent of all female college students wouldn’t date a Trump supporter.”

Basically, if you support Trump, you might as well be wearing a hat that says “herpes.” Your dating pool with college girls is the size of a water bowl.

This is supposedly a big problem because it means that college-age women are “progressive authoritarians” who want to enforce their “woke” positions on race, gender, and sexual mores.

Kaufmann tries to marshal some statistics about ideological and religious intermarriage to argue that there are reasons to worry about what this means for the health of the country. I mean, he says things are easier for Protestant-Catholic couples in Northern Ireland than for a young campus Republican who’s trying to get laid.

I don’t dispute this characterization, but I have trouble seeing it as an area of concern.

It’s Kaufmann’s own fault that people are almost dying of amusement when they read his essay. He didn’t have to tie it all to dating. That was an own goal.

His real point is that a whole generation of educated people think Trump supporters are barely human and have no problem if their genes go extinct. That’s a bad sign for a lonely conservative who just wants to find acceptance in the world. What’s needed is a conservative abandonment of  “deregulatory libertarianism” because without government action Republicans will never get naked with a woman again.

To be sure, he wants to talk about free speech and censorship, but what’s he asking us to do is take Trumpists seriously and treat them with respect. Even if we’d never dream of having sex with one of them, we shouldn’t be allowed to fire them just for, say, interrupting our business meeting to declare that our Anglo-Saxon traditions are under threat.

He even compares the mating prospects of conservatives to the plight of Jews, gypsies and other victims of Adolf Hitler. At least, I think that’s what he’s getting at when he notes approvingly that post-war Germany reformed their education system to account for its capture by Nazis. That’s apparently the model he wants conservatives to follow. First, take over the government and then purge the country’s universities.

Again, he’s saying it’s not all about the dating. He just wants conservatives to have some protection against discrimination and consequences. But if he purges colleges of people who want nothing to do with a Trumper, most classes will have more graduate assistants than students.

Somewhat seriously, we can talk about free speech and censorship in universities but it can’t be part of a lament that Trumpers are pariahs among educated people.

The way forward is so much simpler than Kaufmann’s grand idea for fighting back with laws. If people would stop listening to Trump, they might get some respect. They might not get canceled. They might even meet someone who will want to date them.

I’d recommend starting there and see if there’s any noticeable improvement.