I still remember November 8th, 2016 like it was yesterday. I had been watching the election results come in at a senior friend’s apartment with a couple of friends when we collectively decided to go crash the viewing party in the Commons. When Fox News (I still can’t believe that that’s the channel the school had turned in to) announced that Donald Trump had won Florida, we reveled in the literal tears shed by other students.

We were a group of just ten or so; but all together, we constituted the majority of the most ostracized minority group in the country: college conservatives.

It’s… interesting… being a republican in college. You can find a niche on most campuses, but wherever you go you’re destined to be surrounded by liberals who do not shy away from saying stupid things. This is a list of some of the ridiculous things I’ve heard other people on campus say this week alone, as well as my initial reactions/responses:

1. “It’s ridiculous that I now have to carry all of my documentation with me wherever I go!”
   1. Are you a citizen of the United States? No? You should be aware of this, but if you’re not, I’ll tell you: non-citizens do not have the same legal rights as citizens do in this country. This means that, if at any point during your stay/residence/etc. here you are deemed a detriment to the grand ol’ U.S. of A, the privilege (as President Trump said, “immigration is a privilege, not a right”) of being here can be revoked/terminated, and you can be repatriated with all the legal legitimacy in the world.
   2. You should carry your documentation with you, anyway. Anyone going anywhere, even in their own country, should carry some sort of identification with them, and anyone in a foreign country should carry with them at all times their documentation stating the legality of their presence in the nation. It is both natural and necessary to be cautious!
2. “Our project was sponsored and funded by USAID… which is actually about to have its funding cut by twenty-eight percent soon…”
   1. The people working for USAID should consider themselves lucky, then, considering foreign aid should be cut altogether. We’re trillions of dollars in debt! We cannot afford to be giving money we don’t have to other countries.
   2. Can you shut up about the peanut farms in rural Uganda and stop whining about how the African women couldn’t effectively participate in your study because they didn’t know how to hold a pencil to draw on the pieces of paper you brought to their village?
3. “[Trump] wants to abolish the NEA so that he can increase defense spending. Why do we need a bigger military? We already have the biggest military in the world!”
   1. You’re wrong. The United States military is far from the world’s largest. When you take active duty personnel, reserve personnel, and paramilitary personnel into the count, the largest militaries in the world, by personnel, are:
      1. North Korea
      2. South Korea
      3. Vietnam
      4. India
      5. Russia
      6. China
      7. The United States
   2. You do realize that increasing defense spending doesn’t equate to increasing the size of our military, right? It equates to improving defense technology, increasing the amount of supplies that can be sent to soldiers deployed abroad, and other things of that nature.
   3. We have to increase defense spending because we are the de facto ‘world police’, whether or not we want to be and irrespective of whether or not we should be; as such, whenever a country is getting their ass handed to them in a fight/war, we come to their rescue. E.g.: although over sixty countries have pledged to help defeat the Islamic State, the U.S. is the only country in the coalition that is providing significant support in Iraq and Syria. As of November 2015, the United States provides almost eighty percent of the sorties — attacking troops that were previously on the defensive — in the Levant (source: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/617463/pdf).
   4. You complain about our President wanting to dedicate a larger percentage of our federal budget to our military in the same breath you use to assert that we are obligated to help the Syrian refugees. Can you really not comprehend that eighty percent of the troops fighting the terrorist group that are killing Syrians by the millions are American troops? Go bitch to the Europeans, who are doing virtually nothing, about their moral obligation to help the Syrians because we conservatives are done listening. You can’t say that we have to fight ISIS/ISIL and then criticize our decision to fund the fight.

I wanted to write a list about everything I’ve heard liberal students/teachers say since that glorious night when 3,084 out of 3,141 counties voted red, but if I did that, I would have been writing this all night, and I have six papers to write. (Yes, six! It was seven, but I finished one.) So, while liberals are whining, I’ll be working — but while I work, I’ll listen… and laugh, because the things liberals say are so asinine they’d be amusing if not for the horrid fact that they actually believe the drivel that escapes their lips.