Are the Republicans really that stupid, or is it something more sinister?

Canadian truckers have decided not just to inconvenience everyone, but to cost themselves money, and to risk the lives of their neighbors, and to risk their own lives, and to cost Canada billions, if not trillions — all to demonstrate, with abject stupidity, that they either don’t accept the word of doctors or don’t like obeying laws.

My advice to the truckers is: If you get COVID, don’t see a doctor. See a trucker. They must know more than the doctors.

The problem with stupid people is they are too stupid to understand that they are stupid. No truth penetrates. They are incapable of differentiating fact from conspiracy, so they get their information from such grotesque lie disseminators as QAnon, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Fox News, and proven psychopath, Donald Trump. 

The stupids refuse not only to protect themselves with a vaccination, but they refuse to protect others, not because they are mean-spirited, but because they, very simply, are stupid.

They want to arrest Dr. Fauci for telling them to protect themselves with vaccines and masks (How dare he!)

When you see videos of the attempted coup, which continues even today, remember that the stupids say it was “Legitimate political discourse.”

And, notice the American flags among the Trump flags. Those Stupid Party fools actually believe waving a flag makes them patriots.

Sorry, but being a flag-waver (or hugger) doesn’t make you a patriot any more than holding up a bible in a photo op makes you religious.

Barely a day passes without some prominent Republican doing or saying something stupid. Here is a message a GOP Presidential hopeful has promulgated for more than eight months.

DeSantis sells anti-Fauci t-shirts as Florida Covid death toll hits 38,000

July 14, 2021: Florida governor Ron DeSantis has released a new range of merchandise with slogans targeting Anthony Fauci, as well as requirements for face masks.

Two drink koozies and a t-shirt featuring the words “Don’t Fauci My Florida” and “How the hell am I going to be able to drink a beer with a mask on?” are among the items on sale.

This is what passes for clever humor in stupidland.

“You don’t want to miss out on this,” the DeSantis campaign wrote on Twitter on Monday.

“Shop the store and support your favourite freedom-loving Governor NOW”.

Freedom to die, apparently, as Florida has seen more than 66 thousand people die of COVID and an above-average rate per thousand. Compare that with the outrage about the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed about 3 thousand people.

If you were the governor of a state that had lost 66 thousand of its citizens, wouldn’t you do everything possible to protect their lives? Not stupid DeSantis.

DeSantis, like Trump, directs his lies to the least intelligent among us, the real stupids who believe everything nonsensical, so long as it contains a modicum of liberal bashing.

He’s not only outlawed mask mandates and discouraged vaccines, but he hired a stupid, mask and vax denier, Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who sets a perfect example for Floridians by refusing even to say whether he himself has been vaccinated.

This dummy even refused to wear a mask in Sen. Tina Polsky’s office, though she is trying to recover from breast cancer, and must avoid infection. Why won’t he wear a mask when she asked him to? He just didn’t want to, and didn’t care that he was risking her life.

Would you act that way in a sick person’s office?

And he’s a doctor!!!

Fauci has been one of the sane voices in this entire calamity. So, of course, the Republicans want to fire him, or arrest him, or do something more awful to him, just because he’s tried to speak truth to them.

(There’s nothing a Republican hates more than truth. See: What you need to know about Trump’s weekend of election lies and January 6 whitewashing)

And then there’s this bit of stupidity from the leader of the stupids and America’s #1 traitor and rabble-rouser

Fascism: Trump vows pardons for Jan. 6 seditionists, calls for nationwide protests if indicted

Trump: “If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had in Washington D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere, because our country and our elections are corrupt. They’re corrupt.”

Trump is not angry at the people who committed mayhem in attacking Congress and threatened its members. He’s angry at the Committee that is trying to uncover the facts. They are the ones who are “radical, vicious, and racist.” Stupid.

And when even butt-kissing Lindsey Graham said, the rioters should “not be forgiven,” Trump (who was hiding safely in Mar-a-Lago during the attempted coup) called Graham a “RINO.” (That’s Trump’s favorite word for anyone who disagrees with him.)

Sorry, Lindsey, but you forgot the 6 rules of Trump. Rule #2: Eventually, Trump will stab you in the back.

Of course, Trump doesn’t consider Congress to be as important as a statue. He wrote:

“I have authorized the Federal Government to arrest anyone who vandalizes or destroys any monument, statue or other such Federal property in the U.S. with up to 10 years in prison, per the Veteran’s Memorial Preservation Act, or such other laws that may be pertinent.” Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 23, 2020

Trump’s followers stupidly agree that a statue of a Confederate general (a traitor on a horse) is far more important to democracy and America than are Congress and the Presidential election.

Then there’s the GOP’s Sen .Ron Johnson who continues to set records for stupidity by disseminating false information about virtually everything: He said he trusted the MAGA domestic terrorists over Black Lives Matter protestors, and while spreading Russian disinformation, is lately is being laughed at for his false claim about how Greenland got its name.

He may be America’s most stupid Senator, but he’s in a close match with Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas., who claims with zero evidence or expertise that COVID is a Chinese communist plot.

And let’s not forget Olympic champion of stupid, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.), who claimed the violent mob of Donald Trump supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, just wanted to talk to their representatives. (She also said Hitler’s secret police were “the gazpacho.”)

We would be remiss if we didn’t mention former Democrat, now Republican Sen. John Kennedy, who after becoming a Republican, has delivered tons of truly stupid bull manure including this doozy: After retracting his false claims about Hunter Biden in Ukraine, he went on CNN, and claimed Ukraine was the real country meddling in the 2016 election.

And then there is who might be not only the most stupid man in Congress, but the most stupid man who ever has been in Congress, Republican Sen. Rand Paul. Here is just one example of his dopiness:

“With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have to realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician.

“That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery.

“It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.

“I’m a physician in your community and you say you have a right to health care. You have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you?

“That’s ultimately what the right to free health care would be.”

That is what a prominent Republican, a man Republican voters support, says: Your having healthcare will enslave him.

This post could be 100 times its current length, and still, it wouldn’t begin to cover the rampant stupidity in America, today. We like to view with derision, the stupidity exhibited by the populace in some banana-republics, or even in Europe or Asia.

We always have puffed up our chests and claimed we are the “most” and the “greatest,” and everyone should follow our example.

Well, guess what folks. We now have joined the most stupid with the greatest stupidity, and it seems we are setting a perfect example for the world.

Or . . . are the Republican pols engaged in something even worse than stupidity?

The ostensible purpose of a government is to improve and protect the lives of the populace. the

But that is not the goal of today’s Republican party. This is not the party that gave you Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, the Civil Rights Acts, the Voting Rights Acts, food stamps, unemployment insurance.

The Republican party is bereft of ideas that benefit the populace. Instead, the Republicans focus on two goals:

1. Benefitting the rich at the expense of the middle and the poor
2. Winning elections by taking advantage of America’s peculiar minority-rule laws.

Of the last six Presidential elections, the Republicans have won the popular vote in only one (George Bush).

In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, but won the election. He did even worse in 2020, when he lost by 7 million votes, but whines that he really won and falsely claims the election was “rigged.”

During Trump’s four-year term, his major accomplishments were:

1. Failure of his dozens of attempts to repeal Obamacare (which continues to grow in popularity).
2. Overturning many Obama-era regulations that protected the populace (Example: Ended an Obama regulation that prevented coal-mining companies from dumping debris and waste into nearby streams. Rolled back financial disclosure requirements for energy firms. Gave states the ability to drug test recipients of unemployment benefits, repealed an Obama rule prohibiting the mentally disabled from purchasing firearms.
3. Major tax cuts for the rich

At this point, you may believe that I have described the stupidity of the Republican Party. If so, you would be wrong, for I believe the GOP has been quite clever, though in a evil way.

For historical reasons, having to do with compromises necessary to get the original states’ agreement to join the United States, America does not use majority-rule election systems.

Cities, counties, states, and even the federal government, including the President, are elected by complicated methods that award extra power to numerical minorities of voters.

Gerrymandering, Senate rules, and the electoral college system have resulted, for instance, in the Supreme Court being 2/3 right-wing, despite the nation being slightly left-wing.

An even more telling example is abortion, where a slight majority of Americans favor it, but the Supreme Court, most of whose members claim to be conservative (i.e. conserve existing law), have decided to be activist as well as cruel, so seem intent on changing the laws allowing abortion.

A clue to Republican strategy is seen in this chart:

The educated favor abortion. The uneducated and the religious, people who are less likely to deal with facts and more likely to obey emotions, oppose.

Major religions, despite their claims of morality and virtue, are nothing more than giant cults, where the most important factor is not fact but belief.

The rantings and fables of QAnon and Fox News are neither more nor less based on fact than are the various saints, miracles and gods of the major religions. The highly pious are tend to be accustomed to acceptance above analysis.

Thus, when Trump claims, despite all evidence, that he actually “won” and election he lost by 7 million votes, his religious followers believe with all their hearts and souls, and no amount of factual information will dissuade them.

After all, no scientific evidence will convince a believer that the virgin birth is impossible. 

Trump, despite (or because of) being irreligious himself, cleverly understands this.

The Republicans, rather than developing ideas about benefits for the masses as their vote motivators, have focused on emotional motivators: Hatred and fear of “others.”

This is why conspiracy theories, which are fact-deficient, and based on intuition and emotion, find such traction among the religious right-wing, and it is why lies and craziness are not deal-breakers for those Republican voters.

One of the most puzzling social science findings in the past half century is the Easterlin paradox:

Economic growth within a country does not always translate into an increase in happiness. We provide evidence that this paradox can be partly explained by income inequality.

In two different data sets covering 34 countries, economic growth was not associated with increases in happiness when it was accompanied by growing income inequality.

Earlier instances of the Easterlin paradox (i.e., economic growth not being associated with increasing happiness) can thus be explained by the frequent concurrence of economic growth and growing income inequality.

These findings suggest that a more even distribution of growth in national wealth may be a precondition for raising nationwide happiness.

Being more concerned with power and with the happiness of the rich, rather than the power and happiness of the middle or poor, the Republicans focus on income inequality, aka Gap Psychology (the human desire to widen the Gap below you and to narrow the Gap above you).

Rather than trying to help the middle and lower-income/wealth/power groups, as the Democrats do, the Republicans execute the opposite: They cater to the rich with tax breaks and, importantly, they create anti-poor resentment in the middle, lower-middle, and even the lower-income groups by fomenting hatred of those receiving anti-poverty aid.

The Republicans effectively blame the Democrats for narrowing the Gap below the middle classes, and for widening the Gap above the middle classes. Thus, they are able to generate hatred of Democrats for supporting immigrants and lower-income ethnic groups.

The rich get money and everyone else gets outrage, a potent combination.

SUMMARY  The cult-like, Republican base, being less affluent, less educated, and more religious, is accustomed to accepting myths and lies. To them, faith and belief are more influential than facts.

To them, Trump’s repetition of the lie that the election was stolen, needs no evidence. The Trumpers have faith.

Trump Republican pols are able to lie with impunity because they encounter very little blowback. Conspiracy theories abound in the GOP-world, and powerful media like FOX and Brietbart, cynically foster such belief.

Further, the Republican base revels in the notion that their “saints” help them rebel against control, which is why Canadian truckers, against their own best interests, do what they can to endanger everyone around them.

The rich segment of the Republican voters don’t care about the lies and myths so long as the tax breaks keep coming.

In the eyes of logical thinkers, the Republican myths are ridiculous (“How can the right-wing voters believe such nonsense?”), but right-wing, conspiracy theories are no more ridiculous than typical religious myths.

The Trump-Republicans (Trumplicans) cynically have learned that:

1. Over the short time of elections, fear and hate are far stronger than compassion, and myths are far stronger than facts.
2. Winning elections is more important than benefitting the people.
3. The rich always will run America, and they will pay handsomely for the privilege.

So the GOP focuses efforts toward those most responsive to myths, toward gerrymandered voting rules, and toward the rich.

How “stupid” is that?

In answer to the title question, “Are the Republicans really that stupid, or is it something more sinister?” it’s not the Republicans who are stupid. It’s the people who vote for Republicans; they are the stupids.

They give the charlatans their precious votes, and in return receive nothing, while the Gap above them widens every day.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell Monetary Sovereignty Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

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THE SOLE PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT IS TO IMPROVE AND PROTECT THE LIVES OF THE PEOPLE.

The most important problems in economics involve:

1. Monetary Sovereignty describes money creation and destruction.
2. Gap Psychology describes the common desire to distance oneself from those “below” in any socio-economic ranking, and to come nearer those “above.” The socio-economic distance is referred to as “The Gap.”

Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics. Implementation of Monetary Sovereignty and The Ten Steps To Prosperity can grow the economy and narrow the Gaps: Ten Steps To Prosperity:

1. Eliminate FICA
2. Federally funded Medicare — parts A, B & D, plus long-term care — for everyone
3. Social Security for all
4. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone
5. Salary for attending school
6. Eliminate federal taxes on business
7. Increase the standard income tax deduction, annually. 
8. Tax the very rich (the “.1%”) more, with higher progressive tax rates on all forms of income.
9. Federal ownership of all banks
10. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99.9% 

The Ten Steps will grow the economy and narrow the income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and the rest.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY