Source: Mario Tama / Getty
Break out your umbrellas, good people, because the forecast predicts a 99.9999 percent chance of “water is wet” news.
It appears that researchers have been studying mental, intellectual and cognitive natures of different voter and ideological demographics and it turns out—Republicans are dumb AF.
From Raw Story:
As the new Faith in America survey by Deseret News & Marist College highlights, the basic understanding of the role of religion in a secular democracy has become so polarized that 70% of Republicans believe that religion should influence a person’s political values, where as only 28% of Democrats and 45% of independents share that view.
Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, also do not consume the same sources of information about news and politics. Conservatives now inhabit their own self-created media echo chamber, which functions as a type of lie-filled and toxic closed episteme and sealed-off universe. The creation of such an alternate reality is an important attribute of fascism, in which truth itself must be destroyed and replaced with fantasies and fictions in support of the leader and his movement.
Now, I know what conservatives are thinking: These surveys are nothing but left-wing bias and “the media” should be ashamed of itself for entertaining them.
But let’s just take a look at what right-wingers have entertained.
When Donald Trump lost his election, it took little effort for Republicans to convince their delusional constituency that Trump actually lost to sentient, Biden-loving voting machines, dead people rising from their graves to cast a ballot and a “deep state” conspiracy to steal the election from their rightful overlord. Despite zero evidence backing the “stop the steal” claims and Trump losing all of the dozens of court cases in the matter due to lack of evidence, the MAGA minions still believed. They even started a riot at the U.S. Capitol over it.
From the Black Lives Matter movement to critical race theory, Republicans have been able to spread propaganda with ease, not because they’re particularly clever, but because conservative voters are gullible, bigoted and ignorant rubes who don’t know anything about anything outside of their world of unmitigated whiteness, delusion and flawed sense of Christianity.
More from Raw Story:
Recent research by Darren Sherkat, a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University, demonstrates that America’s democracy crisis may be even more intractable than the above evidence suggests. In his recent article “Cognitive Sophistication, Religion, and the Trump Vote,” which appeared in the January 2021 edition of Social Science Quarterly, Sherkat examined data from the 2018 General Social Survey and concluded that there are substantial negative differences between the thinking processes and cognition of white Trump voters, as shown in the 2016 presidential election, as compared to other voters who supported Hillary Clinton or another candidate, or who did not vote at all.
“Low levels of cognitive sophistication may lead people to embrace simple cognitive shortcuts, like stereotypes and prejudices that were amplified by the Trump campaign,” Sherkat wrote in his study.
In other words, the people who like to claim “facts over feelings” as their mantra are really just a bunch of stooges who believe any ol’ thing so long as it vindicates their bigotry and love of their precious ‘Merica.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to blow y’all’s minds.
Try not to die of shock and awe, please.
