Can Our Nation Survive With This Many Dumb People?

There are many people in this country, literally millions, who no longer believe in truth or facts. They pose a danger to our nation and its democratic system. Can our nation survive them? It's a valid question.

Here's what Eugene Robinson had to say about this in The Washington Post: 

T.S. Eliot wrote that the world ends "not with a bang but a whimper,” but I fear our great nation is careening toward a third manner of demise: descent into lip-blubbering, self-destructive idiocy.

How did we become, in such alarming measure, so dumb? Why is the news dominated by ridiculous controversies that should not be controversial at all? When did so many of our fellow citizens become full-blown nihilists who deny even the concept of objective reality? And how must this look to the rest of the world?

Read the headlines and try not to weep:

Our elected representatives in the U.S. Senate, which laughably calls itself “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” agreed Thursday not to wreck our economy and trigger a global recession — at least for a few weeks. Republicans had refused to raise the federal debt ceiling, or even to let Democrats do so quickly by simple majority vote. They relented only after needlessly unsettling an international financial system based on the U.S. dollar.

The frequent games of chicken that Congress plays over the debt ceiling are — to use a term of art I recall from Economics 101 — droolingly stupid. In the end, yes, we always agree to pay our obligations. But the credit rating of the planet’s greatest economic superpower has already been lowered because of this every-few-years ritual, and each time we stage the absurd melodrama, we risk a miscalculation that sends us over the fiscal cliff.

Today’s trench-warfare political tribalism makes that peril greater than ever. An intelligent and reasonable Congress would eliminate the debt ceiling once and for all. Our Congress is neither.

In other news, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) was speaking to a crowd of Republicans at a country club in his home state Saturday when he tried, gently, to boost South Carolina’s relatively low rate of vaccination against the coronavirus. He began, “If you haven’t had the vaccine, you ought to think about getting it because if you’re my age — ”

“No!” yelled many in the crowd.

Graham retreated — “I didn’t tell you to get it; you ought to think about it” — and then defended his own decision to get vaccinated. But still the crowd shouted him down. Seriously, people?

Covid-19 is a highly infectious disease that has killed more than 700,000Americans over the past 20 months. The Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines all but guarantee that recipients will not die from covid. I have, or had, an acquaintance who refused to get vaccinated, despite pleas from his adult children to protect himself. He got covid-19, and it killed him. Most of the deaths the nation has suffered during the current delta-variant wave of the disease — deaths of the unvaccinated — have been similarly needless and senseless.

Covid-19 is a bipartisan killer. In the tribal-political sense, the safe and effective vaccines are a bipartisan miracle, developed under the Republican Trump administration and largely distributed under the Democratic Biden administration. People in most of the rest of the world realize, however, that vaccination is not political at all; it is a matter of life and death, and also a matter of how soon — if ever — we get to resume our normal lives.

Why would people not protect their own health and save their own lives? How is this anything but just plain stupid?

We are having other fights that are, unlike vaccination, partisan and political — but equally divorced from demonstrable fact.

Conservatives in state legislatures across the country are pushing legislation to halt the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools. I put the term in quotes because genuine critical race theory, a dry and esoteric set of ideas debated in obscure academic journals, is not actually being taught in those schools at all. What’s being taught instead — and squelched — is American history, which happens to include slavery, Jim Crow repression and structural racism.

I get it. The GOP has become the party of White racial grievance, and this battle against an imaginary enemy stirs the base. But the whole charade involves Republican officials — many of them educated at the nation’s top schools — betting that their constituents are too dumb to know they’re being lied to. So far, the bet is paying off.

And then, of course, there’s the whole “stolen election” farce, which led to the tragedy of Jan. 6. Every recount, every court case, every verifiable fact proves that Joe Biden fairly defeated Donald Trump. Yet a sizeable portion of the American electorate either can’t do basic arithmetic or doesn’t believe that one plus one always equals two.

How dumb can a nation get and still survive? Idiotically, we seem determined to find out.

Donald Trump Is "Dimmer Than A 5-Watt Bulb"

(Illustration is by Luci Gutierrez in The New Yorker.)

Donald Trump has bragged repeatedly about having a very high IQ. His rampant narcissism demands that he try to get people to believe that. But people who have to tell you they are smart usually aren't, and that is true of Trump. In fact, he may well be the dumbest person ever to live in the White House.

Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune tells it like it is -- that Trump is really not very smart. Here's some of what he has written:

Donald Trump has many serious flaws, including incorrigible dishonesty, rampant narcissism, contempt for women and a fashion sense that makes him think that hairstyle of his is flattering. But nothing compares to his most prominent, crippling and incurable defect: He’s dimmer than a 5-watt bulb.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was reported to have called the president a “moron” — emphasizing that term with an adjective I can’t repeat here. Forced to hold a news conference to praise the president’s intelligence, Tillerson was too honest to deny what he had said.

The late William T. Kelley, who taught Trump at the University of Pennsylvania, said, “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.” Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of “The Art of the Deal,” says Trump had “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.”. . .

He’s just not bright enough to make connections between his conduct and its consequences. Trump’s travel ban has lost repeatedly in court because he has made clear he has an unconstitutional goal: shutting out Muslims because of their religion. If he had kept quiet, he might have gotten his way.

The evidence of his dimwittedness flows as continuously and voluminously as the Mississippi River. His tweets are studded with misspellings, random capitalizations and mystifying quotation marks.

He taps out tweets that flagrantly contradict what he tweeted when Barack Obama was president, making himself look ridiculous. When he holds forth on policy issues, it’s excruciatingly apparent he has no idea what he’s talking about.

Trump relies on a vocabulary the size of a second-grader’s. To combat opioid abuse among teens, he favors “telling them, ‘No good, really bad for you in every way.’ ” Those paper towels he tossed to a crowd in Puerto Rico were “very good towels.” He wanted to call the tax reform bill “the Cut Cut Cut Act.”

He pretends to be a master negotiator, but he has failed to get the Republican Congress to repeal Obamacare, enact protections for immigrants brought here illegally as children, and fund his border wall.

Trump tries to conceal his intellectual deficiency by insisting how smart he is. “I went to an Ivy League college,” he said last month. “I’m a very intelligent person.” He has to make such affirmations because all the evidence indicates his cranium contains an airless void. . . .

I’m betting Trump will never submit to any process that would document his actual intelligence for the public to see. He’s dumb. But not that dumb.

Will The "American Democracy Die In Dumbness" ?

Poll after poll has shown that the American public does not think Donald Trump is doing a good job as president, and is dishonest and untrustworthy. That is not the case among those who voted for Trump in last November's election though.

The questions above are from a new University of Virginia Center for Politics Poll -- done between April 17th and 19th of a random national sample of 1,000 Trump voters, with a 3.1 point margin of error.

It shows that almost all of his voters are still supporting him, with a job approval rating of 93% approval to 7% disapproval. That's pretty remarkable considering all the lies he has told and issues he has flip-flopped on.

The poll shows they really don't care about his position of the issues -- with 83% saying they are not concerned about his issue flip-flops. A large percentage of them also believe the lies he has told. This seems to verify that his support was not because of his positions on the issues or the solutions he offered for the country's problem. It was much more a cult of personality -- with supporters jumping on his bandwagon because he hated all the same people they hate.

Tom Nichols, in an excellent article for USA Today, says this is the kind of dumbness that could destroy our democracy. Here are some excerpts from that article:

Trump is at this point the most unpopular new president in the history of modern polling. What is bewildering is that at the same time, 96% of Trump voters say they have no regrets about their choice. How can this be? Is it just partisanship, with Americans so divided that they will simply cheer on their own team and stay loyal beyond all rational thought? . . .

The wide disagreement among Americans on the president’s performance, however, is more than partisanship. It is a matter of political literacy. The fact of the matter is that too many Trump supporters do not hold the president responsible for his mistakes or erratic behavior because they are incapable of recognizing them as mistakes. They lack the foundational knowledge and basic political engagement required to know the difference between facts and errors, or even between truth and lies.

As the social psychologist David Dunning wrote during the campaign, “Some voters, especially those facing significant distress in their life, might like some of what they hear from Trump, but they do not know enough to hold him accountable for the serious gaffes he makes.” In other words, it’s not that they forgave Trump for being wrong, but rather that they failed “to recognize those gaffes as missteps” in the first place. . . .

To be sure, some of Trump’s voters, like any others, are just cynical and expect the worst from every elected official. Others among them grasp Trump’s failings but fall back on the sour but understandable consolation that at least he is not Clinton. But many simply don’t see a problem. . . .

There is a more disturbing possibility here than pure ignorance: that voters not only do not understand these issues, but also that they simply do not care about them. As his supporters like to point out, Trump makes the right enemies, and that’s enough for them. Journalists, scientists, policy wonks — as long as “the elites” are upset, Trump’s voters assume that the administration is doing something right. “He makes them uncomfortable, which makes me happy,” Ohio Trump voter James Cassidy told the Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale. Syria? Korea? Health care reform? Foreign aid? Just so much mumbo-jumbo, the kind of Sunday morning talk-show stuff only coastal elitists care about.

There is a serious danger to American democracy in all this. When voters choose ill-informed grudges and diffuse resentment over the public good, a republic becomes unsustainable. The temperance and prudent reasoning required of representative government gets pushed aside in favor of whatever ignorant idea has seized the public at that moment. The Washington Post recently changed its motto to “democracy dies in darkness,” a phrase that is not only pretentious but inaccurate. More likely, American democracy will die in dumbness.

Those of us who criticized Trump voters for their angry populism were often told during and after the election not to condescend to our fellow citizens, and to respect their choices. This is fair. In a democracy, every vote counts equally and the president won an impressive and legitimate electoral victory.

Even so, the unwillingness of so many of his supporters to hold him to even a minimal standard of accountability means that a certain amount of condescension from the rest of us is unavoidable.

In every election, we must respect the value of each vote. We are never required, however, to assume that each vote was cast with equal probity or intelligence.

Fox News Is Still Dumbing Down It's Daily Viewers

I have posted before about surveys that showed Fox News viewers had less knowledge of current events than the viewers of other news sources. Now there is a new survey (from WorldPublicOpinion.org) that verifies the findings of those previous surveys. It seems that the misinformation (and many times outright lies) spread by Fox News in the guise of "news" really is dumbing down those viewers. The chart above shows ten things that are just not true, but which a significant number of Fox viewers believe are true.

And the percentage of Fox viewers believing those things are higher than from any other news media. Here's how WorldPublicOpinion.org describes it:

Those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe that:

*most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (8 points more likely)
*most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points) 
*the economy is getting worse (26 points)
*most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)
*the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)
*their own income taxes have gone up (14 points)
*the auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points)
*when TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points)
*and that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points)

These effects increased incrementally with increasing levels of exposure and all were statistically significant. The effect was also not simply a function of partisan bias, as people who voted Democratic and watched Fox News were also more likely to have such misinformation than those who did not watch it--though by a lesser margin than those who voted Republican. 

Some Of The Dumbest Things That Christians Say

(The image at left is from ClipartPal.)

The following was not written by an atheist or skeptic. It was written by Tiffany Willis, who is a practicing christian. It turns out that many christians, like Ms. Willis, are embarrassed by the dumb things that come out of the mouths of some christians (mainly right-wing evangelicals). Here is what she has to say about those people -- and what she believes are the dumbest things they say:

Evangelical Christians have become stupid.

Or they’ve chosen to be stupid. Or they’re just plain crazy. Or…I don’t know. Rather than believing that God is an intelligent designer, they seem to believe he was a wizard with a magic wand. Instead of seeing God as the Great Scientist, they seem to think God is stupid and can’t have possibly created the heavens and the earth with science rather than wizardry. Evangelical Christians are guilty of making those of us who are sane Christians look stupid. They’re giving us a bad name. They are effectively turning us into the most hated group of religious people in the world. . .

The fact is, I hear and see Christians saying really stupid things. It’s embarrassing. Here’s the best of the best. Or the worst of the worst

1. Evolution is just a theory. By that reasoning, belief in a Biblical God is also a theory — at least to non-believers.
2. If you don’t believe in God, you don’t know right from wrong. Ridiculous. Every day, we hear stories about pastors and other religious figures in a scandal of some sort. Infidelity, theft, child molestation, etc…Their belief in God didn’t help them be more moral, did it?
3. You can’t prove God doesn’t exist. Can we prove that he does? Most non-believers say that the burden of proof is on us who are theists.
4. Anything said while speaking in tongues. I grew up in an Assembly of God church. Speaking in tongues was a common practice. The way it works is that one person supposedly gets taken over by the Holy Spirit and begins to chant gibberish. Then after a few minutes, another church member “translates” the message from God. OK, so the omniscient being (God) that I worship doesn’t know English? This is a great example of Christians implying that God is stupid.
5. Nothing can come from nothing, so an intelligent being must have created it. I personally agree, but did it genuinely definitely happen in seven 24-hour days? I don’t believe it did.
6. A Godly home guarantees Godly children. No. Just no.
7. When someone dies, they become an angel. This is completely not Biblical. Human beings and angels are completely different creatures. The Bible is very clear about this.
8. Put God back in schools. Again, he is an omniscient being. If he wants to be there, he’s there.
9. Keep the Christ in Christmas. Um…no. Man put the Christ in Christmas.
10. We’re in the end times — Jesus is coming soon. The Bible is very clear that no one knows the time of Christ’s return.
11. If you have enough faith, you’ll be healed. I’ve known many people who had lots of faith and they weren’t healed. If non-believers die of horrible disease, Christians say that they didn’t have faith enough to be healed. If Christians die of horrible disease, Christians say that “God healed them completely and took them home” or “God needed them in heaven.”
12. God told me to _______. This isn’t provable on any level. If God did tell you to do something, that was a conversation with no witnesses. It’s asking a lot to expect people to believe that.
13. It’s un-Christian to question anything in the Bible. God (the omniscient being) gave you a brain. Use it.
14. God destroyed ______ with a hurricane (or fire or whatever). That’s very much a logical fallacy, because when it’s done to Christians, they say that the devil is testing them. Or God is testing them. Yet when it happens to anyone else, it’s God punishing the victims. Shut up.
15. If you’re not ashamed to say you believe in God, share this photo (or status or whatever). Because God is spending all of his time on Facebook patrolling memes?
16. Kangaroos were the first to sink during the great flood because they have pouches that filled up with water. Stupid. Just stupid.
17. Most homosexuals molest children. Actually, the horror stories we hear more often than not involve a heterosexual adult who has preyed on a child.
18. The miracles that happened in the Bible prove that God exists. Do the miracles that happen in a Harry Potter book prove that, too? Again, we have to refine our argument if we expect non-believers to take us seriously in any way.
19. Graffiti is a sign of the abandonment of God. What…?
20. Animals ended up on different continents by making rafts out of logs that were knocked down by the great flood. To float across oceans. Um…yeah.
21. Fossils were put here by God to test our faith. Yes, someone actually said this to me. My ex-husband is finishing up his degree in Geology. One of his professors has a father who is an evangelical Christian. When the professor asks his Dad “well how do you explain fossils, etc…if the world is only 7,000 years old?” His Dad’s response? “God put all of that stuff here to test our faith.”OK so, God really enjoys messing with people’s heads and playing games? Pin the tail on the belief? Shut up. Why would anyone want to be a part of our religion if this kind of nonsense were true?
22. Our Founding Fathers were Christians. Nope. At least not all of them were.

“Religions are all alike – founded upon fables and mythologies.” – Thomas Jefferson

“In no instance have . . . the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.” – James Madison

“Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.” – Benjamin Franklin

“I beg you be persuaded that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.” – George Washington

“The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.” – John Adams

My 4 Nominees For "Dumbest Member Of Congress"

Anyone who pays attention to politics will know that there are a plethora of elected officials in the 113th Congress that qualify as dumb beyond belief (especially among the Republicans) -- so it was not easy to whittle my list down to only four. But I think these four bring a whole new meaning to the word "dumb" (and the picture of any of the four would fit beside that word in a dictionary).

My first nominee is Louie Gohmert, from the 1st Congressional District of Texas. Louie says so many dumb things that you may wonder whether he grew up on this planet. Evidently the voters of his district don't think rational thinking (or sanity) is necessary in an elected official -- and Gohmert proves almost daily that he is neither rational nor sane.

But while Gohmert may be the frontrunner for "Dumbest Member of Congress", the other three on my list have shown they are worthy contenders for the crown. They are Steve King (4th Congressional District of Iowa), Marsha Blackburn (7th Congressional District of Tennessee), and Blake Farenthold (27th Congressional District of Texas). If Gohmert was to stumble, and show the least bit of rationality, any one of these three could easily spring into the lead.

You may be wondering at this point how I could leave Michele Bachmann (6th Congressional District of Minnesota) and Steve Stockman (36th Congressional District of Texas) off this list -- and I would agree that normally both would be worthy of being nominated. I left them off because when the new Congress meets early next year, they will not be in it. Bachmann chose not to run for re-election this year, and Stockman chose to run for Senate instead (and was thrashed by Cornyn in the GOP primary).

Unfortunately, unless the voters in their districts miraculously develop some common sense before November, it looks like Gohmert, King, Blackburn, and Farenthold will be returning to Congress -- and continuing to display their special kind of dumb (to the detriment of their states and their country).

Those are my nominees for that dubious honor (Dumbest Member of Congress). You may have a different member of Congress that you think is worthy of being nominated. If so, please leave your candidate in the comments section. I'd love to hear your opinion.