THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Media, Democrats question intelligence of Americans who are voting Republican: 'Aren't very bright'

Media, Democrats question intelligence of Americans who are voting Republican: 'Aren't very bright'

My girlfriend often tells me I am being illogical when I disagree with her so I think the same sort of thing is going on here. Democrat devotees think that disagreeing with them indicates lower intelligence.

In case anyone is interested in the facts, the usual finding is that Leftists do have a very slight advantage over conservatives in average IQ. But which way does the causal arrow point?

It's likely that more intelligent people are more attuned to what is currently "correct" and so are better able to follow the mob in their beliefs. Conservatives, by contrast, may be more independent minded and hence less likely to follow the intellectual fashions. Being intelligent may simply help make you a better conformist in today's Left-dominated society

Liberal media figures and Democratic politicians are questioning the intelligence of Americans who are voting Republican, befuddled by the idea that some could put economic issues over concerns about the state of U.S. democracy.

While voting rights and threats to democracy are key voting issues, especially among Democratic voters, polling has repeatedly shown that issues such as the economy, inflation, crime, and abortion often outperform the former. However, this has not stopped media figures and Democrats from blasting their warnings about Republican lawmakers across the airwaves.

Over the weekend, left-wing documentary filmmaker Michael Moore gave his final push to vote Democrat ahead of the midterms, but in doing so, claimed that 80 to 90 million Americans "aren’t very bright."

"No offense to any of you watching that aren’t bright, but that’s—you’re watching MSNBC, so I’m making an assumption that you know what’s going on," he said.

He also expressed confusion at the idea of women "giving up their rights" because of their alarm over the price of gas or the price of food.

On November 3, "The View’ co-host Sunny Hostin was widely condemned for comparing White suburban women voting Republican to cockroaches voting for insecticide. Some critics even called for the host’s firing.

"What’s also surprising to me is the abortion issue. I read a poll just yesterday that White Republican suburban women are now going to vote Republican," Hostin said, appearing to refer to surveys showing White women backing Republicans in 2022. "It’s almost like roaches voting for Raid [roach spray], right?"

The condescending attitude towards voters leaning Republican in the midterm elections continued on ABC, with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel appearing to mock voters whose troubles have pushed them to vote red.

"The midterm elections are on Tuesday, and we have a tough decision ahead. On the one hand our democracy is being threatened by extremists who want power over at all costs even if it means burning us to the ground. On the other hand, gas is four dollars a gallon now, so," Kimmel sardonically quipped.

Similar conversations could also be found on social media, with liberal journalists appearing to mock Americans concerned about inflation and the price of gasoline.

"I don’t get the obsession with ‘high’ gas prices," Reuters reporter Patricia Zengerie tweeted, alongside a picture of gas at a Shell station being sold at $3.49 a gallon.

Another Twitter conversation saw BBC reporter Shayan Sardarizadeh promote an article she wrote detailing a coalition of Republican candidates who falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen. The tweet also claimed that the group’s founders had connections to the far-right QAnonconspiracy theory.

"But cereal is kinda pricey, so I dunno," The Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols replied to the post.

The contemptuous tone of media personalities toward Republican voters also revealed itself on MSNBC during two separate installments of "The ReidOut."

During an interview with Hillary Clinton, host Joy Reid asked if she was concerned that voters are not "putting the pieces together," regarding how Republican control of the House could embolden fringe theories and an election denier mentality.

"I don’t think people are really able to grasp that—but more importantly I’m not sure they really understand the threats to their way of life," Clinton replied.

A week earlier, MSNBC political analyst Matthew Dowd joined Reid’s show, where he likened Americans voting Republican to German citizens helping to bolster the rise of Nazi Germany.

Reid prompted Dowd by stating that people who sit back and think that a Republican-led Congress won’t be that bad might be as dangerous as the "radicals" vying for public office.

"It certainly sounds very familiar to what happened in Germany—which is a bunch of citizens, Adolf Hitler gets a third of the vote," Dowd said. "Nobody thought it could happen there. They kind of went along because they said he was going to solve the economy and fix inflation, those sorts of things. And then lo and behold a few years later they lost their democracy, and they’re all like ‘how’d that happen here?’"

A New York Times/Sienna poll released in mid-October showed that a whopping 71% of the 792 registered voters questioned say "American democracy is currently under threat."

Among those who fear for democracy, 84% of them, or roughly 60% of all registered voters, view "mainstream media" as some sort of threat. A majority, 59%, call the media a "major threat to democracy" while an additional 25% call it a "minor threat to democracy."

President Biden urged Democrats last Wednesday to show up at the polls during next week's midterm elections or "allow the dark forces that thirst for power" to chip away at American democracy.

One day later, Biden gave a final address ahead of the midterms, pleading with Americans to vote against Republicans, and accusing the party of suppressing access to vote, denying elections, and encouraging political violence.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/media-democrats-question-intelligence-americans-voting-republican-arent-bright

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Media, Democrats question intelligence of Americans who are voting Republican: 'Aren't very bright'

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