HARNESSING NAIVETY....3/18/23

The Republican Party used to abhor slavery and rallied against it for years resulting in the Civil War while the Democrats who dominated the South, owned human beings and often treated them like farm animals. Then when Richard Nixon devised his so called "Southern Strategy", pitting blacks against whites in an effort to win the presidency, the South began to shift and is now predominately Republican.

Now we see another dynamic developing. Donald Trump couldn't have said it better when he shouted at a rally in Las Vegas in 2016, "I love the poorly educated." It used to be that uneducated blue collar workers belonged to a union and voted largely Democratic, but that's changed. Thanks to Fox News, these "beer drinkers" now belong to the Republican Party while the Democrats have become known as the "wine and cheese" party, consisting of mostly college educated people, many of them suburban women.

Trump has shown how the Republicans could brainwash a large segment of dumb people (or let's be polite and say "uninformed") who don't have the critical thinking skills that would compel them to use common sense and reject the bile, vindictiveness, and animosity that now governs the right.

It's fascinating how such a large segment of the population continues to vote against its own interest, enabling the rich to get richer while they themselves become poorer through policies that I guess they are unable to comprehend.