Ask A Genius 908: American Morale and “Trump is a fucking idiot”
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/04/07
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: American morale; that’d be good.
Rick Rosner: Two of me yammering ago, I talked about how Trump’s rhetoric has gotten uglier and Republican party rhetoric, generally, has just gotten more divorced from reality and aggressive. We’re talking about American morale, and I told my wife that the people interested in non-normal government winning, that is, Trump winning, well, they’re engaging in a barrage of BS, and some people call it the Russian fire hose model of misinformation where you own information space by flooding it with bullshit. That’s what is happening, and it’ll get even worse because we still have more than 200 days until the election. Well, this is an AI election because people have recourse to use AI to generate more convincing bullshit, though with the fire hose model, the bullshit doesn’t have to be believable. There has to be a lot of it and endlessly, but yeah, it hurts even more if it’s temporarily, like if you have to pause and look at it to see if it’s bullshit. So, one of the purposes of propaganda isn’t just to persuade; it’s to demoralize, to convince people that we’re fucked, so what’s the point of fighting or voting.
We see that increasingly in polls. Polls are super wrong now that out of the 16 States that had Republican primaries and polling about the results of primaries, Trump underperformed the polls in 14 of them and by a lot in some of them. This is that we saw it in 2020, not so much in 2016, but in 2020, Republicans underperformed even more in 2022, and I think it will be even more so in 2024 for two reasons. One is that there are Republican pollsters who put out polls that are skewed to make the Republicans look like they’re doing better than they are to demoralize Democratic party voters or Independents who might be tempted to vote for Biden.
Thing Two is, trying to get sane people to respond to a poll when you call a phone and say you want to take a poll, only one person in 500 now says yes and if only one person in 500 does something, the odds that that person is sane go down that I think the polls are contaminated with lunatic a-holes who lie to the pollsters and say yeah, I’m a Democrat because the pollster wants to get Democrats and Republicans in proportions that reflect the actual population. So, a Republican who lies and says I’m a Democrat, but I’m voting for Trump this time will skew the polls. All it takes is one lying lunatic in 40, two and a half percent will skew the results by 5% and then because it’s so hard to get people to take polls, some polling companies use polling pools where they’ve recruited 10,000 people, and they pull 1,500 people out of that pool every week; a different random 1500 out of this 10,000 but these 10,000 people end up getting pulled again and again. Often, these pools pay people to take these surveys, and I believe those pools get contaminated with lunatics.
So, we’ve got polling bullshit that freaks people out if you read the polls because about 60% of Americans are reasonable and more or less think Trump would be terrible for the country, even worse this time around than the first time. You could say 40% of the country is on the side of Trump, but in both; the 40 and the 60, half of those pools are people who aren’t paying much attention and vaguely want one or the other, but there’s a big chunk of the population that is rightfully freaking out about the possibility of Trump getting re-elected. All the information we get hit with, whether accurate or misinformation, freaks people out. It looks like a third of the population is turned into assholes who don’t mind Nazi-ish policies. Trump has recently just been calling immigrants animals and saying that if he doesn’t get re-elected, there will be a blood bath, and then Trump apologists say you have to listen to it in the context of whatever speech he was giving. He wasn’t talking about all immigrants; he was just talking about immigrants who murder people, and he wasn’t saying there will be a bloodbath on the streets of America; he was saying there will be a bloodbath in the automotive industry. Then people who aren’t apologizing for Trump say come on, these are dog whistles, and it’s violent rhetoric which encourages lunatics to commit violence.
So, with all this swirling around, it will get worse week by week. Yeah, there’s a certain morale problem in America, though any news that Biden and Democrats… that Biden is not this daughtering older man the way that Trump would paint him, but Biden gave his State of the Union speech, and he came across as in command of the facts and alert and not falling apart that I think much of the country found encouraging. So, any news or any sign that reasonable politics can win out raises National morale and any news that Trump has a shot lowers National morale. Thankfully, Trump is wrong at shit, and Trump as a politician, has never learned to move to the center to try to moderate his extremism. We’re lucky for that because if he were more competent if he listened to his people, he would… he’s clinched the Republican nomination, and that’s usually when you move to the center, you’ve already captured the extremists in your party, but Trump doesn’t seem to be doing that. Trump is a fucking idiot, and even though it’s distressing, it’s good news because it loses him in the middle.
[Recording End]
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