Posted on 07/30/2025 5:19:50 AM PDT by DallasBiff
Preface. This is my book review of Chris Mooney’s 2012 “The Republican Brain. The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality”.
This has grown from a review of this book (far below) to more recent science and writing on the conservative mind. People who want certainty and do not like change or changing their mind have been with us since humans evolved. That is discussed in another post: Garcia, H. 2019. Sex, Power, and Partisanship. How evolutionary science makes sense of our political divide.
Lately with all the division and even talk of civil war, there have been many broadcasts on 60 minutes, PBS, and other media of moderators bringing Republicans and Democrats into a room to discuss matters that divide them. But how can the two sides really come to an understanding when so many Americans are stupid?
Here are some excerpts from David Brooks (2025) Producing something this stupid is the achievement of a lifetime. New York Times.
“…Adult literacy scores have been declining for over 10 years. Andreas Schleicher, the head of education and skills at the O.E.C.D., told The Financial Times, “Thirty percent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child.”
This kind of literacy is the backbone of reasoning ability, the source of the background knowledge you need to make good decisions in a complicated world. As the retired general Jim Mattis and Bing West once wrote, “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”
(Excerpt) Read more at energyskeptic.com ...
“The article is convoluted, but the title says it all, in that liberals think that conservatives and MAGA supporters are illiterate neanderthals.”
Agreed. And they MUST keep that narrative going because it’s all that they have. As long as Dem voters believe conservatives are sub human, they’ll vote Dem, no matter what.
Most of the “science” today is pure garbage and not to be trusted. Most of leftist reality is fantasy and not to be encouraged.
Liberals think men can be women and that men and women are physically equal. That’s denying science and reality in a nutshell.
Bingo. Was going to make the same point.
Also, things like Climate Change are more of a religion with them (vs. a science).
betcha the clown who wrote the article was wearing as mask as they typed away
If you listen carefully to leftist critiques of conservatives you realize who their enemy really is...
Cartoon characters the mass media invented.
—
Example—a leftist relative explained over lunch one day that the nation was being over-run by Nazi protesters everywhere. That was not a figure of speech—he meant literal swastika wearing Nazis.
Of course he had never seen any of them.
It was like being terrified of a Unicorn invasion from Mars.
Good luck talking someone out of that.
“Brains are wired to deny science & reality”
You mean in the same way democrats brains are wired to deny God exists and Jesus Christ is the savior of the world?
“Thirty percent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child.”
__________________________________________________________
I’m a public school teacher; and I hate to break it to the political Left, but metropolitan youth and illegals immigrants form a gigantic portion of US school-children who underperform academically. These two groups’ parents would fall largely under the demographic that votes for THEIR political party in overwhelming numbers.
Democrats projecting. All their “science” turned out to be politics
You get the $cience you pay for.
I still don’t believe the ‘science’ behind the food
Pyramid
Most Republicans are Christians. We have the mind of Christ, which includes having godly wisdom.
Democrats are carnal and operate on instinct.
All MAGA are stupid but all ethnic minorities are repressed geniuses
Based on brain wiring of course
“If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”
Couldn't agree more.
The gender part of my brain only has two wires going to it. It’s a “science” thing.
The Left mistake being arrogant for being intelligent.
When all this Climate crap started...I remember Hillary saying that it was a way of “recruiting” young voters. And indeed they did...schools were and still are... clobbering kids with made up info...
It is worse than it seems. This is promoting Republicans as “the other”. Dehumanization of Republicans makes it ok for Dems to attack them. I recall having read of a similar issue back in the mid 20th century.
Science like climate change? Or reality like a man can become a woman if you cut off his penis?
The author of the article and site identifies and describes herself:
How I stumbled on the energy (and ecological) crisis Let me introduce myself: Alice Friedemann living in Oakland California . This autobiography focuses on the parts of my history that led me to writing about the many factors that are leading to the collapse of all nations due to our utter dependency on fossil fuels, and much more, climate change, droughts, corruption, topsoil erosion, groundwater depletion, pollution, peak food, and much more. Demandt, in Der Fall Roms (1984) listed 210 reasons for why the Roman Empire fell here. Our civilization is so complex there are hundreds more reasons why our fossil-fueled civilization will end. That’s what this energyskeptic.com is all about.
So this gets us back to the main article where she writes:
What happens when people lose the ability to reason or render good judgments? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Donald Trump’s tariff policy. I’ve covered a lot of policies over the decades, some of which I supported and some of which I opposed. But I have never seen a policy as stupid as this one. It is based on false assumptions. It rests on no coherent argument in its favor. It relies on no empirical evidence. It has almost no experts on its side — from left, right or center. It is jumble-headedness exemplified. Trump himself personifies stupidity’s essential feature — self-satisfaction, an inability to recognize the flaws in your thinking. And of course when the approach led to absolutely predictable mayhem, Trump, lacking any coherent plan, backtracked, flip-flopped, responding impulsively to the pressures of the moment as his team struggled to keep up.
Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime — relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence.
What this leftist loon missed utterly was the deep economic realities behind Trump's use of tariffs like everyone misunderstanding who was going to pay, the consumer or the producer with low costs selling into a competitive market. Second she and her kind utterly missed that Trump was using tariffs as a bargaining tool to rebalance the deal for America because he is the world's master negotiator and they are trolls living in basements in Oakland California.
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