The 2022 election displayed a large sect in the Republican Party that was swayed easily to believe provably false information. Chuck Todd revealed a poll that provides more than a clue as to why.
Republican leadership war on critical thought remains
Sometimes it can be informative to step back to ascertain some of the reasons why some people are where they are today. The change can be subtle in immediacy but ultimately large over time. That is what has happened to the Republican Party.
The leadership of the Republican Party, along with its propaganda networks, have progressively corroded the critical thinking process of their rank-and-file constituents. The purpose is that an ignorant or uninformed mind is waiting for direction of any kind. After all, the loss of critical thinking capability is not easily regained when the first instance of reprogramming the mind is disinformation or misinformation.
This exchange a few years ago on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd and Heather McGhee is probative.
“I want to put it up here on this issue, sort of the anti-intellectual streak that’s taking place in the Republican electorate,” Chuck Todd said. “58% of republicans believe colleges and universities have a negative effect on the way things are going in this country. I mean, it was startling — wait a minute — I thought we all agreed college is good. We can have a debate about openness in ideologies at universities. But when did we go all the way there?”
McGhee’s analysis then hits the nail on the head.
“I think you really have to sort of follow the thread of this narrative,” McGhee said. “You know, “Republican strategists began to really recognize how much more highly-educated folks were trending towards being more liberal … Republicans would say it’s a nefarious liberal bias on campus. Others might say that it’s actually the more that you study America’s history and the world, you understand how much we’ve fallen short on values of justice and equality. And you want to tend to work more veraciously towards those goals. But if you look at right-wing media, a narrative has really taken root. It’s, like, ‘The liberal outrage on campus of the day.’ And that’s where that’s coming from. There’s been a real spotlight, a distortion I think of the news of what is coming out of college campuses that it’s just very clear you start to see it pop up on Breitbart, you start to see it pop up on Fox News. And then it moves to the Republican voter.”
In effect, they have built an assembly line that creates a progressively ignorant constituency.
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