The thing I hate though is whenever someone interviews Elon it seems like they can't help but crawl right up his ass. If you wanna see real cringe look at Bill Maher's interview with him. Now he criticizes Elon, but when he had him on I'm pretty sure he was what that AI video of Trump and Elon was trained on.
Maybe stew beef is different, but I figure if Elon detects he can't get the interview he wants he'll bail.
I think everyone has accepted at this point that Trump is extremely stupid and might be borderline mentally challenged. I mean even in the 80s people knew he was dumb, Biff Tannen in back to the future was reportedly based on Trump.
Because the status quo throughout history is an extremely small number of people getting the most benefits by far and everyone else getting screwed, and everyone seeing this as normal. People are used to it, while having everyone on relatively equal footing is new and therefore scary.
There's plenty of evidence that he actually is very stupid, and that he may even have a learning disability. To be honest, once you accept the thought that he may be mildly retarded, you can't unsee it. For example in the recent talk about rare earth minerals, it seems to me that Trump thinks rare earth is actually soil in the way he talks about it and it drives me nuts that the media doesn't point this out:
“We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earth and other things...They have great rare earth. And I want security of the rare earth, and they’re willing to do it."
But he makes up for it politically with great skill in appealing to people's base emotions.
One could argue it did work, just a little too well. In 1995 forget trans rights, gay marriage was just starting to become a question and about half of white people were still against interracial marriage. As the one atheist kid in that era, I was certainly an outlier and society still regarded it as a default that everyone was religious. Basically only black people were worried about whether police were beating people up too much and for the vast majority the only question was why we weren't being harsher on criminals. Society's views on things have changed very rapidly as a result of being able to access information very easily.
I think what we're seeing today is not a result of the internet, but a reaction to the result of the internet. Things have changed too fast for some and there's basically a cultural luddite movement.
I have some hope from the fact that when they showed just how absurdly subservient they are, some people showed up at town hall meetings to yell at them. Not all of these representatives are totally insulated in a maga-encrusted bubble, and at some point the fear of being too pro-Trump might start to compete with the fear of not being pro-Trump enough.
In red districts, primary the Republicans for twice the effectiveness. Let's be real the GOP is where the power is anyway. Kick the corporations out of the GOP and make them deal with being represented by weak democrats for a change.
There's a lot of different people who vote for Trump.
In blue states, to like Trump you probably need to be drinking the kool aid to some degree. But in red states, there's a lot of low-info voters who are just voting how their friends and relatives votes. Until it affects them.
It's funny that the evidence of Trump being a Russian asset is always some rumored connection with a KGB person, not the fact that he extremely reliably and consistently acts exactly like a Russian asset.
The average person (and to be fair, most psychologists) thinks of intelligence as the innate, fundamental characteristic of a person to think across all cognitive areas. However, this concept is not easily falsifiable and therefore arguably exists outside the realm of science.
For example, say I wanted to come up with a concept called "sportsness" which is the ability to be good at sports. I could test a bunch of people in a battery of sports-related tasks, and I'd probably get a nice bell curve where some people have high sportsness across all tasks and others have low sportsness across all tasks.
But does that prove the existence of sportsness? Or did I just measure a spurious correlation caused by the fact that some people are just more likely to be playing many different sports than others, or that some body types may lead to being better at sports related tasks, or some people are just better at handling the pressure of athletic performance tests, or some combination thereof? Of course most would say the latter, but then maybe some would defend the concept of sportsness by saying sportsness is just an emergent property of those things or something like that. But then is sportsness useful as a concept at all? You get the idea.
Also you gotta factor in inflation caused by the injection of $4.5 trillion of additional rich guy wealth into the economy. So even a lot of people making over $300k are probably going to be losing out after you factor in inflation caused by others getting more.
Don't worry, Real World Boston cast member Sean Duffy is on the case.