Can Someone With A 3-Digit IQ Be A Regular Fox "News" Viewer?

Can Someone With A 3-Digit IQ Vote Republican?

Republican voters in South Carolina know Nikki Haley and Tim Scott a lot better than voters anywhere else do— a lot better. And these voters are rejecting them for Trump… overwhelmingly. A new poll of likely Republican primary voters shows the two local favorites... not very favorite:

• Trump- 43%

• DeSantis- 21%

• Haley- 19%

• Scott- 7%

• Pence- 2%

Republican voters in New Hampshire are just as stupid. Chris Sununu may look popular compared to the political midgets he’s had to face electorally but he’s about as popular in a battle against Trump as Haley and Scott are. A new University of New Hampshire poll, which shows support for DeSantis evaporating, shows Sununu at 12%. Candidates with more than one percent:

• Trump- 42%

• DeSantis- 22%

• Sununu- 12%

• Cheney- 4%

• Ramaswamy- 3%

• Pence- 3%

• Haley- 3%

• Tim Scott- 2%

A couple of days ago, we looked at the age-old question, Why Is It That The More Right-Wing Someone Is, The Less Intrinsically Intelligent They Are? and we saw that scientists can measure intelligence and have seen a clear connection between stupidity and prejudice, low mental ability and prejudicial thinking. [R]ight-wing ideologies attract people with lower mental abilities because they minimize the complexity of the world. Right-wing ideologies offer well-structured and ordered views of society, views that preserve traditions and norms, so they are especially attractive to those who are threatened by change and want to avoid uncertainty and ambiguity. Conversely, smart people are more capable of grasping a world of nuance, fluidity and relativity… Low intelligence and ‘low effort thinking’ are strongly linked to right-wing attitudes, including authoritarianism and conservative politics. And again, there appears to be a demonstrable causal link: Studies have found, for example, that children with poor mental skills grow up to be strongly right-wing adults… Considerable evidence shows that conservative ideology predicts all sorts of prejudice— against ethnic and racial minorities, the disadvantaged, any outgroup. Indeed, right wingers are much more likely to see outgroups as a threat to traditional values and social order, resulting in heightened prejudice.”

Former Republican operative Jonathan Last didn’t quite have to go there to make his conclusions about Fox News viewers this week. “I would not blame Fox watchers for feeling used and disrespected by Fox. It’s clear that no one views Fox’s audience with greater contempt than the people who work at Fox. They believe that the people who watch their channel are foolish, irrational, and infantile. They believe that these people cannot grasp reality and that if they were confronted with reality, they would react with anger and petulance. The people who run Fox believe that the people who watch Fox are dim, emotional, and unpatriotic bigots who must be coddled like particularly malevolent children. And here’s the thing: Fox is right. We know that they’re right because Fox’s audience hasn’t abandoned it even as the texts and emails from discovery [in the Dominion case] piled up. Even as the network was forced to cough up one of the largest settlements in media history.”

On Wednesday, James Poniewozik, the NY Times chief TV critic, used the word “everybody” very inappropriately: Everybody Knows What Fox News Is Now. Sorry, maybe every NY Times reader knows but… everybody? They should, but Fox viewers don’t. “The lawsuit,” Poniewozik wrote, “has revealed what Fox thinks of its viewers and, more important, how much it fears the very audience that it created. That fear is the running theme of the voluminous body of texts, emails and depositions that showed the network freaking out over how its audience would react if it did not indulge the fraudulent belief that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The evidence revealed that the people who run Fox, already anxious about viewer blowback over its election-night call of Arizona for Biden, were worried about losing its audience for good. ‘Getting creamed by CNN!’ Murdoch wrote in an email. ‘Guess our viewers don’t want to watch it. Hard enough for me!’ As the days went on, Fox was placed in the nightmare situation of having to pierce the bubble and report the news: That Biden had been legally elected. Fox leaders watched the gains of conservative rivals like Newsmax and saw the audience’s interest in election-theft fantasies building. There was talk of showing ‘respect’ for an audience that, as one producer put it, ‘doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition. They still have hope.’”

But the quote that I’ll remember best— the one that summed up the relationship between Fox and its audience better than I ever have as a TV critic— came from Fox’s star host Tucker Carlson. Referring to the election conspiracy theories of the Trump adviser Sidney Powell, which he called “insane,” he added: “Our viewers are good people and they believe it.”

Say this for Carlson, he can pack a lot into a few words. There’s an implicit agreement here: Whether or not you, the viewer, are correct in the technical sense, you are right in the larger sense. You are the authentic voice of this country. So you deserve to feel right about your beliefs, about your enemies, about how you have been cheated. You deserve— through whatever combination of insinuation or hypotheticals or myths— to have the space to keep believing it, without us making that harder.

All this, trial or no trial, makes clear what Fox News really is. It’s a service provider. That service is the maintenance of a reality bubble and the deference to beliefs that Fox’s hosts helped shape.

Seen this way, the Dominion case wasn’t so much about Fox telling its audience what to believe. It was about the audience telling Fox what Fox needed to believe— or at least, what it needed to give the appearance of not not believing.

That may seem like a devastating admission for an outlet with “News” in its name. But viewed from another perspective— the good people who want to believe perspective— it is essentially advertising. Fox’s private communications and its on-air actions said: The customer is always right. In fact, the customer is boss. Please don’t fire us.

Back to that question we asked the other day about why young people have turned away from the Republican Party... On Thursday Josh Dawsey and Amy Gardner reported that over the weekend, top GOP strategist Cleta Mitchell told a roomful of GOP donors at the fat cat conference in Nashville that “conservatives must band together to limit voting on college campuses, same-day voter registration and automatic mailing of ballots to registered voters.”