Is this gas lighting on the left?

“The American people didn’t vote for all this ridiculous bullshit, and we need to keep fighting.” Gas lighting is defined in my entry To Start Anew.
Simon Rosenberg is not the only pollster to be thrown by the polls. But when he says Americans didn’t vote for BS one has to wonder what per centage is needed to qualify as ‘the American people’?
So Trump got less than 50%. AOC cautioned us to wait for the data. I agree. After Trump’s first victory it took a while for pundits to move off of “it’s those desperate people in trailer parks” to an average Trumper income of $72,000. Not poverty.
Education is now officially (?) the divide in America. Low-information, less than a high school diploma or less than a college degree or less than a masters or the Ph.D. thesis is being written. Any of those might qualify as low-information if they don’t pay attention.
Yes, a huge number of people voted for Harris, no doubt. It doesn’t take a lot of shifting for the electoral college to fall when enough votes in the right states, margins of 3% or less, and BOOM! we got a winner. A 50/50 nation they call us, which means that half of us can say, “We was robbed!” but we usually don’t. Trump’s great contribution to American political warfare is to declare victory endlessly, kind of like saying we won and then just going home without arguing.
I’m sorry Word Press stole my first version of this post; I’d written quite a bit and it was better than this has been so far.
What can be done about voters who googled on election day to see if Biden had dropped out? Education. Well, we’ve tried education but Americans were still enthusiastic about invading Iraq and outraged that Biden put an end to the hopeless war in Afghanistan. Afghanistan! Can you believe anyone would question leaving Afghanistan? While we weep over the shattered lives of women there we are no longer weeping ouver the graves of our soldiers there. I mean, really, when Obama carried out Bush’s order to leave Iraq, the greatest minds said Obama abandoned the country, but Bush still wanted to fly bombing sorties over Baghdad.
So the great sort may be in order. A voter test? Oh, too unamerican; but is was American enough up through my father-in-law’s residence in Texas where he and other Blacks could not vote. No testing involved, just a color chart for every voter registrar.
No. There is no way to screen out that uninformed voter, even though the founding fathers wrote, courtesy of AI:

Thomas Jefferson often stated that an informed citizenry is a vital component of a functioning democracy: 

A well informed citizenry is the best defense against tyranny 
An informed citizenry is at the heart of a dynamic democracy
Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be
Jefferson believed that if the people were not enlightened enough to exercise their control, the remedy was to educate them, not to take their power away.
 
We have tried education and it is up there with the border and Ukraine as a ‘hot topic’, i.e. one people yell about a lot. I’ve written a ton on education on this blog so no more here. I will point out that access to information is no problem for the uninformed voter. We now penalize people for smoking with higher insurance rates, eating outside, etc. because THEY KNOW. In the same way, they know what Trump did and what he promises to do.
At this point, it is time to start star-gazing, to look at what may/can happen and how we will be surprised again…… maybe. 
On my blog entry Time to Shift to a New Paradigm, I enter a process by which we trace not only possible but likely outcomes of Trump’s being elected. Go there and I’ll throw in a lagniappe.
 

 

 

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