I am not one to call anyone inherently stupid. No buts. You can argue that some parts of intelligence are determined at birth (but we have no reliable way of testing it) or some people are born with less empathy, but that does not explain what is happening in the US. What is happening is a disinformation campaign as old as our country, deliberately weaved into its fabric to prevent a true democracy.

At the beginning, mostly it was landed white men who could vote. They had the entire institution of slavery and patriarchy to maintain. The first elections were messes, where there were no universal laws of who could vote. Some free black men and widows with property could vote, and rarely you could vote even if you did not own land. This was rare, because “scientific evidence” pointed to all of these groups being “inferior”. The top of the order, the people who rewrote the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution, didn’t even trust their citizens to know what was going on, with the electoral college being a long fought compromise between democracy and just having congress choose a President. Imagine trusting your representative to pick the right President with all of the debates, policies, and positions on issues behind closed doors.

Besides, what do rich white men get from letting other people vote? They used this “evidence” as a weapon to disenfranchise all of these people , convincing the white men suffering from economic hardship at the time they would let them vote even without land, but make sure nobody who is not a white man votes, because they are “inferior” and your vote would be worth less if it was equal to theirs.

This lie is what allowed slavery to continue for much longer after we declared “all men equal”. People in the South were so desperate for free labor and wealth they fought a war to keep slaves. They then started a massive disinformation campaign to keep Jim Crow popular, by spreading bogus science about race. Racism was not something that had to be propagandized much, because of how widespread it was (and is), but the point was also to make the message so unyielding that African Americans would start to believe it themselves, trying to condition them to accept horrible treatment because it was all they deserved. It took so many years of fighting that narrative, of physically fighting and protesting, and being mauled by dogs on camera for anything to be done about it. It is still a massive issue, even if it exists in loopholes and corners. Racism is a foundation of our country, no matter what anyone says.

We are moving on to capitalism. Corporations started becoming big around the gilded age, where they owned whole towns and could essentially entrap people in their companies. While anti corporate propaganda from around this time is popular, corporations still owned the news, and their own story. It took years of labor movements costing thousands of lives to break the story that everything was not right. Even now, this story is being bent, with the anti corporate attitude being explained by “monopolies” that were “fixed” when monopoly laws were passed. Remind you of the civil rights movement? Corporations have and always will justify their own existence and profit motive with “competition” and “innovation”. Most of the things that people defending capitalism argue corporations are good for could be done without them, better, and without concentrating money and power with oligarchs.

Now that I have explained our history of disinformation, let’s get into what is happening today. This disinformation stream became a torrent with modern tv and news. Once everyone in the nation could be reached at once, it became easy to just throw lies at the wall and see what stuck, and where. Reagan didn’t win the Presidency by actually doing good things, he just said the things he was doing were good, and many people believed him. After all, what he was talking about was proven with complicated math from people that are smarter than them that they should trust. By extension, why not trust him? Drugs can be bad so why not send minorities to jail forever for owning them? It is very easy to focus or bend the truth, like light through a prism, to get anything you want. Say it enough times and it is true. Multiply all of that by 100 for today. Generations of doing this, combined with eroding quality education and giving more people more access to the internet younger, when they are still developing opinions, is having its toll. Is it any wonder my brethren in gen Z are suddenly surging rightward?

So next time you see someone support the most insane and hateful positions, just call them every -ist and -phobic word invented, just don’t start to believe they are “inferior” because they hold those beliefs. Politics is all just a red herring to prevent us from overthrowing capitalism, making us think we have a choice. They may never believe that, may never join us, but they are not our enemy. Our enemy is our government, and the corporations, that lie to us with every word they say.