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During the 2016 election, Donald Trump famously proclaimed "I love the poorly educated!" Well, if "poorly educated" is a euphemism for "cognitively challenged," new research finds they loved him right back.
It reports Trump voters, on average, performed more poorly than Hillary Clintonsupporters on a standard test widely regarded as a good indicator of intellectual ability.
"Intellectual factors played an important role in the 2016 election," writes a research team led by Yoav Ganzach of Tel Aviv University. "These results suggest that the 2016 U.S. presidential election had less to do with party affiliation, income, or education, and more to do with basic cognitive ability."
In the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, Ganzach and his colleagues analyzed data from the American National Election Studies, which included 5,914 participants in 2012 and 4,271 in 2016.
Besides expressing their attitudes toward that year's presidential candidates, participants took a standard test of verbal ability. Specifically, they were presented with 10 sets of words, and asked "to identify the word or phrase in a set of five that was the closest to the target word."

While hardly comprehensive, the test "is considered a good indicator of general cognitive ability," the researchers note.
After taking into account participants' party affiliation, the researchers found intellectual ability was a strong predictor of attitudes toward the two major candidates in 2016. Specifically, they found "clear negative relationships of verbal ability and education with attitude toward Trump."
In contrast, they found "weak, nonsignificant relationships of verbal ability and education with attitude toward [Mitt] Romney" in his failed 2012 campaign. In both elections, higher levels of education and verbal ability were associated with support for the Democratic candidate [Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton].
"Support for Trump was better predicted by lower verbal ability than education or income," the researchers add. "Our analyses indicate that support for Trump was less about socioeconomic standing, and more about intellect."
Ganzach and his team note that Trump, on the campaign trail, expressed his opposition to both socially liberal beliefs (such as support for abortion rights and opposition to racism) and fiscally conservative beliefs (such as free trade). Both sets of beliefs have been linked in past research with higher cognitive ability, so it makes sense that their appeal would be largely limited to those who score lower on such measures.

This research adds to the rapidly growing list of findings attempting to explain why the American voters (although not a majority) supported a candidate widely viewed as lacking the qualifications or temperament to be president.
While economic anxiety has been largely ruled out as a likely explanation, studies have pointed to whites' fear of declining social status in a rapidly changing society, as well as racist and sexist beliefs, tribalism, possessing an authoritarian mindset, and even being prone to anxiety, and thus susceptible to Trump's fear-based appeals.
Ganzach's findings align with those of another recent study that found Democrats who crossed over to vote for him were the least likely demographic to engage in analytical thinking. This may be because, in many cases, they just aren't good at it.

I’ve always found it moronic—if not morosely comedic—that middle-aged women think the plastic proportions of Barbie dolls have a negative influence on the emotional well being of little girls.
Perhaps these “body positive” activists should try waltzing down the boys’ aisle some time. Row after row of miniature super-heroes and professional wrestlers, all sporting impossibly muscular physiques – surely, such perverse parodies of masculinity would have the same deleterious effects on boys’ developing body images, right?
Strangely, you don’t see 50-year-old men—with their sagging bellies and receding hairlines—raising a fuss about G.I. Joe’s “unrealistic” anatomy. Nor do you hear of any organizations attacking the NFL, NBA and bodybuilder magazines for giving boys unpleasant ideas about nigh-impossible-to-attain physiques.
Why? Because men do something that women simply don’t – when it comes to their own bodies, they take self-responsibility for the end-outcomes.
One look at the “fat activist” ranks demonstrates the “body acceptance” jihad is an almost entirely female phenomenon. Statistically, this makes sense, since the bulk—pun most definitely intended—of America’s obese populace is female. But therein lies a key difference between the sexes: while men wallow in obesity in relative silence, female fatasses are utterly obsessed with politicizing—and ultimately, weaponizing—their unhealthiness.

How a whale managed to get this far inland, I’ve no idea.

When irresponsibility becomes a “disease”
Obesity doesn’t just happen out of the blue. In fact, there’s an algorithmic process for how it happens – a person consumes far more calories than he or she expends on a day-to-day basis. One must marvel at the incredible gluttony that occurs for a 5’6 female to maintain a 300-pound-plus body weight. By one metric, to do so would require the person in question to gobble up at least 4,200 calories every 24 hours – more than double the recommended daily allowance established by the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine.
In that, being fat isn’t “a disease.” It’s the consequences of overconsumption and a sedentary lifestyle. But today’s third wave feminists can’t accept they and they alone are responsible for their miserable health conditions – and since it’s much easier to normalize their biologically suicidal lifestyles than hit the treadmill, naturally they try to make a virtue out of their biggest character defects.
Don’t you just love it when feminists use the phrase “unrealistic body image,” as if thin, beautiful women don’t exist anywhere in the world? As evident by the entire industry of modeling still existing, however, it quite obviously is possible to not be a lumbering, 300-pound wad of redundant adipose tissue. Of course, such requires moderation, dedication and vigilant repression of instant gratification wants – i.e., the kind of personal discipline and restraint fat women just can’t muster.

Care for a shag?

Why would anybody be proud of being unhealthy?
At least men are honest about this kind of thing. Average Joes like you and me admit we don’t have the kind of tenacity and willpower to have a physique like Brock Lesnar or JJ Watt. We don’t blame “genetics” and “societal norms,” we blame our damn selves for not having the proper impulse control and sticktoitiveness.

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Donald Trump Is Trying to Kill You

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/opinion/trump-deadly-deregulation.html?smid=fb-nytopinion&smtyp=cur&fbclid=IwAR0WD9Mhmk6hI-8WN91xO_C-0H7snbt95zZd9el0ftG2lL0dQINAhjPmDpM

There’s a lot we don’t know about the legacy Donald Trump will leave behind. And it is, of course, hugely important what happens in the 2020 election. But one thing seems sure: Even if he’s a one-term president, Trump will have caused, directly or indirectly, the premature deaths of a large number of Americans.

Some of those deaths will come at the hands of right-wing, white nationalist extremists, who are a rapidly growing threat, partly because they feel empowered by a president who calls them “very fine people.”
Some will come from failures of governance, like the inadequate response to Hurricane Maria, which surely contributed to the high death toll in Puerto Rico. (Reminder: Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.)
Some will come from the administration’s continuing efforts to sabotage Obamacare, which have failed to kill health reform but have stalled the decline in the number of uninsured, meaning that many people still aren’t getting the health care they need. Of course, if Trump gets his way and eliminates Obamacare altogether, things on this front will get much, much worse.

But the biggest death toll is likely to come from Trump’s agenda of deregulation — or maybe we should call it “deregulation,” because his administration is curiously selective about which industries it wants to leave alone.
Consider two recent events that help capture the deadly strangeness of what’s going on.
One is the administration’s plan for hog plants to take over much of the federal responsibility for food safety inspections. And why not? It’s not as if we’ve seen safety problems arise from self-regulation in, say, the aircraft industry, have we? Or as if we ever experience major outbreaks of food-borne illness? Or as if there was a reason the U.S. government stepped in to regulate meatpacking in the first place?
Now, you could see the Trump administration’s willingness to trust the meat industry to keep our meat safe as part of an overall attack on government regulation, a willingness to trust profit-making businesses to do the right thing and let the market rule. And there’s something to that, but it’s not the whole story, as illustrated by another event: Trump’s declaration the other day that wind turbines cause cancer.
Now, you could put this down to personal derangement: Trump has had an irrational hatred for wind power ever since he failed to prevent construction of a wind farm near his Scottish golf course. And Trump seems deranged and irrational on so many issues that one more bizarre claim hardly seems to matter.
But there’s more to this than just another Trumpism. After all, we normally think of Republicans in general, and Trump in particular, as people who minimize or deny the “negative externalities” imposed by some business activities — the uncompensated costs they impose on other people or businesses.

For example, the Trump administration wants to roll back rules that limit emissions of mercury from power plants. And in pursuit of that goal, it wants to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from taking account of many of the benefits from reduced mercury emissions, such as an associated reduction in nitrogen oxide.
But when it comes to renewable energy, Trump and company are suddenly very worried about supposed negative side effects, which generally exist only in their imagination. Last year the administration floated a proposal that would have forced the operators of electricity grids to subsidize coal and nuclear energy. The supposed rationale was that new sources were threatening to destabilize those grids — but the grid operators themselves denied that this was the case.
So it’s deregulation for some, but dire warnings about imaginary threats for others. What’s going on?
Part of the answer is, follow the money. Political contributions from the meat-processing industry overwhelmingly favor Republicans. Coal mining supports the G.O.P. almost exclusively. Alternative energy, on the other hand, generally favors Democrats.
There are probably other things, too. If you’re a party that wishes we could go back to the 1950s (but without the 91 percent top tax rate), you’re going to have a hard time accepting the reality that hippie-dippy, unmanly things like wind and solar power are becoming ever more cost-competitive.
Whatever the drivers of Trump policy, the fact, as I said, is that it will kill people. Wind turbines don’t cause cancer, but coal-burning power plants do — along with many other ailments. The Trump administration’s own estimates indicate that its relaxation of coal pollution rules will kill more than 1,000 Americans every year. If the administration gets to implement its full agenda — not just deregulation of many industries, but discrimination against industries it doesn’t like, such as renewable energy — the toll will be much higher.
So if you eat meat — or, for that matter, drink water or breathe air — there’s a real sense in which Donald Trump is trying to kill you. And even if he’s turned out of office next year, for many Americans it will be too late.