SKILLS: Donald J. Trump "is smarter than we are?"

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 20, 2024

Donald J. Trump versus Yale: Donald J. Trump is smarter than we are, Michael Moore has now said.

For ourselves, we can't swear that the Oscar-winning film-maker is wrong! Headline included, here's the start of Ron Dicker's report from HuffPost concerning what Moore has now said:

Michael Moore Says You'll Think He's Crazy For What He Thinks About Trump

Michael Moore dialed up the urgency of a possible Joe Biden defeat―and he did it by offering backhanded praise to Biden’s criminally indicted GOP adversary, Donald Trump.

“We don’t want to say this out loud, but I’m going to say it, and the reason why we need to be concerned is that Trump is smarter than us,” the Oscar-winning documentarian said on the latest episode of his “Rumble” podcast, which was released Sunday. “I’ll just let that sink in for a second. I know, I know, you’re calling the people to come to find me—the guys in the white uniforms with the big net—and take me away. Are you crazy? What do you mean he’s smarter than us?”

Moore noted there are also ways where Trump “is quite dumber than us” before providing clarity on his “smarter than us” point.

“I’m talking about the way throughout his entire life he’s been able to pull shit off and get away with it,” the “Bowling for Columbine” director said. “It is an amazing record...You must marvel at how somebody that stupid is that smart when it comes to the performance of his evil and his ability to never have to pay for it.”

Donald J. Trump is smarter than we are? For Mediaite's report about what Moore has now said, you can just click here. 

(Headline: Michael Moore Issues Dire Warning to Democrats: ‘Trump Is Smarter Than Us’)

Is Donald Trump smarter than our own blue team in some definable way? Almost surely, the answer is yes—and beyond that, he has a highly skilled red tribe propaganda apparatus working on his behalf. 

Our own blue tribal apparatus may not be as highly skilled! Consider some presentations we've seen, on various red and blue cable news programs, just since last Friday afternoon.

Last Friday afternoon and evening, we saw several of the dumbest journalistic conversations ever produced on the planet. We refer to the "Snakes on The Brain" pseudo-discussions which poured forth from carefully selected panels of flyweights on the Fox News Channel primetime programs, Gutfeld! and The Five.

A brief news report on the same topic had been delivered on Laura Ingraham's program, The Ingraham Angle. The background to the propagandization was this:

Uh-oh! An analysis piece had appeared in Science Reports, an obscure but respected journal, concerning a topic which would be unfamiliar to most Americans. ABC News then published a perfectly sensible account of the analysis piece. 

Possibly to a lesser degree, so did the Washington Post.

The report in the Post appeared under a "Climate Solutions" heading. Headline included, here's the possibly somewhat kitschy way the Post report started:

Want a more sustainable meat for the grill? Try a 13-foot python steak.

They’re scaly, fork-tongued and can measure upward of 20 feet long. Pythons may also be one of the most Earth-friendly meats to farm on the planet.

A group of researchers studied two large python species over 12 months on farms in Thailand and Vietnam—where snake meat is considered a delicacy—and found that they were more efficient to raise than other livestock.

Their research, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, suggests that python farming could offer a solution to rising food insecurity around the globe, exacerbated by climate change.

The researchers, who studied more than 4,600 pythons, found that both Burmese and reticulated pythons grew rapidly in their first year of life, and they required less food (in terms of what’s known as feed conversion: the amount of feed to produce a pound of meat) than other farmed products, including chicken, beef, pork, salmon—and even crickets.

They're even better than crickets! So the Post report quickly said.

From its headline on down, the Post was possibly trying a bit too hard to make its report entertaining and fun. For better or worse, the report even included a mandated sub-heading, which went exactly like this:

Tastes like chicken

So the mandated sub-heading said.

That said, no one was suggesting that we Americans should think about throwing a python steak on the grill at our next July 4 celebration. That wasn't the point of any of this, until Fox News arrived on the scene.

As the Post's report quickly noted, the original piece in Scientific Reports cited the fact that python meat is already consumed on a regular basis in certain large parts of the world. The research paper in question had suggested that increased python farming might provide a valuable source of protein in such parts of the world as climate change puts additional stress on traditional sources of protein.

There was nothing stupid about the report. There was also nothing which suggested that it should be fare for the carefully-selected assortments of flyweights who populate Fox News panels on such propaganda-based programs as Gutfeld! and The Five.

Inevitably, messaging specialists at the channel seized upon the possibilities which were latent in the scientific report. On Friday's broadcast of The Five, here's the way the hapless Judge Jeanine Pirro teased an upcoming segment on this disturbing new report:

JUDGE JEANNINE (3/15/24): Coming up! Climate change fanatics now want you to eat snakes to save the planet.

For the record, there's absolutely nothing this resident loudmouth won't say. At any rate:

After a commercial break, the panelists generated one of the dumbest pseudo-conversations ever hatched on the planet. The panelists revised the scientific report to fit a standard template on this channel:

The elites are trying to make us regular people do the various crazy things they themselves will never do. 

Sadly, lone liberal Harold Ford was assigned the task of initiating the pseudo-discussion. Acting as moderator for the new segment, he started with this bit of prepared text:

FORD: Are you rattled by climate change? Well, how about a delicious snake for dinner?

The double entendre was excellent! At any rate, the baton was handed first to Greg Gutfeld. As part of a standard diatribe, the angry fellow said this:

GUTFELD: ...They act like, "Oh yeah, raising snakes is just like raising pigs." Have you ever seen a herd of snakes? Could you imagine being a snake farmer? 

This is the dumbest thing ever. Everything they do "better for the environment"—these are the same people who say it's better for the environment if you just die. 

They want you to be miserable. and it's the same pattern over and over again. They tell you that the world is on fire and their data is junk, then they demand that you do things they would never do to remedy it. So they tell you to eat insects, eat snakes...

To watch the entire segment, you can start by clicking here.

Back to Gutfeld! No one was telling the angry fellow that he had to, or should, eat snakes. Still, he knew the data in question was junk, and he knew what the researchers secretly had in their heads.

The angry fellow continued from there, but you're getting the general drift. We see no sign that Gutfeld had any idea what he was talking about, but he was producing perfect propaganda from a standard Fox News template in which the elites are hoping that regular red tribe people will be miserable, or that they'll simply die.

Things moved along from there, with one panelist stressing how "disgusting" the whole thing was and with Pete Hegseth—a Princeton grad with a Harvard master's degree—driving the points about the motives of the elites. By the time the conversation made its way back to Judge Jeanine, the resident loudmouth offered this:

JUDGE JEANNINE: Here's the bottom line. If they want us to eat snakes and bugs, make sure all of the politicians have to eat that stuff before we have to eat it.  And why are they so worried about sustaining the environment? First of all, we're not supposed to have hamburgers—do you remember that?—because of cow flatulence. Now they want us to eat snakes.

"Why are they so worried about sustaining the environment?" Yes, that's what she said.

For the record, no one was requiring, or was even suggesting, that salt of the earth people like Judge Jeannine should be forced to eat snakes. But at this point, the reference to flatulence took the conversation down one more level of the world, as the judge and Gutfeld debated the question as to whether snakes are able to "fart."

Back to Michael Moore's general point about Candidate Trump:

On the one hand, pseudo-discussions of this type are spectacularly stupid. On the other hand, such presentations, repeated on a daily basis, almost surely qualify as highly effective propaganda.

Red tribe viewers are told, again and again, about the way the elites are trying to make them do crazy things based upon junk data. Almost surely, very few viewers will understand that they are watching pseudo-conservations conducted by corporate hirelings who are pimping propaganda points off sheets of paper prepared for them by their tribal lords.

As with Michael Moore, so too here. These conversations are amazingly stupid from one perspective, but they're quite sagacious when viewed from a different perspective. Gutfeld is almost always the angriest and the most insistent propagandist. Here's the way his initial diatribe ended:

GUTFELD: Screw you! They're saying, "Let them eat cake, and you can eat snake." I'll eat pythons, but only if they get to eat these elite jackasses first. I like my snake meat extra fatty and filed with a plump Al Gore.

That evening, on his eponymous 10 o'clock show, Gutfeld led an even dumber "snakes on the brain" pseudo-discussion. He repeated his homicidal fantasy in which the Noble prize-winning Gore, apparently being too fat, is devoured by a python along with the other jackasses.

Conversations of this type take place on a daily basis. As red tribe voters are propagandized in such manifestly braindead ways, the loftier journalists within our own blue tribe agree to avert their gaze.

No one wants to tangle with Fox! Meanwhile, is it possible that our blue tribe is in the process of being defeated by gong-show propaganda of this type?

Those conversations were about as dumb as human intercourse gets. That said, we saw another very dumb conversation as we watched MSNBC last night.

That conversation involved Ali Velshi, subbing for Alex Wagner, and a very highly regarded professor from Yale. The professor in question is loaded with erudition, but he's also plainly lacking in certain basic analytical skills. 

Sacred Troy must die, Hector famously said, just before returning to war. Can our own blue tribe survive the skill levels which are currently on display among tribunes of the reds? 

Tomorrow: "Bloodbath" deciphered by Yale