Unlike Boebert and Greene who are actually ignorant and one would argue, stupid, Stefanik is educated and has a history of being known as an intellectual.
A Democratic colleague spoke to this a few months back and was disturbed not about what she was saying, but about her mendacity and the ease with which she seems to have taken on this "bubblehead" approach.
Here is the thing fellow DUers.
She understands that conservatives are generally uninformed and incurious. When we liberals see Medicaid/Medicare and "evil socialism" together in a phrase, we know that there is something wrong. We can see (if not entirely correctly) that the two programs are government payor systems for healthcare, and while they are not "Socialist" in the sense of the workers owning the means of production, they are a form of Social Democracy and definitely hue toward a socialistic ideal. We can see the bullshit in the statement.
Conservatives DON'T either by volition or by ignorance. They are trained to respond to Symbols, not to arguments. They see the "mask" as a symbol of tyranny, where we see it as a tool made of cloth, that we use to protect ourselves and others from spreading disease. They see a gun and think of power, manhood, protection, etc... where we see the complexities of firearms, where they can be recreational, used for protection, but also very dangerous and deadly making it easy for people with bad intentions to do very bad things. Our thinking is complex and nuanced. Conservatives tend to think in binary fashion, "It is this, or it is that" and they encode information emotionally. We all do, but liberals tend to be able to move beyond the emotional response and consider other information.
Stefanik knows her audience and it isn't "the American people" it is a very specific group of voters that they have to keep engaged so that they can keep elections close enough to win by technicality or by "hook or crook".
She isn't stupid, she is evil.
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