If trump pleases them nothing else matters to him.

Conservative Candace Owens has beat Joe Rogan with the number one podcast in the world. She hates Trump - so her plus 10 million Republican viewers are being told - she apologizes for telling them to vote for Trump.

The Republican Civil war. - America First Group -Tucker, Massie, Rand Paul, MTG, Alex Jones, Fuentes, Candace, Matt Gaetz plus Libertarians Dave Smith and Clint Russell (also top podcasters)

VS - Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, Lindsey Graham, De Santas, Randy Fine, Mike Johnson, Laura Loomer etc.

Mean threats and lots of criticism going on -including some threats some people believe are death threats. “Need to be neutralized” and “need to be taken care of”

Most Republicans on X seem to favor group 1 saying Trump forgot about Americans.

That’s not as reassuring as it sounds.

It’s like the joke by (by Grouch Marx?)

A man spied a beautiful woman soloing in the bar. Knowing that he wasn't debonaire enough to entice her, he cut to the chase, "Say, would you go to bed with me for $15,000?

Surprised and embarrassed, she stammered, "Gee...well, maybe, I guess?"

"What about $150?"

"What exactly do you think I am!," she protested.

"We've already established what you are. Now we are just haggling over the price!"

Our educational system has failed, and failed spectacularly.

The biggest one is that you can lead a horse to water, but education is a personal choice. Many choose functional ignorance instead. For example, close to 85% of Americans report that they choose not read outside of work requirements. And don't get me started about the Stupidity Box broadcasting group-think into peoples' lives from cradle to grave.

IMO the greatest failure of our modern American educational system is its relative silence about anti-intellectualism and willful stupidity. Ignorance should be embarrassing, instead of distinguishing folks we'd like to have a beer with or elect to government office. Educators have long pondered whether "education is best for everyone" driven largely by the apparent distaste many students have for their own self improvement and the extents they will pursue to cheat themselves of it. Mentors cannot zip open their heads and deposit knowledge and wisdom inside-- students bring their own intellectual standards to the classroom and unless educators can convince them otherwise, many hold high standards in low regard. We can lead them to the library, but we cannot make them read. This is a social problem, IMO, not a personal one, although that's essentially how it ends up for the individuals who have that issue. By the time students begin school in earnest, the damage is already done and is often irreparable.

When they were little (even when they were still babies) I read books to them all day long it seemed. They all loved being read to. Even the same books over and over. They were all good students in school, had no trouble learning to read, and all of them still like to read. If only all kids had someone to read to them when they are little. I don’t get how anyone could be proud of willful ignorance.

I know that children who are read to at home and /or grow up in homes where the parents read and have plenty of books around can often pick up reading pretty much on their own. Certainly they have no trouble learning. The exception are those who those who are dyslexic.. Unfortunately, dyslexia wasn't recognized until way too late for many older adults today.

We were all readers in my family.

How awful for dyslexics who were left out of the loop in school. Must have been tough for them.

but it was caught early. I'd read to all my kids from the time they were little and he had started to learn to read in preschool but was having some problems. It was when he was being tested for giftedness that his resource teacher spotted the dyslexia. Turned out he was both gifted and dyslexic, so he received both treatments. The best of all possible worlds. He became a reader after all.

are dyslexic. It's possible to have a high I,Q. and also be dyslexic as well.

They really want John Wayne, but they will settle for a Reagan, a W Bush, a Trump. Men with incoherent policies but a "Damn the Torpedoes!", "My Way or the Highway!" approach to leadership

Say he forgot about them.

Dems should win in landslides.

It's actually higher than the NAZIS percentage in the last free German election.

Or in the 1930s?

The only polls I believe in are exit polls, with that said, any poll I see with Krasnov's popularity above 35% is bogus IMO.

Just wait until the Medicaid and Snap cuts hit his base, his floor will be 10%, the super rich.

Not Trump's support.

The authoritarian studies do apply to fascists leaders, but not sure they can be applied to Trumpism

It's not as if the animus is a function of merely liking different couture. If you administer surveys to MAGAS and NON-MAGAS the findings would be striking. The former reject pluralism, the rule of law, majority rule/minority rights, and the sanctity of the ballot. Trump might not be Hitler but he is certainly in the tradition of Batista, Somoza, Franco, and Marcos.

They decried the eVil lIbErals precisely BECAUSE they think liberals are authoritarian - with their forced diversity, them immigrants, and avocado toasts or whatever

But unlike the support enjoyed by Reagan and Bush 1 and 2, the MAGA movement is crumbling. It took (and takes) a massive media culture to make Trump viable. It's disappearing

If you can't be bothered to find the source of these stats, or an actual article of essay on this topic, please don't help the enshitification of the internet by acting as if AI is anything but 100% bullshit. Even when it gives you results that are real, or at least support your worldview. It takes jobs from people, it sucks up energy driving up utility costs for us all, and most importantly, it encourages us to not think for ourselves.

However

“Trump Approval Rating Hits Low Point Amid Epstein Controversy—Latest Sign Of GOP Discontent”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/11/18/trump-approval-rating-hits-low-point-amid-epstein-controversy-latest-sign-of-gop-discontent/

NYT headline - “ Is President Trump’s Power Over the Republican Party Waning?
Some members of the party are defying him.”

That has happened here.

I wasn't saying that the summary Gemini provided was wrong, only that it could be, given it is unanswerable to any human editor or review. It's intellectually lazy to ask any AI to think for you. Just my opinion.

react poorly to finger-wagging commands. You might try asking nicely, or in leu of that, simply stating your opinion.

I asked them to please stop posting AI summaries. I didn't demand it be removed, I didn't alert on it, I didn't say anything that we as a community don't condemn on the regular. Here's a sampling of AI critical posts on DU from the beginning of November 2025:

The AI Bubble Is Bigger Than You Think
Large online propaganda campaigns are flooding the internet with 'AI slop,' researchers say
I've got a bad feeling about AI ...
'It's going to be really bad': Fears over AI bubble bursting grow in Silicon Valley
Watch out for AI-slop YouTube channels with tear-jerking or sensational fake stories about celebrities
AI, like some people, can talk a blue streak and seem to make sense. https://the.democraticunderground.org/100220812222 (For some reason, it wouldn't let me embed the link in this title.)

And from PC World, just 4 days ago:
How to tell if an AI is hallucinating in its answers. 4 red flags to watch out for
Hint: one of the suggestions is to find other sources to confirm or deny the AI answer.

But the old DSB couldn't care less. Thank you for your kind words.

What's that supposed to mean? Maybe Gemini should check with ChatGPT.

20% of the population would be radically Progressive, 20% of the population would be Radically Authoritarian, and 60% of the people were "the Herd" - generally helpful, blindly passive, or nasty depending on how they felt that day and how the people around them were acting.

All that being said, the "Herd" at the time considered themselves a community and were generally helpful - so long as community prejudices weren't being challenged.
The way to break up the Herd and allow Authoritarianism and Oligarchy to take over is to dull critical thinking, increase cynicism, and use the normal community prejudices to turn people against their own communities.
And that's what is happening now.

I think it's part of the genome. Nature meant for us (or more specifically, random processes of evolution/natural selection produced the outcome) to have a mixture of, at its most basic level, "competitors" (generally them) and "cooperators" (generally us) because it increases overall survival chances for the species. We both need to exist to curb the other's tendencies and balance things out.

A good analog can be found by studying the social structures of our two closest cousins, Chimps and Bonobos. Their side is more "chimp-like", and ours is more "bonobo-like". But both their societies I'm sure if it were studied would find there are bonobo-like chimps, and chimp-like bonobos if you drill down to individuals.

If you put what I just said into AI and ask it to analyze whether what I just said tracks with available facts, it should give you an interesting answer. Tell it by 'us' and 'them' I mean liberals and conservatives, and generally what it's regarding (e.g. the studies mentioned in your OP)

Years ago, I read about the 1/3 breakdown in medicine. About 1/3 of health concerns resolve themselves even without a doctor's care. Another 1/3 of medical issues will end in patient death even with medical intervention. Then there is the magical 1/3 of the time where the doctor really does make the difference between life and death.

Even the Book of Revelation has verses about 1/3 of humanity being wiped out by some Act of God or whatever (haven't read it in a long time; check for yourself) and then 2/3 escaping that fate then another catastrophe culls 1/3 of that remaining number.

Maybe it really is something built into our collective psyche. We have the Rule of Three in comedy, and celebrities tend to die in groups of three.

Seeing things in thirds is both "in our psyche" because it's next simplest after halves, and humans fundamentally like to simplify stuff, but it's also reflective of nearly all statistical distributions being bell curves, which have 3 distinct parts: two extremes, one middle

. . . But isn't the Golden Ratio based on thirds? (Seriously, I am open to being corrected.) As for the two extremes against one middle, Goldilocks immediately comes to mind.

And bringing this back to the original topic, perhaps we can consider human populations broken down to those who are very concerned with the common good and are driven first by compassion, those who tend towards a moderate level of concern and those driven almost exclusively by their own ego needs.

Just speculating.

I believe the Golden Ratio is based on the Fibonacci sequence, which is seen 'implemented' in many places in nature because there's some sort of innate efficiency implied by it. But I know it is not .3333... so not sure if 'thirds' comes into it offhand

And for sure the human population would be a continuum with a bell-shape distribution wrt damn near every statistic you'd want to check, including the topic of our discussion. Heck, not even sex (in the gender sort of way) is truly binary. So I'm saying humans tend towards grouping things into thirds because it's the most basic way to do a decent job of describing a continuum. It's not really because the natural world is like, intrinsically based on thirds, I don't think.

But I also am not an expert on anything, really

So I looked it up and it's *around* 1.618033, but the actual Golden Ratio is irrational like pi, therefore it's unending and non-repeating, and cannot be expressed as integer/integer.

The characteristic of numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are that any two successive numbers approach "the golden ratio" IIF the (L)arger number divided by a (S)maller number i.e. (L/S) is CLOSE to equal to the ratio of their sum divided by the larger number. So if L/S approximately equals (L+S)/L, the two numbers approach the Golden Ratio with one another.

One example of successive Fibonacci numbers are 21 (F8 i.e the 8th number in the Fibonacci sequence) and 34 (F9), so in our equation S=21 and L=34. So 34/21 = (34+21)/34 (not equal though, just really close). In this case, the left side = 1.6190 and the right side = 1.6176 (both are trimmed here to four places, but they both go on forever). Those numbers are both close to the Golden Ratio.

If you did this with two Fibonacci numbers that are a lot of digits, instead of 2, such as 701408733 (F44) and 1134903170 (F45)? You get 1.618033988749894849 and 1.618033988749894847 on either side of the equation (both are trimmed here to this number of digits, but they actually go on forever).

The larger the two numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are, the closer their ratio becomes to the Golden Ratio, but it can never be equal to it because it's an irrational number. There does not exist two numbers that are EXACTLY in the Golden Ratio, so in a sense the Golden Ratio is theoretical, but the larger the two Fibonacci numbers are, the more they approach it.

It's a similar number to Pi, wherein Pi = Circumference/Diameter of a circle in that they are both irrational constants that cannot be expressed as one integer over another, no matter how large those numbers are

This is why the RWers spent 40 years building it, and it works.

Let them fafo in Russia or Hungry, or Saudi Arabia, or Iran, etc.

they are incapable of reason/logic
they all want someone else to think for them

All they do is F*** it up ! (and a proverbial-pain-in-the-ass)

You'd suspect that most of the MAGA cult would not recognize that until Fox et al tell them, but surely some must be thinking there must be better authoritarian leaders to pick from?

I wouldn't bet on it, but I think it's possible that #rump's floor is below 30%.

Let's not forget we had many king George supporters in the 1770s....

The GOP just has a fanatic base that won’t be budged for any reason

Then they start whining about it all forgetting they did this.

Racism, sexism, and anti intellectualism that is generational and societal in nature. And we have
a multi billion dollar disinformation system that feeds those brains toxic hate and Russia’s “Storm
15-16” feeds that disinformation system all the time to.

They work, play, socialize, worship with the same group's. And after work, church and play they go home and watch Fox news all day. They have no interest in outsiders or places.

Are evolutions throwbacks and failures even thier brains are different from ours. I don’t think we should force ourselves to live with the 30% authoritarians we need to set aside an island for them put them all there then blow the island to smithereens. Then we can work on becoming a more perfect union without thier bullshit and criminality fucking everything up.

And churches are all about hierarchical authority.

That is a big part of the 30%

After all, church people were rationalizing child rape long before Trump entered the political scene. To them, authority and the figures who exploit authority are necessary to give structure and purpose to life. If you start questioning the authority figures, soon you will be questioning the very existence of gods.