December 13, 2022

The MAGA mentally ill, emotionally vulnerable, or just plain dumb conundrum

 The MAGA mentally ill, emotionally vulnerable, or just plain dumb conundrum

 

By Hal Brown


Archives on Right >

Public Domain  from Wikipedia

Yesterday I wrote about  the media normalizing mentally ill MAGA's.

Today I noticed the same thing that is a subject of this article in RawStory  even before I read it.


Before reading this I noticed that George T. Conway, III was quoted as saying "The GOP congressman who called for 'Marshall Law!!' in a text to Meadows obviously must have thought he was participating in a coo, not a coup, and so is clearly off the hook." I even made an illustration and tweeted it to Conway.

As I write this this is being discussed on Morning Joe:


Looking back at Trump, who claimed many times to have the biggest brain and bringing up the genes he supposedly inherited from his MIT scientist uncle, and that he went to the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Business School (implying it was their graduate school). Actually he did his first two years at Fordham and transferred to Penn. While there was a clamor for Trump to release his tax returns I never saw anyone demand he release his college transcripts, not that this would have told us anything since he could have cheated his ass off and paid people to do his work.

My friend, a clinical psychologist, who has expertise in interpreting standard IQ tests, told me that she thought Trump's testable IQ would be slightly below average, that is under 100.

While some MAGA politicians spouting conspiracy theories have advanced degrees, and may fit into the category of being mentally ill in one or another way, Mark Meadows has an associate degree from the University of South Florida. We don't know what his grades were, but he is probably their most "distinguished" graduate.

Lauren Boebert went to Rifle High School in Colorado but did not graduate and got her GED.
Boebert's fellow loony-tuner Marjorie Taylor Greene has her BBA (Bachelors of Business Administration) from the University of George.

Of course there are now and always have been brilliant  and accomplished people who never went to college or like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, dropped out, though they were in Harvard.  Some even quit high school before they graduated. Richard Branson quit school when he was 15. David Karp dropped out of an elite Bronx high school, also at the age of 15, to launch Tumblr. 

Arnold Schwarzenegger dropped out of high school to pursue a career in body building and Quentin Tarantino quit because he thought he could do a better job educating himself. There are many more listed here.

Then there's Elon Musk, whose IQ supposedly is in the neighborhood of 155. He is an example of someone who has lost the ability to think critically and not engage in self-defeating behavior because, while they are intelligent, they have the kind of psychiatric disorder described in my previous story.

There is no correlation between intelligence and psychosis, including delusional disorders. There has been research (see the article Personality and Intelligence, for example) into the correlation between various personality types and intelligence. 

It seems to me that anyone can develop a belief that leads them into the morass of conspiracy theories like those of QAnon regardless of their testable IQ.  For example here's how Steven Hassan, a well known expert on cults, describes how he ended up joining the Moonies. (About Hassan)

What all this seems to boil down to is that there is no conclusion to be drawn regarding the initial question about whether these MAGA cultists are mentally ill, emotionally vulnerable like Steve Hassan was, or just plain dumb. They can be either one, two or all of them. 

Talking Points Memo reporter Hunter Walker is quoted in the RawStory piece: "Adults in government, not only engaging in frighteningly undemocratic language, but their base intelligence is called into question." We certain can fairly question their base intelligence, however going further than that leads us into the realm of both the unknown and the unknowable. 

Intelligence may be a factor in their beliefs, but there's no way a conclusion can be drawn to label the overall intelligence of those who can be considered to be MAGA cultists.

Most recent stories:








No comments:

This blog has moved to a new address

  This website is migrating Due to a problem with this platform, Google Blogger, I have moved my blog to WordPress and given it a new addres...