Anyone who has been paying attention lately has heard some form of this quote over and over again, “Most people don’t know that ‘dumb’ has a B at the end.” As Trump tours the country to try and save the Republican Party, he plays the same hits. Hearing it again and again made me wonder if people really don’t know that dumb has a B at the end. It is a four-letter word, after all.
I won’t dig into state education rankings, or county-by-county rankings in each state to try and make the point that it’s possible. In all likelihood, most people actually do know that dumb has a B at the end. Spelling isn’t the issue. Comprehension is the issue.
You can see clearly that comprehension is the issue by paying close attention to those who interview people at these rallies. Or you can head to your social media feeds and find an unfathomable amount of content from people you know, posting some of the most insane things you’ve seen.
In this day and age, there is a high usage of AI from those same accounts. They are posting absurd graphics with phrases that make zero sense, like “liberal communism” or “Communist Sharia law.” I’ve seen both in some form, from multiple “friends” on Facebook and from people on X and elsewhere. Both phrases are contradictions, using words that do not go together and are fundamentally different from one another. So again… it’s a comprehension issue.
The ability to comprehend is an ability that is missing in a lot of people. It leads to rejecting facts and truth. It leads to accepting lies and believing what you’re told by those who’ve confirmed your biases or share your overall belief system, which may also confirm your biases. It leads to believing that the media is merely a tool of the left that can’t be trusted, even though the opposite tends to be true more often than not. It also leads to such polarizing environments, as those with the ability to comprehend run out of patience for those without.
Perhaps I should be more forgiving, more patient. But it’s a difficult task when you can point to basic facts only for those basic facts to be rejected outright because of something they heard on a podcast, or read from a social media post. Never mind the data that you have to back up what you said. Surely whatever data you have is fake and created by the deep state. Am I doing this right? That’s the type of response you’ll often get. It’s mind-numbing. Trump is correct when he says things like, “I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap,” or back in 2016 when he said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” And those are just par for the course.
I think back to George Carlin’s bit on stupid people. He said, “Think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of ’em are stupider than that.” Maybe he was right. And it would seem that many of them attend rallies and wear a red hat while a guy on stage tells them, “Most people don’t know that ‘dumb’ has a B at the end.”