I'm tempted to agree, but I can't shake the question: …Manifested as blind trust in an elite and their institutions?

I disagree, Trump is about as elite as elites come. And the Republicans are hardly underdogs - they're long standing incumbents in many ways.

What's happening is that the Republicans have captured populist messaging pretty well, the Democrats just haven't.

Populism is usually stupid but it's extremely effective if you can flood information stream, particularly new ones. I mean, Radio pretty much made Hitler.

The timing here is perfect. Internet has just become mainstream and is still trusted and our brains haven't developed patterns of discernment. In addition, the economy for every day working people is bad. Its the perfect breeding ground for populism.

These people have no trouble listening. They're deeply into people like Rogan, Trump, their pastor, RFK etc. and eat up their every word.

There’s a similar joke about Russians:

A genie says to a Russian, “I will grant you one wish.”

The Russian says, “I want a million dollars.”

The genie says, “… but whatever I give you, I will give your neighbor two of.”

The Russian responds, “Well in that case, I want a poke in the eye!”

Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451

You can't people that stupid shouldn't actually get a vote in the matter.

> "disease very bad. disease may kill. inject this. you less likely to get disease."

The actual argument is that by everyone getting injected, society as a whole crosses a threshold where viruses fail to spread exponentially and don't cause pandemics.

It's a more nuanced, more complex reason that some (incredibly selfish) people are just unable to grasp.

"Why would I ever a tiny personal risk to stop other people getting sick!?" was a very common argument during the COVID pandemic.

Why would they listen to nonsense that makes them uncomfortable, as opposed to their expressed preference of listening to nonsense that makes them comfortable?

It doesn't matter how much you cite Matthew 19:24 to someone who already had their brain rotted by, say, prosperity gospel. They don't give a shit.

You must’ve not hung out among Louisiana Democrats lately

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It’s a big mistake to thing of people as stupid: they’d be far less dangerous if they actually were.

The problem isn’t lack of intelligence but the information space they inhabit and the feeling that they have somehow been mistreated. There’s an entire genre of “why are leopards eating my face?” schadenfreude posts about MAGAs asking why Trump is doing some “surprising” thing he said he was going to do for years. Because they’re _not_ stupid, once they’ve thrown in with a side they’ll put a lot of effort into coming up with rationalizations or attacks to try to “balance” things out. The bitter grievances are really powerful because they let people talk themselves into seeing things as necessary sacrifices: sure, you’re losing Medicaid and paying more in taxes but the alternative is living in a world where Riley Gaines was forced to tie for fifth so I guess you just have to tighten your belt on behalf of female athletes.

Once all those antivaxers became pro-Russia, which basically has nothing to do with each other

Not necessarily the case, as Russia has a longstanding record of propagating public-health misinformation. See https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39419560 for instance.

This has been a part of their national agenda since the Communist revolution. "If we can't improve our own country, at least we can fuck up everybody else's."

Inflation in November 2024 was 2.7%. That's higher than the Fed target, but hardly "throw out the incumbent at all costs". I know that "inflation" is what they told pollsters, but I have a hard time believing that. Maybe some of it; not all of it, or the biggest part of it.

As to what it actually was... that's less clear to me. I'm sure it was a multiplicity of factors, some of which reflect poorly on us as Americans. (All of us.) I think we accept the "inflation" explanation because it's easier than confronting those.

The latest USA inflation measurement was 11% per year (0.9% per month) PPI in July 2025.

We are not a smart country.

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And this was written before the USA took a 10% stake in Intel, turning it into a Chinese style state-owned enterprise!

FWIW HN doesn't have personalized feeds like that. We all see the same front page. But regardless:

The loons loved it indeed, and it was all over the front page. Right here. Blaming that on the rest of us seems ridiculous, but sort of besides the point. I don't care about blame, I'm saying that whoever you want to blame, it is us, right here, on HN, not some abstract "voters". We made this problem. We told people that masks didn't work and vaccines were poison. If not you and I personally, people writing prose in proxy for us did.

On balance, Hacker News stood solidly on the side of RFK2 and against the CDC in this particular war. It just did.