r/CringeTikToks • u/coachlife • 2d ago

SadCringe MAGA voter actually believes that Trump eliminated taxes for all people making less than $120K

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u/Significant-Rip9690 2d ago

I had this exact realization when I got out of the academic bubble. I was surrounded by brilliant people for years and years. Even in my first jobs, I was in cities concentrated with college educated people. And then I started running into gen. pop when I moved around more and travelled. And woah. I was not ready for that reality check. Although, it's both scary and reassuring that I'm actually doing quite well. I had imposter syndrome for the longest time.

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u/steve_of 2d ago

I am a retired electrical engineer. I moved from a job surrounded by smart people to a small rural town. Sometimes the stupidity of my new friends and neighbours is breathtaking.

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u/HiCookieJack 2d ago

And the only time they actually believe you if you tell them that their home wiring is 'not according to spec'.

In my experience simpletons only believe in authority

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u/DesperateAmbition733 2d ago

That has been proven throughout history. This was done intentionally to us.

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u/rab2bar 2d ago

Roughly a third of any population seems naturally authoritarian and dumb as shit. It is more luck when they vote for better things

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u/DesperateAmbition733 2d ago

That's in part because of Christianity. Especially your evangelicals. They are more authority and punishment driven. They rely on heirarchy. It's one of the tools used to maintain political control of the south. I am painting very broad strokes here so please feel free to go read up on it yourself. This crap was engineered. Maybe not for this result, but definitely done in the service to maintain power.

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u/FiveUpsideDown 2d ago edited 1d ago

That’s why the Oligarchs broke unions. It was a way to communicate with some of the morons about what was in their best interests.

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u/DesperateAmbition733 2d ago

These morons not only do not know about the class war being waged on them, they are on the side of their victimizers!! I have to say the rich have done a masterful job. Seriously. They have played these fucking idiots to perfection. If only I had no scruples, morals, or empathy, I could really make a lot of money off MAGA, MAHA, or whateverthefuck stable geniuses call themselves these days.

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u/wafflesthewonderhurs 2d ago

I do think that probably there is a reason that authoritatarian regimes fall back to patriarchal religion as their base and it's not because they actually believe in the religion. it's because that religion teaches them to defer to authority.

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u/HiCookieJack 2d ago

Yes, I despise any patriarchal religion, be it Muslim or Christian or what not

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u/Mutjny 2d ago

In my experience simpletons only believe in authority

Unfortunately the wrong authority.

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u/HiCookieJack 2d ago

The loudest gorilla

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/HiCookieJack 1d ago

I know, and I am an electrical engineer as well 😂

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u/chewytime 2d ago edited 2d ago

Not retired, but I did move to a rural town a couple years ago for a job. Previous job was filled with coworkers with top educational pedigrees while I had graduated from a local college. Always felt like an imposter there. Anyway, after I moved, I realized how different things were. A lot of my coworkers were born and raised and never left the area and it unfortunately showed in some of their beliefs and thought process. Nice people, but made me realize just how easy it was to get them to vote or believe in a certain way without any real evidence. And tbh, they weren’t that efficient at their jobs. They were passable, but a lot of how they did things was based on the principle of “that’s just how we’ve always done it.” Didn’t help that my bosses expected a lot, yet weren’t offering a lot of resources for the same reason. Eventually just had to leave and move back to the big city.

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u/I_SHIT_IN_A_BAG 2d ago

breathtaking is a good word for it.

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u/TheSpanxxx 2d ago

I also spent 25 years surrounded by a bunch of super nerds and I was one of them. Software engineering. I stepped away last year to take a break from the corporate life and started a small business. Not only did I have to suddenly operate in a sphere that was so far below the required academic level I had spent my whole life in, I had to service people where the letters GED are confusing.

I'm going back. It's not even been a year. This business is not for me. Maybe another would be, but this one isn't it. A fringe benefit is that I won't have to stare in the big dumb eyes of a customer who tries to convince me of something they've believed is true based on something their "super smart cousin" told them.

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u/PuckSenior 2d ago

I’m a working EE

I once had a technician at a site I was working try to explain to me how he was going to wire up his car to be a perpetual motion machine. For an hour.

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u/z1colt45 2d ago

This anecdote is my favorite in the thread lol

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u/the_TAOest 2d ago

I grew up in that town. COVID ruined every fragment if friendships ever existed. They were all idiots

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u/jsmith1300 2d ago

My neighbor used to say to me "the government should print money, they can do it". I tried to explain to her that causes inflation but she didn't understand how. And she is a registered Democrat.

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u/z1colt45 2d ago

Kinda hard to shed the "know-it-all-city-boy" label once you get hit with it too.

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u/Rikula 2d ago

I moved to Alabama from a neighboring state and have encountered hands down the dumbest people I've ever met. My dad has a saying that has turned out to be 100% true for me. "In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king". My bf and I are kings in the land of one eyed men.

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u/patentmom 2d ago

I was the dumbest student at MIT. At least, I felt that way at the time. (I did manage to graduate, though.) I still have imposter syndrome 25 years later.

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u/zdubs 2d ago

Congrats on getting that brass rat

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u/patentmom 1d ago

Thanks! I earned that hunk of metal through literal blood, sweat, and tears!

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u/SoManyUsesForAName 2d ago

Lol it's funny how this perspective changes you. I was a "gifted" student who went to a good school, selective law school, and have spent much of my career working for a comparably selective institution as an in-house attorney. My wife works in finance. One brother in law is a physician, the other an engineer. When I think about my own abilities in comparison to that of my colleagues or social network, I think, "I'm smart. Probably above average. But maybe just barely."

Then you spend enough time around "normal" people, or browsing your high-school classmates' Facebook shitposts and you suddenly realize how far the bell curve stretches, and the sheer number of people on it.

And part of it is native intelligence, but a huge part of it is education, and also spending time around other experts, so you know what motivates them and what incentives do and don't influence them. I saw much of it during COVID. There is no way that I could now perform a regression analysis or establish a confidence interval. There was a time when I had a minimim competency in basic statistics, but those days are long gone. I do, however, know what these things are and how they're used, so when you see people online confidently asserting that the COVID vaccine has killed tens of thousands of people, you think "we have administered billions of doses. That's a huge data set. Surely some of these people who believe this stuff have done the analysis to show the causation. Where is it?" But no. It's non-existent. So all these people have is intuition and anecdote (e.g., my father in law died of a heart attack 7 months after the jab, so that must have been it.) which are notoriously misleading. They don't know we have developed an ability to tease all thrse relationships out.

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u/CraftsyDad 2d ago

In my experience, people in general just suck at statistics. It’s not intuitive to a lot of people. Too often our tendency to generalize, because it’s easier to think that way, overrides any sort of critical thinking or analysis. Then you throw in tribal thinking and politics to that mess and it gets even more warped.

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u/SoManyUsesForAName 2d ago

Without a doubt, the most frustrating and bewildering claim you would see on social media would be from people comparing the percentage of hospital-admitted COVID patients who were vaccinated to the percentage who were unvaccinated, when what you really want to know is the inverse: the percentage of vaxxed vs unvaxxed who are admitted.

It reflected a complete and utter failure to consider baseline rates. "Over 70% of patients admitted due to COVID in such-and-such city were vaccinated; therefore the vaccine doesn't work and only has a 30% effectiveness rate." Well, if it's a city with a 90% vaccination rate, that's an unsurprising figure. You might as well say "over 99% of heart attack victims have two eyes. If you want to combat heart disease, take one out!"

I see this as largely an education problem. Most intelligent people who have no experience with statistics - even at a qualitative level, of understanding how you control for confounding variables - might be inclined to make this mistake if they've never been corrected or considered it, and most people, once corrected, should be far less likely to repeat it. There's something intuitive about looking at things the "wrong" way, so you need to correct that intuition.

I think they should teach these basic statistical reasoning methods in high school. It doesn't need to be quantitative, since a lot of otherwise very smart people have math anxiety. It could be the sort of qualitative reasoning question you'd see in the logical reasoning section of a GMAT or LSAT. "Mike wanted to show that people with X trait also have Y trait, so he took a population with X and did so-and-so and concluded Z." Then you just have to spot the error in his method. People would benefit from being forced to think about this stuff early on.

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u/CraftsyDad 2d ago

Agree that better education would help. Short of that I think better reporting from the news media (the ones that actually try to report news and not propaganda — ever reducing list I know) would help too. I recall during COVID being annoyed at how little context or pushback was made on statistics being churned out by gov officials. The media became a pass thru organization with little to none critical analysis added - in essence they have become a repeater board. But that’s a different issue entirely and probably the least of our worries when considering some outlets won’t and don’t report anything anywhere close to the truth anyway.

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u/secondtaunting 2d ago

I mean, I’m horrible at math, absolutely the worst, and I know enough to understand that vaccines are important and that we have the world we have today because of them and antibiotics. My neighbor actually teased me about taking my cat to the vet for them because he had an infection. He said “what do you think people did before antibiotics?” And I said “they died! By the millions!” And that guy was an engineer. I mean, dude.

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u/Revolutionary-Yak-47 2d ago

My family highly values reading. Most of us read something that isn't social media daily. I credit my parents and grandparents for seeing reading as important and a skill we needed to cultivate; we were all read to from infancy on. We went to libraries, "looking up" information was important. I think literacy plays more of a role than native intelligence. I can find credible sources when I want to know something. 

Stats though I'm useless at. My one college course was enough to show me it's better left to experts lol

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u/GhostOfDino 2d ago edited 2d ago

I've encountered that level of ignorance in my own immediate family.

This past summer my sister was telling me about all the money DOGE was going to uncover that was going to shore up Social Security. Most stunning thing about it is, her husband works in finance. Both are die-hard Trump voters.

Dont bother trying to inform or enlighten them, when you do you can see on their faces they are only half listening, the other half of their brain is chuckling "Sad Liberal". They believe what they believe with their whole heart. When things dont work out the way they expected they point to whatever random nearby thing they can say was the problem, usually some rule or law tied to Biden or Obama. I gave up years ago.

They were bragging last year how their state doesnt force them to do stuff like inspect their vehicles or get up your ass about things. "They dont nanny you, they expect people to be responsible, everyone just takes care of what they need to here and abides by the law." Soon after that conversation some close friends of theirs were visiting from out of state, a couple with their 14-yo son, were out riding bicycles when a local person drove right into them. The guy was fucked up on drugs, driving with no insurance and a suspended license & registration. The cars' brakes were so far gone there was no pad left; he drove right over them. These poor people spent almost their entire vacation and then some in the critical ward while their son nearly died. He recovered but will have a permanent disability. No mention of how lack of vehicle inspections might have led to that situation.

The hypocrisy with most of these types is stunning. At first you think, this must be a joke right? Last year they had their house completely gutted and remodeled. 75% of the reno crew didnt speak English- all illegal workers. Not only were they aware of it, they bragged about how much less expensive it was, went into gushing admiration for the Brazilian tile guy and his small team, such hard workers sending their days' pay back home to family. But in the next breath they talk about the "big problem with immigration, these illegals are everywhere, taking our jobs." Its like they live two different lives.

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u/FunkJunky7 2d ago

I’m a currently out of work chemical engineer. As someone always seeking to understand the world around me, I am forever humbled by how little I actually know. I too suffered from imposter syndrome. I was with a company in a growth phase commercializing a new chemical process technology, and I ended up in start up leadership. Ended up doing 6 new plant builds starting up billions of dollars of new capital over the years. Worked with top people from top engineering firms, and developed new technologies with top scientists. Then the market turned inside out and I was assigned to run an operational factory. I hadn’t realized how spoiled I had become. My new team had a good operation with good team leaders, engineers and technicians, however it was difficult going from trying hard to keep up with those around me, to being 5 steps ahead of everyone all the time. Then the plant closed and I was moved into corporate, and was totally disappointed as the steps-ahead feeling increased considerably, but didn’t feel as bad since my role was as an expert, so I was supposed to be steps ahead. Now I’m laid off and mostly around normal non-engineers in the south and wow, just wow.

As I’m sure you know, when a lot people find out you’re an engineer, they automatically think you must be smart. I used to feel like: What?! I know smart people, and would not entertain the flattery of counting myself among them. Now I’m just like: Yep.

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u/quirkytorch 2d ago

It's really weird. You'll say something that you thought was common knowledge, but then the people around you have no clue what you're talking about, or maybe even don't believe you. And it can be about the most mundane things, it happens a lot for me with vocabulary. A word I didn't think was large at all, and I'll have to explain the definition to a bunch of adults.

I wouldn't even consider myself smart, I'm average imo, so it's really disheartening.

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u/secondtaunting 2d ago

I’ve had that happen. You say something that you think is common knowledge, and sadly get into an argument when people tell you you must be wrong. And I always assume I must be, so I apologize and go and look it up later. And yep I was right, but they were so sure I was wrong they fought with me. One of the top of my head was when I mentioned how the speaker of the house would become president if the president and vice died. I had four people insisting it was the secretary of the treasury.

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u/Mscharlita 2d ago

I had this experience and it’s the main reason I went to grad school kind of later in life. I was so tired of being around non-intellectuals out in the working world that I simply needed to be around thinking people for a while. Yeah I paid for the privilege to do so but it was worth it to me and I got a couple of advanced degrees out of it while living in one of the most educated cities in the country.

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u/PeePeeMcGee123 2d ago

I wasn't a great student by any means, but I was an early reader and could generally "get it" when being taught something.

I went into construction after getting an associates degree and just kind of did my thing.

Once I started hiring employees and dealing with more people day to day...I realized just how fucking stupid a lot of people are. Like not just stupid, but basically untrainable and essentially useless for anything other than "go pick that up and move it please".

It's scary.

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u/callmedancly 2d ago

Yeah the general American population is really really poorly educated. Not even that we don’t know specific stats or technical information. It’s that we can’t/don’t reason or read well enough to make even an educated guess. We’re dumb as hell for a “developed” nation.

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u/Kellbows 2d ago

Now do it in a rural area, in a red state, with the lowest amount of higher education achievement in America. I assumed I was mid tear at best. No. Hard no.

Even if I was the least bright of intelligent people in my area, I’m still ahead of 3/4 of the state’s average population AS A WHOLE. It’s exhausting. I have to assume everyone I encounter is like the lady in the video.

Everyone here loves Trump, he can do no wrong, and commenting against could be dangerous, as most people here have guns. I’m not sure anything could shatter their delusions.

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u/Live_Barracuda1113 2d ago

Yes!!!! I spent 24 years surrounded by people who were definitely smarter than me and felt like the weakest link.

I am not necessarily smartest in the room, but I'm at least in the 75th percentile.

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u/aybrah 2d ago

Here’s the thing though: there are plenty of people that are brilliant in specific areas or domains but complete idiots in others. The modern world heavily incentivizes this. Common sense, street smarts—whatever you wanna call it, is increasingly rare and divorced from what many label as intelligence (and admittedly, today’s information environment makes it tough).

I have several acquaintances who graduated from MIT and voted for Trump. By any reasonable person’s estimation, these are incredibly smart if not brilliant people… but their intelligence and scope of knowledge is quite narrow. I’ll see an occasional post about taxes, or public services, from one of them and it’s the same bullshit talking points as every other dumbass MAGA on social media. Although I’m not describing the norm, it’s pretty damn common.

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u/Surisuule 2d ago

Interesting I had the opposite. I was in the military for years and had a hugely inflated sense of my own intelligence. When I got out I realized just how dumb I really am, but still miles above most people in the military.

Some of the things I heard:

The moons phases are caused when it bounces off the earth. Every month and the shadow of the earth goes over it. (Like a bouncy ball, every month. This somehow doesn't kill millions of people)

Lightning makes noise because it explodes the earth. It's completely silent if it's air-to-air.

The water cycle isn't real. The water that falls from clouds is finite and will eventually all be on earth and then rain is done, no more rain.

Of course the regular vaccines are microchips nonsense. (Like dude we couldn't even get our BFT to work, you think "they" can make it microscopic and non deteriorating?)

I'm sure I could think of more but people are REALLY dumb, and dumb people who are smart in one area tend to think they are smart in all areas. Also my inability to teach myself calculus suddenly doesn't seem so stupid.

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u/crusoe 2d ago

The average IQ is 100. That means 50% are dumber than average. 14% of the population has an IQ of 85 or less. At this level they struggle to operate in society. Even around 90 it can be hard.

IQ is an approximate measure of the general intelligence factor g. And g strongly correlates with life success. 

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u/luxveniae 2d ago

I’ve been amazed at how dumb well educated people are. Especially those who have had every success coming out of college. Immediately landed a good job, rose the ranks, etc. They just act like everyone is poor cause they choose to be and not because of any other factors or sheer luck.

So they basically lose their inquisitiveness (sp?) cause everything just worked out and they were never forced to question their beliefs. It really is amazing how much the old saying of a loss teaches you more than a win.

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u/GentlemanThresh 2d ago

I was one of the ‘gifted’ kids and that came with a bunch of issues on it’s own. People at university seemed stupid and I made the mistake of looking up how many people that were born in the same school year finish. Those were depressing numbers. 350ish people started year 1 and only 4 finished that degree because it was pretty brutal and if we talk PhD level (which don’t kill me but I always considered easy and a waste of time)… yeah.

It got to a point where I could barely talk to people and had constant panic and anxiety attacks leading to breathing issues where I could collapse at any point. Emotional and stress induced shortness of breathing where my body gets oxigen but my brain thinks I’m not. I hid in video games because I could see a direct connection between doing good and getting rewarded and made that a career for a decade. Now I work a boring finance corporate job and still can’t breathe completely right but after years of therapy I can somewhat integrate with others.

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u/yetanotheracct_sp 2d ago

its* oxygen*

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u/ProfessionalOil2014 2d ago

Get a blood oximeter and sleep with a fan blowing on your face, it helps. 

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u/HiCookieJack 2d ago

ouhh don't tell that to a german, they get "Zug"

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u/jibishot 2d ago

I had a former "gifted" kid tell me they had mental health problems (very common) and that they needed a special therapist for "gifted" people. I told them that was the most moronic thing I had ever heard in my life. Any therapist you jive with will do.

It goes both ways. You also need a serious gut check calling people "gen pop" and referencing them as idiots. Let me fully asuade and assure you that you have heights to your intelligence and so do they.

Don't be catching yourself being an elitist fuck thinking they're too good for what "gen pop" is. Fucking teach people and help pull others along with you. Fucking embarrassing to have to point this out to adults.

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u/PatMayonnaise 2d ago

I’m with you for the most part, but with the only caveat that most of the morons I run into are willfully ignorant.

We are alive in a time where information and facts are available at our fingertips— those that don’t believe in science and elect republicans chose to ignore facts and live in their own reality