Good morning. 
Monday in Whitewater will see scattered showers and thunderstorms with a high of 77. Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 18m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 82.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Updated: Downtown Whitewater’s Board meets at 4 PM, Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School Board in closed session at 6 PM and open session at 7 PM.
On this day in 1832, General Henry Atkinson and the Second Army begin the trip into the Wisconsin wilderness in a major effort against Black Hawk.
Recommended for reading in full —
Cameron Easley writes U.S. Conservatives Are Uniquely Inclined Toward Right-Wing Authoritarianism Compared to Western Peers (‘Global Morning Consult data reveals a distinctive authoritarian bent in the American right’):
- A scale measuring propensity toward right-wing authoritarian tendencies found right-leaning Americans scored higher than their counterparts in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.
- 26% of the U.S. population qualified as highly right-wing authoritarian, Morning Consult research found, twice the share of the No. 2 countries, Canada and Australia.
- The beliefs that voter fraud decided the 2020 election, that Capitol rioters were doing more to protect than undermine the government and that masks and vaccines are not pivotal to stopping COVID-19 were similarly prevalent among right-leaning Americans and those that scored high for right-wing authoritarianism.
The Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol gave the country a striking wake-up call to the alarming rise in undemocratic behavior on the right side of the political aisle, and new global Morning Consult research underscores the prevalence of authoritarian attitudes among U.S. conservatives.
The research, which used longtime authoritarian researcher Bob Altemeyer’s right-wing authoritarianism test and scale and builds on recent work he conducted with the Monmouth University Polling Institute, found that U.S. conservatives have stronger right-wing authoritarian tendencies than their right-of-center counterparts in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.
Altemeyer defines authoritarianism as the desire to submit to some authority, aggression that is directed against whomever the authority says should be targeted and a desire to have everybody follow the norms and social conventions that the authority says should be followed. Those characteristics were all on display in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, culminating earlier this year in the attack on the Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump.
The findings come from Morning Consult polling conducted from late April into early May in seven foreign countries, which in addition to the aforementioned trio included France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Responses were gathered among 1,000 adults in each of the seven countries, and were compared with a domestic poll of 1,001 U.S. adults conducted concurrently. (See more about how we conducted the study and produced our findings here.)
Jennifer Rubin writes Why So Many Republicans Talk About Nonsense:
Republicans have all but given up on the notion of governance. At the national level, they consume themselves with race-baiting (e.g., scaring Americans about immigration and critical race theory), assailing private companies (e.g., corporations that defend voting rights, social media platforms, book publishers) and perpetrating the most ludicrous and dangerous lie in memory — that the 2020 election was stolen.
….
In truth, a great many Republicans simply like to be “important people” with the perks of holding office. It seems the notion of finding other work causes them to break out in a cold sweat, so they adopt insane MAGA positions so as not to offend the mob they helped rile up. Certainly, there are true believers who believe Trumpian rubbish and take right-wing TV hosts’ conspiracies as gospel, but they are a distinct minority. Time and again, we hear from Republican dissenters that most of their colleagues do not really believe the MAGA party lies; what they believe in is the necessity of their own reelection.