Patricia Rosenleaf

Robert Heinlein, the author of “Stranger in a Strange Land,” once commented: “You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.”

Truer words, Mr. Heinlein, were ne’er spoken.

In one of Greg Gianforte’s ads recently I heard the phrase “dark money” attributed to his opponent! What a laugh!

The Republicans have been in bed with the dark money people and have furthered its use by pushing for and receiving the Citizen’s United Supreme Court decision, a crackpot piece of decision-making that overturned the McCain-Feingold Act that aimed to establish fair practices in campaign spending and advertising.

Thanks to the efforts of the Koch Brothers and other billionaires, who would like to keep things exactly the way they want them and with that SCOTUS decision, they’ve been able to finance the campaigns of some of the worst of the conservative candidates while remaining anonymous.

“Dark money” was a huge issue in the 2012 election here in Montana when outside forces tried to insinuate one of their own candidates into the Montana Supreme Court through financial assistance from the Montana Growth Network, a nonprofit which did not have to report its donors’ names. And it’s happening again.

The managers of those campaigns are smart, too — they know the catch words and phrases that we listen for; they know as much about human behavior as any psychologist. To say that they can manipulate our thinking is to put it lightly. They understand what Heinlein was talking about when he made the remark about appealing to our prejudices, not our senses of logic.

Just recently, a woman insisted to me that Hillary Clinton is a Russian espionage agent! Donald Trump accuses our president of being the “founder of ISIS and Hillary the co-founder,” and there are people who believe this utter nonsense.

The McCarthy-like woman and The Donald mentioned above not withstanding, I will stack Montana voters against those purveyors of lies and half-truths any day. We Montanans have long had suspicious minds when it comes to vast amounts of money and outsiders who can’t pronounce “Helena” correctly. But if you’re not on your toes, you might be sucked in by their slick salesmanship and trickery.

Most folks, like me, have already made up their minds about who’s telling the truth and who’s pandering to outside forces, so the next few months are just wastes of those billionaires’ money — and that’s a happy thought.

Patricia Rosenleaf of Great Falls is a retired teacher who writes a monthly political column for the Tribune.