Affirmative action for right-wing nutjobs.

Brett Kavanaugh is a prime example, but what brought this to my mind is the GD post about the recent district court appointment of a 39-year-old right-winger who championed voter suppression.

Yes, both of them benefited form being hetero white males, but it's more than that.

Here's how it works. About 40% of Americans support Trump, which means that about 40% of the country consists of right-wing lunatics. But, among highly educated, intelligent people, the fraction is much smaller. For example, look at the levels of support for Trump among either students or faculty at elite college campuses. Right-wingers will call this "liberal bias", but the reality is that it is rare for highly educated people to go along with things like climate change denial, or fundamentalist Christianity, or many of the other core values of the GOP.

Right-wing psychos always complain that their bigotry and science-denial make them feel not at home at universities. And I'm sure they do feel like a minority there. But really, their right-wing psychopathy is a huge advantage when it comes to political or judicial careers.

Because the thing is, even though only a small fraction of smart, highly-educated people are right-wing psychos, the GOP gets to appoint about half the judges (in the long run). So for a normal top law school grad, you need to compete with all the other normal top law school grads for half the judicial appointments. Meanwhile Kavanaugh only needs to compete with the handful of other right-wing psychopaths that went to top law schools for the other half.

The result is that being even mildly intelligent makes you a superstar genius in right-wing circles.