GOP likes Walker's opposition to knowledge

By Andy Borowitz

Credit Photograph by Whitney Curtis/Getty

LONDON (The Borowitz Report)—Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is steadily rising to the top of the 2016 Republican Presidential field because voters are connecting with his “strong and consistent opposition to knowledge,” an aide to Walker said on Thursday. 

While Republican candidates of the past, such as Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, have capitalized on G.O.P. voters’ hostility toward verifiable facts, the aide said, “Compared to Scott, those two look like rookies.”

Walker has burnished his anti-knowledge credentials in Wisconsin by proposing a three-hundred-million-dollar cut in the University of Wisconsin’s funding and by deleting the phrase “the search for truth” from the values outlined in the university’s mission statement.

“That truth thing was a masterstroke,” the aide said. “Our polling shows that voters who oppose knowledge also have negative feelings about truth.”

But Walker’s longstanding opposition to knowledge may have faced its toughest test during a visit to London, on Wednesday, when an interviewer asked him if he believed in evolution and he refused to answer. “He tried to trick Governor Walker into admitting that he knew something, and Scott didn’t take the bait,” the aide said. “I was watching him do that and I was like, ‘Nailed it.’ ”

Moments like that, the aide said, show why Walker will win the White House in 2016. “The American people are sick and tired of a President who knows things,” he said. “They’re ready for Scott.”