The last full week before the election opened with an insult comic literally trash talking Puerto Rico at former president and Republican nominee Donald J. Trump’s star-studded rally at Madison Square Garden. Within 48 hours, however, the alienation game turned on its head when President Joe Biden called Trump’s supporters “garbage” in a television interview with Voto Latino.

Awkward and embarrassing damage control followed, but on Thursday the Kamala Harris-supporting billionaire Mark Cuban made it worse. Appearing on The View, an all-women hosted television talk show on ABC, which has been rated among the most biased television networks, Cuban said, “Donald Trump, you never see him around strong, intelligent women. Ever.”

Strong, intelligent women soon begged to differ. Within hours, the Trump campaign released a statement quoting dozens of women who have worked with Trump in senior positions taking issue with the notion that they are weak and dumb. South Dakota Kristi Noem even challenged the radical left billionaire to an arm-wrestling match.

Trump himself posted that Cuban “is very wrong, I surround myself with the strongest of women … I may, in fact, be surrounded by the strongest women in the World, including Heads of Countries, who make Mark look like a ‘baby!’ All strong women, and women in general, should be very angry about this weak man’s statement.”

In a patronizing damage control post, Cuban denied what he had said, arguing that he meant to convey that Trump doesn’t like to be challenged and that his sexist comment was intended to explain why former GOP primary contender Nikki Haley, who endorsed Trump, has not been active in the former president’s campaign.

Cuban’s explanation fell flat and was followed by an apology, but the incident underscores a vital point. Despite their attempt to build up Harris, it is in fact Democrats who resent strong, intelligent women and, for that matter, strong, independent citizens of either gender.

The dumb and the weak, after all, are much easier to control. They make decisions rooted in negative emotions rather than with rational assessments of their best interests.

Dumb, weak people are susceptible to totalizing ideologies that promise utopian paradise, but they never question why such ideologies have always failed and instead resulted in oppression and horror.

Dumb, weak people need government to survive, whether it’s through welfare payments, social programs, schemes to redistribute wealth, affirmative action, or any other policy that runs against the values and virtues of the strong and the intelligent, which also happen to be the values that made America.

Dumb, weak people are comforted to believe that under Harris government would have “a plan” for them, whereas strong, independent people are repulsed by the idea that the government, under any candidate, would have “a plan” for them.

Dumb, weak people compliantly yield when state power violates their civil rights, confiscates their wealth, deprives them of their liberty, polices civil society and public culture, intrudes into family matters, and then berates them if they fail to be totally compliant. Strong, independent people do none of these things.

To succeed, dumb, weak people need “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” whose acronym, DEI, is now mocked as standing for “Didn’t Earn It,” a witticism cruelly borne out by revelations that numerous prominent individuals who advocate, manage, or have benefited from DEI—including Kamala Harris—appear to have engaged in plagiarizing the work of more talented people .

They are merely the tip of the iceberg covering all the other dumb, weak people— including the grotesquely inarticulate Harris—who owe their advancement in life to factors other than merit or intelligence. When a globalist despot tells his audience that they will “own nothing” and “be happy,” it is the dumb and the weak who readily agree and the strong and the intelligent who reject this project.

Even if Cuban’s cop-out invoking Nikki Haley is truthful, one might ask the logical next question: is she, in fact, a “strong, intelligent woman?” During the GOP primaries, Trump ridiculed her as “birdbrain,” not a great estimation of her intelligence. In his 2020 memoir, Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton, who resigned after Trump refused to follow his policy recommendation to attack Iran and became a noted critic of his former boss, dismissed Haley as an airhead who had a weak grasp of international relations while ambassador to the United Nations. Haley made the less than brilliant choice to stay in the primary race long after Trump clinched it. She thereby sour her relationship with Trump to the point where he appears to have no use for her. In the process, she managed to lose her home state of South Carolina by 20 points, an outcome that hardly suggests political smarts.

What happens to Haley is beside the point now, but truly strong, independent women are supporting Trump.