Many years ago, I began a column with the question, “Are you stupid?” I then assured those reading the piece that they were not, that I believed they were too smart to buy whatever political nonsense was being peddled at the time.

Now I’m less certain, because now we have a combination of stupid acts by Alabama politicians that define the very word.

Gov. Kay Ivey, a wily old political bird if ever there was one, knows on which side her bread is buttered. Signing a bill that bans diversity, equity and inclusion programs at public schools, universities and state agencies, she said: “I refuse to allow a few bad actors on college campuses … to go under the acronym of DEI, using taxpayer funds, to push their liberal political movement counter to what the majority of Alabamians believe.”

It may not have the same rhetorical ring as George Wallace’s “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” but it puts the point across.

Fear based on racism, sexism, homophobia and anything else people are afraid of allows her and others like her to corral Alabama’s Legislature into continuing to preach hatred, fear and divisiveness.

Around the same time, Alabama’s senior senator, former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville, proclaimed that the children of America are being lost to a satanic cult pushed on the country by Democrats. He also said we don’t have a criminal justice system anymore and suggested that no one goes to jail except persecuted conservatives like the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol in a failed attempt to subvert the election of President Joe Biden.

Sounds pretty divisive, doesn’t it?

Divide-and-conquer politics are well understood. For example, the late Louisiana Gov. Huey Long said that when he went to a parish courthouse, he would first “cuss out the boss.” Why? Vilifying the local political boss, Long reasoned, would immediately lose the boss’s supporters — but gain his opponents.

That way, he said, 40 percent would be for him, 40 percent would be against him and “I’ll horse-trade them out of the in-betweens. … I always hit the big man first.”

“Coach,” as Tuberville’s admirers call him, may not be able to tell us who Huey Long was. Nor is it likely that he’s a student of Long’s divisive and destructive politics, though his handlers understand them well.

Politicians support “solutions” to nonexistent crises because they lack the courage to do anything else.

Alabama’s other U.S. senator, Katie Britt, is well-schooled in politics, having previously been long-serving former Sen. Richard Shelby’s press secretary and chief of staff. She had to know that her recent televised tale about sex-trafficking was misleading.

She, unlike Tuberville, is a well-educated person. But like him, Ivey and a host of others, she is too fearful of the monster this climate of political division has created to be truthful.

Instead, she pretends to be a hard-working mom who has just enough time to respond to the president’s State of the Union address before she whips up a little turkey tetrazzini for dinner and then packs school lunches for the kids.

Tuberville plays the part of a folksy guy from Arkansas who is proud that he has a degree in physical education. His touts himself as a common-sense man and successful football coach.

Gov. Ivey is an experienced public official and cynical operator who knows nonsense when she smells it. Yet she is an enthusiastic participant in this nonsense, as long as it keeps her in a position of relative power and influence.

The opening of T. Harry Williams’ biography titled “Huey Long” could have been written about her.

In a stump speech, Williams said, Long told a charming story about how on Sundays he would get up at dawn, hitch up the family’s horse and take his Catholic grandparents to early Mass. Later he would return and take his Baptist grandparents to their mid-morning church service.

After the speech, a local politician asked him why he’d never divulged that he had Catholic grandparents.

“Don’t be a damn fool,” Long replied. “We didn’t even have a horse.”

Was Long stupid for foisting lies on the voters? No. Was he evil? Yes.

Are you stupid for buying what Ivey, Tuberville, Britt and their handlers are peddling?

Thirty years ago, I would have said no. Today, I’m not so sure.

Frances Coleman is a former editorial page editor of the Mobile Press-Register. Email her at [email protected] and “like” her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/prfrances.