Washington, DCApril 1st, 2018

It’s been months since the solar eclipse shadowed corridors of the American landscape, welcomed by the cheers of millions of onlookers, but the effects are not yet over. While scientists warned Americans not to look directly at the sun, or else risk serious damage to one’s eyes and vision, a large number of people—oddly all associated with the Republican Party–are showing signs of sun blindness, including President Trump. (See our report: http://www.bbc.com/news/video_and_audio/headlines/41003929/solar-eclipse-2017-donald-trump-looks-directly-at-the-sun).

“This dramatic increase in retina and iris damage absolutely correlates with the timing of the eclipse and the way one votes, namely Republican,” says American Ophthalmology Association president I.M. Smart.

How can two seemingly disparate factors such as eclipse viewing and voting preferences be related? The answer, says Smart, seems to lie in the Right’s wariness and outright debunking of science, particularly of environmental and evolutionary sciences that are considered by some Republicans to be hoaxes of criminal proportions.

“There is a bright side—if you’ll pardon the pun,” says Chip Sellhigh, a Conservative economist advising the president through his dark days. “We’re predicting a strong uptick in employment nationwide of blindness-related service industries.”

While that may be the case, Republican lawmakers have been working feverishly to push through Congress an immediate amendment to the still-pulsing ObamaCare program—compensation for blind Right-leaning families to hire sighted nanny services. The Left remains skeptical. Coming out of the recesses of despair, Hilary Clinton today tweeted that she was prepared to head any governmental coup that Democrats wished to fund, saying the nation was at last, “a case of the blind leading the blind.”

# # #