How to Win Friends and Influence People is the title of a famous and still-popular book (get it here) by the late self-improvement guru Dale Carnegie (profile here).
I haven’t read it, but the Amazon blurb says it’s about ways to make people like you, win them over to your way of thinking, and change people without arousing resentment.
It was written in 1936, when people were only reeling from World War 1, the 1929 stock market crash, and the Great Depression, and I doubt its techniques work on today’s End Times Republicans. However, I haven’t tested it on them, so I can’t be sure.
I don’t think Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), a House first-termer (i.e., first elected in 2022), has read Carnegie’s book either. If he has, it either didn’t sink in, or he doesn’t believe in its teachings.
Collins (photo, left), a trucking company owner and the son of a former congressman, hasn’t been in the House long enough to make a big ass of himself splash yet, but is working on it. For starters, he launched his congressional office by hiring a guy to run it who kicked a dog and slashed somebody’s tires (details here).
(I’m not making this up, and don’t need to; these are the kind of people GOPers are these days. Note that, being from Georgia, Collins is a member of the same delegation as the redoubtable Marjorie Taylor Greene, so there’s a good chance some of her craziness rubs off on him.)
Collins probably thinks he’s a funny guy. He tells jokes. (And hey, if you want to see him do splits, watch the video here.)
One of his jokes went like this (see story here):
Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) appeared to be riffing on presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s newly reported statement that a worm ate part of his brain and died. “You either die a Kennedy with a hole in the brain,” Collins wrote, “or live long enough to become a Kennedy with a hole in the brain.”
I doubt RFK Jr. thinks this is funny. His father was shot in the head. So was his uncle.
I don’t think they’re going to be friends.