Last night on Fox’s Your World with Neil Cavuto, fellow Fox host John Stossel waxed scientific on the counter-intuitive nature of human intuition. Noting that “we’re alive because our ancestors had the instinct to avoid the tigers and know when to harvest things,” Stossel says that “in a modern economy,” our instincts “are not good.”

His chief example of this theory? “Our instincts say that everybody should vote, but some people are dumb or don’t pay attention, and they shouldn’t vote,” he said. A naturally concerned Cavuto asked him who exactly qualified as “dumb,” to which Stossell replied, essentially, “kids.” Thus, he prescribed that we end the Get Out The Vote campaign because kids don’t pay attention so they don’t deserve to vote:

STOSSEL: I’m not saying we should have a test or something. But this endless cheerleading — let’s go to the rock concerts and register the kids. And the kids aren’t paying attention. And it’s important in a democracy, it’s important to vote. And these are important issues. The people who participate ought to be the ones who pay attention…I’m just saying we shouldn’t have these “Get Out The Vote” campaigns and make these statements: “Everyone has to vote. It’s your patriotic duty!” Well if you’re not paying attention, I think it’s your patriotic duty not to vote.

Watch it via Media Matters:

Stossel apparently likes to time his antipathy for democratic participation with the election cycle. In 2008, he insisted that “some people” — specifically young Americans — should just stay home. In 2010, he believed young people should just “stay in the mall.” After all, “Brain surgery, we don’t want everyone doing brain surgery. And voting is difficult and important too.”

Of course, young voters were very informed on salient issues that matter to them in 2008. And, according to seven separate polls, Fox News viewers — whose average age is in the mid-60s — appear perpetually misinformed. So unless he’s advocating for his own audience stay away from the polls, perhaps it’s Stossel who should just stay away from democracy entirely.

As ThinkProgress noted last night, Kentucky GOP Senate candidate Rand Paul criticized a section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal because he doesn’t “like the idea of telling private business owners” that they can’t discriminate. Paul defended his position in subsequent interviews with MSNBC and NPR, admitting that there are sections of the bill he doesn’t “favor.” “When you support nine out of 10 things in a good piece of legislation, do you vote for it or against it?” Paul said to Rachel Maddow. “And I think, sometimes, those are difficult situations.

The conservative media largely stayed silent on Paul’s incendiary position until after he backtracked in a statement declaring that he “will not support any efforts to repeal the Civil Rights Act of 1964″ and an interview with Laura Ingraham in which he said that he would have voted for the law. Fox News, which hosted Paul at least 21 times since last May, didn’t feature a segment on the controversy until this afternoon when Megyn Kelly hosted libertarian John Stossel, who said that he’s “in total agreement” with Paul:

KELLY: He is getting excoriated for suggesting that the Civil Rights Act — what he said was, look, it’s got ten parts essentially. I favor nine. It’s the last part that mandated no discrimination in places of public accommodation that I have a problem with because you should let businesses decide for themselves, you know, whether they’re going to be racist or not racist because once the government gets involved it’s a slippery slope. Do you agree that?

STOSSEL: Totally. I’m in total agreement with Rand Paul. You can call it public accommodation, and it is, but it’s a private business and if a private business wants to say we don’t want any blonde anchorwomen or mustached guys, it ought to be their right.

To her credit, Kelly challenged Stossel aggressively, saying that it was “necessary” to bar private businesses from discriminating in order to guarantee equal rights. But Stossel persisted, saying that he would repeal the section of the Civil Rights Act that covers private businesses:

STOSSEL: And I would go further than he was willing to go, as he just issued the statement and say it’s time now to repeal that part of the law.

KELLY: What?

STOSSEL: Because private businesses ought to get to discriminate. And I won’t ever go to a place that’s racist. And I will tell everybody else not to and I’ll speak against them, but it should be there right to be racist.

Watch it:

As The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer points out, Paul and Stossel’s “free market fundamentalism is being expressed after decades of social transformation that the Civil Rights Act helped create, and so the hell of segregation is but a mere abstraction, difficult to remember and easy to dismiss as belonging only to its time.” “It’s much easier now to say that ‘the market would handle it.’ But it didn’t, and it wouldn’t,” writes Serwer.

Paul’s campaign has backtracked even more now, with spokesman Jesse Benton issuing a statement that Paul “supports” the power of the federal government “to ensure that private businesses don’t discriminate based on race.” Page One Kentucky notes, however, that in 2002, Paul wrote a letter to the Bowling Green Daily News in opposition to the Federal Fair Housing Act because it prohibited discrimination on private property. “Decisions concerning private property and associations should in a free society be unhindered. As a consequence, some associations will discriminate,” wrote Paul.

This afternoon, Lou Dobbs attacked Fox News host Geraldo Rivera for stating that Dobbs himself is “almost single-handedly responsible for creating, for being the architect of the young-Latino-as-scapegoat for everything that ails this country.” While Rivera accuses Dobbs of defaming an entire race of people, Dobbs insists that he loves immigrants and Latinos and claims that his accusations are nothing but a reflection of Rivera’s “stupidity” and the company of “ethnocentric left-wing activists” that he keeps:

DOBBS: I’m just still fuming over something that Geraldo Rivera said. I shouldn’t let — This guy is nothing but a fiction of his own imagination and a figment of whatever he sees in the mirror. But, I gotta tell you — the guy is so annoying. I should not let people get to me like this, but you know what? I’m starting to get short of patience with them. [...]

Geraldo Rivera wouldn’t know a fact if it hit him in the rear end — and that would probably be an appropriate place if you wanted him to absorb the information. … This is the kind of vile stupidity and ignorance that he spews everywhere he goes.

Listen here:

“Over the years, Lou Dobbs has consistently used his CNN platform to spread hatred and fear,” states Drop Dobbs, one of three campaigns aimed at pressuring CNN to hold Dobbs to journalistic standards or drop him altogether. News Corp. is reportedly “keen” on luring Dobbs over to the Fox Business Channel. However if CNN does drop Dobbs, it doesn’t look like he’ll have too many friends over at Fox. Last week, Dobbs ripped Fox Business News anchor John Stossel as a “self-important ass” with his “own brand of myopic idiocy” after Stossel told Fox News’ “rodeo clown” Glenn Beck that he does not support “the Lou Dobbs-kind of rants about immigrants wrecking America.” Rivera says that one of his Fox News bosses assured him that Dobbs “is not coming to Fox News.”