In a word, “yes”. The deliberate dumbing down of the populace follows along the same lines as punishing people for teaching slaves how to read and write in the 19th century America. If the slaves figure out that they’re being screwed, and actually have the upper hand over their masters, well the powers to be just couldn’t have that, now could they? Hence the forced dumbing down of the populace by the feds, their business interests, and their financial backers.
It has to be deliberate, there simply is no other expectation, to believe otherwise is like going from your home in Florida to San Francisco and seeing your next door neighbor and believing him when he says that he just went to the store for a gallon of milk and somehow wound up in the land of fruits and nuts.
powers to be
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I think you mean powers that be.