Since when did intellect and education become bad things?

Hanford Sentinel ^ | March 8, 2012 | Kevin Horrigan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

[Cincinatus' Wife]

As a card-carrying member of the media elite, it’s hard for me to say something nice about Newt Gingrich. But here it is: He doesn’t wear blue jeans in public.

[SNIP of SNARK due to excerpt limit]

For many Republican primary voters, the only thing worse than a regular elite is an intellectual elite or a media elite or especially a liberal intellectual media elite.

[SNIP]

More to the point, does the fact that a guy reads books and deals in ideas disqualify him?

For many Americans, it does. Anti-intellectualism has been a consistent theme throughout American history. The political scientist Richard Hofstadter won a Pulitzer Prize for “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.”

This was in 1964, and Hofstadter was writing about the 1950s, in the wake of McCarthyism and Adlai Stevenson’s “egghead” campaign. Hofstadter noted “hostility to intellectuals expressed on the far right wing, a categorical and folkish dislike of the educated classes and of anything respectable, established, pedigreed or cultivated.”

Now it’s back. The most prominent American conservative is not the erudite William F. Buckley but the seething Rush Limbaugh.

.....If ideas and knowledge are elitist, if you have to pretend to be ignorant to be elected president, then the country is in more trouble that we thought it was.

[stephenjohnbanker]

” Is there any wonder that the enemies of freedom, the so-called “progressives,” do not promote such authentic histories of America? Their philosophy puts something called “the state,” or “global interests” as being superior to individuals and requires a political elitist group to decide what role individuals are to play.

In other words, they must turn the Founders’ ideas upside-down in order to achieve a common mediocrity for individuals and power for themselves. “

Exactly what the Obama/Soros agenda is. Remove all of the freedom and responsibility of the INDIVIDUAL, and render all of us subservient to the STATE.

[stephenjohnbanker]

“””Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” - C. S. Lewis

Classic!

[TASMANIANRED]

Probably has something to do with the attitude...

We are your betters...kneel when we pass you peons.

[Big Giant Head]

Thanks for the ping, grey_whiskers. This is an excellent thread.