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The Year of Living Stupidly-How long will America continue witnessing our unalienable rights and political freedoms weakened?
Frontpagemagazine ^ | Jan 5, 2022 | Bruce Thornton

Posted on 01/05/2022 8:05:51 AM PST by SJackson

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

In 2021, political, social, and cultural trends that had been developing for decades reached a level of surreal absurdity. Under the stress of the pandemic crisis, we witnessed our alleged “cognitive elites” in government, schools, popular culture, and media saying and doing things that an illiterate peasant in the 18th century would consider the words and deeds of a lunatic. In every dimension of our existence, gross violations of logic and common sense were shamelessly indulged, the lies never acknowledged even when exposed.

The presidency of Donald Trump was the accelerant of these developments. The bipartisan ruling elite found the straight-talking, braggadocios celebrity plutocrat a gross insult to their technocratic pretensions and guild “norms.” The depth of his challenge was especially obvious in the corporate legacy-media, which colluded with the progressive Democrats to inflate preposterous rumors of “collusion” with Russia into existential crises endangering “our democracy.” 

Even when two years of a dishonest, corrupt investigation by the special counsel couldn’t provide a scintilla of legitimate evidence to support these charges, the Dems and their media flunkeys simply moved on to the next fabrication. The four-hour mini-riot at the Capitol building on January 6 was similarly inflated into an “insurrection” and assault on the same “temple of democracy” that progressives have been vandalizing for over a century. The House conducted a second dead-end impeachment of Trump, and when that collapsed, shifted to a still-ongoing investigation of the January 6 protests in order to short-circuit our democratic process by preemptively disqualifying Trump from the 2024 election.

The dishonesty, hypocrisy, and sheer cognitive incoherence of the reaction to a president who for all his crude and insulting rhetoric, had one of the most successful first terms of a president in the postwar period––a judgement the validity of which it took “Joe Biden,” the simulacrum of a president, less than a year of failures and disasters to confirm. Inflation, supply-chain bottle-necks, unfilled jobs, hysterical covid protocols, drunken-sailor spending, exploding violent crime, a dishonorable abandonment of Afghanistan, geopolitical adventurism by our rivals and enemies, loss of our energy independence, runaway gasoline prices, and schools blatantly indoctrinating students with transgender and literally racist propaganda––all are the wages of the Trumpophobia epidemic.

Perhaps nothing better illustrates the peculiar stupidity of modern progressives than Critical Race Theory, a snazzy moniker for old-school racist drivel. Claiming that all “white” people–– regardless of their numerous and diverse ethnic origins and socio-economic status–– are without exception “racist” and “privileged” by “systemic racism” is as morally idiotic and stupid as the “scientific racism” that a century ago justified legal segregation.

Yet the success of intimidating and blackmailing our institutions into accepting and promoting these illiberal ideas has led to embedding racism more deeply into the culture. Superficial physical characteristics, especially crude signifiers of color like “black” or “white,” now are being used to privilege, literally and concretely, some groups and to exclude others. The segregation outlawed by the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment is, for now, legal again. 

So over the past year we’ve seen the accelerating abandonment of equal opportunity, and its replacement with a coerced equality of outcome. Grammar and high schools, for example, are increasingly offering services, programs, and courses forbidden to “white” students. Worse are the so-called elite universities, for the nonsense taught there ultimately trickles down into K-12 education. So Harvard, the temple of “Veritas et Lux,” is ditching merit-based admissions in order to achieve a superficial, cosmetic “diversity,” the Danegeld our institutions pay to the race-industry Vikings ever ready to plunder and sack businesses, institutions, and reputations that resist their illiberal, self-aggrandizing strictures and orthodoxies.

A close second to Critical Race Theory in the stupidity sweepstakes is “Climate Change,” or more honestly, Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming. In 2021 we saw the UN’s 26th “Conference of Parties,” the globalist confab about how to mitigate the alleged catastrophic warming threatening the planet. This century-old hypothesis that humans’ dumping CO2 into the atmosphere will destroy the planet hasn’t fared so well lately given its serial failures of prediction, and its dubious computer models that plug the holes in empirical evidence that result from our ignorance of how an intricately complex global climate functions over time.

But there’s an obvious fact about proposals to mitigate ACGW that bespeak the stupidity of true believers, and the machinations of green hustlers: even if every program and policy for slowing warming were implemented, global temperatures would not be reduced sufficiently to avoid the alleged catastrophe, because big emitters like China and India are not going to play along. China alone emits twice as much greenhouse gases as the U.S, and more than all the developed nations combined. And if the threat is so dire and imminent, why wouldn’t the climate-change Chicken Littles support clean, renewable nuclear power-plants, or push for replacing coal-fired plants with ones fueled by cleaner, abundant natural gas?

This brings us to the causes of these obviously incoherent ideas, ideologies, and policies they promote. Stupidity, of course, is always a factor in bad folly. In the past, a lack of higher intelligence was offset by common sense and practical wisdom, the intelligence most critical for living together, surviving, and flourishing. Our modern world and its technologies, however,have made it possible for people in daily life to survive without practical intelligence. 

But we have mistaken that technical expertise for the wisdom about human nature that comes from tradition, experience, and common sense. We look instead to “experts” who are skilled in narrow professions and disciplines, and give them the authority to speak more broadly about human nature and society, subjects that are not amenable to scientific protocols for discovering truth. 

This mistake is our age’s peculiar “stupidity.” Indeed, for two years, we’ve seen this phenomenon in the contradictory, shifting, downright absurd “mandates” and protocols federal and state governments have imposed on sovereign citizens, at an exorbitant cost to our well-being, children’s education, quality of life, and economic development.

The other cause is the pursuit of power and wealth that justifies anything, no matter how preposterous, that serves a faction’s self-interests and ambitions. The attacks on Trump were about weakening him and his administration before the 2020 elections so the progressive Dems could take power and advance their ideological agenda. Critical Race Theory enriches those who promote it by writing bestsellers and providing, like the Attorney General’s son-in-law, curricula and other training materials sold to schools, corporations, and government agencies. “Climate Change” has for decades been a global grift, transferring billions in taxpayer money to climate researchers, “clean energy” companies, electric vehicle and solar panel manufacturers, globalist foundations and NGOs, legions of government bureaucrats, and battalions of consultant and lobbyists.

Finally, there’s the stupidity of the true believer for whom these ideologies are the doctrines, and the policies the sacraments, of a cult. Climate-change maenad Greta Thunberg is merely the most hysterically flamboyant of such people who, like Holly Golightly, actually believe all the crap they believe. They are the shrill “Karens” scolding the maskless or condemning the unvaxed as heretics wantonly endangering everybody. They are the embodiment of the eternal human flaw of  self-righteousness and condemning those they deem sinners.

Whatever the causes or the varieties of stupidity, this year we’ve seen it dominate the culture. Will we see the policies of stupidity implode like most episodes of mass delusion, and common sensereturn to our culture, schools, and politics? Or will this stupidity and the policies it spawns continue until our country is fundamentally transformed, and our unalienable rights and political freedom further weakened?

November 8, 2022 will be the day those questions are answered.



TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Editorial; Front Page News; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: communism; covid; freedom; liberty
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1 posted on 01/05/2022 8:05:51 AM PST by SJackson
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To: SJackson

Until we revolt.
To a manner that liberals are afraid.
Very afraid.
Period.


2 posted on 01/05/2022 8:08:24 AM PST by Da Coyote
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To: SJackson

Forever! Have you not noticed the long long lines at testing centers by folks who have no symptom and should not even be tested? Because of this (done by fed and state governments) people who really need to be tested can not!

The US is now inhabited by loads and loads of idiots and illegals. The dim party has done a great job in watering down Americans. And the 2 noted will be the brown shirts to try and reign Americans into history.


3 posted on 01/05/2022 8:12:03 AM PST by Harpotoo (Being a socialist is a lot easier than having to WORK like the rest of US:-))
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To: Da Coyote

You think that revolt would’ve already started when they came for our children but the silence speaks volumes. A reckoning? I sincerely hope but doubt.


4 posted on 01/05/2022 8:16:31 AM PST by RoseofTexas
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To: SJackson

Promise them money, promise them safety. Even if both are untrue, they’ll vote for that. As long as the media never questions, the questions don’t occur to the stupid public.


5 posted on 01/05/2022 8:18:26 AM PST by brownsfan (It's going to take real, serious, hard times to wake the American public.)
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To: Harpotoo

Sadly, I feel your assessment is correct. I drove past one of these pop-up testing stations last Friday and the line was just nuts. People standing outside in the cold. NONE of them looked sick, well, okay, maybe MENTALLY ILL. They were ALL on their phones just goofing off like at a big party. If what I saw in that line represented a demographic of America today, we are screwed!!


6 posted on 01/05/2022 8:25:30 AM PST by OHPatriot (Si vis pacem, para bellum)
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To: Da Coyote
"The Year of Living Stupidly-How long will America continue witnessing our unalienable rights and political freedoms weakened?"

The facile answer is as long as Americans do not put an end to it.

But to your point, it won't stop until the perpetrators are in a state where they think twice, three times, or ten times before they pull their bulls**t.
It boils down to how committed they are, and how willing their victims are to end it.

7 posted on 01/05/2022 8:29:40 AM PST by Tench_Coxe
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To: Tench_Coxe
This came to mind:

"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future"

8 posted on 01/05/2022 8:34:25 AM PST by Tench_Coxe
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To: SJackson
Heraclitus quote: War is the father and king of all: some he...
9 posted on 01/05/2022 8:37:27 AM PST by KC_Lion
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To: Da Coyote

Revolt? Not a single shot was fired to stop the 2020 election fraud.


10 posted on 01/05/2022 8:41:51 AM PST by TygertLane
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To: SJackson

The Year of Living Stupidly-How long will America continue witnessing our unalienable rights and political freedoms weakened?


Until never ... far too many people, if asked, would draw blanks of such in-the-weeds questions like “unalienable rights” and “political freedoms”. Most are challenged to answer which state they live in or who Washington, DC was named after.


11 posted on 01/05/2022 8:51:32 AM PST by PIF (They came for me and mine ... now its your turn)
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To: SJackson

General rule: People tend to hope for the best no matter how far into ridiculous it goes. Only when something somewhere goes “too far” does the shite hit the fan. There is a difference between courage and outrage. Courage is uniformly rare but outrage can pop up out of nowhere.


12 posted on 01/05/2022 9:06:40 AM PST by TalBlack (We have a Christian duty and a patriotic duty. God help us.)
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To: SJackson
Organize and muster up the troops with rifles in hand.
Yeah, it's going to be real bad or...we go on like this until we are mob marched to the edge of a mass grave...I guess that's not so bad S/.

Secure elections should be a number one priority.

13 posted on 01/05/2022 9:12:04 AM PST by right way right (May we remain sober over mere men, for God really is our only true hope. )
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To: SJackson

Indefinitely. Politicians, CEO’s, The ‘elite’ are laughing at us. Why? Because at the end of the day all we will do is post comments and memes about their hypocrisy. Then we will pay our taxes and their salaries and shop at their companies. If a boycott gets enough steam they make it political. The left is hurting us (ala Walmart, numerous times) and the right shops there more, we cannot let The left win, oh heavens no. We do so smug and proud. Liberals do the same. We are ridiculous to them.


14 posted on 01/05/2022 9:13:57 AM PST by M_Continuum
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To: SJackson

Being asked to show anything by the police when they can’t articulate a crime is simply a violation of the 4th Amendment.

We did not authorize them to suspend it because ‘virus’.


15 posted on 01/05/2022 9:16:49 AM PST by fuzzylogic (welfare state = sharing of poor moral choices among everybody)
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To: Da Coyote

Yeah, like that will ever happen. Conservatives are angry bloggers, but way short on action.


16 posted on 01/05/2022 9:20:17 AM PST by GingisK
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To: SJackson

For as long as we keep re-electing Assistant Democrats.


17 posted on 01/05/2022 10:04:44 AM PST by Lurkinanloomin ( (Natural born citizens are born here of citizen parents)(Know Islam, No Peace-No Islam, Know Peace)
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To: SJackson

When it does happen it will be relentless and what needed to be addressed will be finalized


18 posted on 01/05/2022 10:31:05 AM PST by ronnie raygun
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To: SJackson
The left's increasing warnings about the "threat to our democracy" posed by conservatives march alongside the left's ongoing attacks on our basic freedoms and Constitutional guarantees: free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, the equal protection of the laws, separation of powers, fair and open elections, and the right to bear arms.

This is no mere coincidence, but rather a strategy. By piling outrage upon outrage, they are trying to raise the anger and stress until someone snaps. Then, they will claim they were right all along. That smelly old stick-man, the walking cadaver known as Merrick Garland, knows exactly what he and his goons are planning.
19 posted on 01/05/2022 10:48:06 AM PST by Steve_Seattle
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To: SJackson

Very few of my contemporaries (millennials) know what their rights are or how those rights are derived. They couldn’t tell you the distinctions among rights, privileges, government entitlements and dumb luck. Many can’t even make change, write cursive, or tell the time on a clock face.

They went to the kind of school that doesn’t teach such things.


20 posted on 01/05/2022 10:58:16 AM PST by Buttons12 ( )
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