America has plenty of problems and faces many challenges, but none is more daunting than the fact that many of our fellow citizens are freaking idiots. This is a real handicap to the body politic, differently-abling us mentally when a viable constitutional republic requires a citizenry that does not contain a substantial fraction of citizens who are certifiable drooling halfwits. But America today has a lot of stupid people, and this is becoming a real problem. 

Now, let’s clarify exactly what we’re talking about here. We are talking about people who are unable to accumulate facts and evidence and then apply them meaningfully to basic rules or principles. That’s how intelligent people work. They must be able to gather information and then process it into something that makes sense. But far too many people fall short on the whole fact-gathering part. Now, there is a subtle distinction here that intelligent people will notice, which is that there is a difference between someone who is stupid and someone who is ignorant. Someone who is stupid can’t know things, while someone who is ignorant doesn’t know things. 

People are ignorant for several reasons. Some are self-made knuckleheads, anti-autodidacts who curate their empty heads. They suffer from a chronic lack of curiosity – they just don’t care about gathering new information, something that is itself connected with the kind of stupidity we’re talking about. Stand in a line at a supermarket, or watch people walking down the street, and their faces are staring at their phones while threads of spit collect at the corners of their slack jaws. They’ve got all human knowledge in the palm of their soft hands, yet not as if they’re challenging themselves with the thoughts of Burke or studying the history of Ancient Rome; most of them are filling their heads with mindless stimulation, often the ravings of fellow dipwads. Not dissimilar are the people who must have some constant stimulation, whether terrible music or terrible conversation that they inevitably have on speaker instead of with their iPhone pressed to their ear like people who aren’t freaking idiots. They need this because they have no internal monologue, and they can’t stand the silence because their brain generates nothing to fill the void.

Other people are ignorant precisely because they are educated. That’s not a typo. Many of us have multiple degrees, so we’re not fooled by the ridiculous credentialism of the allegedly educated class; higher education no longer correlates with a higher intelligence quotient. Marco Rubio’s reference to the famously college degree–free Charlie Kirk riffing on Marcus Aurelius was less a joke than an indictment of our garbage university system. If you were to poll 100 random college seniors at our most prestigious universities, 1 percent might know who the ancient emperor was, 50 percent would have no idea what you’re talking about, 40 percent would think he’s a rapper, and 10 percent would call you a transphobe.

The institutions that are supposed to fill empty heads with knowledge instead fill them with nonsense. Our education system is nothing of the sort. Instead, it’s a communist conformity factory that simultaneously provides sinecures for a bunch of professorial mediocrities who teach nothing of substance. In fact, if you look at pedagogical theory, it’s all against teaching anything that involves substance. They will tell you that they want to teach the students how to learn, which allows them to avoid being responsible for the students’ learning anything. In fact, as a group, teachers are among the dumbest people in society. Look at the roster of dummies with ed degrees who just exposed themselves over the last few weeks, cheering on the murder of Charlie Kirk by one of their fellow travelers. You’ll understand that the people standing in front of our classrooms should often be wearing dunce caps.

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Then there are other people who do know things but can’t process them to save their lives. They look at facts and evidence, and they are unable to come to a sensible, meaningful conclusion. Look at the stupid people who insist on calling Donald Trump a literal Nazi. Now, they know there’s a thing called “Nazis,” and they know there’s a guy named Donald Trump, and they have some info about the characteristics of both, yet they somehow think the Venn diagram of the two is a circle. It’s objectively stupid to believe Donald Trump is a Nazi for many reasons, but the primary reason is that he’s not a Nazi. He’s not even close to being a Nazi. But there are stupid people out there who will insist to their dying breath that he’s the naziest Nazi whoever nazied. You know who else addresses big crowds? Do you know who else was a nationalist? You know who else breathed oxygen? Yeah, Hitler. All the pieces fit. Dur-hee.

Then there are those who feign idiocy, rather than having it thrust upon them by the cruelty of genetics or the betrayal of their teachers. These people are perhaps worse than those whose stupidity comes naturally because their stupidity is a choice, and a cynical one. 

Jessica Tarlov isn’t stupid; Joy Reid is stupid. Chris Murphy isn’t stupid; Mazie Hirono is stupid. Jasmine Crockett is not stupid; Eric Swalwell is stupid. There are a lot of smart people on the other side of the argument – they possess the kind of raw intelligence that allows them to function in a technologically advanced society, but their real problem is a lack of wisdom that makes them misunderstand the nature of both God and men, and therefore embrace foolish frivolities like socialism, feminism, and veganism. They’re not dumb in the classic sense that they are unable to do anything but attempt to force the square peg through the round hole. They are unwise at a minimum, but often outright liars. 

These people who lack wisdom and/or morals often exploit the half-wittedness of their fellow travelers. That’s why many times, when you’re listening to the regime media or perusing the Twitter machine, you’ll come across people who raise a question: Are they stupid, or do they think that the people they are talking to are stupid?

Exhibit A is the great “Was the trans furry-tapping pervert who wrote antifa crap on the bullets before murdering arguably the second most potent voice of conservatism in America aligned with the left?” controversy. If you’re pushing this freak as MAGA, and you are capable of reading a rotary clock, you are not stupid. You are a liar who thinks the people listening to you are stupid. 

It’s intensely cynical because they know what is true and what isn’t, and they don’t care. They figure if they can repeat a lie enough times, the dummies who listen to them are going to buy it even though it’s objective nonsense. This is often how the Democrats get their way. They feed their consumers something that they know is baloney, but they tell them it’s prime 45-day dry-aged ribeye. 

The problem for our country is that the government we aspire to cannot function if too many of our citizens are freaking nitwits. In a dictatorship, it doesn’t matter whether the people are smart or not. They’re just going to do what a dictator says. And that’s why the left likes stupid people. They’re more obedient. They don’t get uppity. They just want their EBT bread and electronic circuses, and they’re perfectly happy to be commanded. But Americans are not supposed to be like that. We’re supposed to be self-determining. Those who would be our bosses in other countries are supposed to be our subordinates here in America. To make America work, we can’t have so many idiots. And yet, we have far too many idiots. Perhaps, besides checking voter ID, we should also test voter IQ.

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