Resistance to stupidity is needed to rise above the degradation of politics

Donald Trump is a symptom of a nation in a severe state of degradation.  At a recent fundraising speech in St. Louis,  he bragged about lying to Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau.   It is considered a political point when one politician can accuse another of lying.  But Trump lies constantly. so anything that comes out of his mouth cannot be believed or trusted.  Still, he holds many people in thrall.  When he can brag about lying and his thralldom falls to its knees in adulation,  it indicates how markedly the U.S. has fallen into decay.   Trump flaunts his mendacity as a demonstration of his power. 

This is not the country that we veterans once served.   It is what we served to protect our country from.

The underlying question is,  what made Trump possible in America?  How did the people allow their government to become the debased imitation of a predatory corporation?  Why have so many people abandoned all standards of human decency and aspiration to worship a person who, at best, can only be termed a low-life creep? What happened to the people?  How were they turned into sheeplike prey for predatory capitalism?

You might say they have been brainwashed.  At any rate, their brains were tampered with.  Among the techniques they were subjected to is psychographic messaging.  The general attack on the human mind is something that George Orwell warned about.   When the media are used to monitor people and flood their minds with misinformation,  they are easily controlled.  Education does not necessarily prevent people from intellectual damage, but enlightened inquiry produced by sound education enables people to resist the attacks on their consciousness.  Those whose minds have survived the media-carried onslaught are people whose educations took and helped them develop the habits of verifying facts and employing critical thought.

But many people do not have the advantage of an education that enables them to have an informed voice in a democratic society.  They do not have the level of literacy that enables them to discern propaganda and manipulative messaging. As school boards have been invaded by right-wing zealots, education in the language arts and subjects that provide perspective and critical analysis of thought have been under attack.   Consequently, many schools have purged their curricula of courses that are not devoted to making students docile, unquestioning employees.  This elimination of courses which encourage the acquisition of thought processes has even reached higher education.  

The success of this purge of intellectual discourse is evident in the comments made on the various media.  Very many of the responses posted on the Internet media are factually wrong, stupid, and malicious.  Attempts to counter falsehoods and hate-driven posts are met with a barrage of ignorance and stupidity.  Trump's puerile tweets  encourage people of mean mentality to join in a chorus of belligerant ignorance.  Trump's tweets follow the known pattern of identifying and gaining mental control of the vulnerable.

The students of Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School in Parkland, Florida, responded to the massacre of 17 of their fellow students and teachers with a thoughtful articulateness that sent many Americans into an abusive rage--former Sen. Rick Santorum, Laura Ingraham,  Ted  Nugent, etc .Senior David Hogg particularly elicited utter malice from Ingraham and a dolt whose efforts at thoughtful articulation are shown on the left.

These people have the First Amendment right to express their feelings.  And we have the First Amendment right to show how their expressions designate them as people of defective minds and character who are unfit to participate in productive human discourse.  They follow the lead of Donald Trump who demonstrates his unfitness daily.

The people who criticize public education are often expressing their fear of students who possess educations and intellects vastly superior to their own.  They are part of the culture war.  They are programmed though psychographic messaging to regard anyone, but especially high school kids, who can competently process information and articulate cogently as being products of liberal indoctrination. These people accused the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School kids as pawns of liberal teachers.  These are the people who claim that professors who practice the precepts of their disciplines and profession in our colleges and universities are displaying a liberal bias.  

These are the people whose intolerance of genuine discourse and debate have brought America to a state of degradation.  They do not value or respect people who are not possessed of their blind bigotry.

If the human learning that has developed over the centuries is to retain any value,  these people must be resisted word by word.  They have dismissed science.  They have said that the legacy media is all fakery.  They cannot use language with integrity,  and cling to Trump's mendacity as their guide to reality.

We need a vigorous resistance to save the good things humanity has produced. We must resist the destruction of a tradition of education that has carried out the vision of the founders. Resistance is survival.