A Nation of Sgt. Shultzes?
12/07/23 16:01
July 12, 2023 (Vol. 17 No. 30) - According to a Gallup Poll issued yesterday, America's confidence in higher education has fallen to 36 percent. That's down from 57 percent in 2015 and 48 percent in 2018. And it doesn't take a Ph.D. to figure out the reason: Donald Trump. Since that Man Child rode down his gilded escalator to announce his candidacy for the presidency in the summer of 2015, anything even closely related to the truth has been under constant attack from the right fringe. It is true: There has always been an anti-intellectual undercurrent throughout American history. There have always been certain politicians who refuse to let facts get into the way of a preferred narrative. And certainly, the Defeated Former President didn't start the current wave of anti-intellectualism. However, the twice-indicted scam artist and convicted sexual assaulter successfully exploited it in 2016, tried to ferment a coup d'etat in early 2021 and hopes to ride its wave back into the White House in November 2024. His lemming-like allies in state legislatures across the land have embraced Trump's "Alternate Facts" philosophy, trying to ban the teaching of inconvenient truths, such as slavery, racial discrimination, sexism and oppressive oligarchical policies that have led to a widening and unethical distribution of wealth and benefits. Much of this anti-intellectualism was fed by the frustration coming from the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists like Dr. Anthony Fauci, acting on the best available information, urged Americans to make sacrifices to halt the spread of the most deadly virus to hit the planet in a century. But that didn't fit into Donald Trump's reelection narrative - and he was willing to allow hundreds of thousands of Americans die because of Trump's callous inaction and incompetence. Instead, Dr. Fauci is the target of right-wing nut jobs who want you to believe he is the real villain. To be fair, Gallup notes that confidence in higher education has fallen among both democrats and republicans. Democrats express concerns about rising costs. Among republicans, the concern is purely political. (This is what the poll respondents said, not Gallup.) They apparently want their children to believe that everyone in America has an equal opportunity to succeed - even though there are mountain ranges of evidence to the contrary. Donald Trump says that's how he became rich - he pulled himself up by his bootstraps. Of course, like practically everything else that orange creature says, that's a lie. What we are experiencing is a 21st century version of the Know-Nothings, a pre-Civil War nativist movement that sought to maintain the status quo of powerful white slave-holding landowners. Slavery may be dead in America, but fear of the country's changing demographic composition is what has been driving the Republican Party for decades along a disastrous anti-intellectual course that threatens to destroy the nation and all it supposedly stands for. (How else do you explain the presence of Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene in Congress?) If we had it their way, we'd become a nation of Sgt. Shultzes from the 1960s TV series Hogan's Heroes whose oft-repeated line was "I know nothing, nothing!" That's it for now. Fear the Turtle.