Conservative Anti-Intellectualism and the Dumbing Down of America

What should I say? Should I be "PC" and beat around the bush or acknowledge the outliers and recite the old saws about blanket statements -or should I say what I really feel? I'll probably get jumped for it but here goes. Every time I read an article like this, the same bells go off. The driving force behind so much of this seems to come from the same damned source time and again; American conservatives -and it doesn't even stop with them.

The fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism

"The rise of idiot America today represents - for profit mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power - the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they are talking about. In the new media age, everybody is an expert."

There are, without question, two forces working in tandem to promote the anti-rationalist and anti-intellectualist movements today and the first is conservatism.

Donald Trump told us that, "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive"

Ignore all those scientists, they've been paid off by the liberals who have worked with china to fabricate climate change because they hate the oil industry and china fears we won't want to buy from their sweat shops anymore. This is the logical chain of thoughts that shipped along with Trump's proclamation. And many more like it have been the added baggage of science denial, of all kinds, for decades. But don't read what the scientists say, don't notice that Trump buys from Chinese manufacturing, ignore the moral ramifications of sweat shops, don't examine anything that might get in the way of your total hatred of liberals and liberalism and certainly don't dare look closely at oil companies.

And that takes me to the other parties involved, the ones behind the conservative movement -the mega corporations, particularly oil / energy. We find it strange that voters from rural areas, with long histories of distrusting large corporations (and with good reason) all the way back to those Grapes of Wrath days, coupled with a severe hatred of the north (dating back to those Gone with the Wind days) should not only trust the politicians who are so obviously backed by the shadiest of our most powerful corporations and billionaires, but so trust Donald Trump who is, to use the rural parlance, a slick-talking Yankee businessman from New York. "New York City? Get a rope..." Remember those days? They are gone, replaced by a growing normalization of pro-corporate culture among all Americans, regardless of politics or geography, that should probably be its own discussion.

How have they so duped the conservative American population into accepting the contradictions right in front of their eyes? How does a billionaire convince you he is for the working class? How does he assure you that your jobs will be safe from immigrant labor when he embraces the practice himself?

Ignorance. Anti-rationalism. Anti-intellectualism. And hate. And it's been going on for a long time now.

That's how you make sure no intellectual's warnings can be heard; you make them despise the liberals entirely, invalidating their word on any number of subjects. That's how you make them not notice Trump imports immigrant labor or buys from China; you make them skeptical of everything outside of conservative sources.

And they have gone to enormous lengths to provide conservative sources that keep them in the bubble.Conservapedia is perhaps the best example. All the misinformation and lies you could want to control your population with all in one tidy site that, by the virtue of becoming the conservative go-to for information, neatly keeps them away from the dreaded wikipedia which clearly has that liberal bias of not being conservative. They cannot imagine that liberal (and some moderate conservative) intellectuals and scientists could possibly research topics without political bias, as though every botanist and physics professor only put their findings in some sort of liberal light. Because the march of progress and enlightenment rolled over creationism and endangered the profits of climate change causing industries, the voters must be made to resent, refute and refuse all science lest rationalism alert them to their folly.

That has been helped by a long-standing movement to undermine education in America, both K-12 and university. And it, like many of these conservative movements, is not the result of some star chambered cabal that cackles and twirls mustaches -it is coming from so many directions, each with their own set of beliefs to justify their actions and only loosely coordinated under a banner of conservatism. They are still pushing for school prayer because they need the religion to be state sanctioned for legitimacy. We have the jingoists who demand school must instill "citizenship" -but of course it always turns more into indoctrination, replete with oaths and flag waving and... fictitious history.

• Rewriting history? Texas tackles textbook debate
• The Conservative Attempt to Rewrite the United States' Progressive History
• Was Moses a Founding Father?
• Tea Party Groups In Tennessee Demand Textbooks Overlook U.S. Founder’s Slave-Owning History

But then, there's also a separate but related movement to mess with science courses

• Conservatives Pressure Textbook Publishers To Downplay Existence Of Climate Change, Evolution
• Texas' New Public School Textbooks Promote Climate Change Denial and Downplay Segregation
• The Revisionaries

When that's not enough, there's an entire movement for homeschooling

• Conservative Christian Homeschooling
• Homeschooling, Liberty, and Libertarianism
• Homeschooling: America's Hidden Breeding Ground for Conservative Ideology

And a push to end public schooling entirely and close the department of education...

• Abolishing the Department of Education is the Right Thing to Do

And lest we forget the historic call for an end to critical thinking courses in schools by the Texas GOP in 2012.

Then there are endless cuts to funding, repeated inflation of class sizes, the demonization of teachers and especially teachers' unions, and many more continual, well-funded and diligent attacks in this multi-pronged approach to tearing down education. And all of that that I just listed, every link -only concerns K-12. Then we move on to the "my liberal students frighten me" rhetoric flooding through the media. Check out the College Fix to see just a sampling of the fallacious and slanted articles hoping to shock the ignorant into rejecting every last shred of progressivism and just be racist, homophobic, bigoted, and unaware.

The Voter Rights Act of 1965, the pillar of the civil rights movement, has been gutted in our lifetimes. We have a surveillance state. We are beset on one side by terrorists and on the other by politicians. Our privacy is a joke. And the mindlessness of Facebook and reality television has made no one care. We are told time and again to stop being "Politically Correct" by people who really mean they just want to call black people niggers without social consequence.

We are now to hate Mexicans (but that's not a race, they repeatedly admit, so it can't be racism, right?) and Muslims (hey, that's a religion, not a race. Safe again!) and illegals (still no race, prove to me Trump is a racist, they scream!) and gays (batting a thousand!) and on and on the list goes until, gosh and golly, you are left with only one sanctioned and approved group -straight, white, christian, conservatives. And don't try to prove that with any number of source citations because now no source is considered unbiased unless it is a conservative source. 

Mother Jones? Not allowed, won't even look at it. I mean, it IS liberal, but never mind the thousands of issues they raise because we can throw the baby out with the bathwater. So on you move to the New York Times. Oh no, that's the "lame stream media" so good luck with that. Only Breitbart and FOX news will do! Amazing how the various and quasi-related multi-pronged approach has effectively stripped every source away until you are left with nothing but propaganda.

We have no one person or organization to blame. We can cite the Heritage Foundation or the laughingly named Family Research Council, churches that double as political rallies and organizers, politicians, and probably scores and scores more sources so you have no lone villain to remove or despot to replace but it all leads back to a handful of billionaires and corporations that fund what was once a small fringe. 

As I approach my 50s, I increasingly wonder what happened. Born in '70, I have watched the nation progress, refusing to accept the hard conservatism of the 1950s and throwing off its yoke until the 80s where religious conservatism seemed to take a distant back seat to fiscal conservatism and the rise of the middle class. 

When I was a teenager, we dreamed of the 21st century as a time of unbridled progress but somewhere after 9/11, surely the worst thing to happen to the American future in our history, we fell into a painful bear trap and have stood still ever since. NASA has been relegated to the back burner, green energy has been hamstrung and replaced by drill, baby, drill, climate change prevention has so long been stymied that if we too every measure we can think of tomorrow it will still happen, and reading a book or learning actual science and history is anathema to half the nation.

So, I'll borrow a page from their playbook, the "let's not be PC" entry -let's face the truth, while not every conservative is "evil" and while not every liberal or centrist or otherwise is guiltless, this billionaire-funded conservative attack on every single aspect of our lives, from what goes on in our bedrooms to what happens in our classrooms, has long been behind the push for anti-intellectualism in America. 

With each generation, they become less and less able to be reasoned with because, like a copy of a copy, the errors and fallacies get ingrained and leave blurry artifacts. But the politicians, since they are rich, don't get offered those "manual laborer" high school diplomas some red states have decided they will push on kids but instead a fine private and ivy league education -so they know the score even if their voters no longer seem capable of it. 

Jeb Bush isn't stupid -he just hopes you are. And in the end, after all of the variables, there is one answer after the equal sign; the greed of a few is fueling the bonfire of anti-reason. Now nearly half the populace is not even adequately equipped to hear your arguments and the elite gets closer to what they have always wanted since the dawn of history -to be the worshiped kings and queens of our time with a near moronic populace to lift and toil for them, accepting their peanuts without feeling "entitled" to more so their lords can sup on the finest foods and live in the finest homes your far harder work will never afford you.

And we'd better start doing something about it.

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