Donald Trump and Know Nothingism and Anti-Intellectualism in America

So a near life long friend dropped me an email pointing to New York Times commentary on Donald Trump by Charles Blow.

Chaos.

That seemed to be the descriptor most tossed around last week to capture the circus around Donald Trump.

But I think chaos is the fruit of this poison tree, not the root of it. That is to say that I don’t believe that Trump desires chaos because he feels most at peace when the world around him is experiencing pandemonium.

Rather, I believe that this chaos is the perpetual result of the absolute incompetence and idiocy of a preening philistine who has faked his way through life pretending that he knows more than he does and is tougher than he is.

Trump: King of Chaos

And that is just for starters. Following is text of the email I sent back to my friend, who, by the way, lives in Alabama, and had the recent pleasure of helping elect Doug Jones, and hopefully finally consigning Roy Moore to the trash dump of history.

Blow is usually spot on in his commentary, I see his stuff frequently.

I for one am not surprised. The key problem in America right now is that Know Nothingism and anti-intellectualism are again on the upswing in American life. Couple this with several decades of increasingly bad television entertainment that replaces reality with “reality” TV, which is actually just a cheap way to make shows that people will watch because people are willing to do stupid stuff on camera and pretend it is real; and the total collapse of the mainstream journalistic establishment, who have become mere transcribers and stenographers, not investigative reporters who ferret out and report objective truth, but just report what anyone says, especially if they are a Republican, with no critical commentary, just a nod, a ‘yes sir, please may I have another sir’, and a hope for an invitation to the next big party the political figure throws with booze and women.

The American people are the end of several decades of dumbing down, thanks to the attacks on our public school system which have led to corrupt charter schools and religious schools that simply do not teach, and public schools in which the sixth grade is taught over and over again for six more years so useless testing can be done, until the kids are turned out after grade 12 and most of them literally know nothing about American history or anything else.

And of course history will punish the GOP, because they KNOW Trump is bat shit crazy and an incompetent narcissist, but they are willing to look the other way because for the moment they have the votes to enact their insane economic tax cuts and attack all the regulations that have kept corporations from poisoning people and banks from robbing us blind. Their recent tax cut will result in round two of the recession we saw just before Obama took office, only this time, it has the potential to shred the safety net of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and to trigger a recession that may be only one step removed from a depression.

When granny and grandpa are eating kat fud, my only advice to them will be to shut up and have another helping, because they are the ones who voted this madman and his henchmen into power, and they can, well, just f*ck off.

I trust I have made my feelings clear on this matter.

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Author: Ron