It’s hard to know where to begin. There is so much stupidity flooding the airwaves these last few days that it’s hard to see or think of anything else. We’re now in the phase of late empire where a semi truck of stupid is rushing down the highway at one hundred miles per hour and anyone with a half a brain is a deer, glued to their spot in its path, waiting for it to run them over. We can hope it’s all a weird fever dream and we’ll wake up to a normal reality. I can tell you, without reservation, that it will only get worse from here.
Let’s look at just some of the ways we’ve gone full stupid.
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The dancing monkey who currently occupies the White House has proposed that Palestinians leave Gaza en masse so the territory can finish being razed and rebuilt as a large scale real estate venture, maybe even owned by the United States. Never mind that it’s been almost completely destroyed by Israeli Defense Forces as collective punishment for an attack by Hamas. Never mind that many of the people who live there are displaced from the territory that is now part of the Israeli state. Never mind that it’s been contested territory for almost a hundred years. Never mind that this anti-immigration administration has the audacity to advocate for surrounding countries to accept Gazan immigrants that haven’t asked to leave. Never mind that the territory could in fact be rebuilt and still be a part of a future Palestinian state. The plan is profoundly stupid on every level. It is the kind of idea a bumbling moron would blurt out without shame because they don’t have the mental capacity to know any better. We would ordinarily look at that moron and feel sorry for them. We would wonder how they tie their own shoes in the morning or even feed themselves. But this is the leader of arguably the most powerful country in the world, albeit a county in rapid decline. It’s like if someone made me leave my home and move to another one, then set up a barbed wire security perimeter around that house, and I retaliate, naturally, so they attack with brutal force to the point that it is no longer habitable. Then they tell me the house isn’t worth living in and should be rebuilt into something beautiful that will never be mine, while I should look for a new home in very specific areas that I have no interest in living in. That level of horror and evil rises to the level of indifference to suffering that has be described as advocating torture. But hey, the dancing monkey thinks he has a big brain, and nobody in his circle has the balls to tell him so here we are, on the brink of stupid being our national identity. The saddest part was the pained look on the chief of staff’s face and the smile Bibi Netanyahu couldn’t hide. This Gaza solution is what Netanyahu has always wanted, and now that he’s robbed Palestinians of any shred of a future life, he’s let the dancing monkey hold the bag of ethnic cleansing stink.
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I feel like I’ve spent the last twenty years hearing from the right how important the Constitution is to our social order. They even used to print little copies of it and hand them out at rallies. Talking heads on television would espouse its virtues at every opportunity. Zealots calling themselves the “Tea Party” without any irony would tell anyone that would listen about their supposed patriotism and commitment to founding ideals. Then, poof, out of nowhere it stopped having any significance at all. Nobody on the right talks about it anymore. Congress – people elected to represent the interests of citizens at state and local levels (hard to fathom, I know) and co-equal branch of government – have stopped pretending that they are anything more than a rubber stamp for whatever executive order, objectively weird nominee, or billionaire with unearned confidence is foisted on the American people. Their obsequiousness would be funny if the consequences weren’t so horrible. Every new bitter pill from the administration has the feel of a science experiment, testing the limits to which members of Congress will embarrass themselves to save their seats. It’s a public shaming every day, a sick joke they aren’t in on. They still peacock for any camera, cosplaying responsible people, who’ve actually sold their souls to a bumbling reality television personality in industrial orange clown makeup. They had many chances to save themselves from this reality and chose not to take them. Moscow Mitch McConnell, for example, could have easily rallied his Senate troops for impeachment after January 6th when every proto-fascist talking head was mortified by the live images of the insurrection. He abdicated his duty and now we have a cadre of fascist revolutionaries knocking down every door of the federal government. We are hurtling head first into becoming a failed state built on crony capitalism and weak institutions, and no Republican “leader” has raised a single meaningful objection.
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The lesson leading pundits have insisted on amplifying since the election is the primacy of the economy in driving voters to elect the dancing monkey. Accepting that as fact requires a giant leap of faith. The dancing monkey’s campaign offered no plan to create jobs, lower prices, help the working class. Now in office, after hundreds of executive orders, nominations of economically compromised cabinet secretaries, attacks on consumer protections and middle class jobs, we can safely say the plan is to make the economy much, much worse for working Americans. A lot has been written about tariffs and how Americans bear the burden of paying them, but it’s just the tip of the stupid iceberg. Instead of any pretense of an economic plan we have full-throated attacks against DEI, wokeism (whatever that is), and any other alleged left-wing thing living rent free in Republican nightmares. It’s easy to attack those things in the abstract. The problem is DEI, at least, stands for something very simple and necessary. If the media, writ large, was doing its job it would be questioning everyone denigrating DEI and forcing officials to specify which of the three they object to – diversity, equity, or inclusion – and why. Nobody asks those questions. Instead we have the dancing monkey and his drugged out tech pal blaming DEI for every failure, in hopes we won’t notice their attacks are nothing more than pure, unadulterated, racism and sexism. The media pussyfoots around that fact at our peril. There is nothing ambiguous about any of this. It’s an attack on reason.
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We’re becoming a country of mental midgets. People with massive egos, unearned arrogance, bluster in place of brains. I think at its core, people in this administration think global American leadership and dominance is a birthright instead of something built of many years and a constant work in progress. Recycling pre-war mercantilist ideas is recipe for taking us back to that gilded age where America was an inconsequential player on the world stage. These are people who are too stupid to know they are stupid. That’s dangerous.
GLAZ 