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Anti-Intellectualism is Infecting American Society Like a Deadly Disease (Video)
In a previous post, you were shown unequivocally that the mainstream media is deliberately advancing an entire set of false narratives and placing millions of American lives in danger in the process, and all out of loyalty to the Democrat agenda. My fellow countrymen, we are at a stage in our great country’s storied history where information and knowledge are key. Right now, more than ever with the 2016 election coming up, information and knowledge will be the difference between retaining and losing this great republic of ours. Dr. James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention recorded in, “The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787,” that when Ben Franklin emerged from the convention a woman famously asked him:
“Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy?”
“A republic,” replied Ben Franklin, “if you can keep it.”
“If we can keep it,” he said, as if he knew some day we’d take for granted the liberties that he and the rest of our Forefathers had fought and died for. Thomas Jefferson once said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” If insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results, then as American citizens we are INSANE. For Eight years we have stood on the sideline watching while the very beliefs and traditions our Founders fought, bled, and died for have been dismantled right before our eyes, and just like in 2008 Americans REFUSE to become informed despite the country’s very existence hanging in the balance.
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Before getting to the brutally honest article below, “The cult of ignorance in the United States: Anti-intellectualism and the “dumbing down” of America” by Ray Williams of psychologytoday.com, for a little humor, comedian Adam Carolla jokes about how liberals have become the epitome of what we would call “anti-intellectuals,” however, many conservatives are following suit during this election.
WARNING: ADAM CAROLLA IS A COMEDIAN, SO THERE IS A LITTLE CURSING
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Rather than do an ounce of their own independent research to become informed, people prefer to remain absurdly opinionated based on lies told by presidential candidates who will say or do ANYTHING to win the most powerful seat on the planet… and that goes for ALL of the candidates. Do people not understand that this is IT! There will be no “do overs.” If we screw up this election, American fails, and if America fails, the world fails? Ronald Reagan once said:
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
Reagan also said:
“Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.”
In Mark Bauerlein’s book, The Dumbest Generation, he says that we have an entire generation of youth now that is being dumbed down by their aversion to reading anything of substance, and their addiction to digital “crap” via social media. Going further, the author of Idiot America, Charles Pierce writes:
“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.”
SAID ANOTHER WAY:
IDIOTS KEEP VOTING FOR PEOPLE WHO PROMISE FREE STUFF
NEWS FLASH: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH!
If you didn’t read, Millennials: History Tells Us Socialism Always Ends in Genocide (Video), then the following video made by Steven Crowder explains why everything Bernie Sanders says is utter nonsense. The same goes for Clinton, the only difference between the two is Sanders is honest enough to call his plans what they are: Socialist. That’s not MY opinion or Crowders. 2,000 years of history proves it.
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BE SURE NOT TO MISS THE TWO HYSTERICAL VIDEOS AT THE END!!!
Ray Williams of psychologytoday.com writes:
There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It’s the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility.
Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, says in an article in theWashington Post, “Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture; a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.”
There has been a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in America, unlike most other Western countries. Richard Hofstadter, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his book, Anti-Intellectualism In American Life, describes how the vast underlying foundations of anti-elite, anti-reason and anti-science have been infused into America’s political and social fabric. Famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once said:
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
Mark Bauerlein, in his book, The Dumbest Generation, reveals how a whole generation of youth is being dumbed down by their aversion to reading anything of substance and their addiction to digital “crap” via social media.
Journalist Charles Pierce, author of Idiot America, adds another perspective:
“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’s a pervasive suspicion of rights, privileges, knowledge and specialization,” says Catherine Liu, the author of American Idyll: Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critique and a film and media studies professor at University of California. The very mission of universities has changed, argues Liu. “We don’t educate people anymore. We train them to get jobs.”
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Part of the reason for the rising anti-intellectualism can be found in the declining state of education in the U.S. compared to other advanced countries:
After leading the world for decades in 25-34 year olds with university degrees, the U.S. is now in 12th place. The World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. at 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly 50% of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are foreigners, most of whom are returning to their home countries;
The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs commissioned a civic education poll among public school students. A surprising 77% didn’t know that George Washington was the first President; couldn’t name Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence; and only 2.8% of the students actually passed the citizenship test. Along similar lines, the Goldwater Institute of Phoenix did the same survey and only 3.5% of students passed the civics test;
According to the National Research Council report, only 28% of high school science teachers consistently follow the National Research Council guidelines on teaching evolution, and 13% of those teachers explicitly advocate creationism or “intelligent design;”
18% of Americans still believe that the sun revolves around the earth, according to a Gallup poll;
The American Association of State Colleges and Universities report on education shows that the U.S. ranks second among all nations in the proportion of the population aged 35-64 with a college degree, but 19th in the percentage of those aged 25-34 with an associate or high school diploma, which means that for the first time, the educational attainment of young people will be lower than their parents;
74% of Republicans in the U.S. Senate and 53% in the House of Representatives deny the validity of climate change despite the findings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and every other significant scientific organization in the world;
According to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 68% of public school children in the U.S. do not read proficiently by the time they finish third grade. And the U.S. News & World reported that barely 50% of students are ready for college level reading when they graduate;
According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it “not at all important” to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it “very important;”
According to the National Endowment for the Arts report in 1982, 82% of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later only 67% did. And more than 40% of Americans under 44 did not read a single book–fiction or nonfiction–over the course of a year. The proportion of 17 year olds who read nothing (unless required by school ) has doubled between 1984-2004;
Gallup released a poll indicating 42 percent of Americans still believe God created human beings in their present form less than 10,000 years ago;
A 2008 University of Texas study found that 25 percent of public school biology teachers believe that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously.
In American schools, the culture exalts the athlete and good-looking cheerleader. Well-educated and intellectual students are commonly referred to in public schools and the media as “nerds,” “dweebs,” “dorks,” and “geeks,” and are relentlessly harassed and even assaulted by the more popular “jocks” for openly displaying any intellect. These anti-intellectual attitudes are not reflected in students in most European or Asian countries, whose educational levels have now equaled and and will surpass that of the U.S. And most TV shows or movies such as The Big Bang Theory depict intellectuals as being geeks if not effeminate.
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John W. Traphagan,Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Texas, argues the problem is that Asian countries have core cultural values that are more akin to a cult of intelligence and education than a cult of ignorance and anti-intellectualism. In Japan, for example, teachers are held in high esteem and normally viewed as among the most important members of a community. There is suspicion and even disdain for the work of teachers that occurs in the U.S. Teachers in Japan typically are paid significantly more than their peers in the U.S. The profession of teaching is one that is seen as being of central value in Japanese society and those who choose that profession are well compensated in terms of salary, pension, and respect for their knowledge and their efforts on behalf of children.
In addition, we do not see in Japan significant numbers of the types of religious schools that are designed to shield children from knowledge about basic tenets of science and accepted understandings of history – such as evolutionary theory or the religious views of the Founding Fathers, who were largely deists – which are essential to having a fundamental understanding of the world, Traphagan contends. The reason for this is because in general Japanese value education, value the work of intellectuals, and see a well-educated public with a basic common knowledge in areas of scientific fact, math, history, literature, etc. as being an essential foundation to a successful democracy.
We’re creating a world of dummies. Angry dummies who feel they have the right, the authority and the need not only to comment on everything, but to make sure their voice is heard above the rest, and to drag down any opposing views through personal attacks, loud repetition and confrontation.
Bill Keller, writing in the New York Times argues that the anti-intellectual elitism is not an elitism of wisdom, education, experience or knowledge. The new elite are the angry social media posters, those who can shout loudest and more often, a clique of bullies and malcontents baying together like dogs cornering a fox. Too often it’s a combined elite of the anti-intellectuals and the conspiracy followers – not those who can voice the most cogent, most coherent response. Together they forment a rabid culture of anti-rationalism where every fact is suspect; every shadow holds a secret conspiracy. Rational thought is the enemy. Critical thinking is the devil’s tool.
Keller also notes that the herd mentality takes over online; the anti-intellectuals become the metaphorical equivalent of an angry lynch mob when anyone either challenges one of the mob beliefs or posts anything outside the mob’s self-limiting set of values.
Keller blames this in part to the online universe that “skews young, educated and attentive to fashions.” Fashion, entertainment, spectacle, voyeurism – we’re directed towards trivia, towards the inconsequential, towards unquestioning and blatant consumerism. This results in intellectual complacency. People accept without questioning, believe without weighing the choices, join the pack because in a culture where convenience rules, real individualism is too hard work. Thinking takes too much time: it gets in the way of the immediacy of the online experience.
Reality TV and pop culture presented in magazines and online sites claim to provide useful information about the importance of The Housewives of[you name the city] that can somehow enrich our lives. After all, how else can one explain the insipid and pointless stories that tout divorces, cheating and weight gain? How else can we explain how the Kardashians, or Paris Hilton are known for being famous for being famous without actually contributing anything worth discussion? The artificial events of their lives become the mainstay of populist media to distract people from the real issues and concerns facing us.
The current trend of increasing anti-intellectualism now establishing itself in politics and business leadership, and supported by a declining education system should be a cause for concern for leaders and the general population, one that needs to be addressed now.
To highlight some of America’s thirst for opinions, rather than information, enjoy the following two videos from Watters’ World. To be fair to all sides, the first one is from the Bernie Sanders Edition, the second is the CPAC Edition.
Bernie Sanders World – Election 2016
Watters’ World: CPAC Edition
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no, no and no.
it isn’t ‘anti-intellectualism’, it’s anti-SCIENTISM.
don’t you know that scientism is the great, one world religion?
they keep us waiting for it, but it’s been here for 500 years.
they are using SCIENCE TO CONTROL THE PEOPLE. false science. lies and unending formulas to confuse and confound.
what the cabal considers an ‘intellectual’ is one who conforms to science lies.
what is a real intellectual is one who LOOKS FOR THEMSELVES.
well said!
science is indeed a religion nowadays. not only that but as you pointed out i too believe it to be the one world religion in its final prepartory stages.
its time for us as believers to fight back with our sword, the word.
we know who wins in the end.
http://www.mindfulofthetruth.wordpress.com
Yes! I agree with you guys! People make fun of me when I explain to them that the Erf is flat. I learned this in a video game. And that we haven’t been to the moon. I just learned this in BIN last week. And the sun is only 50 miles away and it’s held in the air with wires.
And also, there is no global warming, the scientists really fooled us with this one. To the point where we are supposed to use electricity (which isn’t even REAL) to make our cars go. LMAO!!! And use wind to make power. Hell, all those stupid windmills do is kill birds. We DO NOT NEED SCIENCE!!!!!!!
Science in USA was CONTROLLED from the start…….your National Academy of Sciences was set up by the “Scientific Lazzaroni”. Jesuit Theologians/Scientists bound by an “OATH” , & ousted/ridiculed anyone that didnt follow their interpretation………
Found this out in UFO Research. Leading UFO Skeptic/Denier ; P.J.Klass would pay $10 000 IF, the National Academy of Sciences verified the sighting………
What is this Oath, that makes leading scientists dismiss phenomenon & explain as Weather Balloons??????
Once you realize that the SMITHSONIAN has the same logo as the JESUIT Sun Symbol, & “Science” was infiltrated from the very beginning, the World makes a lot more sense…….anything that goes against the “Creation”/,Historic Timeline in the Bible was severely attacked >eg Darwins theorys….. SCIENCE COULD PROVE THE BIBLE WRONG!!!!!
To become a scientist today, your PhD has to be approved by an Emeritus Proffessor/Bishop…….
Today its UFOs, Ancient Archaeology Timelines,FREE Energy,Climate Change, & DNA gene evidence……
Intelligent Design / Directed Panspermia are the theories the “Lazzaroni” are scared of today>Alien Intervention….
## Skeptic Shermer, Wrong Heiser, & glamboy White are the Jesuit Uni’s “scientific voice of reason” . PhD’s used to state the official version…….anti-intellectualists???????…..or faith based deneirs?
To late, America lucked out in the Gene pool in the 70′s. And it’s been a riot to watch ever since. I just feel sorry for the few smart one’s but if you are still there you might not be as smart as you think.
HONEY BOO-BOO FOR PRESIDENT. Lil redneck is still probably smartest out the lot.
Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons. R. Buckminster Fuller
Those who play with the devil’s toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword. R. Buckminster Fuller
We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims. R. Buckminster Fuller
When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. R. Buckminster Fuller
God is a verb, not a noun. R. Buckminster Fuller
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/r_buckminster_fuller.html