The Are We Really This Dumb? Election

America has a body image issue. Ours is a great and beautiful civilization, but when we look in the mirror, we see ugliness, ungainliness, disproportion, and a history of sin spanning the ages from the founding to the modern-day. So we hang our heads in shame, self-flagellate, fast, binge, and yo-yo diet, leaving wounds, indentations, breaches, and bulges that make the distension and distortion we see in our reflections no longer merely imaginary.

The root cause of the problem is that those who hold a mirror to our civilization are unreflective of the rest of us. The journalists, the celebrities, the artists, the academics, and other educators — these are a class apart: generally wealthier, more credentialed, and starkly different in their ideological convictions. (READ MORE: Anti-Democratic Skullduggery Against West, Stein From the Democratic Party)

As the noted sociologist Philip Rieff has argued, adherence to moral standards is usually a demand that emanates from the middle class, not from a nation’s oft-licentious, degenerate elites. This is why there are many things we normal Americans know that they — our do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do elites — don’t:

• We know that immigration must be legal (6 in 10 Americans see illegal immigration as either a very serious or somewhat serious problem) and that those who have broken the law, cut in line, and come into this country illegally are certainly not entitled to the red-carpet treatment they have gotten, with free room and board in nice hotels and an array of free social services (unequivocally supported by Kamala Harris and leaving taxpayers with a $5 billion bill over just two years in New York City alone), even while the migrants themselves are either illegally employed and, when not taking jobs away from legal low-wage workers, creating a domino-effect of downward pressure on wages throughout the economy or else, in the case of a majority of those who have arrived since 2022, not employed at all and not even looking for work.
• We know that crime must be met with punishment (58 percent of us think our current criminal justice system is not tough enough on crime), that “criminal justice reform” is code for higher crime, that police “defunding” is sheer lunacy (only 15 percent of Americans supported defunding in 2021) and that because most crime is concentrated within a small fraction of repeat offenders, intensive policing of hot-spots and longer sentences keeping those repeat offenders off the street really do work.
• We know that border walls (which 53 percent of Americans support) and blue walls (even after our elites’ ideological onslaught on police, 51 percent of us have confidence in cops) keep us from harm, and save for a few bad apples of the sort that may be found in every walk of life, our cops, like our firefighters and our soldiers, are not our enemies but our brave protectors who risk life and limb to keep us safe.
• We know what a woman is (57 percent of us believe gender is determined at birth) and know that letting biological males masquerading as females into girls’ locker rooms (46 percent of us are against such invasions, as opposed to 37 percent in favor) or into women’s sports (69 percent believe women’s sports are only for cisgender women and men’s sports only for cisgender men), and especially combat sports, is downright dangerous, unfair and absurd.
• We know that speech must be free (90 percent of Americans believe unpopular opinions must be protected, but only 45 percent believe free speech is secure in America today) and don’t want Big Tech companies (75 percent don’t trust Big Tech to engage in content moderation) or government censors (which only 14 percent of us support) — with their shameful record of colluding to suppress the truth about important issues such as the Wuhan lab leak that is all-but-certain to have been the source of the Covid pandemic or the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story that could have swung the narrowly decided 2020 election — calling the shots and taking it upon themselves to resolve inherently complex and oft-political questions of what is or is not okay to say.
• We know that education must be apolitical (58 percent believe political views have no place in education), and school is for learning reading, writing, history, math and science, not for indoctrination in gender ideology (48 percent feel there is too much focus on that topic in school, with only 23 percent supporting the opposite viewpoint) or other “culture war” subjects, like the various teachings of critical race theory (48 percent are against teaching CRT in public schools as compared to 29 percent in favor, and 45 percent are against its use to train teachers as compared to 32 percent in favor).
• We know that it is wrong to take race into account in making potentially life-changing decisions about college admissions (50 percent are against, only 33 percent in favor) and employee hiring and promotion (74 percent are against consideration of race in such decisions, and 24 percent are in favor).

If all of these clear preferences held by substantial majorities of the American electorate were reflected in the actual policy choices our leaders made, so many of the wedge issues that seemingly divide us would be dissolved in a heartbeat. The reason that does not happen is, as I have suggested above, the fundamental mismatch between the views of ordinary people and the views of the political elites who have outsized voices in our national dialogue.

Our Professors, Teachers, and Hollywood Elite Are Much More Radical Than You Are

As of 2023, 33 percent of us are conservative, and 39 percent are moderate. Only 23 percent are liberal.

But among journalists, 78 percent are liberal, and only 22 percent are conservative. A vanishingly small 3.4 percent of journalists are actual Republicans, while 36.4 percent are Democrats.

Among college professors, 50 percent are liberal, and only 26 percent are conservative. In 2016, conservatives made up only 2 percent of political science professors, 3 percent of literature professors, 4 percent of philosophy professors, 7 percent of history professors, and 8 percent of sociology professors. More troublingly, an astonishing 17.6 percent of professors in the social sciences — the ones, in other words, who are more likely to be most influential in public life — are flat-out Marxists, with another 20.6 percent deeming themselves activists and 24 percent identifying as radicals. (READ MORE: The Spectacle Ep. 140: The Lord of the Rings is Still Relevant)

Among K-12 teachers, 58 percent identify with or lean Democratic, while only 35 percent lean towards the GOP. Teacher’s colleges — the places where our teachers are molded — are some of the most radical institutions in America, with one of their most widely read texts being the wacky Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire’s 1970 tract, Pedagogy of the Masses, which instructs would-be educators on how to prep their students to take part in a violent revolution overthrowing their ostensible oppressors.

While I have come upon no surveys reflecting the political views of creative artists and celebrities, the overwhelmingly left-leaning propensities of these groups — as reflected in once-respected actor Robert De Niro’s recent public meltdown on the general subject of Donald Trump — are common knowledge, have often been observed anecdotally, and lest there be any doubt on this point, in the 2018 election cycle, “[o]f the more than $4 million in federal donations made by the top Hollywood executives and entertainers [as reflected in the ‘THR 100’ list of most powerful people in entertainment], 99.7 percent went to Democrats and Democratic-leaning political action committees or organizations.”

Our Elites Are Making Old Problems Worse

This political disconnect between us and our elites yields a resulting disconnect between who we really are and who we think we are, between the views we actually hold and the ones these outspoken elites impose upon us. Day in and day out, they tell us we are a nation built on sin, founded on colonialism, slavery, white supremacy, nativism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, and we are sent, on this basis, into a crazed frenzy of over-correction to atone for these purportedly eternal wrongs.

Ironically, just as obsessing over food choices will only make an eating disorder worse, the newfound national obsession with these old pathologies being forced down our throats has only fixated us on what are largely historical bygones, arresting our civilizational development and leading to an all-around deepening of fissures along precisely these same troublesome identitarian fault-lines.

Kamala Harris is the latest hissing-and-booing serpent head emerging from this seemingly unvanquishable, many-headed hydra. That she herself is a vacuous cipher with vaguely far-left instincts and who is barely capable of articulating a coherent thought is — or should be — obvious to any thinking American. We know it and they know it. Their only hope is that they — the body of the monster ravaging our land — can prop up its new figurehead for long enough that we’ll get fooled again before the hoax is exposed.

To that end, just as in the case of her dementia-addled predecessor, Harris’s handlers keep her under wraps, and release her to the public only when a teleprompter is queued up and waiting (often resulting in painful repetition from one campaign stop to the next), avoid unscripted moments at all costs and defer for as long as possible in bothering to articulate a political platform with concrete policy positions because … well, a concrete political platform would either — if it is honest to her view — commit her to unpopular positions at odds with those Americans hold (as detailed above) or else — if it is dishonest — entail blatant backtracking on all her earlier commitments on issues like the Biden Administration’s open borders policy and its crackdown on free speech, her support for race reparations and her opposition to fracking.

On the few issues on which her handlers have spoken, the latter approach, viz., blatantly dishonest flip-flopping, appears to be the tack they are taking, which also exposes this fundamental difference between Trump and Vance and Harris and Walz: Trump and Vance, who hold all the widely popular policy positions described above, are unafraid to voice and defend what they really believe, whereas Harris and Walz are doing media-assisted pirouettes to spin their way out of their years-long records of unhinged radicalism.

We Have Some Tough Questions to Ask Ourselves Before Election Day

Just like Biden before them, Harris and Walz have to campaign as moderates to swindle their way into the opportunity to govern as radicals. Just like Biden, their radicalism consists not, as they would have us think, in advancing working-class interests but in the exact opposite: enacting a radically anti-American, pro-elite, pro-corporate agenda that will result in rampant inflation driving corporate profits while creating cuts in real wages, an influx of illegal immigrants oversupplying labor and creating a similar domino-effect of downward pressure on real wages throughout the economy, billions upon billions of our tax dollars expended on needless and destructive foreign wars that the foreign policy neocons in power provoke behind the scenes, and currying favor with the elites by attempting a student loan debt giveaway for individuals (even well-off individuals earning up to $125,000 or couples earning up to $250,000) who made the voluntary choice to assume debt to go to college, even while others — primarily in the working class — may have made a more financially responsible choice to forego college or go to a less expensive school for which they did not need to take on debt. (READ MORE: Kamala Harris Is No Joe Biden. Or Is She?)

Such realities are why, in lieu of tangling with Trump and Vance on specific policy commitments, Harris’s handlers and their media machine have mounted a thoroughly vacuous campaign befitting their vacuous candidate. Thus, we are told by all the organs of the elite media working in collaboration with the Manchurian candidate that she and her race-riot-promoting, trans-grooming, valor-stealing running mate embody joy in contrast to that gloomy, grumpy Trump and his sad, weird sidekick.

Ironically, these elites are so out of touch with America that even their conception of joy is deranged and demented. If every single voter would just watch this cringeworthy Kamala Harris-RuPaul campaign ad, I’d wager on Trump winning in a landslide. In another instance that may have broken the peak-cringe detection meter, infantilized and projected into the role of babes in the loving, doting embrace of the federal government, we are invited to imagine Harris and Walz as our kindly “Momala” and “daddy.”

Every attack on Harris for being the unaccomplished, undeserving D.E.I. candidate that she clearly is is reflexively, mindlessly branded as racism and sexism. In the meantime, the “joy” candidates’ main line of attack on their opponents is to label them “weird” — never mind the fact that calling people “weird” is unbecoming of any dignified, self-respecting political campaign and is little more than a case of childish, junior-high-school-level bullying. It is, in essence, pointing a finger at the nerdy, pimply smart kid in the front of the class and saying, “That freak isn’t one of us.”  The additional irony in this particular case is that it is Trump and Vance who are a whole lot more like us than their counterparts dummying for the elite ventriloquists pulling their strings.

And so the question this election comes down to is as simple as this: Will we fall for the dummy act, or as a recent New York Post headline put it, “How dumb do they think we are?”

Alas, with the polls trending in their direction at the moment, perhaps what we ought to be asking, instead, is are we really this dumb? Are we going to fall for the propaganda yet again and then spend the next four years seeing our quality of life continue to deteriorate, as our tax dollars are frittered away on free benefits for illegal immigrants or used to fund destabilizing foreign wars raging near and far. This, all while we are forced to watch biological males beat up women in a boxing ring and subjected to daily lectures by supercilious elites — lectures we have already been getting ever since Harris entered the race — for our supposed racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia?

On Nov. 5, we will learn the answer. In the meantime, if we have any hope of salvaging what remains of America, we’d better start asking ourselves and our would-be overseers some hard, probing questions.

The post The <i> Are We Really This Dumb?</i> Election appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.