Ignorance, Stupidity and the Fascist Regime

...and what to do

Yup, there’s a tee shirt.

Ignorance is when someone doesn’t know something. It’s easily fixed by acquiring information and knowledge.

Willful ignorance (known as “willful blindness” in law) occurs when someone intentionally avoids information about the negative consequences of their actions. Specifically in law, it is when a person seeks to avoid civil or criminal liability for a wrongful act by intentionally keeping themselves unaware of facts that would render them liable or implicated.

Stupidity is a lack of intelligence, understanding, and/or reason, combined with an inability to learn.

I am ignorant of many things. I bet you are, too. My list includes things like understanding anything mechanical¹, successfully baking anything other than Pillsbury Poppin’ Fresh crescent rolls, and anything related to organized sports. If I gave up politics, activism, blogging, and my job, I could probably overcome my ignorance in these areas, and others that are not my lanes².

Willful ignorance is the mainstay of the Convicted Felon and all of his fascist regime. Take last week. This is text from the 14th amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

ALL PERSONS (that means EVERYONE) born or naturalized in the United States, are citizens of the United States.

There is that little carve out related to “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” which is truly a TINY carve out. There are places in the United States that are “foreign soil” - that means embassies and consulates. In the same way, US embassies and consulates in other countries are considered US soil. That is international law.

So, if a baby is born on embassy grounds, that baby is a citizen of that country. Meanwhile, if the same mother gave birth to the same baby at an American hospital, that baby would be an American citizen. A corollary is that babies born to servicemembers on American bases in foreign countries (or on our ships at sea) are also American citizens by birth.

VERY straightforward. IF you can read.

OH WAIT.

The DOJ lawyers doing the Orange Menace’s bidding CAN read - instead, they have “willful blindness.”

I want to talk about “reading” for a moment. Please indulge me. For 11 years, from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I taught reading to functional illiterates through a local (now defunct) nonprofit.

The students were wonderful. Incredibly dedicated. Each and every one of them worked harder to learn the “-at” words (bat, cat, fat, etc.) than I had ever worked at learning anything.

These people couldn’t read for a variety of reasons. For example, the man who had to quit school because his dad died, and he became a laborer to support his family at age 12. He knew his letters, and he knew some words, like “Stop” and “Danger” but he was about to become a grandfather, and he mourned that he’d never been able to read to his kids and wanted to be able to read to his grandchild.

Another woman never learned to read because of growing up in an abusive home where they didn’t let her go to school. She was a waitress. She had learned to write in what she described as “pictures”. She had studied the menu, and she saw what she knew was a hamburger in the photo, and she learned to write “hamburger” by practicing as if it were a picture, the letters meant nothing to her. She had a huge written “vocabulary” - everything on the menu.

But the restaurant was changing to a system where she would need to make selections from a computer screen, so she needed to understand actual words and letters to keep her job.

These people were smart, and they were clever. Many of my students had found ways to hide their illiteracy, even from family. Their thirst for learning encouraged a few to ask me if I could also teach them basic math (number lines, fractions, decimals) and so we did that, too.

I tell that story because I want to impress on you that one can be ignorant of something (like the ability to read), but that does NOT make one “stupid”³.

But it’s time to get to stupid people. There is some relevant medical information, but it’s long, so I put it in a footnote⁴.

All of the Orange Menace’s minions, meaning his voters, are stupid. Also dull, shortsighted, imbecilic, moronic and witless. Every single person who voted for him. We can make a carve out for the billionaires who voted for him because they will benefit directly from his grifting, proposed tax cuts, and inclusion in his inner circle. So, that’s all his voters minus, oh, let’s say, 250 Americans.

I am terrified about the stupidity of the American public, because it looks identical to every single other situation in which democracy ended up dismantled. It’s why we need to fight against stupidity: in ourselves and our children.

The GOP for DECADES prior to the Tea Party and MAGA was committed to dismantling secular education. In certain ways, this was an attempt to morph as many Americans as possible (especially children) into a lumpen proletariat. Before they created this false “critical race theory” narrative, they were all in for the annihilation of critical thinking.

Merriam-Webster defines critical thinking as:

[T]he act or practice of thinking critically (as by applying reason and questioning assumptions) in order to solve problems, evaluate information, discern biases, etc.

I’m old. When I went to school “critical thinking” was part of what we were thought. HOW to evaluate things. HOW to reach accurate conclusions. HOW to develop alternatives.

The actions of the fascist regime are dedicated to making sure that American kids in primary and secondary school NEVER learn how to think⁵. It is incumbent on all of us to help teach our kids, grandkids, nieces and nephews, and kids in the neighborhood how to overcome these educational black holes.

The other thing, which is even MORE important is that the fascist regime is going to try their hardest to make ALL OF US STUPID. They cannot make a smart person stupid, but they can certainly convince even smart people to do stupid things.

Yes, I’m serious.

Here’s an example:

For now, all sorts of health data are being withheld by the fascists. Therefore, we do not know the levels of Covid, flu, RSV, bird flu and norovirus circulating in our neighborhoods. This makes us IGNORANT of the facts. (No shame there.) One of their reasons for doing this is because they believe in herd immunity, which can easily be deadly in this instance. Therefore, we can be SMART and protect ourselves, and assume the levels are high, or we can do something STUPID and assume that no news is good news.

Another example:

There are a ton of school board elections this year, in municipalities from coast to coast. Moms for Liberty⁶ will be running as many candidates as they can. We may be IGNORANT of our local school issues, especially if we don’t currently have kids in school. (Again, no shame there.) It is smart to go to school board meetings, to learn the issues, and to candidate forums to learn about the candidates, and then to not only vote, but turn out voters on your block, and in your neighborhood. It would be a STUPID action to stand idly by while a whole generation of kids grows up without learning how to read, write, do basic math, and oh hell, THINK.

I could go on. But I’ll spare you.

We must fight stupidity with intelligence. We must avoid letting them trick us into doing stupid things by keeping us ignorant of facts.

That’s my rant for today. Back to regular politics tomorrow.

1. Stories are LEGION amongst my friends and family.

2. Please feel free to use the comments to list what you are ignorant of, it would make me feel good! Ignorance is not a problem, just a knowledge hole or two.

3. I also relate the story because of how impressive each and every one of my students were. Some of the earlier ones would come back and encourage newer students. Sharing is caring.

4. Most babies are born with the capacity to be “smart”. Granted, few achieve these levels. Certainly, there are some genetic and congenital abnormalities that can limit intellectual capacity, but that’s statistically rare. At birth most babies have high intellectual potential.

But immediately, babies’ potential is stratified by economics. During the first two years of life, a process called “myelination” occurs. This process enables nerve transmissions (electrical impulses) to travel throughout the nervous system. An easy way to understand this relates to electric wires: the thicker the wire, the quicker the conduction, with the decreased resistance seen in thinner wires. More myelination = better brain function, more capacity to learn and understand.

Myelination is dependent before age 2 predominantly on diet and movement/exercise. (Babies don’t formally exercise, but things like learning to raise their heads to create the right spinal curves, along with crawling and then walking count as “exercise” in babies and toddlers.) If babies have poor nutrition, especially not enough fat in their diets, there is less myelination.

The next thing to keep youngsters from ending up stupid is the early education to which they are exposed. Kids in home with more books, learning toys, and outside experiences have more skills when they start school, and tend to better educationally. Poor nutrition and less early knowledge lead to lower IQs, less acquired knowledge, higher drop-out rates and a complete inability to be “smart”.

While there is not a definitive one-to-one correlation, the smarter someone is, the less likely they are to vote for the Convicted Felon. This is borne out by voting data, stratified by demographics. Those data are starting to trickle out now, and there will be a lot more in the next couple months.

5. Their ultimate goal is nonsecular education. It’s why they want to get rid of the Department of Education.

6. Think book bans, teachers on short leashes and choke chains, curricula based on the Bible and not on science.