Brave New Frontiers in Willful Ignorance

cnn is brain poison

You have to see this to believe it.

MAGA Republicans are claiming that America is a republic. That’s very dangerous!

The interview is jawdropping. CNN correspondent Donie O’Sullivan: “I’ve heard a lot of conspiracy theories, I hear a lot of things out on the road, but to hear Americans, people who would describe themselves as patriots, say that America is not a democracy, that stopped me in my tracks.”

And then High Insider Anne Applebaum, who just keeps getting more ridiculous, says this: “Honestly, the word ‘democracy’ and the word ‘republic’ have often been used interchangeably. There isn’t a meaningful difference between them.” She also says, threatening my blood pressure, that America was founded as a democracy.

This is just brain poison, and of course it’s darkly hilarious that people like Anne Applebaum regard themselves as the educated elite standing up to the uneducated populist masses. A democracy is majority rule: 50%+1 vote for X, so X is policy. If 50%+1 vote to ban newspapers, a democracy bans newspapers. A constitutional republic places fundamental matters beyond popular choice, with rights that can’t be voted away, and with checks and balances that distribute power instead of concentrating it behind popular will. This is fourth grade civics.

Moving onto high school American history, the United States experienced a gradual — gradual — transition that made it a more democratic republic. Universal white manhood suffrage in the Jacksonian era. The Fifteenth Amendment. The Seventeenth Amendment. The Nineteenth Amendment. To say that the country was founded as a democracy is to say that no one should ever listen to a word you say.

Also, could someone please send this dangerous MAGA conspiracy theory to CNN?

Idiocracy made some good guesses, but it missed one enormous reality. As a ruling class gets dumber, it doesn’t get more sloppy and casual:

Instead, it gets more pompous, and speaks in tones of aristocratic condescension:

Anne Applebaum is the face of Idiocracy. We’ve reached a level of pathetic ignorant performativity that I would not have imagined to be possible.