I love how that article blames the Universities and the kooks like Jenny McCarthy but never gets around to dealing with those that have pushed Anti-Intellectualism to the point of electing Trump. What we have now is what TFS has been laying the groundwork for all of my life.
I will never read whatever mendacious garbage the Federalist is offering up, but I also argue academia is partly to blame. Academics renounced their responsibility for being public intellectuals by retreating into the Scholasticism of the jargon of PoMo. It didn't have to be that way. PoMo is, at heart, absolutely obvious. There is no neutral text. There is no place outside of ourselves to stand and objectively evaluate facts, we are part of the experiment.
But I just explained that is important about PoMo in 25 words. None of them French. Only one of them ("text") jargon, and that one something we can understand without 3 years of philosophy. That was the great betrayal of Academia in the last 50 years. They turned their backs on plain language and went wriggling up their own as-sholes. Classic guild gatekeeping. Protecting themselves from external criticism. Fighting their precious little battles for tenure and the corner office and leaving the rest of the world at the mercy of rightwing nutjobs who were "a stupid person's idea of what smart people sound like."
They also abandoned the first principle of advanced knowledge that
every culture has known: most people aren't ready for the truth. They won't understand it, they'll be terrified by it, they'll react with anger and violence. Think of your high school. 67% of human beings will never have a thought that wasn't put there explicitly by someone else. 67% of
those people will kill you if you transgress one of those thoughts that was implanted in them. The majority of people are stupid, and the majority of that majority are violent. So you don't overload the circuits. You give people what they can handle. You make all the facts available but you also give them a minimum of a safety cap so the dopes won't go where they shouldn't by accident. And it also helps build some intellectual muscle to have to work for it a bit. I always thought every smart kid should go to Catholic school -- first to learn real rhetoric and logic, and then to learn the limits of one's teachers and transcend them.
So, yeah, the conveyor belt of academia is part of the betrayal, and one reason I'm not on it anymore.
But the main reason is there has been an industrialization of anti-intellectual demagoguery by the Right all in the service of lowering the top marginal rate with literally no heed for any human consideration.
