Today we have an eclectic collection of articles that address topics ranging from society’s stupidity to war to the younger generation’s lack of historical knowledge and perspective to a reminder of how much better things are today than they were under China Joe. All of these articles are quite informative and entertaining. I hope you enjoy them.
America’s Stupidity Crisis
BY: Kurt Schlicter (May 27, 2026)
America has no shortage of crises. Even during this period of unparalleled prosperity, we face daunting challenges. And perhaps the biggest one is stupidity. There are a lot of stupid people out there. Incredibly stupid. Now, let’s distinguish that from the unwise. Unwise people can be smart but lacking in wisdom. I’m talking about morons. Nitwits. Idiots. I mean, people who can’t comprehend basic stuff. America has a stupidity crisis, and we must act. For too long, the dumb have dominated our society in the sense that everything is directed toward keeping them from fully expressing their dumbness in all its mouth-agape glory. These are the people responsible for hammers that come with warning labels telling you not to hit yourself in the head with a hammer. And they are bringing America down.
Stupidity is a sad fact of life that confronts us at every turn. We are slaves to the whims of people too dumb to remember to breathe, and so much of our society has been designed to cater to and ameliorate the consequences of their foolish choices. Everywhere you look, there is dumb. If you go to McDonald’s—which itself is dumb in an age where the once-yummy Big Mac is now the bland Medium Mac, apparently made with ground earthworms, while the famous French fries have gone from a crispy, tasty treat to a soggy, tasteless mess—the first thing you see is baffled people. They’re either baffled by the little computer screen you’re supposed to default to ordering from, or they’re baffled by the menu when they’re talking to the cashier. It’s McDonald’s. It’s not a hard choice. It’s not something you need to ponder. But they need to ponder. It’s like they’ve never been there before. That’s the thing about stupidity—every day, every experience, every moment is like the very first time they’ve encountered it. “What’s a McNugget?” they inquire, genuinely puzzled. “This hot mustard sauce… Is it hot and does it taste like mustard?”
And the worst part is that these people vote.
So, I got on an airplane the other day. That’s always enough to flush your faith in humanity down one of the things that Herr Oberstoysterfuhrer Graham Platner performs onanism upon. Yet again, we have the first-time phenomenon. It’s like a significant percentage of the passengers have never boarded a plane before. Much like how all happy families are alike, but each unhappy one is unhappy in its own way, every competent airline passenger is the same, but each knucklehead is different in his own way. There are the people lugging a steamer trunk down the aisle until they stop and try to stow it, only to be shocked to find it doesn’t fit in the overhead compartment—just like the last time they lugged the steamer trunk down the aisle, only to be shocked to find it didn’t fit in the overhead compartment.
Then there’s the guy who has to be on his phone having a conversation as he works his way down the aisle. If they want to take it to the next level, they don’t hold it to their ear—they hold it in front of their face on FaceTime with the speaker on so everyone can hear and see the idiot he’s talking to. Yes, because some guy who looks like he got dressed by having a hobo barf on him needs to have vital lines of communication to open while finding his seat.
And let’s not forget the ladies who look like they swallowed a carry-on, waddling down the aisle and getting irritated because their ample flanks are brushing the sides of the seats.
Again, these people vote.
The stupidity of people on social media goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway, even though it’s like pointing out that the sun rises in the east. At least on social media, you can detect clues that someone’s a slack-jawed numbskull pretty quickly. The new all-purpose dummy detector is any reference to either Israel or the Jews. Oh, you know something smart’s coming when you see that. Now, on social media there’s not just the denial of dumbness but the active assertion by people with inactive cerebellums that they are geniuses. There are so many dumb people pretending to be smart on social media that it’s become a cliché. Start with the people who think they’ve got a clever analogy to share.
They never have clever analogies. They are why we should require permits before people can use analogies. My new favorites are the people who analogize Trump’s dealings with Iran to Obama’s JCPOA. OK, because Trump may make a deal with the Iranians does not mean it’s the same thing as Barack Obama making a deal with the Iranians. It’s just not.
Different things are different. One can be good, and the other can be bad. But you’ve got a lot of people looking at their phones, nodding their heads at a parallel that’s not at all parallel.
Oh, and then you have the people who think they are experts on everything. When COVID came along, they were epidemiologists. When tariffs came along, they were economists.
Then the war with Iran begins, and they’re all experts on the Strait of Hormuz despite having been unable to locate it on a map before last Tuesday. That’s the worst kind of dumb person: the one confident in the soundness of his own stupidity.
Which brings us to the Democrats. The competition is pretty heavy, but perhaps the most egregious is AOC, the poster child for unearned self-confidence in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Have you noticed she’s not talking quite as much?
Maybe it’s competition from other idiots, but it’s almost like they’re pushing her aside because every time she opens her mouth about black cowboys or, heaven forbid, economics—“Are these evil billionaires in the room with us now, Sandy?”—someone out there has the revelation that this media-manufactured mannequin doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together.
Oh, but let’s not leave the Republicans out of it. They can be a marvel of stupidity and a demonstration of what happens when lackwittedness is supercharged with arrogance.
Take Thom Tillis and Bill Cassidy. Please. They really thought their voters wouldn’t notice that they had no intention of doing what they had been elected to do. And when their voters essentially told them to go pound sand, they were not merely stunned but offended. And to prove those voters wrong about their disloyalty, they loudly and publicly resolved to be even more disloyal now that they don’t have to worry about facing the electorate anymore. They proudly stand for the principle of lying to the people who elected them because of principles, or something.
That’s not good for their buddies still in office, but it’s good for us. Hey, I’m all for dumb people doing dumb things that hurt themselves. We America-first types are lucky that so many of our enemies are so stupid. It would make it a lot harder if they were cunning. You can say what you want about Mitch McConnell, but that guy was no dummy, and we’re lucky he’s on the way to retirement because he can be a problem. But Thom Tillis? Every time you see him, you hear circus music in your head.
Yet there is hope. Not everyone’s dumb. Trump is smart, but dumb people think he’s dumb. That’s OK. It’s always good to be underestimated. And in society, you occasionally see flashes of appreciation for smart things. I watched the movie Project Hail Mary the other night. It’s about a guy in space, and he solves problems by being smart. People love that movie. That’s because most people love intelligence. They like to see people being smart. They love to see people solve problems. To keep it on the space tip, you remember Apollo? We reveled in how smart we were in solving the problems of space. And now, watching Elon Musk launch rockets and then catch them on the way back down, the smart among us smile while the dumb get mad because he’s been successful and they live at their mom’s place, have $13.22 in their wallet, and can’t find one of their shoes.
Society needs to stop catering to the dumb. We need a society that demands more, that organizes itself around letting the smartest people do their smart things while imposing consequences upon people who do dumb things. Let’s make it uncomfortable to be stupid. Then we’ll probably have fewer stupid people.
And now we just have to figure out a way to keep dumb people from voting.
___________________________________________________________________
War is hell, and peace can be bad too
Freedom is always paid in blood
BY: Don Feder, The Washington Times (May 24, 2026).
War has dominated human history. The best we can do is to minimize its impact. In the past century, it’s possible that almost as many died from peace as from war.
Since the end of World War I – “the war to end war,” in case you’ve forgotten — there has been an interstate conflict, civil war or insurgency roughly every year-and-a-half.
When he was shown the Treaty of Versailles, which marked the end of World War I, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the last commander of the French Army in that conflict, declared: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.”
His prediction came to pass 20 years later.
World War I was followed in quick succession by World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and now Iran.
Our attention is focused on our war with the Islamic republic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict. But there are also civil wars in Sudan, Myanmar, Syria, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, not to mention Israel’s fight against Hamas and Hezbollah, which is part of an Arab-Israeli war that started in 1948 and never ended.
Our international efforts to avoid war have misfired badly. The League of Nations, launched at the end of World War I, was useless.
The United Nations, which was created in the optimistic afterglow of the end of World War II, has become a tool of totalitarians and tyrants. It’s now controlled by a combination of Muslim and Marxist regimes and old-fashioned dictatorships, whose primary purpose is to attack the United States and Israel and undermine real peacekeeping efforts.
If Israel discovered a cure for cancer, the U.N. would condemn it as Zionist aggression.
NATO helped to check the Soviet advance in Europe for a time, but has long since outlived its purpose.
Humanity is an aggressive species. No one wants war — except those who are in the grips of a delusional ideology and the savages who want what you have and are willing to kill you to get it.
Peace only comes through strength and the determination to use it.
The conduct of a war should not be determined by the price of gas or the need to avoid civilian casualties. How many civilians did we kill in bombing Germany and Japan to force an Axis surrender in 1945?
Pope Leo XIV says war never solved anything, thus betraying a tragic ignorance of history.
The Revolutionary War gave America its independence. The Civil War ended the institution of slavery on this continent. World War II stopped the Holocaust and freed Western Europe.
War can be like a surgical instrument used to excise evil.
More than 3,500 have died in Iran since U.S. and Israeli airstrikes began. The Islamic Republic executed 10 times that number for peacefully protesting before the fighting even began. If Iran’s maniacal rulers ever get their hands on nuclear weapons, the carnage will be incalculable.
Pyrrhic peace can lead to more deaths than war.
When the Bolsheviks won the Russian Civil War in 1922, bloodshed on the battlefield ended and a century of firing squads, torture cells, purge trials, planned famines and gulags began.
Deaths in the Chinese Civil War, which ended in 1949, were dwarfed by the body count from the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square and everything else that followed.
In 21 years of fighting (1954-1975), an estimated 2.4 million died on all sides in the Vietnam War, including 58,000 Americans. Then came the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, followed by the Cambodian Killing Fields and an estimated 1.5 million to 3 million deaths in the course of a few months.
Freedom isn’t free. It’s always paid for with blood.
More than 1 million Americans died in all of our wars from 1775 to today. You can thank every one of them for the freest nation on Earth. Someone once asked conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. if there was anything worse than war. He replied yes, slavery.
Genocide is worse too.
Evil is held at bay only by those who are willing to walk the ramparts, gun in hand. When there are too few to keep that watch, a civilization dies.
On Memorial Day, thank the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice to keep us free. As the saying goes: Land of the free because of the brave.
___________________________________________________________________
Have We Forgotten… So Quickly?
BY: Bob Hoge (May 25, 2026)
I hear the pundits on the interwebs. I witness the often-vicious back-and-forth battles on social media. I see commentators whom I once respected descend into antisemitism and conspiracy theories.
Donald Trump has not completely vanquished the Deep State, they say, and his potential deal with Iran is a disaster that shows Operation Epic Fury accomplished nothing. Gas prices are up, which means that his economy is a fraud, and activist judges keep jumping in off the third rope to neuter his agenda, which proves he’s impotent. Detailed House investigative committee hearings that implicate high-ranking officials are often shrugged off as “strongly-worded letters,” with critics saying that they are pointless and that only hard-core consequences are noteworthy.
Of course, in reality, the wheels of justice move slowly, and accountability takes time, but that doesn’t matter to these fair-weather friends. They want heads to (figuratively) roll yesterday, and anything short of that immediate gratification is a failure.
We watch in fury as recalcitrant Senate Republicans refuse to nuke the antiquated filibuster and get things done — knowing full well that the Democrats will make that move immediately if they regain power. I agree — there are simply too many wimpy GOPers who won’t stand up and do what’s needed.
I understand the frustration, but the old adage applies: “Laws are like sausages — it’s better not to see them being made.”
My overall takeaway is different: I don’t think that any of this proves that Donald Trump is a failure; I think it proves how dangerous a world he’s dealing with. His enemies are legion: the mainstream media, the feckless globalist Europeans, Iran, the communist Cubans, the Deep State, the now hard-core extremist Democrat party, and the rising scourge of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Has he delivered on every single promise he’s made? Of course not. Has he magically solved every single geopolitical problem in just a few short months? Nope.
But I worry that for too many conservatives, they have forgotten where we were just 16 months ago. We had a decrepit president in Joe Biden, an inept wannabe successor who couldn’t string a sentence together, a group of rabid Democrat congresscritters who were hell-bent on turning our country into a woke socialist gender-race experiment that would rip our nation into a sad replica of the greatness it once was, a Defense Department War Department that seemingly was focused on us losing as much as possible, a Department of Justice regime that was more obsessed with punishing regular American citizens than it was on combatting criminals, and an autopen-run White House that let tens of millions of unvetted illegal aliens onto our shores.
Not to mention a COVID dictatorship that forced people to take shots that to this day raise questions about their dangerous side effects, and which caused countless people to be fired, have their careers ruined, and their family relationships destroyed.
Those days may be gone for the time being, but we cannot forget.
Trump is just a human being, an imperfect one, just as every human being in the annals of history has been. Do I like every tweet, every utterance? No. Am I a blindly allegiant cultist? Also no. But do I believe we are in almost every measure of life better off than we were just a short time ago? Absolutely yes.
And I feel that too many have forgotten that in the day-to-day sausage-making of politics.
This is not the time for weak knees. With the midterms coming up, the future of our republic is arguably at stake — and we saw what that was like during the Biden-Harris catastrophe.
Sky-high interest rates, people promoted to top jobs based on their skin color or gender identity, not on their merit, and an “America sucks” message broadcast out to the world.
We may have dodged a bullet in November 2024, just as Donald Trump did in July of that same year in Butler, Pennsylvania, but we have certainly not won the war. The Pelosis, Schumers, Hakeems, Newsoms, AOCs, Mamdanis, and their ilk are all still circling, waiting for their chance to strike and turn this country into their wokefest, socialist nightmare.
Think that’s too extreme? Come visit Karen Bass’s dystopian Los Angeles, where entire neighborhoods were burnt down to the ground because of incompetence, or other areas of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s California, where you need poop maps just to navigate the terrain and protect your shoes. This is what they want for you, and they’re determined to deliver that dark vision to your neck of the woods.
If it weren’t for the president, we certainly wouldn’t live in a climate where LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt and CA gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton even have a chance.
Looking to end the communist nightmare in Cuba and confronting the terrorist threat of Iran wouldn’t even be in our thoughts. Joe Biden certainly wasn’t going to do anything.
So while a whole lot of bystanders are busy twisting their knickers, the reality is that we live in an entirely different world than we did less than a year and a half ago. Those who forget to appreciate that fact do so at their own peril.
___________________________________________________________________
Millennials and Gen Z arrogance needs a history lesson
Youthful certainty can become dangerous political manipulation
BY: Everett Piper, The Washington Times (May 23, 2026)
Of all the concerning trends in American politics right now, the juvenile arrogance of today’s millennials and Gen Zers must rank near the top of anyone’s list.
Just look at any social media thread on any given day and the proof reveals itself in spades.
The junior high–ish attitude of, as Bill Maher calls them, “the kids,” is legion, and it exists on both the right and the left. Whether it’s the “Groypers” of Nick Fuentes or the addled acolytes of AOC, the valley-girl cattiness of our rising generation is pervasive.
It doesn’t matter what the topic is; they know more. Suggest that socialism has never worked and never will, and their response is, “OK, boomer.” Point out that no nation has ever taxed itself into prosperity, and yep, you guessed it: “OK, boomer.”
Argue that if you really want to follow the science, you might want to start with acknowledging the biological fact of what it means to be male and female: “OK, boomer.”
Make clear that it might be a good idea to stop an Islamic regime hell-bent on your death and destruction from acquiring nuclear weapons: “OK, boomer.”
The list goes on and on. There literally seems to be no topic about which “the kids” don’t know more than anyone else. Whether it’s climate change, masking, vaccines, sexual identity, fiscal policy, education, the Electoral College, parenting, packing the courts, Charlie Kirk’s murder, Mossad, marriage or morality, the response is always the same: “OK, boomer.”
The thoughtlessness of the rejoinder is stunning. It’s as if an entire generation (or two) has been brainwashed to dismiss reality, logic and any semblance of rational thought and to simply respond with a flip of the hair, a roll of the eyes and, yes, the mindless and, oh so predictable, “OK, boomer.”
If you have a sense of deja vu here, you should. Stories of the pitfalls of youthful arrogance are as old as time.
Whether it be the medieval tale of the Pied Piper playing his music as all the children of Hamelin dance off to their death or the story of Robespierre rallying the know-it-all twentysomethings of France to cut off everyone’s heads, the moral is the same: A bunch of uninformed and poorly educated perpetual Peter Pans can be easily manipulated to do just about anything, even if the end result is their own neck in the guillotine.
Consider the cautionary tale of Mao’s Red Guard. Anyone who has even a mediocre public-school education should know it.
In 1966, Chairman Mao Zedong recognized that one of the best ways to bend his country to his political will was to exploit the idealism and ignorance of the Chinese youth. Mao knew that the poorly informed idealism of his own “Gen Z-ers” could be easily manipulated to consolidate his power and crush his opposition.
In other words, he understood very well that the analogy of “useful idiots” that Bogdan Raditsa coined in October 1946 was spot on and that he could easily use such fools to his advantage.
And that’s exactly what he did. Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Mao “played” his nation’s youth like a fiddle. He rallied Chinese teenagers and college students to foment chaos. As his young proteges worked feverishly to completely dismantle all that their parents had left them, he sat back and watched Rome burn.
This is the way one writer summarizes it. “Mao manipulated them, channeling their idealism [and ignorance] into a mass political weapon … He encouraged the students to attack traditions and weaken rivals … He used their sense of superiority. He amplified it through propaganda … and once mobilized, he pushed the youth to denounce teachers, party officials, intellectuals, and even their own parents.”
Mao was the master puppeteer of what was essentially the “OK, boomer” movement of his time, one that resulted in millions of people being killed and or imprisoned.
But here’s the take-home that today’s “smarter-than-thou” social media influencers seem to miss. Among the millions marched off to their deaths were the students themselves.
Why? Because Mao knew only too well how dangerous the untethered arrogance of the ignorant masses was — and so he used the power they had given him to forcibly “relocate” them to “reeducation camps” where they would either conform as obedient lemmings or die in hard labor.
George Santayana once warned, “He who doesn’t learn the lessons of history is doomed to repeat them,” and G.K. Chesterton chimed in: “The old man is always wrong, and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him.”
Oh, that our next generation takes a spoonful of humility and listens to the likes of Chesterton, Santayana and even their own parents and grandparents, for just two seconds before reflexively typing, “OK, boomer” to this article.
GFK
Observations From The Fifth Estate 