Suddenly, Americans Have a Huge Appetite for Raw Stupidity

Readers from outside the U.S. often express how perplexed they are about the goings on here.  In particular, where did Americans’ sudden appetite for sheer stupidity spring from?  “You folks seemed fairly intelligent until just a few years ago,” someone said to me. “What happened?”

A partial answer is the degradation in our education system, but that doesn’t really explain the extreme velocity toward idiocy.  And it’s true that before 2016, someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene would not have stood a chance of being elected to Congress.

She seems not to understand that our public health response to a viral-based pandemic may need to be different from our policies on a non-contagious disease.