Those Who Successfully Gutted the American Educational System Are Now Reaping the Rewards
We’re just now learning about the factors that put Trump back into the White House. In particular, too few voters are capable of understanding the issues, and, as a consequence, too few showed up at the polls.
Many people, me included, mistakenly supposed that the threat of a full-on fascist in the White House was going to bring voters out of the woodwork After all, do Americans really want to be led by someone who admires the world’s dictators and clearly wants to become one himself?
The answer is that most of them simply don’t care. Involvement in politics would require effort, e.g., taking a few minutes to look up words like “authoritarian,” and familiarizing themselves with the issues covered in Project 2025, a federal policy agenda and blueprint for a radical restructuring of the executive branch, key components of which include:
• Opposing abortion and reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants’ rights, and racial equity.
• Targeting immigrant communities through mass deportations and raids, ending birthright citizenship, separating families, and dismantling our nation’s asylum system.
Now that all this is clear, an important question arises: What about America’s future, given that our investment in educating our young people is under greater attack with each passing year? I know a young person who buys his beer at a convenience store whose Gen Z clerk was unaware that the United States had an election earlier this week. What’s that level of ignorance going to look like when it keeps increasing exponentially?
Are they laughing? In a word, no. Quite the contrary.
When Americans went to the polls earlier this week, the idea expressed in the meme here went from a real possibility to a pipe dream.
Now what? We can start by feeling sorry for many different groups of people, mostly here, but some abroad as well, who will experience terrible consequences of Trump’s re-election, either directly or indirectly.
When American actor (then called an “actress”) Katherine Hepburn made this statement in the middle of the 20th Century, it hit home with our country’s women. After all, how many females at the time could expect to live with the same rights and privileges as men?
The author of the meme needs to understand the use of apostrophes.
Perhaps the saddest single feature of our world today, and the United States in particular, is what we do with power.
Almost all Americans have a passionate interest in the outcome of today’s presidential election, but how many of us see these results as something that will be meticulously studied by historians over the coming decades?
It’s true that Trump supporters don’t care about morality, legality, or the truth. But almost half of these American voters do have things they care about very deeply: White Nationalism, the rejection of science, and the end of women’s rights.
At left is another good example of a “straw man fallacy,” one that occurs “when someone misrepresents an opponent’s argument in order to make it easier to attack and refute. The person using the fallacy pretends to be arguing against their opponent’s original position, but instead creates a distorted version of it that is easy to rebuke.”
