'You Are a Genius' -US 4th Circuit Court of Appeals

"This should be shocking not only to judges, but to *the intuitive sense of liberty* that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear."

Do you want to be smart? Or do you want to be stupid?

We can still avert “Idiocracy”

The Heritage Foundation wants you to be stupid. They want you to fail. They want the United States of America to become a failed state. But that’s only possible if we fail as individuals. And that can only happen if we’re idiots.

On Friday NPR reported Trump’s State Department is “substantially scaling back” the issuance of annual human rights reports, moving to cover only those required by law—and meagerly and capriciously so at that.

By ending the United States’ role as a human rights watchdog, Trump and his backers have granted a free pass to regimes rife with corruption, gender-based violence, and the suppression of free speech. Sound familiar? Perhaps most chillingly the U.S. will no longer expose foreign nations’ records of detainee abuse and poor prison conditions.

And instead of treating all reports uniformly—impoverished though they may be—reports on countries crucial to the Trump Administration such as Hungary, El Salvador, Russia and South Africa will pass through a selective edit by a political appointee.

This is an attack on the core principle of accountability in government. It’s an endorsement of the same illiberal to outright tyrannical practices abroad that the techno-fascists are trying to instill at home. And it’s designed to make us stupid. Where knowledge is power, this administration is scaling back the public’s awareness and by extension our collective agency.

A cynical response to this move would acknowledge that domestic human rights abuses are by no means new, that American soft power is derived from the practice of pointing the finger abroad where we lack the moral high ground at home—that the old way is less about human dignity and more about raw state power.

An even more cynical reaction would hold that MAGA, the tech-bro would-be overlords who rooted for the matrix in The Matrix, and the Heritage Foundation all want to make us as stupid as possible because an ignorant populace can be manipulated and plied like putty:

• When the FDA ceases regular safety inspections, that doesn’t merely prevent our food from being dangerous—it keeps us guessing about what is even safe to eat.

• When NOAA regional climate centers go dark, that doesn’t stop hurricanes from landing—it only prevents us from knowing where or when.

• When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau closes, purveyors of financial products can still rip us off—we just know less about the con job and how to seek justice.

• And when Trump fires independent inspectors and threatens bureaucrats who don’t play along with his coup d’état, corruption and fascism still exist—but the lid is pulled over our eyes.

So while they systematically imperil us, they’re very deliberately undermining our ability to know what the hell is even going on.

As

John Ganz

reminds us, the seeds of our national unraveling were planted in 1992 when libertarian Murray Rothbard thundered: “We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal…We shall repeal the 20^th century.”

But today’s thugs-in-chief want to go even further: they want to repeal the enlightenment. They want to break the clock of modernity and modern society. The ascendant Elon Musk/Peter Thiel wing of the GOP champions “techno-feudalism” for precisely this reason. They don’t just want us to be dumb. They want us to be flat out illiterate.

This warped vision makes sense, in a demented sort of way. If you perceive regular people as “non-playable characters” in a video game, it can be a little confusing when those people display curiosity or agency or—gasp!—opposition to your agenda. For Musk, Theil and

Bill Maher

it may actually seem easier to eliminate the intellectual power we have rather than reconcile the contradiction between a free-thinking populace and the idiots they want us to be.

But we know this to be a nihilistic fantasy. We’re not going back—not to the 19^th century and not to the 14^th century. Even if we lose our ability to read and write, they will never kill off our ability to think for ourselves.

This week the 4^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a Trump Administration appeal of District Judge Paula Xinis’ decision probing the government’s defiance of her previous order that the wrongly detained and deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia be returned to the United States:

"It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter," Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote for the court. "But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done."

"This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

Your intuitive sense. Your innate, god-given understanding of right and wrong, of truth versus deceit. They can work overtime to invert reality, label everything fake news, and bury our nation’s proud historical place as a purveyor of knowledge. But they’ll never take away your reasonable mind or your well-wizened spirit.

The framers pointed to your inherent genius when they declared it self-evident that we are all created equal, endowed with certain unalienable rights such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The most powerful AI will never come close to the real and irreplaceable aptitude of an organic human being. Empathy is brilliant. Creativity is clever. Kindness is savvy. Insight is bright. Intuition is intelligent. Common sense is sharp. Resilience is shrewd. Love is wise. Curiosity is genius.

The 2006 satirical film Idiocracy imagines a future where human evolution stumbles backward, where stupidity beats out intelligence in our species’ battle for the survival of the fittest. While hysterically funny and vicious in its critique of our times, the extreme scenario painted by the film will never come to pass—no matter how many idiots Elon Musk aspires to breed. Idiocy—however cultivated and incentivized—will never, ever beat out intelligence. For better or worse, human evolution only moves in one direction.

But we must reframe our understanding of intelligence. We have to appreciate and revere the ways that every one of us is smart. And not in the cringeworthy, millennial-centric participation trophy sense of the word. I’m talking about actual intelligence. We’ve gotten to a place in society where smarts are rated on a linear scale defined by test scores, vocabulary sizes, and bank balances.

Actual smarts cannot be determined by an IQ test any more realistically than they can be measured by a caliper. The most powerful “artificial intelligence” large language model will never come close to the real and irreplaceable aptitude of an organic human being.

Empathy is brilliant. Creativity is clever. Kindness is savvy. Insight is bright. Intuition is intelligent. Common sense is sharp. Resilience is shrewd. Love is wise. Curiosity is genius. (

Elad Nehorai

gets it.)

As usual, Elad Nehorai gets it.

The only way to be stupid is to stop caring. To cease being curious. To stop asking questions. The only way to lose is by giving up our individual and collective intelligence. Democracy dies when the mind and the spirit starve—not for a lack of available nourishment, but for a lack of an appetite.

Make no mistake: Trump and co. are doing everything in their power to drive our country into a failed state. But as long as we stay hungry, we cannot fail as a people. As long as we remain curious, we will not falter as a species. For as long as you care, you will never fail as a person.

It is self-evident.

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