The new favorite adjective of the unguided left is "toxic." Toxic masculinity, toxic racism, toxic this, toxic that. The real problem today is toxic ignorance.

Lack of education, lack of facts, lack of tolerance, and lack of grounding principles have weakened the immune system of society and made it vulnerable to the ravages of toxic ignorance. It's easy to call screaming throngs "stupid," but their stupid conduct has at its source ignorance — lack of information combined with lack of perspective.

Many factors have combined over the last 50 years to remove the moral scaffolding into which we fit incoming information and prioritize it. Judeo-Christian values have been demonized and replaced with relativism. Relativism implies that nothing is all good or all bad, all wrong or all right. There are no justified priorities. Live and let live. Once this took hold, toxic education stepped into the breach and indoctrinated students with substitutes for what used to be "right" and "wrong." The only truth is your own personal well-being. So teachers set about redefining history and interpreting ideas with which the left disagrees as harm to one's person.

This makes it a small step to say "speech is violence." Golly, I might get hurt! That milestone has long passed, and added to it is "silence is violence." Wow, maybe I'm being hurt and I don't even know it!

Actual history is being replaced by dopey but powerful ideas. Today's teachers tell our youths that America was full of noble savages living in peace before Europeans came and annihilated them. A moment's thought to the idea would suggest that if those people hadn't come here, what do you think would have happened? A little more thought might point out that we didn't invent local traditions such as scalping.

There are an alarming number of issues like this that have been weaponized and used as cudgels on the common sense of our young people. Those people are now coming into leadership positions in our society. When their malleability encounters ambition, they dive full speed ahead into their notion of success. They say the same things over and over, treating the public as they have been treated. The more mature public sees them as the ranting roosters they are and doesn't believe them. This sends them into a state of hysteria. "I said this five times — why don't you get it?" When they use their accumulated bum dope to draw conclusions, we adults know better. No, we don't want to pay more taxes so you can retrofit buildings to be "greener" and create more bird-dicing wind farms and bird-incinerating solar farms.

Ignorance, lack of critical thinking ability, and narcissism have led people to do things that are incredibly short-sighted. They put listening devices in their homes that listen to everything they say, waiting for the word "Alexa." They put cameras and microphones into the rooms of their children. They turn social media facsimiles of people into their best friends — all the while forgetting how valuable all this access and gathered data is to those who wish to do harm to them or simply to make profit from them. If something is free, you are the product. If you can remotely unlock your door, so can someone else.

There is an antidote to chronic ignorance: factual information. The four-year university degree paradigm meant something when there were few books and fewer scholars. Now it's just a way to prostitute heritage and make money. Now anyone can educate himself — there is no excuse for ignorance.

How much time do our future leaders spend educating themselves? When someone states a questionable "fact," do they stop and check it out in a couple of ways, or do they just believe what someone who is a "professor" professes? Congressman Nadler certainly hopes it's the latter.

Toxic ignorance has weakened the last two generations of new adults. It has made them vulnerable to manipulation by the better informed. In the absence of perspective, their anger is easily invoked and, sadly, easily metastasized into hatred. Hatred is the most toxic sentiment a human heart can harbor. The half-life of hatred is far longer that the life expectancy of any of us.

Take the cure for toxic ignorance: man up and educate yourself.