The Poison that Is Killing America

The Mueller report came back after almost two years of work and millions of dollars of reactionary political efforts aimed at removing an American president. The results are devastating to the NeverTrump community. They were galvanized over the fantasy theme of President Trump colluding with the government of Russia to prevent secretary of state Clinton from becoming president. The pathological behavior of our epistemological communities is the latest escalation in our intellectual culture adapting itself to ever more Jacobin techniques of propaganda. We must recognize and resist this intellectual culture. This epistemological poisoning is killing America.

My colleague Dr. Robert Denton and I documented this problem in our 2017 book The Social Fragmentation and Decline of American Democracy. We highlight the corrosive social forces tearing us apart. We nonetheless conclude that a recovery is possible. For this better world to come about, we must become more fully aware of the depth and causes of our epistemological poisoning. Our journalists, academics, movie stars, and federal government agencies are locked in a reactionary anti-American methodology that is killing our nation. The simple fact that U.S. life expectancy has declined for three years in a row without serious concern by our cultural elite is a passive endorsement of the attack on red-state America. America ought to be celebrating a serious political success presently: the defeat of ISIS. We cannot celebrate this success among our intellectual elite because it contradicts an important narrative: President Trump caused the deaths of more than 50 Muslim worshipers in New Zealand. Yet millions of Muslim lives have been saved by ending the sovereignty of ISIS after more than 50,000 Muslims were savagely murdered by Islamic supremacist Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. The supremacist allies of ISIS in Nigeria, Somalia, and the Philippines are continuing to kill Christians and anyone who differs from their beliefs by the hundreds. The American public needs to defend itself against the false charge of "Islamophobia" raised against those who publicly criticize this media spectatorship surrounding the false narrative of American President Trump causing the killings in New Zealand. The rise of ISIS is tied to the pathological habits of our intellectual culture. Beginning in 2004, our media overlords demanded a premature withdrawal from Iraq because there never were "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. Though this is demonstrably false, President Obama was largely elected on this pathological premise so that tens of thousands of Muslims could be more effectively killed by Islamic supremacists across the world. The U.S. released Baghdadi from prison by abandoning Iraq prematurely. We militarily defeated ISIS by re-entering the nation our intellectual culture demanded we leave in 2006. We cannot defeat our media masters until we turn their abuse of language against them. Our intellectual overlords are Islamophobic. They do not care if Muslims are killed by Islamic extremists like Al Shabaab and Boko Haram. They will not credit Republican presidents fighting these Islamic supremacists groups who primarily kill Muslims. The anti–Republican president narrative of 2004 killed hundreds of American troops and thousands of innocent Iraqis as our intellectual culture worked to create another "Vietnam" narrative. President Trump himself derides Iraq as one of the worst decisions ever made while escalating the U.S. troop presence in Iraq to defeat ISIS. Trump's contradictory daily behavior acts like a buzzsaw against an intellectual culture aiming to deconstruct America with Alinsky-styled rhetorical tools. At home, roughly 200 to 300 Americans are dying each day from the deformities of health care wrought by the Affordable Care Act, but we are not allowed to challenge these partisan premises because it is a signature achievement of a president our intellectual culture reveres for his efforts to "transform" us. The dismantling of the ACA will likely begin to allow free markets to serve Americans better, but we must as a wise public resist the Jonathan Grubers who intellectually abuse us and lie to us in order to get the Platonic order of their own utopian fantasies. All of these statist fantasies should have been demonstrable in state experiments such as Bernie Sanders's Vermont and Jerry Brown's California. Yet these smaller-scale experiments do not work, and our intellectual culture is well aware of this. The current crop of more than a dozen presidential aspirants have a near uniform affection for "Medicare for all" that would dramatically expand the public-sector control of health care and accelerate the more than 10 million enrollments "achieved" under the ACA. In an intellectually honest culture, the disastrous decline of U.S. life expectancy would easily discredit such a pathological proposal. That is not the case because our pundit class does not analyze the defects of the ACA in relation to the positive results of free markets. The analysis proceeds from a neo-Marxist view of "capitalist versus socialist." Intellectuals pretend to be pleasantly mystified that so many people under 30 appreciate socialism. This is because the reactionary professoriate indoctrinates students about "capitalism" and its immoral ends. Were any other institutions so committed to such a narrow ideological agenda, they would lose their tax-exempt status, but not America's colleges and universities. Professor Jason Hill's "We Have Overcome" is an ideal rejoinder by one professor willing to talk honestly about what is being done to young people on our campuses. The two-year obsession with proving that President Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to corrupt a presidential election is a testament to the stubborn pathology that holds our intellectual culture to its deconstructive mission aimed at the American soul. The American public must resist by employing the same rhetorical warrants against this intellectual juggernaut that were used to build this epistemological nightmare. Our intellectual overlords are racist, sexist, and Islamophobic — not the public. President Trump did not incite the ecological white supremacist who committed the atrocious murders of Muslims. The extravagant intellectual fantasy themes carried out by our official interpreters are a threat here at home and abroad. Dr. Ben Voth is an associate professor of corporate communication and public affairs and director of speech and debate at Southern Methodist University. He is author of three academic books on how societies engage in deception to harm human individuals.