It Must Be True, It’s on the Internet
I fell into a YouTube rabbit hole. I was not looking for “Sovereign Citizen” courtroom dramas when I accidentally clicked on a video next to the book review I had searched for. An internet rocket scientist was arguing with a black-robed judge; a disagreement in which said rocket scientist claimed he was above the law because he was traveling, not driving. No, really. That was his actual defense. He went on, when asked if he understood the judge’s instructions, said he did not “stand under” the magistrate, and that he was a foreign national and therefore was immune to U.S. traffic laws.
Yes, he really did say that.
Because I watched the video all the way to the rocket scientist’s removal from the courtroom by a large specimen of police officer, YouTube’s algorithm fed me more knuckle-draggers who challenged the authority of the courts. One of them argued against the court’s jurisdiction because the Constitution gave him immunity from state and local statutes, another declared that the legal system awas out to “get” him. All of them had flooded the courts with sheaves of papers downloaded online, papers filled with invalid legal jargon that purported to “prove” their innocence or the court’s guilt, or both.
I’ve written before about the awe-inspiring lack of intelligence Americans demonstrate when they have the bullhorn and the podium, but this was a level of willful ignorance beyond any previous experience. The Sovereign Citizen movement is the crowning achievement of the American education system.
An elementary school teacher once told her science class, “There is no such thing as condensation and evaporation; God makes it rain.” Later, on reflection, I wondered how many of that class of some thirty students bought into that fount of wisdom and authority. I assume that some of them are now Sovereign Citizens.
Having obtained some experience with the anti-intellectual mob, I have come to see that a third of that classroom, and an equal percentage of the American population, have agreed to that teacher’s medieval superstition; that is ten kids in the unqualified teacher’s classroom that day, and ninety-three million adult Americans.
So, I came here today with the intent to, again, bash the gross stupidity American people and the abject failure of our education system. But then, in reading Michael Shermer’s Truth, my contempt for the anti-intellectualist fervor that has occupied the nation from its earliest days was softened. Shermer brings into the mix the mix journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon’s Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy (2021). I read an excerpt about the problem of race in America that elevated my low estimation of America’s intelligence back to its original dimensions.
Michael Shermer almost convinced me that our hate and ignorance add up to small numbers. No, I argued: one third of a class of thirty is not a small number; one-third of Americans who support an authoritarian government after a two-year reality TV show from the White House demonstrating incompetence never before seen are not small numbers.
And so, my curmudgeonly love of complaining about the severe lack of thinking I see among my fellow humans has been well served. What would I have to revile if Americans were to suddenly wise up and use the brains that nature gave them?
I would think of something.
Stay tuned.
