(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) While The Simpsons most often gets credit for predicting the future, no film seems as prescient in a broader overall sense as Mike Judge’s 2006 satirical comedy Idiocracy.
The cult classic from the creator of Beavis and Butthead revolves around a contemporary slacker put into a time capsule, who awakens in a dystopic, unfamiliar world where America’s consumerist culture has put evolution into reverse. Suddenly the most intelligent person alive, the hero, No Idea, is taxed with restoring common sense to a country so helpless that it is on the brink of total collapse.
Just 16 years since its release, the only thing that seems implausible is how quickly it all happened.
A PARADE OF INCOMPETENCE
Despite the Left’s well-coordinated push to gaslight the public, there are clues all around that this new brand of Brandon Democrats may not actually believe what they espouse.
For instance, the speedy effort to deport 50 illegal immigrants from Martha’s Vineyard and then target Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis with every frivolous lawfare and PR tactic in their Alinsky toolbox—for doing things, no less, that they themselves have spent the last 20 months doing—shows how disingenuous and devoid of conviction they truly are.
And that is just the latest example.
When all the deflective tactics are exhausted, the truth often comes to light, as Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot confirmed after waging ad hominem attacks on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for sending illegals from his state to the Windy “Sanctuary” City.
“This is not a new challenge for us,” Lightfoot finally admitted last week when caught wrangling the migrant chattel out of Chicago and into a neighboring, Republican-run suburb.
“We need federal support. Resources, communication, and collaboration, and that has to come in short order,” she continued. “This is a national problem. It needs a national solution. Cities and states cannot be left to fend for ourselves.”
Democrat Mayor Lori Lightfoot on illegal immigrants arriving in Chicago:
Biden “has to step up. This is not a new challenge at the border. We need federal support.” pic.twitter.com/uDgGHdMh7y
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 15, 2022
The same type of backpedalling was, of course, true of President Joe Biden himself, who pronounced in a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday that the coronavirus pandmic was over—only to have the statement walked back by his handlers upon realizing its serious political implications.
Joe Biden: "The pandemic is over"pic.twitter.com/ME1dUY1TmU
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) September 19, 2022
Meanwhile the inconsistent messaging and arbitrary rules from leading health officials like Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have practically telegraphed their own insecure doubts about their scientific authority.
And, in June, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen finally issued a mea culpa about her incompetence in handling inflation—after a year of insisting it was transitory—but only because it had become too obvious to deny with the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate hikes on the horizon.
Political pollsters, likewise, are ready to admit that their push polls showing a sudden wave of Democrat momentum this summer—reported nonstop in mainstream media—were utter bunk.
In reality, nothing has changed from the past polling failures of 2016 and 2020 (and a 2018 midterm that was projected to be much worse than it actually was).
Now that the Biden administration has essentially classified “MAGA Republicans” as a threat to democracy marshaling federal law enforcement to focus on them. This move has created a new type of voter that will be even harder to poll or even estimate.
— Robert C. Cahaly (@RobertCahaly) September 17, 2022
CIRCULAR FIRING SQUAD
Most egregious of all are the current justice system and intelligence community.
The very agencies that wrote the book on conducting psychological warfare could not, under the stewardship of ideologues like Attorney General Merrick Garland, fool anyone as to the true nature of their partisan intentions.
Garland’s Justice Department prosecutors have regularly relied upon circular reasoning to justify their raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, for example.
In true Catch-22 form, they have demanded that Trump’s legal defense provide a basis for arguing that Trump is entitled to an independent review of classified materials, but they won’t allow access to the materials for the lawyers to know what those materials actually contain.
Meanwhile, DOJ leakers have been happy to offer the media unverifiable information that would undermine Trump’s standing in advance of the midterm election.
But after two performative impeachment attempts (remember the unnamed whistleblower?) and the political theater of the Jan. 6 commission, the notion that Democrats are continuing to use the same playbook and expecting voters to fall for it seems an insult to the intelligence of many.
Then again, even some far-left lawmakers do appear to have been duped by their own disinformation.
In Congress on Wednesday, Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y.—who has not been shy about lobbing stink bombs of inflammatory rhetoric—incredibly tried to claim on the House floor that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick had been bludgeoned to death while responding to the Jan. 6, 2021, uprising at the U.S. Capitol—not the victim of a stroke, as certified by the Washington, D.C., medical examiner.
After being called out by Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., Jones—who thankfully lost his primary for re-election—proceeded to double down on the bogus claims in flagrant disregard of the factual record.
“Are you denying that at least one Capitol police officer was murdered in the midst of what happened on Jan. 6?” Jones demanded.
“I think I am denying,” replied the factually accurate but flabbergasted Bishop.
WATCH: Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY) says that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was "bludgeoned to death" on January 6 and is left looking like a fool when @RepDanBishop reminds him that was a lie and the medical examiner ruled he died of natural causes. pic.twitter.com/jluOdH7NEV
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 21, 2022
THE WAR ON CHILDREN
These incidents raise the all-too-frequent question of whether the perpetrators are sincerely putting their best foot forward and are simply out of their league—or, conversely, whether they are lying to mask their truly malignant intentions.
Most likely, it is some combination thereof.
While ethically bankrupt left-wing operatives of the past may have intentionally lied to manipulate the public into supporting harmful policies, the current crop, after a lifetime of being groomed into willful ignorance, is just too dumb to know otherwise.
The failings of the education system to promote actual reasoning ability and the persistence of the media to let stupidity go unchecked have taken an irreparable toll on those too deeply invested in Democrats’ complex propaganda machines to break free.
Worse yet, what these institutions have done with the minds of hapless Americans, woke medical professionals are now seeking to do with their bodies—inducting them into a grand-scale social experiment that will leave them permanently marred.
Several well-known watchdogs—including the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo and Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik—have been busy exposing pediatric hospitals’ attempts to normalize and institutionalize transgenderism.
Clearly, the line has been crossed between promoting tolerance of diverse lifestyles and actively attempting to proselytize or indoctrinate people to engage in sexual deviancy—even at the risk of violating their Hippocratic oath.
From their outward rhetoric, one might never know that there were private compunctions about this drastic shift in medical care.
But after Walsh ran a recent exposé on Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s programs encouraging adolescent gender transitions—including hormone treatments and genital surgery—the hospital left no doubt about its guilty conscience by taking down the website for its transgender clinic.
FOLLOW THE MONEY
Walsh’s reporting, in fact, revealed the underlying motive that hospitals like Vanderbilt are using to justify these nefarious procedures: money.
Vanderbilt doctor Shayne Taylor said in a 2018 video that clinic could rake in up to $40,000 on “top surgery” (aka double mastectomy) alone.
Vanderbilt opened its trans clinic in 2018. During a lecture the same year, Dr. Shayne Taylor explained how she convinced Nashville to get into the gender transition game. She emphasized that it's a "big money maker," especially because the surgeries require a lot of "follow ups" pic.twitter.com/zedM7HBCBe
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 20, 2022
In any other business, pursuit of the filthy lucre by meeting the demands of customers and clients might be a laudable strategy.
Not so for institutions that must provide sound expert advice and evenhanded judgment to help their stakeholders make informed personal decisions.
Like trying to irrigate plants with Brawndo™ energy drink, what you crave and what you need may not always be the same.
In addition to hospitals selling out, colleges and institutes of higher learning are inherently moneymaking operations—a fact that hasn’t been lost on the victims of Biden’s recent student-loan hustle, with critics arguing that taxpayer subsidies for poor educational choices will simply encourage already overpriced indoctrination centers to jack up their tuition.
Accordingly, if there were no financial incentives to offer majors that are the academic equivalent of transgender bottom surgery, they wouldn’t.
Thus, we see the consequences of the Left’s exploitative customer-service model, peddling its toxic wares to the lowest common denominator of dupable nitwits—and usually billing Uncle Sam for its efforts, regardless of the results.
The intellectual sterility it promotes has now worked its way up the ranks to the highest office in the land, and actual sterility is soon to follow.
But that may be a silver lining after all.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at truthsocial.com/@bensellers.
