https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/year-living-stupidly-bruce-thornton/
In 2021, political, social, and cultural trends that had been developing for decades reached a level of surreal absurdity. Under the stress of the pandemic crisis, we witnessed our alleged “cognitive elites” in government, schools, popular culture, and media saying and doing things that an illiterate peasant in the 18th century would consider the words and deeds of a lunatic. In every dimension of our existence, gross violations of logic and common sense were shamelessly indulged, the lies never acknowledged even when exposed.
The presidency of Donald Trump was the accelerant of these developments. The bipartisan ruling elite found the straight-talking, braggadocios celebrity plutocrat a gross insult to their technocratic pretensions and guild “norms.” The depth of his challenge was especially obvious in the corporate legacy-media, which colluded with the progressive Democrats to inflate preposterous rumors of “collusion” with Russia into existential crises endangering “our democracy.”
Even when two years of a dishonest, corrupt investigation by the special counsel couldn’t provide a scintilla of legitimate evidence to support these charges, the Dems and their media flunkeys simply moved on to the next fabrication. The four-hour mini-riot at the Capitol building on January 6 was similarly inflated into an “insurrection” and assault on the same “temple of democracy” that progressives have been vandalizing for over a century. The House conducted a second dead-end impeachment of Trump, and when that collapsed, shifted to a still-ongoing investigation of the January 6 protests in order to short-circuit our democratic process by preemptively disqualifying Trump from the 2024 election.
The dishonesty, hypocrisy, and sheer cognitive incoherence of the reaction to a president who for all his crude and insulting rhetoric, had one of the most successful first terms of a president in the postwar period––a judgement the validity of which it took “Joe Biden,” the simulacrum of a president, less than a year of failures and disasters to confirm. Inflation, supply-chain bottle-necks, unfilled jobs, hysterical covid protocols, drunken-sailor spending, exploding violent crime, a dishonorable abandonment of Afghanistan, geopolitical adventurism by our rivals and enemies, loss of our energy independence, runaway gasoline prices, and schools blatantly indoctrinating students with transgender and literally racist propaganda––all are the wages of the Trumpophobia epidemic.