Some of you on this website might be old enough to have posessed an email adress in 1995. In which case, you would have been likely to get The Long March spam in your inbox. For those of you who have, I'm sorry to bring it up again; for those of you who haven't, its basically a long essay about how white people are better than everyone else.
For anyone who is thinking, even for a split second, that it might be true, one need only witness the current crop of Republican politicians to realize that it could not possibly be. The generation of conservative US lawmakers raised on this sort of thinking have turned out to be some of the most pig-ignorant buffoons ever to set foot in Washington.
A few examples:
-- Sue Lowden saying people could pay for healthcare by bartering chickens
-- Rep. Hank Johnson saying Guam might capsize
-- Kellyanne Conway saying that the CIA could tap microwave ovens
Matt Gaetz calling impeachment "The zenith of cancel culture"
-- Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green calling the Gestapo "gazpacho"
-- Rep. Clay Higgins with the "woke sky" tweet
-- Rep. Lauren Boebert claiming there are only 10 amendments to the US Constitution
-- Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene blaming California wildfires on an orbital laser
-- Rep. Lauren Boebert putting out press materials for an impeachment titled "IMEACH BIDEN"
-- Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene calling for Nancy Pelosi to be executed for treason
-- Rep. Lauren Boebert claiming that her primary opponent sells "hot hemp"
And lest you think I'm just picking on those two yahoos:
-- Rep. Louis Gohmert suggesting that the U.S. Forest Service could alter the moon's orbit to affect climate change.
This is the Master Race? This a level of ignorance that would have been unacceptable in 1803, let alone 2022. Granted, many of these people are coming from some of the worst educational environments in the country. But the fact that they didn't try to make up for their crappy schooling by seeking knowledge beyond what they'd been told is on them.
Or is it? Many of these people are also coming from home environments where their elders teach them to never question what daddy says. It's not like flat-out racists in decades prior have necessarily been morons -- you could call Cecil Rhodes a scoundrel, a tyrant, a scourge upon the earth, sure, but he didn't get as far as he did with an intellect the size of a pea. But people like Cecil Rhodes and Adolf Hitler and Robert Moses all had decent educations. Even if their own White Supremacy led them to be overconfident, they had knowledge to work with.
These people, though...
I had a political science course in college where the professor did a lot of complaining about how there aren't enough conservative professors in academia. He made the point that academia wasn't a friendly environment for American political conservatism. I eventually told him that the American public had always been distrustful of academics in the first place, and that most of that sentiment was now carried in the Republican party. Well, that was ten years ago. It's only been amplified since then. These people don't WANT to be smart. Literally, the Texas Republican party put out a draft platform in 2012 that opposed critical thinking.
One wonders how people like Lauren Boebert and Louis Gohmert even managed to run a political campaign. Maybe someone was holding their hands most of the way.