Elite censorship and targeting of political opponents have created a self-justifying feedback loop. Don’t like a policy? Claim that the policy harms a given constituency, say that the policy’s supporters are attacking said constituency, and then claim that the attackers’ ideas don’t merit consideration—or even that the attackers deserve retaliatory or liberationist violence.

This rhetorical approach has made the elite intellectually lazy, since they feel no need to engage ideas on their merits. Consider that 2020 MIT article, which uses “anti-maskers” belief in “doing your own research” as a smear. Most “media literacy” programs use the same sleight-of-hand: instead of teaching people how to engage with information, they identify for people which sources of information are safe—generally those so defined by the government and its favored interests. It’s much easier to dismiss a speaker out of hand than to engage with his views.

[This has roots going back much farther than the authors of this essay postulate. We stopped providing classical education that served to teach people how to think decades ago, relying on the philosophy and moral foundations of Western civilization. We cut that off, left students to consider all history poisoned, and then started teaching them WHAT to think, usually based on post-modernist, nihilist, and/or Maoist/Marxist ideologies. We have created generations of people who can’t debate or even deal with dissenting thought, so rather than engage in real argument, they treat all contradictory thinking as heresy and punish it accordingly. This isn’t disdain — it’s intellectual and ideological panic. — Ed]