Note from the OP: this is an opinion piece, not a news piece.
On Wednesday, the news was all about a big bag of wind destroying Florida and flooding the South, spreading destruction and threatening pestilence and death.
Then there's Hurricane Idalia.
Also on Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell froze and stood motionless in front of an assembly of reporters — for the second time this summer — so that's encouraging.
But seriously, folks. Last Thursday, Donald Trump turned a 22-minute booking for a felony indictment in Georgia into a six-hour media special, complete with a larger motorcade than the actual president's — with dozens of camera lights on the runway and a chopper-talk session.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden, the aforementioned actual president, quietly lent assistance to Hawaii after the devastating wildfires on Maui, for which he was criticized by Republican members of Congress. He also met with international leaders at the White House this week, and went after Big Pharma to negotiate reduced Medicare prices for 10 common prescription drugs.
The press? Well, we completely missed the point, as usual, and covered every juvenile tantrum Donald Trump threw in his malevolent attempt to stay in the news. The context is missing. The press is failing us, and people are too ignorant to notice the problem. That's because we're busy dividing ourselves into teams of social cheerleaders, cheering on our champions and literally booing the opposition.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.' -Isaac Asimov
I kind of agree with Asimov here, I think the cult of ignorance has been with us a long time, I think it springs from the puritans who emigrated here to escape the "persecution" of living in Europe during the Enlightenment. I mean, we're talking about dumbing things down for a country that historically had witch burnings and more recently a Satanic Panic? The cult of ignorance has always been here, it's just grown cancerous due to proliferation of misinformation and disinformation.
