The Dumbest Americans Since the Confederacy

 For most of my life I have been confused by how easily the South’s ruling elite managed to get the white underclasses to fight and die for the 1%’s “right” to own black people (and white people if they had their way).  The past 10 years has cleared that up for me, with painful clarity.  There is no bottom to stupidity and “you can’t fix stupid.” 

The United States has been breeding for stupid from the start, beginning with the failed English Jamestown “settlement,” which was mostly stocked with the 2^nd and 3^rd sons of British aristocracy who weren’t going to inherit much from their parents and were obviously useless, spoiled excess males.  As should have been expected, once the working-class sailors and soldiers who delivered the deadbeats to Jamestown left, the 3^rd tier British elites starved to death waiting for someone to feed and house them.  England followed that debacle by exporting the unruly mobs from Scotland, Ireland, and the unemployable chumps from England’s urban underclasses.

As Bill Murry proudly(?) said in “Stripes,” “We’re not Watusi.  We’re not Spartans. We’re Americans, with a capital ‘A,’ huh?  You know what that means? Do ya?  That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world.  We are the wretched refuse.  We’re the underdog.  We’re mutts! . . . But there’s no animal that’s more faithful, that’s more loyal, more lovable than the mutt.”  Yep, you can kick ‘em, beat ‘em with a stick, starve ‘em half-to-death, but a mutt will just keep coming back for more because they aren’t smart enough to know that they have the option to run away, or stay and fight, for a better situation. 

Outside of the US, lots of people are wondering how Americans could have elected someone as stupid, petty, and destructive as Trump and his cronies to the Presidency.  Inside the US, it’s pretty obvious: the country is full of idiots, gullible cultish fools, and illiterate know-nothings who make proving the Dunning-Kruger Effect their life’s “work.”  It’s not, as many desperately want to believe, that our “education system has failed.”  The problem is that a significant percentage of the gene pool in the US has been pissed in by goobers who shouldn’t have made it past the embryo stage, let alone “grown up” to be mental dead weights dragging the world into the Sixth Extinction and reproducing like Viagra-stoned rats. 

Every time you hear a vehicle with an illegally loud exhaust, you’re listening to the sound of a moron passing, spewing unspent fuel and burned oil from poor maintenance and shade-tree “engineering.”  Every tattered and faded “Trump/Vance” sign you see on a run-down, unkempt yard marks the home of an idiot.  Every “Remember Charlie Kirk” flag marks the home of failing K-12 grades and chronic economic dependence. 

A lot of the country (and world) has been deluded into thinking that Minnesotans are all like the Twin Cities “bleeding heart liberals” who put their lives and freedom on the line to protect their neighbors. A quick glance at the responses to Amy Klobuchar’s Facebook page would destroy that hope.  Just look at the stupid nonsense, mostly coming from rural Minnesota’s dumbest voters and you’d be hard-pressed to imagine this state is any smarter than Alabama’s inbred, low-brow honkies. 

I lived in a St. Paul suburb for 19 years before retiring and moving to a southeastern Minnesota small town (foolishly for the “quiet” and “slower pace”).  Outside of Harley Davidson “season” (6-9 months out of the year), we mostly got the quiet.  “Slower pace” mostly means way too many morons per square mile: “slow” as in mentally slow.  In 2016, 85% of Ramsey County (our old Cities’ district) voted for Clinton while 57% of Goodhue County (where we are now) voted for Trump.  We had only been here for two years at that point and Ms. Day was ready to pack up and run back to the Cities immediately.  We probably should have done that while we could afford the move.  Not surprisingly, house values in Goodhue County have been stagnate since about 2016, but Twin Cities housing prices have increased 168% since 2016, pretty much pricing us out of the market.  (We sold our Cities home, in 2015, for $254,000 and it’s currently valued at $450,000!)  In 2016, many of Goodhue’s available housing inventory were foreclosures and we’re beginning to see that trend again in 2026.  So, getting out of here is going to cost us some retirement security. 

Early in our experience in rural Minnesota, I took a cabinet-making class in Winona, MN.  Same school system as the course I wanted to take, about 70 miles south on Highway 61, but easier to enroll for a class that year.  The end result was massive cultural shock.  I have lived in some pretty regressive places, but I haven’t lived anywhere worse than the people I met in that class.  Primitive, racist, unintelligent, uneducated, superstitious, entitled, dependent, and unpredictably violent are just a few of the words that come to mind in describing the mostly-old-white-men in that evening class. 

The word that always comes to mind when I realize how outnumbered we are in so many areas of this country is “disappointing.”  63 years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, this is not where I’d hoped we’d be in these rarely-United States.  It is probably hard to remember, but a lot of that “Sixties’ hippy nonsense” was about hope and optimism. Yes, we were protesting a genocidal war and a blatantly and violently racist “Establishment,” but we somehow imagined building a better world for the future.  While that was going on, “the worst of the worst” (The Heritage Foundation, for example) were working toward a very different world.  And we are living in it now: a superstition-filled, racist, martial, patriarchal, oligarchical, “Christian Nation” that denies reality, science, justice, and democracy at every opportunity.  And all that has been possible thanks to the dumbest Americans since those fools who fought and died for the Confederacy.