The Republican Need for Stupid People

How Killing the Department of Education is Job One for the GOP.

Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash

The Republican Party is destroying the Department of Education because it needs stupid people. They are its lifeblood.

Trump and his career sociopaths know that as the world shrinks, technology improves, and human beings evolve, they cannot survive as an entity without a steady stream of people who have been weaned on a contempt for knowledge, people who never develop the ability to think critically; people who mock Science, abhor Medicine, and despise expertise. Such people are easily fooled, easily distracted, and ripe for indoctrination into a miserable and violent death cult.

By dismantling the hub of America’s access to education and replacing it with a rogue’s gallery of white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, and Bible-thumping cave people, the GOP is waging war on this nation by churning out people who will not know this nation’s history, have no appreciation for diverse cultures or experiences, and have no interest in objective truth. They will be guaranteeing generations of just the kind of slow, dim, parochial, and terrified human beings that they need to remain in power for the rest of this nation’s ever-darkening history.

All hatred is rooted in ignorance, and since hatred is the Republican Party’s sole political platform, they must propagate a steady stream of that ignorance.

This was always the plan for this Administration, and those of us who spent the better part of the last two years explicitly warning people about Project 2025’s specific agenda to dismantle The DOE and so many other parts of the scaffolding of this nation are left with unhelpful I-told-you-so’s, a heavy grief over what we’re losing, and the disbelief that tens of millions of Americans simply didn’t pay attention and chose a convicted felon over a brilliant woman of color.

I suppose that’s what makes this newest and most brazen assault on education, learning, and intelligence so painful to witness, because we are in danger of losing the ability to reach people who they will be rendered unreachable by the methods decent human beings have always used: thoughtful debate, reasonable discourse, the centering of data and facts, and an empathy that seeks to feel the pain of others.

As more and more of Red rural America is cut off from the actual world, they will be incubated in a smaller, more terrifying, less diverse world; a world filled with encroaching enemies to be defeated, threats to be eradicated, monsters to be slain.

Those of us who can see what is unfolding right now need to prioritize saving the Department of Education, through the courts as well as through public pressure on our state and local politicians. But should these efforts fail (and they very well could), we need to be creative and steadfast in making sure that America does not surrender to this Republican campaign of prolific stupidity.

We must preserve our nation’s flawed history so that it is not rewritten by bigots and phobic Evangelicals.

We have to become keepers of the untold number of books they will attempt to wipe from our collective consciousness.

We need to steward the Arts and Science and Medicine, as these are deadly weapons in the battle against ignorance.

And above all, we cannot, under any circumstances, allow the truth to become obsolete, or we cede hundreds of millions of American minds to Fox News propaganda, Bible Belt Conservative Christian fear porn, and White nationalist fever dreams.

The Republican Party desperately needs stupid people, and we need to defeat them by fiercely guarding education.