We all know that only some of the people can be fooled all of the time.  But how do we find them, so they can be thoroughly exploited?  It’s simple: Just put out the right bait, and they’ll flock to your arena.  The most tried and true kind of bait used to lure the gullible into a trap is fear.

The most exploited form of fear being used today is the threat of ongoing catastrophic weather events.  This is especially effective due to the profound lack of common knowledge of the various forms of earth science — geology, meteorology, paleontology.  Suffice it to say that humanity is still far from fully understanding what makes weather happen.  A significant factor is the jet stream — which wasn’t even known about until American high-altitude bombers began attacking Japan in late 1944.

Then there’s the well known issue of dinosaurs.  Imagine giant reptiles stomping about the earth, all the while being cold-blooded.  It takes an awful lot of ambient warmth to sustain such behemoths.  Will we ever get to be as warm again?  Good question — and a very good counter to a gullible global warming acolyte.

Next up is fear of disease.  Were it not for the COVID pandemic, Joe Biden would have never been president.  Meanwhile, health issues continue to be a major tool of demagoguery, especially when it comes to how to pay for medical services.  The efficacy of various procedures, such as vaccination, also remain serious causes for controversy.  To point out a particular deviation from the real issue, what people really care about is not health care, but health itself.  It’s normal to want not to be sick.

In addition to fear, greed and guilt have been combined to support the fatuous clamor for reparations.  Slavery was abolished in the U.S., at great human cost, by mostly non-African soldiers, over 160 years ago.  And while you’re dolling out other people’s money to assuage your guilt (and theirs), you might also want to consider the innocent victims of illegal aliens and other dangerous felons being released back into society by gullible judges and prosecutors.  (After I first wrote this, I found that a high-up member of the Trump team recently expressed exactly the same sentiment.)  This reality still doesn’t stop the Calyfornia political establishment from at least signaling their virtue by passing legislation that mostly does nothing.

But what of those of us who just aren’t gullible enough to play along with these follies?  We just get to stand back and watch, while also being seriously inconvenienced and separated from our money by dumb public policy agendas.  So what is it that makes us all so different?  I can’t possibly know enough stuff to offer a complete answer to this question, but suffice it to say that life experience may come close to filling in much of the void.  We have learned a lot while simply dealing honestly with reality.

I would also like to insert the word dogma into the mix.  There are certain concepts that “woke” progs must accept as true, regardless of thoughtful analysis.  My current representative in the state assembly used as her campaign slogan “Housing Is a Human Right.”  What does that mean?  Builders, carpenters, lumber yards, and many others must be enslaved by the government to better serve the rest of humanity?  She was nonetheless elected to replace her husband, who got kicked upstairs to be attorney general.  I love democracy!

In this context, the buzzword “equity” is gaining even more popularity among the seriously gullible.  What it means, however, is not more fairness being bestowed upon the populace, but rather spreading artificially induced misery even farther from its source.  This is being repeated almost everywhere.

How did so many people get to be so gullible?  It doesn’t take much effort to look at the government school monopoly.  Before the teachers’ unions infiltrated the system, education was fairly objective.  I am a product of that previous reality.  The world is different now.

And yet most people are at least a little bit gullible, or else there’d be no casinos or lottery tickets.  What is really the problem is profound gullibility, as practiced by even some educated middle-class people, who believe verbatim everything they see and hear on the “legacy” media such as ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, the N.Y. Times, and the WaPo (can you say “Maryland father”?).  This disconnect has become all the more obvious since the internet has exposed a vast proliferation of information sources, thus opening many more pathways for the curious to follow.

Image: Chris Dodds via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.