Subscribe for free to the America First Report newsletter.
How often have you tried to discuss a political issue with your neighbor, only to find them becoming angry rather than addressing any issues? Or maybe watched Jesse Watters do a man-in-the-street interview, only to be amazed at the manifest ignorance of Millennials? Or marveled at Tucker Carlson tying a left-wing guest in knots simply by asking careful questions? If any of these is true, you’ve been hit square in the face with the primary evidence of Cognitive Vacancy Disorder.
I know, you can’t find Cognitive Vacancy Disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, but that psychiatric resource was primarily written by liberal psychiatrists who want to maximize their income and influence through speculative diagnoses. And since the bureaucratic Federal rules on payment were written by more Lefties, should we expect to find CVD there?
Fifteen years ago, Cognitive Vacancy Disorder was manifested as Bush Derangement Syndrome. With the 2008 election, it was replaced by worship of “Hope and Change,” played by Barack Obama. A complete disregard for Obama’s utter failure to deliver on improving their lives again demonstrated the massive inactivity of gray matter on the Left. Now Cognitive Vacancy Disorder is on display as Trump Derangement Syndrome.
We are often left bewildered as Lefties slather their word salad with Russian dressing. They make grand allegations but their only real argument is name-calling. Why do they resort to schoolyard bullying tactics when many questions are of great import?
Cognitive Vacancy Disorder is a diagnosis. But, saying you have CVD is just like saying you have Ebola. That only describes the end-point of the pathology. If I go no further, I achieve nothing. An antibiotic won’t help you, since Ebola isn’t caused by a bacterium. I have treated you incorrectly because I didn’t address the true cause of your illness.
In the same way, we must discover why the Left refuses to use the frontal lobes God gave them, preferring to live in the lower centers of their brains. If our diagnosis is incorrect, our treatment will be as well. But this implies that there is an effective treatment. We must discover the cause and address it. Failure to do so has grave implications for all Americans. So lets’ work our way backwards.
The Left is outraged. When you ask one of them his reason, he’ll generally be unable to tell you anything of substance. Instead, he’ll scream that Trump is a racist, a misogynist, or some other despicable thing. But when you push for evidence supporting that claim, he can’t give any. The rare Lefty who proffers what he considers “evidence” will claim Trump’s Access Hollywood tape clearly means he’s a misogynist or his Charlottesville statement means he’s a racist. And that’s as far as he can go.
This is a curious state of affairs. When the Access Hollywood tape is examined, Trump clearly says that women allow certain things. That’s not misogyny, that’s pandering by the women who want their fifteen minutes with a famous man. His Charlottesville statement factually pointed out that both sides had good people and both sides did bad things. In both cases, the truth is contrary to the Lefty narrative. The Lefty who can’t explain why the truth supports his side doesn’t understand what the facts are.
Our first step is generally to try to get the Lefty to explain what the facts are. Unfortunately, most Lefties will simply start yelling at this point, shutting off all further discussion. This is the result of a threat to their self-esteem that comes from a simple challenge. They perceive you as saying that they are uninformed idiots, and that’s a massive insult. But the schoolyard response indicates that the Lefty is uninformed, because if he were informed, he’d engage the conversation.
We then have to ask why the Lefty holds his positions so firmly when the facts are clearly contrary to them. There’s only one possibility. He didn’t arrive at those opinions independently. They came from a trusted source somewhere. But because the Lefty isn’t able to explain the reasons for that opinion, we know that they were uncritically accepted. In short, they came from a process of indoctrination, not from reasoning.
Indoctrination doesn’t work when people know how to think critically. Unfortunately, we aren’t born with that ability. We start by trusting our parents. As small children, we really have no choice. But as we grow, if we are properly challenged by our parents and teachers, we learn how to separate fact from fiction. In short, our BS detectors become trained.
But if we learn that trophies come from participation and grades come from attendance, then our critical thinking skills will never develop. We will learn our “truths” as they are delivered from on high. A teacher will tell us that a particular person is evil, and since we haven’t learned how to test that assertion, we don’t know whether it’s true or not. We lack an essential life skill. When our indoctrination is challenged, our only coping skill is to eliminate that threat. Welcome to Antifa.
There’s no way that this intellectual defect can be remedied in one fell swoop. Each person must first discover that the problem exists. And for that to happen, often it is essential to be confronted with a fact that cannot be ignored. Therein lies the tale. How do we find such a fact?
Fortunately, one such fact is about to hit the Left squarely in the face. The Trump tax cuts have unleashed a torrent of business activity. Literally millions of people are getting unexpected bonuses, and they are of substantial size. In days the majority of workers in the US will see larger paychecks. These are facts, and they contradict everything the Left teaches about corporations. Even the CEO of Apple, a well-known liberal, has openly stated that good things will come to almost everyone from the tax cuts.
This set of facts cannot be ignored by everyone on the Left. Their dogma that corporations are evil and rapacious has just been shattered. And no one on the Right told them. Reality hit them in the face. This will have consequences far more serious that the elimination of the falsely named “Net Neutrality.” They were able to ignore the fact that nothing happened and their online games went on as before. But better jobs and fatter wallets can’t be set aside.
Ultimately, however, we cannot allow this salutary state of affairs to be the only piece of education that the Left receives. Just as they’ve won the verbal war on abortion with the horribly misnamed “pro-choice” movement, we must coin “sound-bite” expressions that convey serious truths in ways that cannot be ignored. For example, we cannot effectively argue that growth is the best way to deal with income inequality. It’s a fact, but the Left can’t hear it. Instead, we simply point out, “When was the last time a poor person gave you a job?” This forcibly states that the economy requires rich people to employ the less wealthy. But it doesn’t do it in a way that provokes anger.
We also hear about “greedy corporations.” They “don’t need the money and should pay higher taxes.” While the tax cuts are winning the day, we can point out that “Corporations don’t pay taxes. They just collect them from you in the price of their goods.”
Our challenge is to control the conversation. We have to do it in a way that educates. Just as the Left weaponizes language, we have to create greater verbal weapons with greater staying power. Since the Left hasn’t developed the ability to deal with complex ideas, they need to simple and strong. For every warm and fuzzy term they use to describe their deadly ideas we need a more powerful and hard-edged term.
President Trump has shown himself to be quite adept at this verbal sparring. His key weapon is nicknames. Who can forget “Low Energy Jeb” and “Lyin’ Ted Cruz?” “Fake News” now has its key target, “Crazy Jim Acosta.” Our task now is to find ways to describe the Left’s proposals with effective, yet demeaning names commensurate with their idiocy. Perhaps if we effectively engage in this war of words, we can get some truths into otherwise closed minds. Slowly they may be forced to accept reality.
We should remember that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. Our job is to make that reality unavoidable. Then the epidemic of Cognitive Vacancy Disorder will start to wane.
Covid variant BA.5 is spreading. It appears milder but much more contagious and evades natural immunity. Best to boost your immune system with new Z-Dtox and Z-Stack nutraceuticals from our dear friend, the late Dr. Vladimir Zelenko.