Yet another Texas politician, Rob Smith, is railing against "intellectuals."
I have a stupid question to ask. How many intellectuals are there in Texas?
I am reminded of Poland. There are maybe 800 Jewish people living in Poland; yet the whole country likes to howl about the Jews. How much harm can 800 Jewish people do to a country of 40 million?
And, by the same token, how much harm can maybe 5 to 10 intellectuals that live in Texas do to Texas?
In America, there are close to 6 million Jewish people; and America has much more than does Poland. If Jews were a destructive influence, then America would be significantly behind Poland in every way. In the case of the intellectuals, America has fewer of them than most major countries; and Texas has many fewer per unit of population than most of America. Which means that these people cannot be a credible threat to Texas, and blaming them is a case of scapegoating from real problems, a vast chunk of which were created by Texas Right.
When banking systems crash, under Texas Republican administrations, the reason has nothing to do with the intellectuals and everything to do with private-sector fraud and public-sector negligence. When right-wing conmen deny reality of man-made global warming and do what they can to stand in the way of technological progress, the reason likewise has nothing to do with the intellectuals but rather with those who want intellectuals deep-fried. The same is the case when sections of population decide that the world is run by a Satanic conspiracy, that AIDs is God's way of controlling the homosexual population, or that hoping for an end of the world in our lifetime is patriotism and family values. And it does, in fact, take people skilled in reasoning and intelligence to counteract these malignancies.
The real purpose of the intellectual in any society is to tell the truth. That makes the intellectual the arch-enemy of conmen. This means that conmen will be very fond of attacking intellectuals; and the more the conmen attack intellectuals the more they show themselves to be conmen.
Similarly we are seeing such conmen claiming that they are against politicians. Then what are they doing as office-seekers? Rob Smith is as much a politician as Joe Biden or Barack Obama. Only Rob Smith is not honest enough to say that that's what he is, whereas Biden is.
It is sickening to see these people claiming to have honor or values or responsibility or common sense as they continue to aggressively deny reality. It is sickening to see these people claiming to have family values and dedication to America's future when they want a violent destruction of the whole world before the children being born now have reached maturity. It is sickening to see these people claiming that they are America, and that the rest of America isn't America. And it is sickening to see these people claim that they have character and integrity and that you do not.
The Texas Right is a Big Lie; a vast and malignant deception. In their world everything is inverted, so that truth is regarded as lies and lies are regarded as truth. When George Orwell said that the first freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four, he may as well have been talking about Texas Right and its consistent politics of deception. Whatever integrity these people think that they possess is a false integrity - one premised upon a lie - and as such destructive of any real integrity or real intelligence that might come about.
So whenever one hears people railing against intellectuals, the most likely reason is that they are themselves conmen. This is especially the case in places like Texas, that have very few intellectuals. The anti-intellectual fervor in Texas is just as misplaced as is the anti-Jewish fervor in Poland. In Texas, there are not enough intellectuals, but more than enough conmen. And it is conmen, not intellectuals, that have been the source of most of the problems we see in America today.