First and foremost, beyond all other things, the problem is that people in the United States see no other country but the United States. You have libertarians arguing that taxation is theft as if the United States is the only country in the world with an income tax. You have people talking about 15 minute cities as if it’s some theoretical, untested idea instead of the absolute norm in every other country. America is continually pretending that it can’t see its problems solved everywhere else. That it can’t imagine a better world even though one already exists.

The American dream is an all time amazing piece of propaganda that has left every American imagining that one day, through hard work, they will become the oppressor, and that has created a population so submissive and pliable in the face of its own destruction that Russia, China, and even North Korea could never even dream about having.

They wanted less government interference, but instead got an authoritarian state with no funding for education, healthcare or police training.

It has been building to this for a while. When the republicans are in office it escalates a lot, and when the Democrats are in office it escalates less, but it only ever escalates.

This is what a private education system gets you.

In authoritarian societies, restricting education serves a purpose as a sort of anesthesia for the minds of the people. Solzhenitsyn, describing the few years just before the Great Terror of 1937 started in the Soviet Union, mostly from the perspective of a political prisoner (from Volume II, Chapter 4 of the “Gulag Archipelago” which can be found in its entirety on the web, in The Archive):

And the clock of history was striking. […] The Great Leader (having already in mind, no doubt, how many he would soon have to do away with) declared that the withering away of the state (which had been awaited virtually from 1920 on) would arrive via, believe it or not, the maximum intensification of state power! This was so unexpectedly brilliant that it was not given to every little mind to grasp it, but Vyshinsky, ever the loyal apprentice, immediately picked it up: “And this means the maximum strengthening of corrective-labor institutions.” […] And this was not some satirical magazine cracking a joke either, but was said by the Prosecutor General. […] All this was printed in black on white, but we still didn’t know how to read.¹ The year 1937 was publicly predicted and provided with a foundation.
And the hairy hand² tossed out all the frills and gewgaws too. Labor collectives? Prohibited! […] Professional and technical courses for prisoners? Dissolve them! […] Graphs, diagrams? Tear them off the wall and whitewash the walls.

1 My take: The author and his peers most definitely knew how to read, but they could not fully comprehend what was being published because of its, at that time, unparalleled egregiousness.
2 Certainly the one of Stalin.

After WWII there was a halcyon era where nearly every adult in America agreed that nerds had been crucial to our winning. That’s why Operation Paperclip came to be where we stole all the former Axis nerds we could find.

It also led to an unprecedented boom in education spending, research spending, etc., mostly aimed at beating the USSR at technological development. Sputnik goosed that significantly, and the Apollo program briefly did as well, until Americans got bored of Moon landings…

That was probably the first major flashing red warning light most of us ignored: Moon landings… boring!!!

Anyway, educated people started doing things that weren’t directly associated with winning the Cold War, like exposing the dangers of lead in everything, the dangers of smoking, the dangers of chlorofluorocarbons, the dangers of greenhouse gasses, etc.

That threatened the ability of grotesquely wealthy hoarders to hoard even more grotesque levels of wealth.

So they started the project to dismantle education in America.

That project kicked into afterburn once the USSR collapsed and the Cold War ended.

And so far, nerds haven’t been successful in regaining their status.

Maybe, but they weren’t always the loudest like today and they weren’t connected over vast distances immediately to grow their isolated hatred of the unknown

Ive travelled through the states a couple times. You guys have always been quirky. You believe you have X level of freedom, while the rest of the world clearly sees it aint true, huge ugly car infrastructure and massive health problems yet somehow your chins are up high.

Besides that, i have met and partied with am american guy nicknamed meat who looked like xmens juggernaut (neck and head fused) chug an alcoholic 4 loko from a beer bong and then screech like a pterodactyl and then i had a nice long discussion with 2 women who worked on the hillary clinton campaign. In the same town 1 day apart from each other

There are extremes everywhere.

The US Empire failed to raise successors that understand how it works, and thus they raised a generation of “true believers” in the myths and lies the more competent generations of leaders spread to legitimize their policy. Look at the defunding of programs like USAID, which has historically played a critical role in US-sponsored regime change, now seen as “woke” by the current admin.

This is the furition of things Reagan and Nixon put into motion. There’s been a concerted effort to attack our public education and stoke reactionary sentiment for the last 40+ years to bring us to this point, the dumbing down is deliberate

Hitler thought america would side with him in ww2, he was a fan of jim crow

Who knew it just needed to take 80 years to become accurate

Edit: did you know 60 is not the same as 80?

The short version is this - once politicians realized that human engagement was maximized by anger, a segment of politicians focused on making white christian Americans believe they were a minority group under attack and being disenfranchised by their country. The seeds of this have been getting sowed for decades.

Yeah, the people of the United States have been so stupid for so long that Europe and Canada have spent the last month scrambling to figure out how to do without all the things they rely on us for, to include computer operating systems, CPU architecture, to cloud computing and payment processing systems.

The truth is our stupidty is not unusual, it’s just a preview of what is coming down the pipe for some of you. Right-wing populist dipshits are gaining ground in a lot of countries. It tends to go along with economic hardship. People look for other people to blame for their problems. The real truth is that it’s not immigrants, or jews, or woke women that are ruining everything for everybody, it’s a very small number of inconceivably rich people. Sure, the economy looks great (historically speaking) but real measures of happiness, like the cost of medical care, education and household measured in working-hours has shot through the roof, something which “the economy” does not capture very well.

Tl:dr, shit is going bad almost everywhere, and if you don’t get the to root cause of the issue ( a few rich people owning everything) then the stupids in your county are going to elect right-wing dipshits too.

Have americans always been stupid? Yes. Have americans always been this stupid? No.

Lack of intelligence isn’t the issue. Take the dumbest person you know and imagine they’re trapped in a room with no visible escape path. They panic and start destroying whatever’s in the room. They damage themselves in a fit trying to escape. Now take that same scenario but put in small creature comforts and distractions. Now your dumb friend isn’t panicking or fighting to get out. He’s still trapped and his intelligence neither helped or harmed his situation. This is what’s happened over the last 100 years, and it’s accelerated to decline.

If so I wouldn’t exactly be shocked