For most of my life, I have contended that ignorance was a matter of whose turf you were on. There are a few things I know a lot about and multitudes more that would display my ignorance if I should choose to voice it out loud.

However, we seem to have arrived at the point where expertise has no value, and everybody can speak persuasively on everything, whether they know anything about it or not. I encountered this twice this week, once with someone who contended that COVID vaccinations were useless and another who stated unequivocally that Michelle Obama was male.

In the first exchange, I cited some government statistics that said that more than 90% of the people in the ICU with COVID were unvaccinated and that according to the CDC, unvaccinated people are more than 11 times more likely to die and more than 12 times more likely to be hospitalized than vaccinated people. His response was that these were simply reported numbers, and he favored the evidence of his own eyes and ears to reported numbers.

The second instance was even more grotesque. The poster said that “Michelle” Obama had been born “Michael” Obama. She said that people should do, as she did, their own research. Being open to improvement, I did that. Her research evidently includes such sterling journalistic sources as mynews, outrageousminds, jlwaragnews, and loququendzxe.com. She evidently missed the Politifact post that said that the whole thing was bunk.

Isolated instances such as these two probably won’t tear the fabric of civilization as we know it. Unfortunately, however, it’s become a movement, evidenced by the demonstrations at various school board meetings protesting CRT. (I admit that prior to the hullabaloo I knew nothing about Critical Race Theory and wondered why so many people were upset about outdated computer monitors.) However, because of the protesters, I’ve had “to do my own research,” and I think I’m better at it than they are. For most of my life, I’ve been hired to write about things I knew little or nothing about.

It turns out that this is what the protestors are protesting:

Critical race theory is a body of legal scholarship and an academic movement of US civil-rights scholars and activists who seek to examine the intersection of race and US law and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice. CRT examines social, cultural, and legal issues primarily as they relate to race and racism in the US. A tenet of CRT is that racism and disparate racial outcomes are the results of complex, changing, and often subtle social and institutional dynamics rather than explicit and intentional prejudices of individuals.

As best I can tell, this says that there is built-in racism in our society, something I can’t imagine anyone denying. Interestingly, the protestors claim that it’s anti-white, which isn’t true unless white and white supremacy are synonymous.

So, a governor’s race in Virginia may turn largely on the fact that a significant number of voters are open-minded because their minds are not cluttered up with facts. It is a fact that no K-12 student is being taught Critical Race Theory. It’s probable that they are being taught that our country has committed shameful acts. And that’s the way it should be.

CRT is joining an ever-increasing list of words that seem to belong in the Alice in Wonderland dimension, the one where the word means exactly what I want it to mean—no more or less. (Keeping in mind that the quote is from Humpty-Dumpty, and we all know what happened to him.) Other words on the list include socialism (and all of its derivatives), communism (and all of its derivatives), welfare handouts, and trickle-down economics. There are others appearing almost daily.

I don’t know that there is any cure for aggressive ignorance, not so long as maintaining a position is more important than learning the truth, just as I don’t know how far this country has to go down the rabbit hole before it no longer deserves saving.

I hang on to this thought. We are still arguably the richest nation on the planet, and we still have people who are experts, who know a lot about their particular fields. Perhaps, at some point, enough people are embarrassed by the blatant show of ignorance abroad in our land that they will begin making enough noise to balance the clanging of the empty kettles.

Beyond that, our only hope is to pray for the Republic.