It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?

But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.

It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?

This article encapsulates everything that is so much more wrong about today than in decades past. Every new generation decries the current times as the worst, but we are at a point where Americans are dumbening by the hour. I may over-internalize the problem of the extreme right, but before you know it, over half of the Republican party will believe anything and everything Rush Limbaugh and Fox News tell them. I don't know about you, but what a bunch of hate-filled, misogynistic, racist, wholly uneducated, and poor-people-and-basic-government-services-be-damned people we will become if they rule the country.

I'm just glad that the Daily Show is still on otherwise I would have turned my back on television and any semblance of accuracy in reporting a long time ago.

-janelane, pessimistically

Building a Nation of Know-Nothings - NYTimes.com