In my last column, I explained at length “the Right’s intelligence problem.” However, my diatribe should not be construed as absolving the Left of intellectual vacuity. After all, many on the Left subscribe to the conspiratorial view of America I described here. It’s worth exploring how the Left is also blind to how this ignorance differs considerably from that found on the Right.

Just to pick a few, some of the characters on the Left who reflect this intellectual vacuity are Kamala Harris, Jamaal Bowman, Elizabeth Warren, and Sheila Jackson Lee. Harris speaks like a college student who has waked and baked every day for the past year. If we take Bowman at his word (and (we don’t), he did not understand what a clearly labeled fire exit was. Warren thinks that being 1% Native American makes her oppressed. And Lee skipped a few too many science classes in elementary school.

Still, these examples do not fully capture why the Left is uniquely dull.

The Left dresses up stupidity with the veneer of intellectual fortitude. Leftists deny basic scientific truths and yet cite countless academics from elite institutions to back up their absurd claims. This is why James Lindsay et al. were able to carry out the Grievance Studies Affair, where academic journals accepted bogus articles making horrifically gross claims such as that dogs could engage in rape culture and that men could reduce their transphobia by using anal sex toys.

In fact, the exaltation of transgenderism is perhaps the most obvious display of the Left’s ignorance. In a now-deleted video, a Boston Children’s Health Hospital suggested one could experience trans-consciousness from inside the mother’s womb. (That contradicts the Left’s abortion dogma about a “clump of cells.”) While this example of gender highlights severe cases of infection by the woke mind virus, the more palatable belief that gender is a social construct without biological basis is equally dumb but even more widespread.

At its core, the transgenderism debate is built upon this mantra. After all, if gender is a social construct, then there is no objective measure to delineate between what it means to be a male and a female.

Outside of the transgenderism debate, this belief has even more pernicious implications. It inevitably leads to the claim that virtually all statistical differences between men and women must be the result of conditioning by our patriarchal society. And while this claim sounds counter-historical, scholars in fields like sociology have worked tirelessly to produce a voluminous academic literature that reinforces it.

The concept of white privilege also reveals the Left’s shallow thinking on societally crucial matters. Having correctly identified that at one point in time, whites enjoyed privileges denied to others, the Left takes this observation to the extremes, applying a deconstructive acid to build an incomplete narrative for inequality in the 21st century.

To any one of the millions of Americans who can’t afford healthcare or barely make rent each month, being condemned for having white privilege would leave them aghast. To the leftist, it is a sign of peak enlightenment to believe that race defines privilege, while those who look at real measures like socioeconomic status are seen as juvenile. After all, countless books and academics have abstracted the definition of privilege to apply specifically to whites for wrongs committed by their ancestors.

The common theme here is that the Left takes counterintuitive — and often stupid — ideas and makes them socially prestigious by dedicating entire university departments to confirming them. This makes it uniquely difficult to hold unorthodox views because doing so puts you up against an entire body of “scholarly” work.

This ties directly to my recent claim that “the university serves as a harbinger of intellectual fads that eventually trickle down to the masses.” This dismal reality suggests that conservatives will need more than social media posts to reclaim their status as serious thinkers. The good news is that many conservatives are busy dismantling the tenets of the woke religion. Figures like Heather Mac Donald, Roland Fryer, Wilfred Reilly, and Christopher Rufo, and outlets like City Journal, are assailing the walls around our perverted academic regime and laying the foundation of a Renaissance.

Contact Caleb directly at [email protected].