“The masses of people are accustomed to thinking of the elites as smarter than themselves. But when civilizations teeter it is usually because the elites have proved stupider than the common man.” —PJ Media’s Richard Fernandez

Not quite. The collection of feckless elitists who inhabit the Obama administration do not lack intellectual acumen. Rather they are afflicted with an ideologically driven, willful ignorance so-all encompassing, they will abide an increasing collection of corpses as a reasonable tradeoff for maintaining an agenda totally at odds with reality.

Unfortunately, such willful ignorance has breached the confines of elitism. Millions of leftists no longer abide Daniel Moynihan’s irrefutable logic that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Thus, despite the reality that Orlando terrorist Omar Mateen professed allegiance to the Islamic State and posted religious rantings on Facebook during the atrocity, 60% of self-identified Democrats characterized the attack as gun violence, compared to only 29% who viewed it as Islamic terrorism, according to a Gallup poll.

What explains this disconnect? Media collaboration with the leftist agenda is a critical component. “The New York Times runs an editorial on ‘The NRA’s Complicity in Terrorism,’ but the Orlando mass murderer Omar Mateen isn’t a member of the NRA,” writes Thomas Lipscomb. “He is a member of the Democratic Party, who voted for Obama twice, and worked as a subcontract security man for Homeland Security under Obama appointee Jeh Johnson.”

Reporter Sharyl Attkisson illuminates the bigger picture, revealing that “government interests, corporate interests, special interests have learned how to use the news media, how to use social media to control the narrative in ways, I think, more aggressively than has ever been done before,” she explains. And when reporters veer from that narrative, “they’re controversialized, they’re bullied, they’re driven out of the mainstream.” In fact, she adds, “It’s a global trend” — one that is “certainly happening here in the United States.”

Yet the cracks are starting to show. “Gun shops typically see a spike in customers after mass shootings,” Fox Denver reports. “But this time, many are seeing shoppers they’ve never really seen before: More gays and lesbians.” Those would be the same gays and lesbians who have overwhelmingly marched in lockstep with Democrats and their anti-Second Amendment agenda for years. Perhaps many of them have come to realize the truth behind a very old law enforcement euphemism: when seconds count, government help is only minutes away.

Jarring as that inconvenient reality is, it remains based on an another assumption that no longer applies: that government actually wants to help us. Even as the Islamic terrorist threat continues to metastasize, Obama and his acolytes repeatedly insist global warming is the primary threat facing the nation. Moreover, just as he did one day before Paris exploded in Islamic terrorist carnage and bloodshed, Obama again insisted “we are making significant progress” in a campaign against the Islamic State that is “firing on all cylinders.”

CIA Director John Brennan didn’t get the proverbial memo. Last Thursday, [he told the Senate Intelligence Committee the administration’s efforts have not hindered ISIL’s “terrorism capability and global reach,” and that it “is probably exploring a variety of means for infiltrating operatives into the West, including in refugee flows, smuggling routes and legitimate methods of travel.”

Refugee flows? “The Obama administration believes it will be able to process many more Syrian refugees in the last half of fiscal 2016 than in the first six months, allowing it to meet its goal of admitting at least 10,000 by Sept. 30,” Reuters reports. What Reuters omitted? In order to meet that goal, the Obama administration decided last April to reduce an already questionable vetting process to three months, as opposed to the 18-24 months it originally promised.

Smuggling routes? Our border remains one in name only, and in one of the more infuriating revelations disseminated last week, Americans discovered the very same G4S security company that employed Mateen was hired by the Department of Homeland Security to drive illegal aliens from the border to a Phoenix bus station — where Judicial Watch reports they were released “without proper processing or court appearance documents.”

Legitimate methods of travel? “A total of 527,127 foreign nationals who were admitted to the United States on non-immigrant visas and who were supposed to leave the country in 2015 failed to do so” DHS officials admitted before the House Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security last Tuesday. And those totals only include visitors who entered the country at air and sea points of entry, not foreigners who crossed the U.S. border by land. Ten thousand of the over-stayers were considered high-risk. ICE subsequently determined 4,000 of them were in compliance, and they arrested 1,900.

The other 4,100 high-risk individuals? A sobering chart published in The Washington Post reveals it is simply impossible to monitor all terror suspects here or abroad. In America, the number of police officers needed to monitor 25,000 individuals on the watch list is 500,000 — out of a total number of 800,000 police officers in the entire nation.

The administration’s response? DHS released a bulletin warning travelers, sports fans and concertgoers that may see more police and tighter security screening at airports and events this summer in the wake of the mass shooting in Orlando.

Columnist Mark Steyn eviscerates the administration’s warped sense of priorities: “I think this is insane when I listen to people say ‘oh, we’re now going to have to have metal detectors in night clubs, security in nightclubs. Ok, so what happens next? They blow up a bakery, they blow up a little pastry shop, so then you’re gonna have to have metal detectors to get into the pastry shop? Instead of having all these individual perimeters around every Dunkin Donuts franchise or every gas station, or every J.C. Penny, why not have just one big perimeter around the country? We could call it a border! And we could have, like, a border security!”

Forget it. Border security is utterly anathema to the “borderless future” envisioned by John Kerry, and embraced by a globalist-driven Obama administration that views national sovereignty — and thus the Constitution itself — as a nostalgic concept with no place in the modern world. Yet when Americans see this orchestrated chaos, and realize they’re completely on their own? The administration and their media apparatchiks bristle with elitist indignation when those same Americans exercise their constitutionally protected right of self-defense.

“The forgetting [of the 9/11 attacks] in some circles is intentional,” writes New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin. “As determined as many still are to Never Forget, others are determined to move on, to redefine, to downplay.”

We are at war. And the only thing more terrifying than that is the realization only the Islamists are bringing their full capabilities to the battlefield. One that used to be located in the Middle East — not at a fort in Texas, a marathon in Boston, recruitment centers in Chattanooga, an office building in San Bernardino, or a nightclub in Orlando. And American civilization is teetering, because we are under attack — every bit as much by progressive, elitist ideologues wholly unsuited to the federal government’s primary task of keeping this nation safe — as we are by Islamic terrorists.