Feet of Clay Icons: A disconcerting observation:

Victor Davis Hansen explains that the US's most important institutions - the military, science, and the law - are losing the trust of middle America.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/23/feet-of-clay-icons/

   

Feet-of-Clay Icons

   Americans mostly have given up on familiar institutions for entertainment, guidance, or reassurance. What now do Hollywood, network news, the media in general, Silicon Valley, the NBA, NFL, MLB, or higher education all have in common?

   A propensity to lecture Americans on their moral inferiorities, a general ethical decline in their own disciplines, and a strange obsession to acquire great wealth while living in contrast to what they advocate for others. Add also incompetence. Movies are mostly bad now. The network news is blow-dried groupthink. There is no “paper of record” anywhere. Twitter and Facebook no longer even try to hide their politicized contortions of warped rules and twisted protocols.

But until recently there were still a few institutions we considered sacrosanct, incorruptible, and invincible amid faith-based assertions, toxic woke fads, civil dissension, and hatred of the past. One certainly was the military. Another was “science,” or rather the scientists, researchers, and investigators who devoted themselves to disinterested empiricism. And, a third, was the sacred idea of the “law,” or the idea that Americans respect our statutes because they were crafted by ourselves and applicable to all, equally, and without exception.

All three have lost their luster. Americans do not trust them, at least not in the old way. Perhaps it was the 2020 perfect storm of plague, quarantine, recession, riot, a contentious election, and red/blue antipathies that ripped off the scab and exposed beneath something far different than what the public had assumed.


Protect or Proselytize?
Our most important and cherished institutions are losing the trust of Middle America. I doubt they will easily recover it, or find any such loyal supporters among their new coterie of fair-weather, progressive sycophants—and to the detriment of us all ... https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/23/feet-of-clay-icons/

Calypso Jones wrote:Public school educated kids know nothing of the constitution and definitely unaware of that last line in the above quote.