Jim Carrey is an actor with a net worth of about $150 million.  He made his fortune by playing a fool in a host of movies and on television.  Little did we know that he is one.

According to Ben Shapiro,

Over the weekend, once-superstar comedian Jim Carrey announced he'd be releasing a new song, titled "Cold Dead Hand." He also announced the gist of the song via Twitter: "'Cold Dead Hand' is abt u heartless motherf%ckers unwilling 2 bend 4 the safety of our kids." Just in case you didn't catch his point - that gunowners are morally deficient human beings - he stated in early February, anyone "who would run out to buy an assault rifle after the Newtown massacre has very little left in their body or soul worth protecting."

So, what was Carrey's new musical masterpiece? It was a rip on dead former movie star and NRA president Charlton Heston. Carrey played Heston as a moron, a crazy person. Then, posting as a character on Hee Haw, Carrey sang, "His immortal soul may lay forever in the sand, the angels wouldn't take him up to heaven as he planned, cuz they couldn't pry his gun from his cold, dead hand." He then proceeded to make the oft-cited liberal idiot claim that gunowners want to own firearms because they have inferiority complexes about their penis sizes: "You're a big big man with a little bitty gland, so you need something bigger with a hairpin trigger."

But that wasn't the end of the video. The chorus was straight from the minds of Barack Obama and Piers Morgan: "It takes a cold dead hand to decide to pull the trigger. It takes a cold dead heart and as near as I can figure, with your cold dead aim, you're trying to prove your dick is bigger, but we know that your chariot may not be swinging low."

And more: "Imagine if the Lord were here and he knew what you'd be thinking, would his sacred heart be sinking into the canyon of despair. And on the ones who sell the guns, he'd sic the vultures and coyotes, only the devil's true devotees could profiteer from pain and fear." Carrey then portrayed Heston trying to work a rifle in a simulation of masturbation.

Carrey's song is as idiotic as the characters he plays as was his tweet, but that's not my main point.  My mother-in-law told me that my late father-in-law refused to watch another Ingrid Bergman movie after he found out that she became pregnant out of wedlock.  That was about 60 years ago, and my father-in-law wasn't alone.  Once upon a time in America, morals mattered.  If celebrities and high-profile politicians wanted to protect their careers, they did their best to hide their indiscretions.  Today, they flaunt them, and the masses love it.

Consider Bill Clinton, for example.  He lied under oath and encouraged a White House intern to perform oral sex on him in the Oval Office.  He did many other things as president that would have made him a national disgrace  and ended his political career a few decades ago, but the only thing that kept him from winning a third term as president was the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution. 

Today, Clinton is the darling of the left, and he has made a fortune giving speeches around the world to enraptured audiences.  His wife, Hillary, is also well known for her adroit truth stretching, but she became a U.S. senator and secretary of state.  The only reason that she didn't become president in 2008 is that a person with African-American blood was her opponent.  Hillary had the audacity to call Barack Obama a liar during that campaign.  Of course, she was right as anyone who follows the president knows, but that's a great example of the pot calling the kettle black.

The problem that I'm writing about isn't limited to the political left, either.  For instance, Donald Trump is as much celebrity as businessman.  He has made billions of dollars in real estate and entertainment, and Mitt Romney was thrilled to accept his endorsement for president in 2012.  Cracked.com posted a piece on Trump titled "10 Stories About Donald Trump You Won't Believe Are True".  It's worth examining because if even half of what they say about Trump is true, Romney should have avoided him like the plague. 

Wayne Barrett at The Daily Beast suggests that one of the reasons Trump decided not to run for president himself in 2012 was his connections with organized crime:

In the days before Trump dropped out, he could certainly not have been too happy to hear from me again. We met in the late '70s for hours of taped interviews, and The Village Voice stories I wrote then resulted in a federal grand jury probe of his early deals, though, in the end, no indictment. When I published the first biography of the Donald in 1992, the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, which oversees casino licensing in Atlantic City, put Trump under oath and issued a 34-page report, confirming some of the ties to organized crime I described in the book and stating that they could not verify others. I was later visited repeatedly by gaming officials from Missouri when Trump applied for a riverboat casino license there; he wound up withdrawing the application.

While I was reporting that book in 1990, I was muscled out of Trump Castle and handcuffed overnight to a wall at the Atlantic City jail. I haven't done much reporting about him since the book, but when his numbers shot to the top in recent presidential polls, I took another look and asked his office for an interview. His response was a letter threatening a libel suit.

Unfortunately, in 21st century America, it looks as though wealth and celebrity trump morals every day of the week, no pun intended.  I'm not a pessimist, but when I look at what America has become, I wonder if we have the political will to right the ship of state before it sinks.  If the U.S. does eventually go the way of Greece and Cyprus and Italy and Spain and Portugal, for example, we can expect violence in the streets, and that brings me back to Jim Carrey.

Ordinary American citizens may need guns and ammunition to defend themselves and their families in the not-so-distant future.  That's why they are buying AR 15s and other scary looking weapons in record numbers.  Like me, they can see the writing on the wall, and they are preparing for what might happen.

Trump, the Clintons, and Carrey have enough money to hightail it to a luxurious safe haven if things explode.  President Obama and Vice President Biden have Secret Service guards day and night.  Most Americans will have to live through the nightmare, and they don't want to do it without protection.  Can you blame them?  Hardly.  It's just good sense.

Neil Snyder is the Ralph A. Beeton Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia.  His blog, SnyderTalk.com, is posted daily.