Political pundits are stunned at the recent ouster of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy.  The removal is the latest public backlash against political establishment politics in the United States implemented by a corrupt intellectual culture.  The catalyst to McCarthy’s defeat was certainly the vote for a continuing resolution on the Federal government’s budget activities that remain far beyond constitutional order and the primary driver for the inflationary pains the general public has felt since rapidly escalating federal government spending in spring of 2020. 

America’s intellectual culture is dangerously malicious and reactionary -- spinning false narratives in order to control an American public that is increasingly restless with the obvious political cruelty inflicted upon them by the ruling classes of Republicans and Democrats. There are at least two narratives that Republican and Democrat elite spin in a way that inflicts massive harm upon the public:  1) national debt and 2) illegal immigration.

In the pathological storytelling of our intellectual culture, the national debt is simply a timeless unfortunate burden of being a global superpower and fulfilling obvious moral duties such as child care, feeding the hungry, and medical care.  In reality, the United States ran a surplus as recently as 1999 and 2000.  In 2007, the deficit was a mere $160 billion compared to $2 trillion today.  Moreover, taxpayers will provide roughly five trillion dollars in annual revenue to meet the wide array of national needs.  This is 25% larger than the entire expense structure of the Chinese Communist government serving more than one billion people. Especially important in the reality check is the massive growth in revenue the USFG has experienced in the past 30 years.  The federal government is definitely overspending and the debt and deficit are caused by reckless spending and not by economic cycles, tax cuts, COVID, unexpected emergencies, or a myriad of excuses.  The American public provides generous revenue increases almost every year.  If the federal government simply limited its growth -- not even taking a cut -- to less than the increases provided by taxpayers, the U.S. would move quickly toward surpluses.  Most importantly, this process would lower interest rates and the most aggressive tax on our citizens in poverty -- inflation.  The USFG is the by far the nation’s largest employer and it refuses to take pay cuts or face layoffs in the way every single other private industry among the private public has suffered since the 1980s.  The corruption of D.C.’s faux budget debate was exemplified by a Democratic representative pulling a fire alarm and referring to Republicans as “Nazis” in order to delay the vote. 

In the pathological storytelling of our intellectual culture, illegal immigration is simply a timeless story of oppressed innocent people seeking refuge in the worst country in the world:  America. Mysteriously, more than five million people have chosen to enter the most racist, sexist, and discriminatory society ever known in human history.  More profoundly, this immigration is only a benign trek for refuge.  There is no vast army of international corruption in the form of cartels delivering human beings at an average cost of $15,000 per person into the United States.  There is no vast regimen of violence against children that includes sex trafficking.  There is no concert of villainy stretching from the labs of China to narco drug lords in Mexico delivering deadly fentanyl in the open border at Texas and Mexico.  The United States federal government has an immigration policy at the Texas border that acts to deliberately destroy and thwart all domestic efforts to constrain the human slave trade at the border.  Federal officials are cutting fences and welding gates open in order to prevent any limits on the human slave trade at the Texas Mexico border.  Of course the American public -- including growing numbers of sanctuary city residents -- recognize that the United States federal government that covets the borders of Ukraine and Russia, despises the existence of a border between Mexico and Texas. 

These two issues and many more, enrage the public and make them want to lash out at their political leadership today.  The idea that Kevin McCarthy suffered an impossible indignity on October 3 is a testament to how out of touch our intellectual culture is with how the public is regularly victimized by its own federal government.  An intellectually honest elite would admit these things as a productive point of political dialogue.  Unfortunately, the loss of Kevin McCarthy is only the beginning of a public looking to take revenge against its reactionary intellectual culture that shows them such contempt. 

Dr. Ben Voth is a professor of rhetoric and director of debate at Southern Methodist Unviersity in Dallas, Texas.  His most recent books -- Political Campaign Communication 10th edition with Robert Denton and Centennial of the Modern American Presidency:  The Presidential Rhetoric of Wilson, Harding and Coolidge (both with Lexington Books) come out in December. 

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