The Smartest Dude in the Room

Smart people understand that there are many components to intelligence. Cognition, judgement, a virtuous morality upon which to base our thoughts are what connect intelligence and knowledge to WISDOM. It has been my experience that when in the presence of great intelligence, the smartest person in the room doesn’t need to tell everybody in the room how smart they are—aka Barak Obama. It will eventually come out and sooner rather than later. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) recently called into question the intelligence of obviously one of the smartest people in the world—Elon Musk. According to the New York Post, (that just yesterday appropriately took over the front row seat in the White House Press room from the New York Times):

“This dude is not smart, and the danger in the lack of intelligence and the lack of expertise that Elon has, I mean, this guy is one of the most morally vacant but also just least knowledgeable about these systems that we know of,” she added, referring to his efforts to reform government spending—which she and her Dem cronies vehemently oppose. The South African-born Musk, 53, moved to the US from Canada in the 1990s and quickly formed the multimillion-dollar company Zip2 before starting another firm that later became PayPal. Using funds from those companies, he built SpaceX from scratch before taking over and dramatically scaling up Tesla, which Musk claims is the first new American start-up to have produced sustainable mass production in the 21st century. SpaceX is currently developing the most advanced super heavy lift rocket ever created.

Just think what “the dude” could have accomplished if he had been smart!

I believe like so many people on the political left Ms. (AOC) is intelligent, but not necessarily wise. Like so many people in politics who claim they have been “down for the struggle” (AOC) grew up in the upper middle-class neighborhood of Yorktown in Westchester County (average income per family of $140,000). after spending the first 5 years of her life in the Bronx. Her father was an architect. She was a good student and went to Boston University majoring in economics and international studies. After graduating from college without any life skills she had two choices to make—become a lawyer and go into politics or become a waitress-bartender and go into politics. She chose the latter honing her “people political skills” as a bartender. Her life story is very much like that of Corie Booker and Kamala Harris—both also growing up in upper middle-class families but claiming to be “down for the struggle”.

C. S. Lewis in SURPRISED BY JOY describes riding on a train with one’s back to the engine as the train is moving rapidly forward. As one looks to the side, the countryside passes by quickly, with the passenger being almost unable to perceive what is outside of the train. With his back to the front one doesn’t see like the engineer of the train, what is in the front. The passenger does have the opportunity to look through the window and see what has passed by. Looking backward he has time to see and compare various landscapes, and even small snippets of events as cars stop at crossings, or maybe passengers can see children playing in a park.

Progressive liberals seem to be always looking at the side door and then maybe even trying to glance at the future. They make up their own realities based on the rapid moving events of the present, and then they extrapolate their “feelings” about events to come; not based on any data or by applying the discipline of cognition. They react instead of think.

If they had any understanding of the present based on political, economic or Biblical history they would understand that socialism and collectivism has been tried in some way or another in every and at every time in history across all civilizations. It has never worked. As the industrial revolution spread across the Western world and then the entire world, the politics of controlling the masses became more coercive and stifling—Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Polpott to name a few in modern history. Liberty continued to lead the way toward advancing the plight of everyday people. At no time in the history of the world has there been the opportunity for the masses to work their way out of grinding poverty and a subsistence lifestyle than what the opportunities of a liberal (classical liberal therefore conservative) political and economic philosophies have had on modern western societies and that we enjoy today.

Liberty is based on God’s second greatest gift to man—FREE WILL. Subsidizing individuals temporarily to help them pull themselves upward may be a short-term tactical solution to poverty. But if it incentivizes dependence, it is then evil. Let us not forget how Ms. AOC stopped Amazon from building a distribution and call center in her district in the Bronx that would have given jobs to as many as 6000 people, who now may be on some form of government subsistence. Was it in her political interest to keep them dependent on a government largesse, than to actually be independent economically themselves?

Engineers and developers create. Elon Musk and Donald Trump have created more jobs, made more people less dependent on government, than any politician could hope to ever do in a lifetime. Artists, engineers, scientists, poets and writers create and call us to be better in every aspect of our lives. Politicians like AOC tear down and destroy creators like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, by reallocating the fruits of honest people’s labors—not their own.

Every time Ms. AOC opens her mouth, she proves that she is not the “smartest dude” in the room. Very little “rocket science” in that brain—”with all due respect”. WINNING