I have lots of occasions in this newsletter to cite George Orwell’s famous quote that there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them. That’s especially handy when covering stories out of our wack-a-doodle leftist university faculties, like the two alleged “academics” who just wrote an open letter urging President Biden to simply ignore any Supreme Court rulings he doesn’t like. They call this “Popular Constitutionalism,” although using the Constitution as toilet paper isn’t very popular in my house. It’s also the legal theory cited by segregationists in the 1960s.

https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/07/what-happens-when-democrats-start-ignoring-u-s-supreme-court-rulings-they-dont-like/

Stories like this often prompt the question, “Why do people who have elite college degrees and claim to be very intelligent constantly fall for transparent nonsense?” That’s the premise of this interesting article by Laura Dodsworth at the Brownstone Institute, “Why are intelligent people so easily tricked?” I suspect the first mistake some of these people made was getting tricked into believing they were all that intelligent in the first place.

https://brownstone.org/articles/why-are-intelligent-people-so-easily-tricked/