Drop the bomb

Time running out for UFO transparency?

Roll over, Grant Wood — American Gothic 2025 is here and fixin’ to kick ass.

Over the past week we’ve endured endless rehash about why voters so thoroughly repudiated democracy, how the Dems misread the national mood, what Trump knew about America that the wine-and-brie crowd didn’t, the price of butter, they/them politics, the elites, the enemies within, Christian nationalism, Haitians eating cats and dogs, schoolkids coming home with altered genitalia, etc. But ascribing what happened last week to yet another disastrous collapse of American political judgement misses altogether an even more ominous story. Our entire species is undergoing an apparently irreversible neurological transformation with unfathomable implications.  

Brain science began tracking the trend curves decades ago, sometimes with conflicting results. From the 1930s through the 1980s, researchers noted how IQ averages in the United States, Japan and Denmark had risen by three points thanks in large part to improved nutritional standards. By the 21^st century, however, reversals were surfacing. From 1884 to 2004, the University of Amsterdam determined that residents of Western nations had mysteriously shed 14 IQ points. Analysts wandered into the minefield of genetics, and provoked a firestorm of criticism by exploring the idea that the uneducated were outbreeding the educated.

Just 10 years into the new millennium, however, the suspect list had narrowed sharply. A UCLA neuroscience study indicated “the computer is like electronic cocaine,” and according to a 2012 Newsweek expose, the brains of the burgeoning Internet-tethered population were starting to resemble those of drug addicts and alcoholics.

Coated in Dorito dust

Chinese researchers noted “abnormal white matter” in areas governing attention span, self-control and executive function, with “structural abnormalities in grey matter,” or a 10-20 percent shrinkage in the regions responsible for processing speech, memory, motor control, emotion and sensory information.” The Journal of Pediatrics pointed at “Facebook depression.” Newsweek described a “sad, stressed-out world of people coated in Dorito dust and locked in a dystopian relationship with their machines,” leading to an “evaporation of the genuine self.”

Researchers at Temple University discovered that consumers “trying to drink from a firehose of information has harmful cognitive effects,” leading to “mental exhaustion” and “info-paralysis.” Test subjects exposed to granular data on stocks actually made poorer investment choices than those with more generalized information; subjects given excessive details on strawberry jam rated those products higher than the jellies their own taste buds actually preferred.

In 2014, the journal Science examined University of Virginia psych department studies on test subjects who agreed to surrender their phones and tablets. Their only task was to sit quietly alone with their thoughts in a barren room for anywhere from 6 to 15 minutes. In one phase of the experiment, participants were given the option of self-administering painful shocks if they found tranquil repose too challenging. Twenty-five percent of the women and 67 percent of the men chose pain; one male subject zapped himself 190 times.

In 2020, National Affairs magazine examined the erosion of “deep literacy” generated by digital platforms and social media. Described as “what happens when a reader engages with an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author’s direction and meaning,” deep literacy is a “cultural achievement” that reaps cumulative rewards, not only for individual growth but for society at large. It offers the “potential to bear original insight,” “empowering our creativity and imagination, and refining our capacity for empathy.”

Perpetual intellectual adolescence

By contrast, growing evidence on “mediated electronic interactions” evoke a phenomenon called “acquired social autism” informed by algorithms foisting default choices onto “ever less cognitively adept humans.” Digital technology is “creating novel neural pathways,” particularly among youngsters, with dire political implications:

“Populism of the illiberal nationalist kind is what happens in mass-electoral democracy when a decisive percentage of mobilized voters drop below a deep-literacy standard.” Furthermore, “Those who lack a reading habit may be locked in perpetual intellectual adolescence, but they can still gather in the street, shout, and even shoot.”

With the ascendance of digital-native generations, future prospects for deep literacy at this point look hopeless.

Between 2007 and 2021, the Centers for Disease Control reported a 62 percent spike in suicide rates among young people between 10 and 24 years old. Although the American Psychological Association maintains digital media is neither inherently harmful or beneficial, a recent investigation by The New Yorker dug into the national avalanche of harm-related lawsuits and the rise of groups like the Social Media Victims Law Center. Its report reiterated what slot-machine designers already know, that predictable rewards lack the allure of the unknown, and that the associated dopamine rush is “like putting children in a 24-hour casino with chocolate-flavored bourbon.” End-stage capitalism never tasted so good.

Bang!

Doing a slow burn into this volatile mix is the dynamite fuse of the Electoral College, the 18^th-century strait jacket conceived to enshrine the prerogatives of 18^th-century one percenters, the landed gentry. But it took more than 200 years for the powderkeg to blow. The result has been a calamitous war in Iraq, a convicted billionaire felon who attempted a bloody coup to retain power, and a Supreme Court that has legalized political corruption, dispensed with regulatory guardrails, abandoned women’s reproductive health to red-state religious fanatics, and immunized the commander in chief with monarchal powers. In all likelihood, the November 5 results will prevent us from ever knowing the full extent of state secrets compromised by the truckloads of classified documents Trump transferred from the White House into his Florida palace in 2021.

In the coming months and years, probably sooner than later, cheered on by mobs eager to see the whole system burned to the ground, Trump will order civilian and military authorities to take action that, if obeyed, might well finish off what’s left of Constitutional law. To that end, faced with the accelerating evolution of the wired mind into despair and psychosis, public servants must consider launching a preemptive strike before inauguration day and play the UFO card before the demolition of institutional norms can begin.

Trump’s late October interview on Joe Rogan revealed breezy indifference to the issue at large. But the Harris-Walz campaign volunteered nothing at all about the biggest story of all time. Nevertheless, the UFO controversy returns to the spotlight once again, on Wednesday, in a hearing convened by subcommittee members of the House Oversight Committee.

We’ll need more than another hearing

For the third time in as many years, lawmakers on Capitol Hill will question stakeholders in a hearing optimistically titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth.” Its star witness will be Lue Elizondo, the former counterintelligence agent whose recent book, Imminent, charges that “legacy programs” operated by private corporations since the mid-20^th century involve UFO crash-retrieval/reverse-engineering projects. But if precedent prevails, there will be no meaningful followup, despite veterans’ persuasive testimony about the national security challenges provoked by UFOs.

Longstanding speculation about public reaction to the confirmation of wildly superior technology operating in our atmosphere by nonhuman intelligence accommodates everything, from apathy and reverence to panic and disruption. Given the chaos on the Project 2025 menu, the Biden administration, or conscience inside the Pentagon fed up with the asphyxiating and probably illegal classification system responsible for perpetuating the UFO logjam, now has a choice. With MAGA in control of all three branches and running the table on everything else, the new regime will have no incentive to pursue a variable with the potential to dilute its agenda of payback and plunder. Trump pays lip service to dismantling the so-called deep state; in reality, the clandestine transfer of public funds to the private concerns hoarding UFO treasure is the model for MAGA governance.

There’s never been a more urgent or appropriate moment to toss a wrench into the machinery of an immoral status quo. The courage to do the right thing could prove to be the most consequential and redemptive moment in the ebbing light of American democracy. The time is now:

Drop the bomb.