The term, which I had never heard before or at least had never focused on, is featured in an essay by Jonathan Tobin at the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) titled, “Candace Owens is a cautionary tale about platforming ignorance.” Indeed she is: I had written about how Owens has embarrassed conservatives by, as I put it last November, “being revealed as an ignoramus” by her embrace of Palestinina propganda after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. More recently I listed her as one of the political performance artists (Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Bill Maher, James Carville, Ann Coulter, yada yada) who cannot be trusted to provide genuine opinions because they calibrate what they say and write according to what they think will get them the most clicks, eyeballs, gigs, and cash. Clearly, I was giving Candace far too much credit.

She is a genuine, bona fide idiot, whose recent self-outing as a virulent anti-Semite ( the inspiration for the JNS piece) is just the tip of a really stupid iceberg. As conservative collective AG noted on “X,” Owens has recently declared that…

• Israel was involved with 9/11
• The earth may be flat
• It’s absurd to believe dinosaurs roamed the earth and were killed by an asteroid
• Macron’s wife is secretly a man
• Jews were behind the Bolshevik revolution and it was secretly a genocide targeting Christians that was worse than the Holocaust
• The Holocaust is either fake or severely exaggerated
• The crimes of the allies in WWII and post-WWII were worse than anything the Nazis did
• The deportation of ethnic Germans from the rest of Europe post-WWII was worse than The Holocaust
• US dropped the bomb on Nagasaki to target Christians
• Israel/AIPAC/Jews were secretly behind the JFK assassination
• A secret cabal of Hollywood Jews were behind the death of Michael Jackson and people around him.

Nice! Owens is certainly an extreme case, and it is important, I think, to distinguish the true idiots from the cynical hucksters, though Owens is both. The overall lesson, however, is that as a society and culture we need to take care not to provide outsized megaphones to stupid, ignorant people. The internet has enabled too many of them to fashion super megaphones of their own, but that does not mean anyone else should give them interviews, publicity, guest appearances on podcasts and talk shows, speaking engagements or book deals. Doing this literally makes people dumber, and the more dumb people a democracy has, the worse it functions and the more likely it is to stop being a democracy at all.

Perhaps “The View,” a product of ABC News ridiculously enough, is the apotheosis of this fatal mistake. None of the women on “The View” are responsible, able to restrain their own biases, or at all reluctant to proclaim facts that don’t exist. It is broadcasting malpractice to give these opinionated fools a platform that presents them as authorities or legitimate pundits: if they have to have a TV show, it should be a cruel reality show like the one built around poor, dumb, Anna Nicole Smith, where you tuned in to laugh at the rich, famous and unbelievably dim.

Worse still, of course, is providing the ignorant with elected positions of power. That’s really dangerous, as we have already discovered to our nation’s sorrow. Ominously, enough of those platformed dummies have combined forces to infect society with the DEI contagion, which increases the platforming of ignorance by relegating merit and demonstrated wisdom and competence to a status subordinate to color, ethnicity, gender and other irrelevancies. Combine these with the traditional warping factors of fame, beauty, wealth, popularity and skillful demagoguery, and now no society in human history has platformed as many undeserving dolts as the United States of America.