It can be a pleasure to learn from the Internet, but you best have acquired your basic knowledge from something that is not the Internet. A book is a good idea; five hundred (good) books is better. If you do not really read or cannot read well (a common condition, actually), your head is likely to be a blooming, buzzing confusion. Half the people in our country, by definition, have an IQ less than a hundred. They have been tossed into a life during a time where the world can be a joyous place indeed, but it can also be a rankly complicated one. And along comes a figure who clears up the confusion. He relieves citizens of the burden of intellectual activity that every open society in some measure imposes upon them. He knows what is true, right, and just. He tells you the idealized past is better than the chaotic present, and he gives you the hope that we might return there. He is never wrong. Not for nothing did the ever-shrewd Trump say that he loves uneducated people.
Mark Edmundson, “The Politics of Possession in America,” Liberties, Fall 2024, 86.