Yes, yes we are, sadly.

The answer is simple and in 3 words... Fox news MAGA. So yes, yes they do believe everything and have MAGA cult brain damage.

They say, and I’m not joking, critical thinking is woke and therefor evil.

Critical thunking skills come with the brain reaching full maturity in a person’s mid-twenties, at 25 or 26. Somehow we’re seeing grown adults, well past the age of 26, whose brains obviously never matured, as they 100% lack critical thinking skills. Wonder which environmental factor contributed to it. Microplastics? Lead? Other heavy metals? Is it nutritional? Of course, I know a huge part of it is our public education system, which has been going downhill since the later eighties. They don’t teach Civics anymore, so kids don’t learn how their own government works. They also pass kids on to the next grade before they full master what’s taught in the previous grade, so we also have a barely literate population, willing to believe what they told, even when it’s wrong, and most of whom don’t know enough to question authority, especially when it is wrong. These are the enablers of the more clever criminals and monsters who convince them they’re going to take care of them, when in actuality they’re going to chea5 and abuse them just like the rest of us. Being so slow on the uptake, they won’t realize it until it’s too late.

US Right-Wing nut-jobs think critical thinking is "woke."

Small hope; we were even dumber and even more gullible during, say, medieval times. Then we almost exclusively believed every single bizarre lunacy the church decided to feed us with (a lot of it is still ingrained in christianity even today). For example. Other eras have been equally stupid with their own stupid sources and delusions. So we may not be doomed as a species, necessarily; our civilization should be reaching its end phase though. Few civilizations lasted much longer than a couple of thousand years, it should typically either violently fall or quickly but more discreetly morph into something vastly different fairly soon. Within the next millennia or so, give or take. I suppose potential archaeologists of the future will be looking for smartphones to figure out how we lived. But that’s only if we can come up with something better than capitalism before the fallout from that makes human life unsustainable on this planet. If we can’t, THEN we’ll be doomed for real - to survive we kind of need the planet to function - and there will be no future archaeologists.

Here's the thing, and it's been seen time and again in human history... Critical thinking is something of an illusion with a lot of humans. They learn how to perform the process, but instead of applying it universally, they apply it only in the context that they learned it in. Contextual learning is one of those problems that society brought upon itself from the number of exceptions to its rules, but the end result is that we're generally geared from a young age to expect that any rules we're taught are very specific. And that includes when to use critical thinking. Those who know this exploit it and harness something that was considered an exception by the parents of the current adult population (in this case, TV news) as those parents will have taught their kids to trust that source unquestioningly without even realizing it.

I never learned critical thinking skills in school until I was in college, and picked up Fundamentals of Logical Reasoning as an elective. Best decision I ever made.

not the whole species fault educations illegal in america. there are other countries