What Took Us So Long to Learn About World War Eleven?
One of the jokes in high rotation in the late M. Stanton Evans’s repertoire involved a teleprompter miscue, a la Ron Burgundy in Anchorman, in which the newsreader discussed events concerning World War Eleven. Other listeners of the joke, I assume, also regarded it as of dubious origin, told to illustrate not a literal but a figurative truth, i.e., human evolution took a U-turn on intelligence several decades back.
It turns out that Stan Evans was not wrong about someone reading “World War II” as “World War Eleven.” He was merely early. This, of course, makes Evans a prophet (as many already knew that as sensed the inevitability that someone, somewhere, sometime would read the Roman numeral “II” as “11”).
“The last time the Alien Enemies Act was invoked,” Rep. Ilhan Omar explained, “it was used to detain and deport German, Japanese, Italian immigrants during World War Eleven.”
Omar actually said this at a Capitol Hill press conference last year (the presence of Mazie Hirono excluded Omar as the stupidest person on the dais).
Why did it take us so long to learn about an event as historic as World War Eleven?
The widespread distribution of the clip took about 15 months. During a much slower news cycle, Dan Quayle’s botching of “potato” reached everyone within 24 hours. It stuck with him to this day. But Omar holds Progressive Privilege.
Progressive Privilege ensured that it did not hound her the way “potatoe” did Dan Quayle or tripping followed Gerald Ford, the most athletic president in our history. Even Sarah Palin, who never said “I can see Russia from my house,” gets dogged by a line that Tina Fey said during an impersonation.
Omar’s stupidity demonstration recalled Rep. Hank Johnson, who questioned an admirable admiral about whether the weight of so many U.S. military personnel on Guam might nudge the island into the Pacific Ocean. “My fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated,” Johnson told the admiral, “that it will tip over and capsize.” (RELATED: President Trump Outs Dems: ‘These People Are Crazy’)
“The government you elect is the government you deserve,” Thomas Jefferson allegedly once said.
Hank Johnson has represented Georgia in Congress for two decades. Ilhan Omar has never in her four elections to the House of Representatives won by less than a 2-to-1 margin.
Omar serves as a representative. Who does she represent? Increasingly, America.
The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, a film about a video game character who first appeared in 1981, ranks as the top-grossing movie in the United States for 2026. For the last decade, sequels, remakes, and films based on old comic book characters have ruled the box office every year. We recycle the past and create little new.
The top political streamer on Twitch calls the fall of the Soviet Union “one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century” and recently compared China favorably to the U.S. government after a trip to Tiananmen Square, where the Chinese police inspected his phone and questioned him about filming. He didn’t get his own irony. On the political right, one of the most popular podcasters insists that the French First Lady once had a penis and implies that the Israeli government took some part in the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
It astonishes not that a people who elevate all that elects someone as dumb as Ilhan Omar, but that someone occasionally brilliant — Brandon Gill’s recent masterclass questioning of a witness falls into this category — slips through the cracks and into Congress.
Stupid is the new smart.
And if you do not buy that, best believe that the Kungabidgian Empire’s enslavement of half of the Xyloxian Alliance made World War Nine far more destructive than the infamous World War Eleven.
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