One seeking to understand why America has veered so woefully off course in modern times must understand the degree to which those who read a suspiciously high volume of books, of professional studies, and investigative journalism in subjects ranging from economics to health care to the social and the earth sciences have managed in the past to “enlighten” significant numbers of American citizens, and to retain enormous influence at the highest levels of government.

 

Indeed, until only recently, expertise had been allowed to all but run amok in America’s public square, persons proficient in their areas of study allowed to indoctrinate Americans with near impunity. Fields such as classical economics, peer reviewed science, comparative government, foreign relations, climatology, health science and American history were permitted to flourish.

 

While much has dramatically changed, and much continues to do so, there is one misconception that somewhat alarmingly retains its hold on low information Americans, and that is the canard that the sun appears each morning on the eastern horizon.

 

While those who bear the greatest responsibility for the lingering credibility of this misbelief, astronomers, geographers, “experts” in longitudes and latitudes, and astrophysicists, have been strongly rebuked by prominent, eminently learned truth-tellers such as World News Daily, The Drudge Report and Sean Hannity, conviction in the fake assertion that the sun makes its daily rise in the east persists among some traditionally hard-headed, and unreliable segments of the population, for instance college graduates, those with advanced degrees, the well read, the reasonably intelligent, the commonsensical, the rational, and the fully sighted.

 

Recently uncovered and strongly persuasive evidence suggests an ongoing, well-coordinated conspiracy involving  compass designers, mapmakers and sundial manufacturers to validate the myriad individuals, and entities with clear financial incentive for perpetuating a hoax involving both the location in the sky of celestial bodies, as well as our general understanding of the directional, among them elementary school teachers, birds flying south for the winter, and the internal guidance systems of moths, which cause the insects to fly instinctively toward sunlight, or any source of light that approximate it in its absence

 

It is heartening though that a new breed of Americans now regularly and reliably rejects the knowledgeable, the reputable, and all who would keep America moving in the wrong direction, those who would drive west believing they were driving east, those following the sun to California when in actuality it makes its way across the sky from the Western hemisphere, over the shores of Nova Scotia and on to the Far East.

 

Perhaps nothing has been of more value, more solace and more encouragement to truth-seekers than the hegemony of Republican politics, and the election to the presidency of the United States  of America of Donald J. Trump.