The New Dumb

Hunter S. Thompson warned us about this moment

Hunter S. Thompson had a name for this type of thing.

He called it “the New Dumb,” writing about it for ESPN during the chaos that was the 2000 election.

The concept…it wasn’t ignorance, but something way worse. An overwhelming confidence, a cockiness, that no longer depends on truly understanding something. A certainty not obligated to explain itself.

Dan Carlin mentioned it recently and it stuck with me. Then Minnesota happened.

On January 7 in Minneapolis, Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent. She was 37, a U.S. citizen, a mom of three, and a poet.

She was unarmed in her Honda Pilot, with children’s toys still in the car as she lay there lifeless.

Video shows an agent yank her driver-side door. Bodycam footage captured her calm, almost apologetic voice: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” She slowly pulled away, the car turned, and shots were fired. In the bodycam audio, a voice can be heard cursing immediately after. She died in the street.

These are facts.

What happened next is where things broke. Within hours, Kristi Noem and Donald Trump called it “domestic terrorism.” They didn’t carefully review evidence, but deployed the phrase immediately as if following a playbook. All before the evidence could be examined.

But more footage came out. For many people, the picture sharpened. She wasn’t armed or trying to hurt the officer. He fired as the car veered away from him.

Other people didn’t see it.

This is the part worth focusing on. The evidence didn’t confuse things, it clarified them. And yet it failed to change minds. Not because the facts were unavailable or hard to attain (i.e. the videos), but because they got in the way of conclusions that had already been reached.

There was a time when video could act as a referee. Imperfect and incomplete, but still capable of forcing a reckoning.

If this had happened a decade ago, there would have been more talk on the right of a “miscommunication,” a “tragedy,” an “unfortunate accident.” Now, a victim is publicly blamed within hours of her death.

The federal response didn’t attempt to persuade. There was no shame or embarrassment. No visible effort to establish the facts. Just: this is what happened.

Hunter S. Thompson understood the danger of this moment. When disagreement stops mattering because persuasion is no longer the goal. Truth becomes immune to evidence and institutions learn they don’t need to convince anyone anymore. Because the audience they care about already knows how to hold the line.

This is the New Dumb. It isn’t loud or chaotic. It’s confident and obedient. The facts still exist, but they have very little leverage.

For me, the most unsettling part isn’t that this happened in broad daylight and on video. It’s how normal it’s all starting to feel.

Hunter S. Thompson would have recognized this immediately. And he would have been pissed.