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.
Sometimes I think people drawn to Hunter’s work make the mistake of thinking that Hunter was only concerned with the main characters of power itself (ie, Nixon), and not how those main characters in our democratic Republic are a projection of the ugliness of the American psyche as a whole. What’s far scarier and saddening is that there’s *a whole lot of people* out there that exercised their vote for this ugly reality. It’s very grim.
“This maybe the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.” - hst
It is becoming harder and harder to maintain my 'Gonzo' amidst all the ugliness that spews forth in torrents from this administration. We need someone like Hunter to rise to the occasion and pick apart these evil bastards and lay their splayed viscera out for all witness. Nobody has the fortitude for that kind of an attack on the Giant Orange Pedophile (GOP). Where are all the award winning journalists now when the freedom of the whole of this nation hangs on the precipice? Guess they are all scared for their lives like the rest of us...