The Midwit Meme and the Rittenhouse Affair

Periodical Media Diary

The midwit meme template depicts a graph of a Bell Curve IQ distribution. At the center of the distribution is a caricature of the midwit, typically one of several variations of “Crying Wojak”, a crude but strangely evocative sketch of a person of slightly better than average intellect who is emotionally invested in the conformist babble of today’s right-thinking striver class. This figure is smart enough to rationalize himself into a cultivated pseudo-intelligent idiocy that the natal idiot, shown at the left edge of the curve, is too dumb to understand — and that the sage, depicted on the right is wise enough to regard with contempt precisely because he does understand.

The amusing convergence of the figures at opposing tails of the distribution — the untutored but sound instincts of the natal idiot, unburdened by the corrupted intellectual baggage of the age, meeting up with the genuinely cultivated insight of the sage over and against the spurious poetasting and Science-Believing of the midwit is explicitly illustrated in this iteration of the meme:

All of us on social media over the last half-decade witnessed the extent to which our celebrities, our media, and our political, corporate, and even military leadership have been absorbed into the manufactured frenzies of the midwit mind, which have been supercharged in their potency by cascade of apocalyptic rhetoric and identitarian grievance that the Trump presidency summoned up in response to itself. We have either succumbed to the frenzy ourselves or reacted against it; such is the relentlessness of its keening that one must either join in or flee from it. It is what brought most of us here to this platform as a writers and readers.