Conservative Voice

There are dumb people who do stupid things and there are smart people who are misguided. Neither is particularly damaging to society as a whole. The people that are most damaging are smart people who leverage their cleverness to misguide a large number of dumb people to do stupid things.

For example, Michael Moore is a smart guy. He knows how to take advantage of the situation (like the Oscars) to promote himself and increase his wealth and influence. The reason he is so dangerous in that the MTV generation hears a lot of his garbage and believes it, because it is packaged in such a way that both amuses and confuses those without a decent cognitive skill level. He is much more dangerous than, for example, Maureen Dowd, the NY Times columnist who uses her intelligence to do deep thinking and write erroneously about politics and other subjects. Her falsehoods fall mostly on the already-converted liberal readers of the NY Times.

An analogy is the difference between hard-core pornography and Friends…

Those that are addicted to hard-core porn are already suffering from a serious lack of morality. They are beyond the subtle, morally degrading influences of more mainstream media. There are many others out there who are not so jaded to morality, but are unfortunately subject to the subtle influences of the free-love, no-morals messages presented week after week on the television series Friends. Friends reaches a wide audience with its guard down. Most are not aware of the subconscious messages being propagated by the show. Therefore, the seemingly innocuous Friends actually does more damage to the general morality of society than a blatantly pornographic movie. It entertains society with episodes like one where the friends got free reception to a porn channel and watched it 24-hours per day. The show never showed pornography, but it used humor and subtly to suggest that viewing pornography was normal, common and acceptable. Sure, Jennifer Anniston has made a better career choice than a porn queen, but characters like hers harm society more.

To tie the analogy to the example, Michael Moore is Jennifer Anniston and Maureen Dowd is a porn queen. Both would probably be flattered.