There’s a term called the “heckler’s veto” which describes how lunatics are able to stifle normal public discourse. Colleges will not invite Ann Coulter to speak anymore because the lunatics are so disruptive the school fears harm could come to their students. The crazies over at Media Matters and The Southern Poverty Law Center work from this premise. In both cases it is a small number of people, but they make such a ruckus it is easier to go along with their racist demands than do the right thing.

The thing is, Media Matters et al. rely on mass media to pull their stunts. One of the weird consequence to the technological revolution is we now have the lunatics veto and the stupid person veto to go along with the heckler’s veto. Because we made it so easy for the stupid and crazy to reach a broad audience, we are more aware of them than at any time in human history. Matt Osborne, in another age, would have passed the time playing checkers with the other patients at the local asylum. Today he participates in public debate.

Steve Sailer has a post about the increasing number of two-digit IQ’s writing for popular websites. That column by Daisy Hernandez is funny, but it is also a good example of the the stupid person veto. Her bio suggests she is clever enough to fool others in her slice of the bell curve, but she is not adding anything to the stock of human capital. In a different age, she would be a secretary at an office somewhere or at home raising children. She’s also not a “woman of color” but she’s smart enough to know that’s how stupid people gain a toe-hold in the opinion rackets these days. Liz Warren got a job at Harvard once she became a fake Indian.

Reading her column, you see a familiar game. Some self-described victim declares herself to be a moral authority. That gives her a veto over the rest of us. After all, the only reason her “white male editor” spiked her asylum story is he is a racist. His pointing out the idiocy of such a proposal is the proof. After all, only “skinny white guys” notice that dimwits like Ms. Hernandez have heads for of goofy ideas. Because it is so easy for blockheads like Daisy to get on twitter and Facebook, they can now shout down everyone else.

I’m fond of pointing out that the mouth breathers on MSNBC were not allowed on TV and radio thirty years ago. The men running television and radio, sympathetic to the causes of these lunatics, were still responsible enough to keep these nuts off the air. They rightly feared the consequence. Even now, without mandatory cable fees MSNBC would go out of business in a week. technology has flung open the asylum doors and we are awash in dimwits and lunatics. The sane and sober are drowned out and the results follow.