Be sure to Click LIKE at the bottom of this article, and share it everywhere!! By Craig Andresen – The National Patriot and Right Side Patriots – Commentary

13 year old Jacob Stevens, of Greenfield, Ohio, took a TikTok challenge, and lost. The challenge entailed consuming 12 to 14 Benadryl tablets — more than six times the recommended dosage. The challenge was supposed to create hallucinations, and 13 year old Jacob Stevens’ buddies filmed him taking the challenge, and the massive dosage of Benadryl.

The kid started having seizures and collapsed.

His buddies got scared and left him on the floor.

Jacob Stevens was taken to a local hospital where he showed no signs of brain activity, and six days later, his family took him off life support. Jacob Stevens was buried last week.

It was national news. A GoFundMe page was set up to assist with expenses, and there is always one thing that runs through my mind when something like this happens, and to be clear, it seemingly happens more and more often…so what?

I’m supposed to feel sorry for this kid? I’m supposed to feel empathy for the kid’s family?

Why…exactly?

It seems to me there wasn’t a whole lot of brain activity going on in that kid’s head before the TikTok challenge, but this sort of thing always results in compulsory finger-pointing. It was TikTok’s fault. Ban TikTok. It’s the fault of social media as a whole. Ban social media. Are we now supposed to ban Benadryl too?

Here’s a legit question…what about the kid’s parents?

Jacob’s  grandmother, 75 year old Dianna Stevens said, “We tried to tell him to stay off TikTok. We didn’t want him on TikTok. There’s things on there that are good, but there’s also things on there that are bad.” Oh, you and the adults in the family “TRIED” to tell him to stay off TikTok? You “TRIED?” Did you ever try to teach the kid that taking 12-14 of ANY medication was both butt-stupid and dangerous? Did you or any of the adults in the family ever try to teach the kid that just because one idiot jumps off a bridge doesn’t mean that the rest of the idiots should do it too?

At that point, grandma said something staggering…“I think Jacob kind of thought the Benadryl wasn’t going to hurt him. He’s had done it before.”

Lady, you are 75 years old and his parents are probably in their 40’s…and you knew that he had done it before? You knew that he had taken the TikTok challenge BEFORE, that he had swallowed maybe a dozen or more Benadryl capsules all at once BEFORE…and you didn’t see THAT as a teachable moment? You didn’t take the kid’s phone away from him, didn’t punish him or drill into his head that such bone-crushing stupidity could potentially KILL him?

Justin Stevens father now wants people to see the photo of his son in the hospital, laying in a bed, hooked up to machines showing what an online challenge did to him. That’s just more finger pointing as far as I’m concerned, and it’s not that I’m cold or uncaring, it’s just that I’m being honest. Being brutally honest is, I believe, the only way to get through to people in a case such as this, and it wasn’t what an online challenge did to Justin Stevens’ son, it was what his son did to himself.

And don’t even start with the platitudes, which Justin Stevens has already done, saying that his son was a well-mannered, funny, loving kid. He played football for Greenfield schools and could always make him laugh because we all know now that on a larger scale than all of that combined, the kid was an idiot.

Yes, the challenge, if that’s what you want to call it exists online, but the mere existence of it didn’t make the kid try to beat the odds any more than a gun fires itself. Only Jacob Stevens was responsible for his actions.

Far too often we see stories like this one, and far too often we hear about the body bags filled with people who died of fentanyl overdoses. There is no fentanyl social media challenge, and while most who die from it aren’t taking that particular opioid, or more accurately, synthetic opioid as a stand-alone drug, they’re taking it mixed in with something else, the finger pointing is useless. China? Mexico? The drug cartels? Sure, they all have a role in it as does the wide open border thanks to Joe Biden, but who is really, ultimately responsible?

China manufacture the fentanyl, and Mexico and their drug cartels move it across the border or cut it into other drugs, that’s true, but people who are buying drugs off the street for a cheap and quick high are ultimately responsible for their own actions. Nobody else. We’re talking about drug addicts. People who in most cases have no idea what they’re ingesting or shooting or smoking and don’t really care. Many are mentally ill, and a good deal of that could well have been the ramification of doing way too many drugs for way too much of their lives.

Am I supposed to feel sorry, and shed tears for them? Am I supposed to get behind some government program or welfare system that comes at the expense of our taxpayer dollars to save them?

Portland, Oregon has set in place places where addicts can get clean needles and other drug paraphernalia as though that’s going to solve the problem. Really? Drug addicted mentally ill people running the risk of getting an infection while they’re shooting poison into their veins…THAT’S the problem? 100,000 idiots dying of fentanyl overdoses in our country isn’t a government problem on any level of government. Sure, close the border and go to war against the cartels, but ultimately, what we have isn’t a drug problem, it’s an idiot problem.

We just have too many idiots.

Look around. The idiots are everywhere, and they’re not just kids. We have DA’s who have gone soft on crime, actually encouraging criminal behavior by not holding people responsible for their own actions. We have full-grown adult men dressing up as women and demanding that they be allowed to read stories to kids in schools and libraries while teachers try to normalize and mainstream such behavior. We have kids being “transitioned” from one gender to another by school administrators while hiding it from the parents of those children. We see those who feel entitled to what other people earn demanding a living wage for entry-level jobs and when they can’t get something for nothing, they steal whatever they want because there are no ramifications for doing so.

The one thing all of these people have in common with dead drug addicts and dead social media challenge takers is that they are idiots…and now we have adult idiots indoctrinating a whole new, younger generation of idiots.

While I do not begrudge those who rely on medical marijuana to manage pein from medical procedures and related complications, societally, we have become so dumbed down that medical marijuana is now made into gummies…a fruit-flavored child-like candy marketed to adult idiots.

So, the question becomes…what are the root causes of dumbing down?

There are many. Engagement over substance is a primary contributors to the manufacturing of idiots. Far too many users of TikTok and other social media are seeking engagement, or followers based on doing idiotic things in order to appeal to other like-minded idiots. The appeal to emotion is another factor in the agenda of dumbing down our society in that such appeals completely neglect any comparison of risk regarding actions and the simple fact that ALL actions or inactions come with risk.

Groupthink, another contributor to dumbing down has become so pervasive that idiots will now believe anything as long as they can find someone else dumb enough to believe it too, and then there’s nudge theory which is the idea that subtle suggestions, choices and positive reinforcement often achieve more influence and better results  than do commands, rules and punishment. A prime example of the abject failure of nudge theory for the sake of this commentary would be Jacob Stevens’ grandmother saying, “We tried to tell him to stay off TikTok. We didn’t want him on TikTok. There’s things on there that are good, but there’s also things on there that are bad.”

Perhaps one of the hardest things to do is to convince an idiot that they’re being an idiot because as a society, we’ve become far too politically correct and concerned with offending the idiots or others on their behalf. No parent wants to be told that their child is an idiot, and I’m sure Jacob Stevens’ parents don’t appreciate hearing it about their son who Darwined himself out of existence and it’s too late to correct the affliction, but imagine the different outcome had  they flat-out told their son is was being an idiot after the first time he tried that TikTok challenge. Image how things for that family would be different today had their son told his friends that THEY were being idiots.

I’m sure there will be those who believe I’m being too harsh, too insensitive and/or too offensive in this commentary, but ask yourselves where soft-peddling things, being sensitive and inoffensive have gotten our society over the past several decades. Is society better off for not being blunt and honest?

Mark Twain once said,“Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.”

In closing, I’ll say this as simply as I can so that even the idiots among us might understand it…our society, and our country would be far, FAR better off today if we would just quit allowing the inmates to run the asylum.

That’s the bottom line.

Copyright © 2021 Craig Andresen / thenationalpatriot.com all rights reserved

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For more political commentary please visit my RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS partner Diane Sori’s blog The Patriot Factor to read her latest article The Presidency Is Ours To Lose

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Tomorrow, Tuesday, April 25tth, from 7-8:30pm EST, RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS Craig Andresen and Diane Sori discuss ‘The Presidency Is Ours To Lose’; ‘Idiots vs. The Hard Cold Truth’; and important news of the day. Hope you can tune in to RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS on https://rspradio1.com. Click ‘LISTEN LIVE’ starting at 6:50 pm EST with show beginning at 7pm EST.