Stupidity Watch 1

Lamenting the Loss of Catholic Indulgences By Robert Korczynski The History of Indulgences ​Martin Luther objected to the Catholic system of buying your way out of purgatory because he claimed it unfairly taxed the poor to fund the construction of church buildings like St. Peter's Basilica (it didn't), because he questioned the Church's authority to declare the destination of a human soul based on money paid (which was heresy), and because he said the practice discouraged people from truly repenting. Protestants generally view the doctrine of purgatory as unbiblical and, historically, have often characterized the indulgence system as a cynical marketing tool used to exploit the fear of the afterlife for financial gain. This skepticism is bolstered by the fact that the Eastern Orthodox Church, which shares roots with the early Church, does not hold to the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory, nor did it utilize the Western system of indulgences. ​Because of Luther's atta...

How Naoki Sakai Saved Automotive Design with Puff Pants ​By Robert Korczynski For the 40th anniversary of the release of the Nissan Be-1 concept car at the 1985 Tokyo Motor Show, an automotive profile written by Alex Kwanten was published on hagerty.com in December of 2025. The piece covered the entire Pike Factory lineup, including the Pao and the Figaro, and talked to Nissan engineers, not Naoki Sakai. The article focused heavily on the internal staff's engineering and assembly efforts, directly quoting Yoshiro Kobata, who led the design team at the factory. In the profile, Kobata noted, "No one imagined it would become popular," adding that his crew was trepidatious about public reaction to a car hastily prepped for the show. ​While the article highlighted the frantic scramble to build the cars, it downplays the outside creative spark that made the project possible in the first place, Naoki Sakai and Water Design, unlike every other article that has been written over t...

High School Principal Quits After School Lunch Quran Giveaway ​The intersection of religious freedom, public school policy, and statutory law has become one of the most contentious battlegrounds in modern American culture. To understand the boundaries of the law, one must look at how the judicial system built the rules governing religious expression on public school property. The legal architecture developed over decades makes a clear distinction between protected private student speech and illegal religious endorsement by outside adult organizations. ​High School Student Clubs and the Equal Access Act of 1990 ​The modern era of religious speech in public secondary schools began with a major legal battle over student rights, culminating in the landmark Supreme Court case Board of Education of Westside Community Schools v. Mergens (1990). Bridget Mergens, a high school senior in Nebraska, sought to form a Christian student club at her school. The administration denied her request, asser...

How the RICO Act Allowed Rampant Antisemitism in America ​By Robert Korczynski The Judge, the Fixer, and the Volunteers ​In the late 1930s, the German American Bund held massive, high-profile rallies, most famously at Madison Square Garden in New York City. They followed every law. They had permits. They held their assemblies and exercised their rights to free speech. These were Americans who were antisemitic and sympathetic to Germany, but they had every right to assemble and hold offensive opinions, and they were not breaking any laws. ​The turning point occurred on February 20, 1939, at their massive rally at Madison Square Garden. A man named Isadore Greenbaum, an anti-Nazi, rushed the stage to protest. He was brutally beaten by the Bund’s security while thousands cheered, ending up bloodied and broken. That image became a foundational moment of outrage. ​Nathan Perlman, a judge in New York, saw the reality of the situation. He realized the system could not stop them because Americ...

How Political Islam Conquered The Democrats ​By Robert Korczynski The platform of the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party relies entirely on the belief that America is full of systemic racism, and that white supremacy is a growing existential threat to American life. But is America really full of systemic racism? And is white supremacy really a growing existential threat? On April 21, 2026, a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering for running a deceptive fundraising loop that had them paying literal white supremacists to do things that they documented and used for fundraising, while claiming that they were doing legitimate investigative legal work into hate speech and hate groups in America. The Department of Justice exposed that the SPLC raised millions from donors under the vow of dismantling hate groups and ...

​An Islamophobia Primer ​ By Robert Korczynski ​The word "Islamophobia" has not been around long. It is an Islamic terrorist propaganda word coined by the Muslim Brotherhood to silence dissent. This is the first paper to connect not only the 2026 terrorist designations of the Muslim Brotherhood with their creation of the word Islamophobia, but also the rise in antisemitism and the rebranding of Zionism as white supremacy that began during the summer of mostly peaceful protests in 2020. ​1. The Tactical Appropriation in Virginia ​While the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928, the word Islamophobia was created in 1991 at the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT) in Herndon, Virginia. This group served as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood in North America. ​ The Subversion: The Brotherhood's internal documents explicitly stated that their work in America was a "kind of Grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying Western Civilization from within, an...