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A startling new scientific paper shows what patriotic Americans already suspected: feed machines the same viral trash that fries young minds on our phones and the machines themselves go dumb. Researchers at major universities ran controlled experiments showing that large language models retrained on short, high-engagement social media posts suffer measurable declines in reasoning and long-context memory — a modern, mechanical version of the doomscrolling epidemic Glenn Beck warned about.
The numbers are brutal and uncomfortably specific: in the study, reasoning scores on standard benchmarks fell sharply as the junk ratio rose, and long-context comprehension plunged in lockstep. The team documented dose-response decay — the more the model ate of the attention-optimized junk, the worse it got — proving this is not a fluke but a predictable, repeatable failure mode.
Even more alarming, the paper reports that ordinary fixes don’t fully undo the damage. Retraining on clean, high-quality data and a variety of mitigation tactics produced only partial recovery, and the researchers point to persistent representational drift as the reason the rot lingers. The project even published code and reproduction materials so anyone can verify that this cognitive corrosion is real and stubborn.
This is not merely a tech problem — it is a moral and cultural crisis. If our children are raised on cheap, dopamine-driven scraps and our machines are trained on the same garbage, we’ll accelerate a collapse of thinking, character, and civic virtue. Conservatives understand that freedom requires citizens who can read, reason, and pray; letting Big Tech feed both people and machines on a poisoned information diet is an act of national self-sabotage.
The solution the researchers point to is obvious and patriotic: stop pretending popularity equals truth, enforce provenance and quality in training data, and treat data curation as a matter of public safety. That means lawmakers, state attorneys general, parents, and responsible companies must demand transparency about what goes into models and stop allowing engagement metrics to become the de facto curriculum for machine minds.
This is a call to reclaim our time and our attention. Put the phone down, read a book, talk to your neighbor, and teach your children to think instead of scroll. Restore the rhythms of family, church, and community that actually build virtue and sharpen minds — because no algorithm will save what we refuse to guard.
If we tolerate an online ecosystem that literalizes brain rot into the guts of our technology, we will inherit a hollowed-out republic. The warnings from this paper and from voices like Glenn Beck should wake us up: protect our children, demand accountability from the tech giants, and refuse to trade our thinking for convenience or clicks.
