It will never cease to amaze me how brilliant minds can believe some of the most skull-hammeringly stupid ideas ever concocted. A video featuring famed astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson has been circulating on social media. It shows an interview between himself and ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, in which the scientist waxes anything but eloquent on gender and sex.

Warning: The following video is so asinine that you might lose a couple of IQ points just from watching it.

The video starts with Tyson arguing that “the XX/XY chromosomes are insufficient. Because when we wake up in the morning, we exaggerate whatever feature we want to portray the gender of our choice.”

For some reason, Tyson then points out that the United States “was a land where we have the pursuit of happiness” and goes on to explain:

Suppose no matter my chromosomes, today I feel 80 percent female, 20 percent male. I’m going to put on makeup. I’m going to do this. Tomorrow, I might feel 80 percent male.

Remove the makeup and I’ll wear a muscle shirt. Why do you care? What business is it of yours to require that I fulfill your inability to think of gender on a spectrum?

This man is far to intelligent to be saying things this stupid. pic.twitter.com/jMoXl4B8DG

— Jeff Charles, King of the Nonwhites🏴 (@jeffcharlesjr) August 1, 2023

In the video going around on Twitter, detransitioner Chloe Cole intersperses her commentary with Tyson’s, pointing out the absurdity of his comments.

“How about we stop confusing basic human biology with cosmetics,” she said. “Like, what a weird jump. I don’t wear makeup most days. If I leave the house without makeup on, does that make me like 70 percent male?”

Cole continued: “If it was only truly about aesthetics, nobody would care. It’s my business because you’re using 1950s gender stereotypes to justify an ideology that leads to the sterilization and mastectomies of 15-year-old girls who just don’t fit in … girls like me.”

Author and journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, when writing on the destruction of the 20th-century Western man, noted how our higher learning institutions have only served to dumb down the masses – especially the elites. In his book, “The End of Christendom,” he noted how the Western world is gradually bringing about its own destruction:

Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over–a weary, battered old brontosaurus–and became extinct.

It is that last sentence that is illustrated in this story. Tyson revealed something that is true about many, if not most, of those who fall victim to the intellectual atrophy brought by academia: They have been educated into “imbecility.” The progressive influence on academia has turned out generations of people who are so steeped in their ridiculous ideas that they believe all manner of silly and unscientific ideas. Unfortunately, judging by the prevalence of hard leftist gender ideology, the problem is only becoming worse.