Big Stupid Has Infiltrated the State Department, and Now We Can’t Even Make a Correct Map

ALEX WROBLEWSKI//Getty Images5 min readIt’s a Big Stupid Summer, America! As I have said before in Esquire, things have leaped forward in the field of stupid. Yes, our overall level of discourse has gotten dumber, our politics nastier, and our entertainment more insipid. This much is obvious. But what’s even more concerning is that market forces seem to be conspiring to make us denser by the day, to give us no options but the most idiotic. As Big Tobacco once held sway over our government to avoid accountability for the deadliness of its product, Big Stupid has its hands on all levers of power in this world and will not let go. Here are a few recent highlights, and I think you will agree they are dim as fuck.To wit(less):That Map of AfricaAt an event hosted by the International AIDS Society in Rio de Janeiro last weekend, a senior State Department official gave a presentation about U.S. funding of HIV programs on the African continent. Unfortunately, this senior official used a map of Africa that was made by a junior (in high school, taking a remedial summer school geography class, and his edible had just kicked in). The map mislabeled every country the official called out in the presentation.Come on. I found out the Czech Republic changed its name to Czechia when I saw it on the Eurovision Song Contest, and even I think this is embarrassing. Health officials from around the globe got to watch a representative of the United States work off a map that put coastal Nigeria in the middle of the Sahara Desert, made Mozambique much mo’ northern, and gave one unnamed country a bar that went nowhere. We have put our best foot forward once again, and once again we placed it right onto a banana peel.A watermark on the image reveals that the crazy mixed-up map was generated by OpenAI, which of course it was. This is further proof that we are currently being led by people who aren’t just too stupid to remember to take off the watermark; they’re too lazy to put their own eyes on their own work. Even in the age of artificial intelligence—a wonderful tool that can replicate human thought but can somehow only make one kind of concert flyer—you still have to use some of the organic intelligence the good Lord gave you. You still have to give your work a quick gander and see if your brain catches any obvious mistakes, like the Ivory Coast being in a place where it has no Coast at all. The rest of us learned this lesson when word processors started coming equipped with spell-check: You still have to proofread and make sure a correctly spelled word isn’t being used in the wrong place. Everybody knows this. That’s why you don’t see obvious mistakes on, say, the front page of the New York Times Sunday Styles section.Oop!Those Signs in Front of the Smithsonian A July 24, 2026, executive order from President Trump directs the National Park Service to “install temporary signage along the NPS-maintained sidewalks” used by the public to enter the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. These signs will warn visitors about the “ideological capture” of the museum and inform them that they may be shown “inaccurate information” about our nation’s history, because “the current leadership of both the Smithsonian Institution and the Museum cannot be trusted to tell America’s story with honesty and gratitude.”The alleged “inaccurate information” inside the Smithsonian Museum of American History includes controversial takes like “We did slavery and it was bad,” “This country was built and is sustained by immigrants and that is good,” and “Transgender people exist.” This is all too much for the tough guys inside the Trump administration, who live by the famous adage “those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it awesome and everything turns out great for them.”The House Subcommittee on Delivering Government Efficiency dragged the museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, into a couple hearings last week to ask her “what is a woman” a million times and do all the other things congresspeople do to audition for TikTok in 2026. The Smithsonian has made no comment about the executive order. So I will: If you are too frightened to be challenged by something you learned at a history museum, that’s a you problem. You’re putting your desire for comfort ahead of everyone else’s need for growth and edification. Here’s my hot travel tip for you: Next time you’re in D.C., skip the Smithsonian, go to a Massage Envy, and keep the rest of us out of it.The signs haven’t gone up yet. Polymarket isn’t even taking bets on whether they’ll have spelling errors, because the odds would be 100 percent.The President Posted a Very Stupid Video, Part One MillionThis week, in the middle of the night, when someone with an important job should be sleeping so that he can maybe hope to stay awake through a whole funeral, the official White House X account posted a video of Donald Trump and JD Vance as Rick and Morty.We’re in a misbegotten war with Iran, I just started a GoFundMe for a tank of gas, and a salad will make your butt fall off, and this is what the president of the United States is doing. It’s a small thing, frivolous, I know. But it does make me wonder: What will be the thing that makes it perfectly clear to everyone on the planet that this man is unfit to lead the country? What will he do or say that makes it irrefutable, that makes it impossible for even the most compromised public official not to take action and remove him from the highest office in the Greatest Country in the World?What will it take? And how sure are you that we’re going to see it?It’s all too much. I’m going to read some People magazine, where the news may be fluffy, but at least they’re reporting it with only the highest and most rigorous journalistic standards.Dave Holmes//AppleOop!