OPINION:
Last week, socialists swept primary elections in New York and establishment Democratic incumbents fell by the wayside.
They now threaten other Democrats, including Gov. Kathy Hochul and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in New York and Democrats elsewhere. Here in the Sunshine State, Florida folks are asking, are those voters evil or stupid?
Arturo Perez-Reverte, one of Spain’s foremost men of letters, recently commented on Spanish television that stupid people are more dangerous than evil ones. Evil is contagious because stupid people will believe anything. Put 100 stupid people in a room with one evil person, and you end up with 101 evil people.
That sentiment has also been attributed to two very different thinkers, Anatole France and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
France was also a man of letters. Poet, journalist and novelist, he earned the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature. He famously wrote that “stupidity is far more dangerous than evil, for evil takes a break from time to time, stupidity doesn’t.”
Bonhoeffer, a brilliant Lutheran theologian executed on Adolf Hitler’s order, wrote from his prison cell that “stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. … Against stupidity we are defenseless. … Reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed.”
Three gifted thinkers separated by time and language came to the same conclusion: Stupid people are a far greater danger to humanity than evil itself.
America’s socialists continuously spew the evil that we are a racist nation led by corrupt and contemptible fascists worthy of hate, spite and removal. Their disdain for America is palpable.
In the American context, however, evil and stupid have a symbiotic relationship. It is not either; it is both, and evil always leads.
These new socialists spawn ideological armies of stupid followers. Their rhetoric is toxic. They are responsible for assassination attempts on President Trump and other acts of violence against law enforcement officers, businesses, national conservative leaders and even Supreme Court justices.
Socialism is evil.
The stupid act for the evil people who lead them. They are evil’s foot soldiers with too many supportive organizations and front groups to count. An army of stupid does not portend a good outcome, as New York’s recent elections demonstrated. Wherever you find a socialist candidate, you will find an army of stupid people ready to follow and execute on command.
The stupid are always right and do not need to be convinced otherwise because truth is on their side. They are immune to self-correction, dialogue or discussion. One evil person can indeed turn 100 fools into 101 evildoers. Socialism is evil.
Socialist evil takes advantage of the stupid and can adjust strategies, such as hijacking the Democratic Party. Bonhoeffer told us that having become a “mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.”
Unhinged political stupidity becomes pervasive, relentless and remorseless.
Today’s socialists offer everything for free: utilities, education, housing, transportation and life. The stupid follow and vote for them. They want to weaken our armed forces and police, erase our borders, promote a globalist foreign policy, subvert our education system, corrupt our elections, attack people of faith and destroy the nuclear family.
Evil says we need to abolish the Electoral College, the Senate, the Supreme Court and the presidency. It says that there are multiple genders, that we need big government and high taxes, that men can play in women’s sports and give birth to children.
It says child mutilation is just fine, that virulent antisemitism is necessary and that we must abolish our police and prisons. The stupid cheer and vote for all this.
Sadly but predictably, the Democratic Party’s interventionist policies created this parasitic socialist evil, which, in turn, galvanized armies of stupid and betrayed them.
German playwright Friedrich Schiller tells us, “Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.” Yet our responses cannot be in vain. We need a new coalition of the willing to vanquish the socialist evil and blunt the foolish followers who vote for them.
There can be no room in the American experiment for recreational socialism. It is an ideology that destroys entire societies, has killed 100 million people, crashes economies and divides families. The stakes are too big, the costs too high.
We must confront evil and stupidity. When we allow them to grow and gain respectability, America loses.
• Emilio T. Gonzalez is a retired U.S. intelligence officer who has served in senior positions in the U.S. Army, on the National Security Council and in the Department of Homeland Security.
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