Con

Con: a ruse used to gain another's confidence.

— Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary

Texas is suing a Christian "influencer" for falsely claiming she could cure eating disorders, Insider reports.

The state accuses Brittany Dawn of misleading customers about her expertise and of falsely promising custom nutrition plans she never delivered.

A self-proclaimed "Jesus seeker" with a half million Instagram followers, Dawn also promised customers regular phone check-ins that never occurred and charged them "shipping fees" for emails.

Allegations against Dawn first surfaced in 2019, when followers began to call her a "scammer" on her Facebook page. Their complaints led to an investigatory report on ABC's Good Morning America.

When the heat grew too much to bear, Dawn shuttered her nutrition business and turned to monetizing Jesus, producing hotel shows for vendors of Christian tchotchkes.

    Jesus clears the "den of thieves"

Brittany Dawn is only one of thousands of scammers we innocents encounter on line every day.

They've made the web a den of thieves.

But who was America's first big scammer?

The credit goes to William Thompson, known to history as the original "confidence man."

Operating in New York City in the 1840s, Thompson would dress up as a gentleman, walk up to a wealthy mark on the street, and begin a conversation, as if an old acquaintance. After a minute, Thompson would borrow the mark's watch, then disappear from his life forever.

Thompson's haul each time was considerable. A gentleman's watch in the 1840s cost $4,200 in today's money.

Thompson capitalized on the instinct of the genteel to avoid a faux pas at any cost; in this case, the cost of a fancy watch. His consummate skill at appearing trustworthy earned Thompson the newspaper nickname "Confidence Man," a moniker that quickly became synonymous for scammer; and, in its shortened form con, synonymous for scam.

Herman Melville immortalized William Thompson's nickname in 1857, by using it for the title of a novel. 

The Confidence Man features a cast of characters who are card sharps, stock swindlers and snake-oil salesmen, cheats who Melville thought symbolized all that was wrong with America.

NOTE: The word scam, by the way, entered American usage in the 1960s. Meaning a "trick," scam is a carnival barker's term derived from the 18th-century British word for a "highway robber," scamp.

POSTSCRIPT, FEBRUARY 10. 2022: Axios today announced that Maggie Haberman's Confidence Man, the "book Trump fears most," will be published in October.    

Coup

Trump boasted Sunday he tried to overturn the 2020 election.

While our first president to stage a coup, Trump is by no means the first plutocrat to do so.

That dishonor is shared by the leaders of the American Liberty League, a cabal of CEOs that included J.P. Morgan, Jr., Irénée du Pont, Robert Clark, and the then-heads of General Motors, General Foods, and Birds Eye.

The year was 1933. The target was FDR.

Inaugurated in March, FDR had promised a "New Deal" to help lift the nation out of depression. A boon to working men and women, as well as the unemployed, the New Deal incensed the nation's CEOs, who labelled the patrician FDR a "tyrant" and "traitor to his class."

FDR wasn't in office month when the Liberty League sprang into action. 

It plotted to recruit a popular Marine Corps general, Smedley Butler, to lead a half million angry veterans in a march on Washington, with the goal of removing FDR from the White House at the barrel of a gun. 

The League's leaders were ready to spend $30 million to supply the veterans Remington Rifles—the equivalent of $500 million today.

But General Butler, a patriot, would have none of it and exposed the League's plot to the FBI. He also shared before a Congressional committee the details of what the newspapers called the "Wall Street putsch."

The Congressional committee's final report, delivered 11 months after FDR's inauguration, stated that the committee had "received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country.

"There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient."

Thirty-four years later, the committee chair, Rep. John McCormack, told a reporter, "We were in the depths of a severe depression, and we had a good man, Roosevelt, in the White House. 

"The plotters definitely hated the New Deal because it was for the people, not for the moneyed interests, and they were willing to spend a lot of their money to dump Mr. Roosevelt. 

"If General Butler had not been the patriot he was, and if they had been able to maintain secrecy, the plot certainly might very well have succeeded."

HAT TIP: Thanks to Ann Ramsey for pointing me to this forgotten bit of history.

Impressed

"I'm impressed."

With snark being our default reaction to everything, perhaps we don't say it often enough.

The verb impress, meaning "to have a strong effect on the mind," entered English in the 14th century.

Its root was the Latin impressus, meaning "stamped," "indented," or "imprinted."

A marvelous event impressed you, stamping its mark on your mind.

A second, less joyous meaning of the verb arose two centuries later.

During wars in the 16th century, when the king needed to fill the ranks of the Royal Navy, he would press seafarers—usually sailors with the merchant fleet—into naval service. 

The king in fact claimed the permanent right to impress sailors any time he chose.

To do so, he would dispatch "press gangs" to roam the coastal towns. The press gangs were little more than bands of brutal thugs, led by ruthless naval officers. Often they'd snatch any man they spotted—regardless of seafaring experience.

To be "impressed"—a fearsome event—meant to be "kidnapped into the service."

The practice of impressing men into the Royal Navy lasted well into the 19th century, when crown service was made voluntary.

The Supermoms Assemble

O Columbia! the gem of the ocean,

The home of the brave and the free,

The shrine of each patriot's devotion,
A world offers homage to thee.

Thy mandates make heroes assemble,
When Liberty's form stands in view.

Thy banners make tyranny tremble,
When borne by the red, white, and blue.

— Thomas á Becket

Across the nation, a new American hero is emerging: the Supermom.

Uninformed and dogmatic, she is as great a threat to democracy as any Proud Boy.

Perhaps greater.

She is, after all, your mom.

The extreme right is enlisting Supermoms to oversee elections and run for local offices. 

Supermoms have their own PAC, Moms for Liberty, too; and have been singled out by Trump operatives for cultivation.

The Supermoms' goal is to turn back the clock 180 eighty years to the time "Columbia the Gem of the Ocean" was penned.

Back then, God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. 

Columbia was indeed the gem of the ocean, which meant you needn't worry about porn or pervs or gang violence or uppity Blacks, Jews, Latinos, Asians, Muslims, Queers, and Feminists.

Supermoms claim they are "fighting for the survival of America" by galvanizing parents to defend their rights against tyrants.

Of course, the tyrants in their sights are all Democrats—most especially those of color.

In the past few months, Supermoms in Arizona, Colorado, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania have organized state-wide door-knocking campaigns to uncover phantom voters; launched forensic audits of the 2020 election results; and lobbied state lawmakers to scrap all voting machines, so they can count the votes in future elections. 

And just this week, Supermoms on a Tennessee school board banned Maus because it's "vulgar," while Supermoms on school boards in Nebraska, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming banned hundreds of books authored by Blacks.

In more ways than one, fiery Supermoms compose America's 21st century Luftschutz.

The Luftschutz was an all-volunteer civil defense league founded by Hermann Göring in 1933. At its peak, more than 22 million Germans belonged, many of them women.

Organized by local air raid wardens, the Luftschutz trained its members to place sandbags, fight fires, clear rubble, and respond with first aid in the event of aerial bombings and gas attacks. The wardens claimed the Luftschutz's purpose was Selbschutz (self- protection).

The darker purpose of the Luftschutz, however, was to recruit average German citizens into the Nazi party, which was a minority party in 1933. Göring understood that if you just let moms wear cool hats and attend gatherings, you could count on their silence when the time came for the Final Solution.  

Supermoms may consider themselves simply "concerned" soccer moms protecting their precious children, but they're in the grip of fascists.

That makes them wholly to be feared.

Above: Frau im Luftschutz! Nazi poster by Ludwig Hohlwein. 1936.

Happy January 6th!

We’re an illiberal state because we’ve marginalized the liberals.

— Victor Orbán

 

How January 6th will be commemorated in the future depends on the outcome of the 2024 election.

If Trump or his clone wins the presidency, January 6th will replace July 4th.

Sadly, Trump's base, too stupid (yes, that's the word) to grasp European politics, will take no note of their savior's endorsement yesterday of Hungary's prime minister Victor Orbán.

Trump called Orbán a "strong leader" who's "done a powerful and wonderful job in protecting Hungary."

Orbán's record is a blueprint for the next Trump presidency. 

Orbán has:

• Replaced Hungary's Constitution with his own
• Rigged elections so his party wins every time
• Cut the number of Members of Parliament by half
• Packed the courts
• Fired thousands of "disloyal" government employees
• Taken control of all radio and TV stations
• Blacklisted citizens who criticize the government
• Created a secret police to fight "Muslim terrorists"
• Broken up protests using violence
• Sheltered billions of stolen dollars in phony foundations
• Rewarded government contracts to family and friends
• Siphoned EU funds to political cronies
• Nationalized universities, utilities, and parks
• Nationalized all Hungarians' pensions
• Eliminated welfare and unemployment insurance 
• Doubled the limit on paying workers for overtime
• Targeted immigrants by criminalizing immigrant assistance
• Targeted LGBTQ people through bans on depicting them 
• Muzzled academics who criticize the government
• Rewritten school textbooks
• Endorsed the supporters of Nazi Germany
• Pocketed untold billions of dollars of government money 

"The new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state," Orbán said in his 2014 state-of-the-union address.

That means only one thing: a "state that puts money in my pocket."

Happy January 6th!

Inquisitor in Chief

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

— Monty Python

Governor Ron DeSantis is bucking for Inquisitor in Chief. His target: wokeism.

Labeled an "oppressive mind-virus" by right-wingers, wokeism threatens to infect more Floridians than Omicron, DeSantis believes.

And so he has proposed a new state law, "the strongest legislation of its kind in the nation."

It's called the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (WOKE) Act.

The WOKE Act will let citizens sue schools and companies for promoting critical race theory.

"We won't allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country," DeSantis said in a news release.

Eyeing the White House in 2024, DeSantis is clearly exploiting Whites' fears of wokeism, a tactic that put Republican Glenn Youngkin into the governor's seat in Virginia in November.

Were DeSantis of Irish descent, I'd say this is just warmed-over McCarthyism, and no one need worry: it's pure booze-fed Blarney.

But DeSantis is Italian and that's spells big trouble. 

He's a right-wing Catholic without an alcohol problem.

That means, when it comes to purging wokeism, he'll be zealous, ruthless, and cruel.

His closest historical forebear is Tomás de Torquemada, also known as "The Grand Inquisitor," who for Catholicism's sake murdered 2,000 Spaniards in the 15th century.

Torquemada didn't just murder the unorthodox.

He spied on them in their homes; traced them through informants; had them arrested by his secret police; humiliated them; and put them on trial before judges just as fanatical he was. He waterboarded, garroted, and racked those found guilty, before burning them at the stake.

What will DeSantis do to rid America of wokeism?

It's anyone's guess, but I predict it will be brutal.

Nobody ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Above: Torquemada, Grand Inquisitor by Jean-Paul Laurens

Grandpa Niall

People who mess with me should beware: they're their messing with a royal.

My 23andMe test shows I'm directly descended from a High King of Ireland, Niall Noigiallach—best known to the ages as Niall of the Nine Hostages.

Niall had a lot of kids, including 14 sons. Geneticists today estimate that a full 8% of the world's Irishmen and 2% of the Irishmen from Greater New York carry his genetic signature. 

The latter include the likes of Bill Maher, Bill O’Reilly, and me.

Operating from atop the Hill of Tara, Niall ruled from 445 to 453 CE. His kingdom encompassed nine vast provinces in Ireland, Scotland, England, Wales, and France. Niall earned his nickname from a fondness for kidnapping members of opposing royal families, the most famous of whom was the wealthy Englishman who'd later become Saint Patrick.

Abandoned by his queenly mother, Niall was raised by a poet, who saw in this son of a king future greatness. 

When the young Niall on a dare kissed a witch in the forest, legend has it, she granted him the High Kingship of Ireland, and promised his clan would rule for 26 generations.

As it turned out, the witch was right on target: Niall's dynasty lasted 500 years.

Niall was a badass, pure and simple; so bad, he beat back not only the the Saxons, Britons and Franks, but the Roman legions.

But, bad as he was, he couldn't escape death. Niall was killed in France by an archer, near the River Loire. His troops brought his body back to Faughan Hill, in the heart of his kingdom, for burial in 453.

In 2006, Trinity College professor Dan Bradley showed through DNA analysis that Niall, the "early-medieval progenitor to the most powerful and enduring Irish dynasty," has three million living descendants, nearly on par with Genghis Khan.

In 2015, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates showed through DNA testing that two of Niall's descendants are Bill Maher and Bill O’Reilly.

You can learn more about Niall of the Nine Hostages here.

Prisoners of Progress

For all the badmouthing I do about gross materialism, I am simply apeshit about all of the amazing crap we humans have made via the Industrial Revolution!

— Nick Offerman

An antique engraving graces our family-room. It's one of my favorite possessions.

The engraving depicts the birthplace of George Stephenson, the English engineer who, according to the engraving's caption, "devoted his powerful mind to the construction of the locomotive." A Victorian family gathers in front of the lowly cottage, there to celebrate "the commencement and development of the mighty railway system."

Stephenson was a hero to the Victorians, an innovator akin to Bill Gates or Steve Jobs today. His 1813 invention "induced the most wonderful effects, not only for this country, but for the world," the engraving says.

Railroads made it possible in the 19th century for people, products and raw materials to move overland great distances, and to do so cheaply and rapidly. 

We're so callous in our time, we complain when Amazon's free delivery service runs a day late. How absurd is that?

'Tis the season for mass consumption: for mornings, noons and nights at the mall; towers of empty boxes at the curbside; trashcans overstuffed with trees and wreathes and plastic packaging; trips to southern beaches; gifts for people you don't even like.

Can this way of life possibly be sustainable?

Whether it is or isn't, one thing's for sure: we're all prisoners of progress.

By that I mean to say what the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger said so well in his 1954 essay, "The Question Concerning Technology."

Heidegger believed the Industrial Revolution marked a radically new age for the human race: a time in history when nature has come to mean resources; and to be to mean to be consumable.

The absolute power of technology, Heidegger said, swamps the human being, because technology reveals all existence—the universe—to be no more than "raw material." 

Everything is inventory, stuff, crap. Crap to be extracted; crap to be requisitioned; crap to be assembled, packaged, shipped, opened, exchanged, consumed; crap to be discarded.

Technology "attacks everything that is," Heidegger said, "nature, history, humans, and divinities.”

And just as the railroad shrinks distance, technology shrinks mankind. 

It boxes us in and makes us pygmies, constricting our experiences to "brand experiences" and denying us connections to things as they once seemed: sources of wonder.

Today, we no longer wonder. We only want and want and want.

What a paltry fate.

Note: You can read more about Heidegger's thoughts on technology in my essay here. I also recommend Nick Offerman's fun new book, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play.

Above: The Birth-Place of the Locomotive. Published 1862 by Henry Graves & Co., Publishers to the Queen, London.

Making Merry

An English Christmas in the Middle Ages would begin before dawn with a mass that marked the end of Advent and the start of the holiday.

The Christmas feast was an EOE affair.

Commoners made sure at least to serve ham and bacon. 

One memoirist of the period described his family's Christmas feast also to include sausages, pasties, black pudding, roast beef, fish, fowl, custards, tarts, nuts, and sweetmeats.

Royalty took things up a notch. In addition to the above goodies, King Henry III added salmon, eel, venison, and boar to his table; King Henry V, crayfish and porpoise.

Royalty also drank heartedly on Christmas. 

Wine was served, not by the bottle, but—literally—by the ton (a ton equaling 1,272 bottles). 

Henry III served 60 tons of wine on Christmas. That's more than 76,000 bottles! 

What will appear on your table?

Above. The Only by Ans Debije. Oil on panel. 6 x 6 inches.

Biologism

We have only one task, to stand firm and carry on the racial struggle without mercy.

— Heinrich Himmler

The belief that links all white supremacists worldwide and throughout time is the belief in biologism.

Biologism insists that genes determine destiny; that nurture holds no sway; and that race, gender, sexuality, and ability are all natural endowments.

The Nazis gave biologism a bad name. But it's still with us, like a bad pfennig.

Biologism rears its ugly head at rallies like the one in Charlottesville in 2017 and the one on Capitol Hill in January, where members of the master race gathered to wreak havoc and reinstate their churlish champion of biologism, Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, the rest of us—normal people who know nurture trumps nature every time—shake our heads and wonder: what's wrong with these loons? Didn't they get the memo?

Biologism's roots are old: Aristotle believed in it in the 4th century BCE; so did Linneaus in the 18th century and, to a degree, Darwin in the 19th.

But as a result of its "practical application" in the 20th century by the likes of Madison Grant and Adolph Hitler, biologism crescendoed. Its decline after 1945 was a rapid and irreversible.

Only misfits believe in it today.

Remembrance

 

Americans have no sense of history.

— Howard Fast

Today marks the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, our parents' and grandparents' 9/11.

Occasions like today's are good reminders that tyrants have no fondness for America.

Ignoring tyrants doesn't help. 

Cozying up to them doesn't help.

Only vigilance does.

And vigilance requires remembrance.

Apologies

We are so busy winning we can't concede our mistakes.

— Aaron Lazare

To err is human.

But to apologize—?

“Never apologize, mister" John Wayne said. "It’s a sign of weakness.”

That seems to be the code of most men. (Women, on the other hand, "live lives of continual apology," as Germane Greer said.)

An apology, according to psychiatrist Aaron Lazare, is really a reparation: you've wronged someone, and you owe them your admission of guilt.

Apology is a 15th-century word borrowed from the Greek apologia, literally "sprung from divine speech" (apo + logia). An apology was the pronouncement of a god, channeled through an oracle. 

To the Ancient Greeks, an apology wasn't just manly; an apology was godly.  

The English word apology first meant a "defense" or "self-excuse." Samuel Johnson defined it as such in his dictionary, adding "Apology generally signifies excuse rather than vindication, and tends to extenuate the fault, rather than prove innocence."

It gradually came to mean an "an admission of error." In other words, a guilty plea.

Like John Wayne, a lot of Americans feel no urge to apologize.

And they're sick of other Americans apologizing: apologizing for genocide and slavery and imperialism; for witch trials and lynch mobs and McCarthyism; for redlining and segregation and the caging of immigrant children; for strip-mining and gas-guzzlers and deforestation.

Apologies aren't manly.

Apologies are for losers.

But one form of apology worth considering is the apologetic.

An apologetic was an early Christian's defense of his faith.

Apologetics—short essays—were published at a time when the Romans would execute a Christian merely for refusing to worship the pagan gods (a lot were executed, and often in grisly ways).

Of the hundreds of written apologetics, On the Testimony of the Soul, penned in 198 AD by Quintus Septimius Tertullian, stands out as an especially persuasive one (Tertullian was a lawyer).

In the apologetic, he argues that there's little difference between Christians and pagans, when you consider that both believe in God, demons and souls.

Both, Tertullian says, admit expressions like "God help us," "God bless you," and "God wills it." 

Both, moreover, admit that souls can become corrupt—that demons exist who can capture and bend souls to their will.

And both admit, finally, that souls experience an afterlife; some a pleasant one; some an unpleasant one.

Given these common beliefs, Tertullian says, it's easy to see that Christians and pagans are bound by their humanity, and that their differing faiths are inborn and don't derive from religious discourse, but from the "testimony of the soul."

"Every race has its own discourse, but the content is universal," Tertullian says.

"God is everywhere and the goodness of God is everywhere. The demons are everywhere and the curse of the demons is everywhere. The summons of God's judgment is everywhere. The awareness of death is everywhere and the testimony of the soul is everywhere."

The testimony of the soul provides the evidence clinching Tertullian's case: pagans shouldn't execute Christians; for, in doing so, they only snuff themselves.

We'd be wise to remember with Tertullian that we're all one people, united by the fact that we all have a soul; and that, sometimes, apologies are due.

"When you forgive, you free your soul," says the writer Donald Hicks. "But when you say 'I’m sorry,' you free two souls."

The Real Danger of Inflation

I filled my gas tank yesterday and realized it costs 33% more to do so than when I bought the car five years ago. 

A lot of the price increase has come recently.

I'm as wary of inflation as the next guy.

But the real danger of inflation isn't to our pocketbooks.

It's to our republic.

As columnist David Brooks observed this week, run-of-the-mill, white-shoe Republicans are in a lather over federal spending, and will vote for Trump simply to damper it.

They're unaware of the evil Trump and his followers embody.

To these naïfs, he's just a good Republican. 

If inflation becomes chronic, they'll rally to him.

You'll recall from your history books a troubled time in Germany after World War I. 

The government had been forced, by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, to pay war reparations to the Allies.

To fund that debt, the German government printed money—tons of it—sparking runaway inflation.

At one point, German housewives burned piles of Reichsmarks, because they were worth less than firewood.

The inflationary spiral gave rise to extremist political leaders and movements, in particular Hitler and the Nazis.

Burning money soon gave way to burning books and, eventually, to burning people.

Don't think for a minute it can't happen here.

It can.

Inflation—and pocketbook-issue voters—can return Trump to office.

Living Large

I have had a life which, for variety and romance,
could hardly be exceeded.

— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, retirees spend more of their time sleeping and watching TV than anything else.

How sad.

I recently attended a memorial gathering for a friend who died last year from Covid-19.

The people who gathered—mostly strangers to one another—were encouraged to share anecdotes about our departed friend and, though aware of his polymathy, were surprised to learn how wide in fact it ran.

In his eighty+ years, we learned, our departed friend had been a marine, a laborer, a spy, a sailor, an economist, a filmmaker, an amateur historian, a long-distance hiker, and a world traveler.

I admire people who live large.

Another of them was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, best remembered as the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Irish-Catholic and Jesuit-educated, Doyle became a surgeon at the age of 22. While still in medical school, he published short detective stories that mimicked his favorite writer, Edgar Allan Poe; and seven years out of school, the first Sherlock Holmes adventure, A Study in Scarlet. 

While in med school, Doyle also took a post as ship's surgeon on a whaler that circled from England to the Arctic and back, a voyage that gave him a lifelong taste for exotic travel.

Although the Sherlock Holmes stories—60 in all—made him wealthy and famous, Doyle longed to be a "serious" writer, like Charles Dickens, and so wrote another 17 adventure, mystery, historical, and sci-fi novels during his lifetime, including The Lost World, the 1912 forerunner to Jurassic Park. (Jurassic Park was written 78 years later by another polymathic doctor-turned-author, Michael Crichton.)

At the same time, Doyle became a student and proponent of spiritualism, writing and lecturing on the topic worldwide. He also volunteered to serve as a surgeon in the Boer War; ran twice for political office; took up golf, hot-air ballooning, and body-building; and began to write and produce stage plays. When World War I erupted, he became a war correspondent.

Not to rest on his laurels, Doyle also took up the study of landscape photography, publishing 13 articles on the subject for the British Journal of Photography, designing and building a large-format camera, lens, and tripod, and organizing photo expeditions; and learned how to ski. His efforts to popularize skiing—previously unheard of outside Northern Europe—are credited with making the Alpine sport mainstream. 

Today, 110 million people in more than 80 countries ski, thanks to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Now that's living large!

NOTE: Sherlock Holmes was born on this day in 1887.

Pardon My French

When I see certain social science theories imported from the US, I say we must re-invest in the field of social science.

— Emmanuel Macron

Merde alors!

Something stinks. 

The French, believe it or not, are complaining about the "American" export they call wokisme.

 

President Macron complained last year that wokisme is undermining the whole nation. 

And now French grammarians are complaining that wokisme is corrupting the French language.

Putain!

The French rather conveniently forget that wokisme originated in—of all places—France!

French philosopher Michel Foucault concocted it. 

In the late 1970s, Foucault's radical beliefs vent viral, spreading in less than a decade from the cafes of Paris to the classrooms of America—doubtless making Foucault the single-most influential French export since Coco Chanel.

A disciple of the German Nihilist Friedrich Nietzsche and the French Marxist Louis Althusser, Foucault saw the world in the starkest of terms: as a endless warfare between the powerful and the powerless; between oppressors and the oppressed. 

Foucault interpreted culture—in the broadest sense of the word—to be the club the powerful wield to assure their power. 

And culture surrounds us. Turn over any rock, you'll find the same thing: the people in power subjugating everyone else.

Foucault's idea informs almost every aspect of the "American" woke movement.

And now the chickens have come home to roost.

Or, as we used to say in grammar school, he who smelt it, dealt it.

Combating Stupidity

I don’t like shaking hands with these disgusting people.

— Donald Trump

German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hanged by the Nazis for his participation in Operation Valkyrie, understood stupidity and the danger it poses to freedom.

In his essay "On Stupidity" (unpublished in his lifetime), Bonhoeffer offered his conclusions after a decade of witnessing the sorts of Germans who rallied behind der Führer.

They were all adamant.

Stupidity is dangerous because it is adamant, he said; unassailably so.

"Against stupidity we are defenseless: neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything," Bonhoeffer said. 

"Reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed; and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as incidental. 

"In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous."

Stupidity isn't related to brains, education or economic class, according to Bonhoeffer. Stupidity is a voluntary defect. People "allow this to happen to them," he wrote.

And stupidity isn't a solitary pursuit. It flourishes within parties. Stupidity is a disease of the psyche wrought by historical forces that propel people, willingly, to surrender their autonomy to a leader and his wims. 

"Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere infects a large part of humankind with stupidity," Bonhoeffer wrote. 

"The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell."

Therein lies the danger in stupidity. 

"Having thus 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," Bonhoeffer wrote. 

"This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings."

Diabolical leaders manipulate the mindless for their own ends, "expecting more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom."

Wise and responsible people can only respond to such manipulation through political acts, Bonhoeffer believed; god-fearing "acts of liberation" designed to unchain the stupid by undermining their leaders. 

We should forget trying to convince a stupid person he's being stupid: combating stupidity head on is "senseless." 

"Internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it," Bonhoeffer wrote.

That's why he joined the plot to remove Adolph Hitler—and why he was hanged.