So French president Emmanuel Macron is trying to talk “sense” to a dictator-wannabe by taking the flattering-the-ego approach with Trump. Of course Macron has tried this approach before with another actual dictator as I talked about here 1, pointing out the gulf between wishful thinking and reality:
Obviously it didn't work with Trump, if we take the absolutely despicable and shameful treatment of Zelensky by both Trump...
...and the pathetic Vance in the Oval Office as evidence, here reported with well-justified disgust by the Irish Star 2 . This "meeting" proves why Russia only wants to "negotiate" with Trump and why Europe should go it alone without the U.S., and tell Trump that a fraudulent "peace" deal won't be accepted as legitimate. They know Trump is only acting on his own bigoted impulses and not in the interests of his own country.
The Oval Office meeting dust-up was obviously pre-planned by Trump and Vance to avoid talking about security guarantees for Ukraine and angering their friend Putin. The spineless Marco Rubio, instead of resigning, issued a statement demanding that Zelensky "apologize" for Trump and Vance's boorish behavior, and Lindsey Graham engaged in his usual hypocrisy by flip-flopping on his "opinion" on Zelensky.
And let's remember another thing: Trump never did anything to help Ukraine; he only wanted "dirt" on Biden to use in the 2020 election. Trump couldn't care less if Ukraine survives or not. In fact, we may be justified in the belief that the power-mad Trump only views Zelensky and Ukraine as "DEI" entities that are an annoyance and must be destroyed. Before, nobody thought the U.S. was the laughingstock of the world supporting a sovereign state against a murderous dictator; today, Trump has made himself the laughingstock of the world bringing greater scrutiny to his lies and self-deceptions.
Of courser Trump still won’t say anything “bad” about Putin, hoping that maybe he will play “nice” and not make Trump look like a complete fool, crawling to him like a dog begging for just one bone to gnaw on. I think we should take the “wait and see” approach about any “peace” deal, since as we ought to remember (but many choose to “forget”) we’ve been here before with this—with North Korea, and all those “lover letters” exchanged between Trump and Kim Jong Un not only didn’t bring “peace,” but made Kim the “spurned” one, and more dangerous than ever.
And what was that other "peace deal" Trump made with the Taliban, leaving the Afghan government, that the U.S. allegedly supported, on the sidelines? Sure sounds like Trump is using the same "playbook" with this so-called "peace dealing" with Russia, leaving Ukraine and Europe on the sidelines.
Now, one suspects that Putin realizes now that he got in over his head, and didn’t expect any serious pushback from the U.S. and Europe other than more of those sanctions that had already been in place after the invasion of the Crimea. He apparently didn’t expect the influx of military hardware that was superior to his own that would cause a war that is dragging on into its fourth year.
He even convinced Kim (for a price) to send him “bodies” as cannon fodder instead of using up all of Russia’s manpower, to be needed for other “operations.” Any “peace” deal needs to take advantage of any fear (behind the scenes) that continuing this war is a losing proposition for Putin, yet Trump seems willing to give away all his (and Europe’s) cards, like folding with a royal flush when the opponent only has a pair of twos. It’s “stupid”—and it’s Trump.
Remember when Speaker of the House Mike Johnson finally convinced some Republicans to vote for that last aid package to Ukraine? He said he “prayed to God” and that “And then he told me the next day: I want to be on the right side of history.” He also asserted that “To put it bluntly, I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American boys. This is a live-fire exercise for me, as it is so many American families. This is not a game. This is not a joke.”
He was telling the truth, for once. Macron was forced to remind Trump, who claimed that Ukraine was going to pay back all the cost of the military assistance to Europe it received—just as he himself expects Ukraine to “pay back” U.S. assistance in the form of “free” rare-earth minerals at a cost far more than what the U.S. has actually given in assistance—that Trump’s has misconstrued the intent of both U.S. and European assistance to Ukraine: to essentially use the Ukrainian military as a proxy force to weaken the threat of Russian aggression to both U.S. and European interests in the region.
It is Ukrainian blood that has been shed to this purpose, and expecting them to pay back “everything” shows that Trump is fully on being Putin’s “best friend” because he regards him as an “equal”—unlike leaders in “little” European countries—and that fuels his megalomaniacal delusions that Putin interprets as Trump being nothing more than an amateur who doesn’t think things through, and is willing to throw away a winning hand. One thing we do know for certain: Putin has an ally in Trump in the lying department, and that the former KGB agent knows how to "play" Trump's paranoia about being publicly humiliated by his own lies.
Of course that is not all that is stupid that is going on in the world. We got a taste of how “policy” is formulated in the Trump administration recently concerning those DOGE “dividends” announced by a real Jewish Nazi, Stephen Miller, during this press briefing, being led on by Fox News' sycophant Peter Doocy…
…which if you think he is over-selling about how much this is supposed to help “working people,” you are correct. 59 million lower income households won’t receive a cent, and those who paid even just $1 more than their refunds will receive a “theoretical” $5,000 check. But all of this is contingent on cutting virtually all so-called “discretionary” spending—which is what Musk refers to as assistance for “parasites”—which apparently includes most of the government workforce save for those whose only function is to say “yes” to anything Trump says like an animal acting on instinct with no thought involved.
What exactly most of those people who would be allowed to remain in government "service" will actually do is left unspoken, as we see those Trump stooges in the Justice Department and the FBI advising their new recruits not to answer what exactly they are doing in response to those DOGE emails. Unless of course your "job" is simply to say "yes" to Trump, which is deemed not a waste of taxpayer money.
There are critics galore of this “plan” to allegedly pass a portion of all that "savings" to taxpayers and how it is being "sold." Musk’s present activities should not be taken for being a “public service” since his motivations are clear enough: to use it as a “mask” to hide that he wants to gut federal oversight of his own activities, which includes the “possibility” that he as a government contractor has passed on state secrets with our adversaries. Here we learn that any promise to avoid even the appearance of corruption should never have been believed:
Of course the “collateral damage” is causing people who need government assistance or representation against the powerful to find that it will take longer or not at all because Musk and Trump think they are “parasites”—even the white ones in red states.
The UBI Guide suggests that after Musk and his teenage gang leaves behind the wreckage of their amateurish, unsupervised meddling…
…the result will be far less for a lot of people. 59 million working class households will receive nothing at all, while billionaires are certain to get what amounts to a day’s worth of pocket change at “best,” and the probable amount of “savings” will amount to a dividend pool that is worth only $200 per household that is eligible. And for what?
Finally, I want people to consider the nature of a proposal like this. This is a one-time payment for the ending of many federal jobs doing all kinds of things for the foreseeable future. Is it worth a one-time $200 check to end incredibly valuable research that no business is ever going to do because it isn't profitable? Is it worth it to decimate IRS jobs that for every $1 generate $12 in tax revenue from the wealthiest Americans who already pay a lower tax rate than you? Is it worth it to hamper the ability of FEMA to respond to future disasters that impact you? Is it worth it to make your food less safe to eat and predatory businesses more free to deceive and defraud you out of far more than $200?
Think of it this way: Trump’s 2017 tax cuts massively cut tax rates for the rich, but he also claimed he cut taxes for working class people. Did he now? Ever notice how your tax refund checks are half as much as they were before the 2017 tax cuts? That is because the Trump tax law merely reduced the percentage of income tax withheld for those in the middle to lower income bracket, to make it “sound” like a “tax cut.”
In fact that supposed “tax cut” that hardly anyone noticed from paycheck to paycheck was ultimately less than what would have been refunded. Was it “worth it”? No it wasn’t, because the prior additional tax refund could have been used as real savings. or to make a large purchase; instead, much of it was just frittered away unnoticed.
This “DOGE Dividend” so far is the only “program” that the Trump administration has come up with that “helps” working people, having reduced the NLRB to impotence—and yet most of those who earn less than $40,000 per household will get no help at all. Forbes is also unimpressed by this proposed “dividend” which is unlikely to happen anyways, but is useful as propaganda to impress the uninformed:
Another way to approach the potential savings is to look at the addressable savings amounts and the implications for the amount of a DOGE Dividend check. Jessica Reidl, an economist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, put it bluntly in a CBS MoneyWatch interview: "It is completely impossible for DOGE to save $2 trillion… The promise of a $5,000 DOGE Dividend check is built on very optimistic—and, by all accounts, unrealistic—projections of government savings. Even at the upper end of optimistic estimates, the checks would fall dramatically short of the headlines, revealing a stark disconnect between political rhetoric and fiscal reality. As the debate over the DOGE Dividend check continues, one thing is clear: a reality check is in order. The lofty promises of $2 trillion in savings and $5,000 checks will likely be replaced by much more modest payouts—if the program even materializes.
So where did this “idea” come from in the first place? From some 30-year-old investor named James Fishback, who told Newsweek "It came to me in a dream. I woke up and called our Head of Research at Azoria, and we drafted the proposal during a two-hour lunch at Capital Grille,” after which he posted it on X and of course Musk found himself lost in its dream state. Of course anything that even “hints” at possibly suggesting that the Trump administration is doing anything at all “helpful” to working people and not just for billionaires, corporations and international foes of this country (i.e. non-democracies) is a straw both easily grasped and just as easily revealed to be without substance.
Yet even if there is an actual “dividend” of any substance, experts warn that like with Trump’s tariff plans, it will only lead to significant increases in inflation. It is interesting to note that Trump has renewed threats to impose 25 percent tariffs on our neighbors, yet we discover that Trump’s 10 percent tariffs on our adversary China does not apply to the vast majority of Chinese imports, as Trump has now backed-off on imposing tariffs on Chinese products worth less than $800 after complaints from some of Trump's business friends.
Products like cheap clothing would have seen even higher prices than before, and would have hurt the lower-income demographic disproportionately. But that will likely still happen, especially since much of U.S. produce is imported from Mexico and Canada, both of which are still being threatened with the imposition of those 25 percent tariffs on March 4.
Thus Trump and Musk’s “proposals” will amount to little more than a regressive tax that hurts working people (most who won’t even receive a dividend) even more than they supposedly were during the “worst” years of inflation under Biden. And of course we now see a weakening of the strong economy that Trump inherited; remember that Biden inherited a weakened economy from Trump due to his mishandling of the pandemic.
Yet reality continues to escape many Republicans who misinterpret the fact that they are holding bare majorities in Congress. They insist that the country voted for “change,” but they refuse to understand that Trump barely won the popular vote, and most of the voters who did go for Trump were deliberately misled about the full reach of this “change." After facing angry constituents (especially concerning the proposed massive cuts to Medicaid), House Republicans are being advised to stop having town hall meetings, because this isn't about the "people," it is about sucking-up to Trump.
Trump claimed he never read “Project 2025," but for some reason he is employing people like Russell Vought and Brendan Carr, both who are key "architects" of the "project." Carr, the new FCC chairman, especially likes to talk about preserving "freedom of speech"--unless of course it is speech he and Trump don't like. And then there is his
press secretary, Karoline Leavitt…
…whose fanaticism in spreading lies and misinformation can now be better understood, who suggest that opponents of Trump’s efforts to extend his “dictatorship” for a day every day into an unconstitutional third term that is supported by those involved in formulating P-25's objectives are the ones who are "delusional."
Still, there are plenty of people in this country willing to eat this shit up; watch any YouTube video where uneducated MAGA fanatics are asked to explain their “reasoning” for believing the latest conspiracy theory, or gag when fed actual facts. There are many theories that try to explain this “phenomena,” most of which try to “normalize” it. Of course for people who regard their abnormal beliefs as “normal”--or conversely, many people in this country think anything that upends their stereotypes (say, about "Mexicans") is seen as "suspicious"-- you can’t convince them otherwise, and people who are on the “fence” for no other reason save that one day is no different than the next can find themselves believing anything that sounds like “common sense.”
For those who have actually watched William Friedkin’s little remembered and underappreciated 2006 film Bug, it may come off as “crazy” and not as a study of how “crazy” people take advantage of paranoia and convince others not only to share their insane, conspiratorial beliefs, but invent their own conspiracies from otherwise normal life experiences. On second viewing it helped to listen to Friedkin’s audio commentary on the disc release to find out what exactly he was after, and once you settle into “I get it” mode, it is possible to see that what is on the screen helps one to “get” what is happening to the country today.
Here we see Agnes (Ashley Judd) receiving the first of several phone calls in which no one speaks on the other end; her response to these phone calls bring the suggestion that she is or could become paranoid and open to “suggestions” on how to explain these mysterious events.
In a grocery store, Agnes seems fixated on a red onion; we don’t know why yet, but it will come into play later as part of her journey into paranoid fantasy:
Agnes, whose ex-husband was abusive to her, is introduced to some quiet man named Peter (Michael Shannon) by her friend and co-worker at a honky-tonk club, R.C. He is invited to Agnes' house, where he needs to be coaxed out of the bathroom; what he might have been doing in there will become suggested soon enough:
After R.C. leaves them alone together, Peter seems fascinated by a painting; he points out the people in the picture which of course neither we nor Agnes see, but maybe he has the ability to “see” what “normal” people don’t:
Agnes’ ex-husband Goss arrives after being released from prison, looking for a place to stay. She tells him she doesn’t want him around, so he smacks her, but is convinced to leave after Peter arrives back after going on a lunch pick-up:
Agnes sees him as someone who will keep her safe from Goss, and invites Peter to stay with her, since he seems nice enough. They have sex, and that is when things start to get a little “strange.” Peter claims to “feel” that there are “bugs” in the sheets, and finds an “aphid” which Agnes doesn’t actually see herself, but is willing to “believe” she sees something if he is so insistent:
Goss and R.C. show up the next day, surrounded by flypaper that do not seem to have caught any flies, and as the two “sane” people in the room, they cannot convince Agnes that the “crazy” Peter is a bad influence on her:
Peter’s conspiracy theories about “bugs” reaches the point where he insists that he was subject to government “experiments,” and that his body is infested from within with egg sacs that have hatched into live “bugs” crawling under his skin. His paranoia reaches a climax when he claims that scientists had inserted bug eggs or a queen bug constantly laying said eggs inside one of his molars, and he makes a bloody mess of himself by wrenching it out with plyers, He then looks at the tooth with his toy microscope, is horrified by what he sees...
...and then invites Agnes to take a look...
First we see what is actually there—normal blood vessels…
…but this is what they see in their current state of mind:
A man who claims to be an Army doctor shows up, and when he is about to tranquilize Peter, he is unexpectedly stabbed to death. Peter manages to convince Agnes that this man isn’t really human but a “robot,” showing her that his blood and skin are “synthetic”:
Agnes still has “doubts,” and Peter launches into a monologue that “sounds” rational since it mixes in fact with its mostly fictional conspiracies theories:
On May the 29th, 1954, the consortium of bankers, industrialists, corporate CEOs and politicians held a series of meetings over three days at the Bileerg Hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland. The drew up a plan for maintaining the status quo. It’s the way things are. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. They devised a plan to manipulate technology, economics, the media, population control, world religion to keep things the way they are. And they have continued to meet once a year, Every year since the original meeting. Look it up.
Yes, we can look it up, and yes such meetings by this “consortium” having been taking place once a year in various locales since 1954. There is also a technology firm called Calspan which has done some work for the military, although at this point Peter’s mind is clearly consumed with paranoid fantasy:
Under their orders, the CIA smuggled Nazi scientists into the states to work with the American military at Calspan, developing an inter-epidermal tracking microchip. It’s a surveillance tool. It’s a computer chip that has been implanted in the skin of every human being born on the planet since 1982. The test group for the prototype was the People’s Temple. And when the Reverend Jim Jones threatened to expose them, he and every member of his church were assassinated. But it’s not enough just to track people to spy on them. They want control. So they create the intelligence-manned interface bio chip. A subcutaneous transponder, a computer chip imprinted with living brain cells.
This is all delivered in a “rational” way—albeit more fitting for a science fiction movie—and for someone like Agnes who lives in her own bubble world of innocuous tribulations, perhaps it isn’t hard to understand how all these new “facts” can seem “real” to her. So what is Peter’s involvement in all of this? He is certainly “convinced” of it:
They needed lab rats to test it. And they found us, me in the Gulf. And another soldier working at Calspan at the time, Tim McVeigh. They turned us into fucking zombies. Remote control assassins. And they pick him up, chuck him in the prison factory. But I found my chip and cut it out. So they sent me back to the lab for further testing in a new experiment. (Your’re John Doe #2) That’s who they want me to be. That is the flaw in the IMI bio chip. They can’t get to everybody. People slip through the cracks. They find the chip, the cut it out like me or Ted Kaczynksi.
Yes, it is also true that the Oklahoma City bomber, McVeigh, worked for Calspan. The webpage for PBS’ Frontline documentary on the bombing supplied this document used by the McVeigh defense team to describe his mindset at the time:
Tim lived in the Lockport area and worked for Burns Security. He was assigned to work at Calspan Industries in Buffalo, NY. It was during this job assignment that Tim met Carl Lebron and Carl recorded him. Stress was getting to him during this period because of his "heightened sense of awareness of what the news was really saying". Also, Tim was living with his father, sleeping on the couch. When Tim watched the news he became embroiled. First he would be mad at the politicians because they tried to blend politics and the military. Then he would get mad at the government for strong-arming other countries and telling them what to do. Next, it was the increasing anti-gun sentiment in America and the liberal mindset that all things in the world could be solved by discussion. He said the military taught him aggression. He realized that most of the times issues could be solved with discussion or negotiation, however, there were times when negotiations failed. As examples, he cited physical fights he had in the army, repeated attempts to complete the Declaration of Independence, and confrontations with subordinates at work. He felt during this period that politicians did not want to face the tough questions or give the tough answers, nor did they want to make any tough decisions. They tried to smooth it all over.
Of course there is nothing here about McVeigh being the subject of “experiments.” What isn’t pointed out here is that most of McVeigh’s “confrontations” were with non-white people. He was a racist, and after reading the Turner Diaries he began thinking of how to start his own “race war,” which he believed would be initiated after the bombing of the OKC federal building.
But Peter doesn’t let facts get in the way of his version of reality, which we can see is now infecting Agnes’ mind as well:
They need a chip that will self-perpetuate. That will spread like a virus, that people can pass it on to everyone. They got it (Oh, you mean the bugs). The ultimate parasite implanted via a queen bug. The super mother who mates with a drone, lays egg sacs in the body of the host and governs a growing army of rapidly multiplying brainwashing bugs (They gave those things to you and you gave them to me). Agnes I don’t believe my presence here is accidental.
At this point Agnes is ready to crack and Peter compels her to confirm his version of reality by concocting her own “explanations” of certain past events in her life, beginning with the disappearance of her son:
We were in the grocery store. I took him to the grocery store and we were grocery shopping. And he was right there in the cart. And I went back to get an onion cause I forgot the onion. And I just, I just turned away. And then he was just gone. Somebody took him. Somebody took my boy because he was—somebody. Not anybody. Because he was smart. He wouldn’t be talking to strangers. So then it had to be somebody that he knew. That he wasn’t scared of. Like his daddy. It was his daddy. Goss took him.
Except that Goss was probably still in jail at the time. What we have seen of Goss in the film is that he intended on “shacking up” with his ex-wife after getting out of prison, and never once even mention their son, which seems to indicate that whether his son was alive or dead was of no interest to him. In fact we begin to wonder if this son was actually a figment of Agnes’ fantasies, which only seem to grow the more she expounds on her story:
And the police couldn’t help me. And I tried so hard and they couldn’t help me. They wouldn’t help me, the police and the FBI because they paid Goss to take him. They paid Goss to take him and he gave him to them. Oh god, R.C. was there (R.C. was here, and she left cause she was spying on you). And you brought the bugs. The bugs were under your skin and the egg sacs. RC brought you, and then you brought the bugs, and since R.C. brought you, R.C. brought the bugs. And then Goss got outta jail and they let him outta jail. And he wasn’t supposed to get out. And they gave him early parole. And he came here (Just when I showed up). Because they sent him here. He made a check, got an early parole and they let him out to send him because of the bugs. To track the bugs, to check on the bugs. To watch their progress.
Of course what Agnes is doing now is inserting Peter’s own conspiracy theories within the framework of perfectly “normal” events in her own life. R.C. is hardly the kind of person who would be caught-up in such crazed schemes, and Goss clearly has no interests outside his immediate needs. However, completely random events come together in “coincidences” that can explain the irrational notions in a “rational”—or as Trump would say “common sense”—way. She even suggests now that her supposed “son” was kidnapped in order to trade him to R.C. and her lesbian partner in exchange for her “cooperation” in bringing the bugs to Agnes:
And R.C. told us there weren’t any bugs. But R.C. brought the bugs. They made her bring the bugs. Oh that boy. The boy, Lavoice’s little boy. The kid, they gave me the kid they did that on that a couple of fucking queers they wanted to give him that kid and they made her bring me the bugs to give me to give them the kid.
Agnes’ story isn’t making much sense now, but that doesn’t matter now to a captive audience of one, Peter, since she is filling in the “blanks” with of his own fantastical claims that now have nothing to do with any “factual” information that Peter had started peppering his conspiracy theories with initially. And it will only get more absurd from here:
And then, and then, but wait, no, no. You never had bugs before you got here. They had you all the time. They did all those things to you. And you never had no bug until you got here. Until after you, after we, oh my God. We, it’s us. They gave you what they call that the drone. They gave you the drone. And they gave me the queen. They gave me the mother. And that’s when they came out. That’s when they made it. When we made them. And then, oh my god. It had to be me. It had to be me from the very beginning.
Agnes’ version of events has now completely taken over the narrative...
...and her supposed son is now part of whole “experiment”:
Because they took Lloyd, they took him somewhere. They took him to this laboratory and they cut him. And they cut him open and the stuff matched, or whatever the DNA and the blood and it together. And so they started to build the queen, the mother. And they gave it to me. The juice, the bug. The mother, the bug, the super mother bug. I am the super mother bug! We made them, we made them, we gave birth to them. They will never leave us because we made them. And those people, those people are trying to come in here to kill us because the bugs won’t go out into the world to do their work. They would never leave us. They are trying to kill us to send the bugs back out into the world.
After this, a pizza delivery is inspected for "bugs"...
...and a simple knock on the door becomes a military attack with a helicopter overhead:
Agnes and Peter decide that in order to end this menace to the world order they must exterminate themselves and the "bugs" nesting inside their bodies, which they do by burning themselves alive:
This all sounds “crazy” just reading this, but Peter and Agnes (as convincingly played by the actors) are completely beyond being inhibited by the incredulity of sensible people listening to this; they are “true believers” who cannot now be swayed from their fictional world.
In a sense this is the world we live in now, created by Trump and mindless fanatics like Miller, and one that is being "justified" by a slim majority of the popular vote in an election that saw fewer votes cast than in 2020 and an oligarch (Musk) who believes he is "smarter" than everyone else and consumed with his new, unaccountable power.
House Republicans with one or two vote “majorities” claim that Trump has a “massive mandate” to conduct “radical change” for which common sense and rationality is entirely absent. Trump says that imposing tariffs on this country’s allies means the country will no longer be treated like it is “stupid.” But given what will result from this, can there be any question that the “stupidity” is coming from someone who claims to be “rational” and acting with “common sense”?
Unlike Agnes and Peter who decide that in order to end this menace they must exterminate themselves, which they do by burning themselves alive, Trump true believers, of course, seem to think that the way to “save” the country is burning the whole country down—like Trump “envisioning” turning Gaza into a giant “resort” after its complete destruction by the Israeli military.
It is all so stupid, but as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German anti-Nazi Lutheran pastor who was hanged in the final days of the Third Reich, wrote
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.
Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
In the context of mass insanity, much as Peter would be the leader of if he had a platform to speak to a whole country of people like Agnes for whom facts are lies to hide the “truth,” Bonhoeffer wrote that is less a psychological problem than a sociological one.
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, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. 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. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.
Bonhoeffer noted that because
these people have been captured by evil players in society, it is pointless to
try to understand what “the people” really think and it is “irrelevant for the
person who is thinking and acting responsibly” to even attempt to. Only when
the evil of those who captured the minds of the “stupid” becomes a living,
breathing reality (like, say, the Holocaust) is revealed, can there be any
reckoning. In the meantime, “disagreements” with Trump and those who try to
push his “stupid,” commonsenseless agenda are dealt with in some form of abuse in either verbal or physical fashion...
…which is how we generally expect misinformation that contradicts verifiable facts to be “discussed” now. For now, we live in a country where “stupid” is confined to what is directly targetable, like weaker and easily bullied countries, federal workers, inspector generals, federal prosecutors and DEI programs—the hypocrisy of the latter of which is apparent in the fact that the Trump administration is full of people who have not been selected because of “merit,” “qualification” or “experience,” but because they are stupid, fanatical sycophants.
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