The Age of Dangerous Idiots

By Abe Greenwald

One of the most disorienting aspects of our current national moment is the mismatch between the heinous deeds inflicted on us and the pathetic people doing the inflicting. Americans are being preyed upon either by a legion of freaks or an army of imbeciles. 

As an example of the former, consider the man who just opened fire at a Pawtucket, Rhode Island, hockey game. A transgender Nazi fan, he looked like a football player in drag for a comedy sketch. But he nonetheless killed his ex-wife and son and wounded several others. These trans shooters always have pitiable online lives and look like passed-over circus performers—and they kill a lot of innocent people. 

The line between the freaks and the imbeciles isn’t always clear. Streaming hate-peddlers like Andrew Tate are a bit of both. Tate has been charged with rape and human trafficking, and he brags about why reading books is for people with slow brains. He’s a goon and a moron, and he’s also a leading figure in the online promotion of Jew-hatred and misogyny. Another former fighter, Jake Shields uses his prominent platform to deny or minimize the Holocaust, yet he can’t pronounce “Auschwitz” for his life.   

Speaking of trouble with words, Candace Owens, the queen of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, struggles mightily with basic English. To note just a few of her lost battles with her native tongue, in Owens’s nutty rants, “grandiose” becomes “grandoys,” “bureau” is “burrow,” “satiating” is “saychayting,” “napalm” is “nahpalm,” “beret” is “barrette,” “reminiscent” is “remnishent,” “posthumous” is “post-humous,” and “compartmentalize” is “comprementalize.” She’s like a child learning words for the first time—every time. And she makes powerful observations, noting that “truth,” for example, “is way stranger in fiction.” Owens is the unwitting Yogi Berra of Jew-hatred. And there she is, driving basement-dwellers into Nazism. Like her friend Kanye West, who once announced he was going “death con 3” on the Jews (the term he was looking for is “defcon”), she sells anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism to the illiterate. 

There’s a lot of that going around. Beyond the straightforwardly illiterate, we’re menaced by the historically and religiously illiterate as well. There are the self-appointed revisionist historians who’ve never read a single work of serious history. There are people like Carrie Prejean Boller, the disgraced former beauty queen who converted to Catholicism last year, just in time to lecture Catholic clergy and scholars about the religion’s incompatibility with Zionism. Tucker Carlson, who only recently read the Bible cover to cover and wrestles demons in his bedroom, does the same. 

We also have lesser imbeciles who enjoy greater public standing. Over the weekend, AOC attended the Munich Security Conference, where she asked whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan were it attacked by China. Her answer: “Um, you know, I think that, uh, this is such a, you know, I think that this is a, um, this is of course a very long-standing, um, policy of the United States. Uh and I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point and we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.” Yet, she didn’t hesitate or stammer in telling European leaders that Israel committed genocide in Gaza.  

When hard and serious men are the villains, it’s obvious what must be done. We must be hard and serious in fighting them. But it’s more confounding when we have to respond to the horrific deeds of gamer screwballs and the malicious words of morons. Some of them seem barely to take themselves seriously. So you find yourself tempted to swat them away. Or you hang on to a thin hope that they’ll be undone by their own eccentricities and deficiencies. But they seem, instead, to be multiplying and doing ever greater damage.  

Decades ago, I was in a video arcade in Penn Station when a small group of children demanded I give them money. I started to laugh at the scenario—but then I noticed that at least one of them had a crude weapon. All decent Americans are now facing something like that situation. The new enemies of civilization are at once dangerous and ridiculous. But they’re not children, so we must still be hard and serious in defeating them. 

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.