By Scot Loyd
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words land like a hammer on the thin veneer of our modern illusions:
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice… Against stupidity we are defenseless… facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed… and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential.”
He wrote this from a prison cell in Nazi Germany, watching a cultured, churchgoing people swallow propaganda whole and call it patriotism. He understood something that we still struggle to admit. The real threat to a society’s moral core is not always raw hatred. It is the smug, self-satisfied certainty that refuses to be corrected.
We have all seen this play out in our time. Just recently, at an extraordinary press conference, President Donald Trump announced that he would be taking over the Washington, D.C. police department, deploying National Guard troops, and placing the city under a “public safety emergency.” Standing beside a lineup of loyalists—Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Jeanine Pirro, Kash Patel—he declared it “Liberation Day in D.C.” and vowed to rescue the capital from “crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor.”
The problem is that crime in D.C. is actually down. The city’s own statistics show violent crime has fallen by 26 percent from last year, overall crime is down 7 percent, and property crime is down 5 percent. These are not small numbers. They are significant improvements. But the facts did not make the speech. Instead, we were given a grim caricature of the city: “roving mobs of wild youth,” “drugged-out maniacs,” “bloodthirsty criminals,” “homeless people” who “we don’t know how they even got there.” In his telling, D.C. is a war zone, and only federal control can save it.
Bonhoeffer could have written his warning yesterday. This is not malice in its purest form. It is not even lying in the way we traditionally understand lies. It is an entire worldview armored against reality. In this mindset, data is irrelevant if it does not serve the narrative. When confronted with contrary evidence, the believer does not pause to reconsider. They double down. That is why Bonhoeffer called stupidity “utterly self-satisfied” and “dangerous by going on the attack.”
And here is the danger. In politics, stupidity can wear the mask of moral urgency. “We’re here for a very serious purpose,” Trump said, echoing Bonhoeffer’s insight that the stupid person can be “critical” and even appear principled. The crowd sees a leader “telling it like it is” when in fact he is telling it how it feels. Feelings, once enthroned as truth, make evidence a trespasser.
The insistence on dogmatic certainty in the face of contrary evidence is not unique to Trump or his followers. It is an old temptation, older than Bonhoeffer, older than the printing press, older than Israel in the wilderness worshiping a golden calf. It is the same spiritual stubbornness that keeps churches split over points of doctrine long after scripture, history, and reason have made the case for a broader table. It is why people would rather live in the echo chamber of their choosing than risk the dissonance of having been wrong.
This is more than ignorance. Ignorance can be healed through education and exposure. Stupidity, as Bonhoeffer defines it, is a willful rejection of correction. It is a hardening of the mind and heart, a refusal to admit that one’s understanding could ever be incomplete. It thrives in crowds, grows in the fertile soil of propaganda, and sustains itself through a constant diet of us-versus-them narratives.
And so, when the president of the United States tells the nation’s capital that it is under siege by imaginary hordes, the facts are not merely ignored. They are treated as an enemy tactic. The response is not, “Maybe I was mistaken.” It is, “The numbers must be fake. The media must be lying. The deep state must be hiding the truth.” The fortress of certainty stays intact, its gates sealed against both reason and compassion.
In the church, this looks like the preacher who cannot be swayed from a misreading of scripture, even when confronted with the original language and historical context. In politics, it looks like the leader who calls it “Liberation Day” while stripping a city of its home rule and militarizing its streets. In both, it is the same impulse, to bend reality to the service of one’s cause and to treat any dissent as proof of conspiracy.
This kind of stupidity can be more dangerous than outright malice because it is harder to confront. Malice wears a recognizable face. It knows it is doing harm. Stupidity in power believes it is doing good. That is why Bonhoeffer tells us not to waste our breath trying to persuade it with reason. It is senseless and dangerous.
We live in a moment where our national conversation is being strangled by this very phenomenon. We no longer argue toward truth. We argue toward victory. We treat loyalty to the narrative as a higher virtue than loyalty to reality. In that vacuum, leaders can spin whole alternate universes into being, where crime is soaring when it is falling, where enemies lurk in every tent under a bridge, where salvation comes in the form of federal troops on street corners.
If Bonhoeffer is right, and I believe he is, then the work before us is not merely to call out lies. It is to resist the conditions that make this stupidity possible: the isolation, the propaganda loops, the uncritical consumption of partisan fear. We must cultivate the humility to admit when we are wrong, to seek truth even when it costs us pride, and to value reality over rhetoric.
Once stupidity gains a foothold in the halls of power, it does not just distort the truth. It rearranges it entirely. And in that rearranged reality, crime can be falling, but the streets are “out of control,” a city can be functioning, but it is declared “liberated,” and citizens can find themselves defending the very thing that is undermining their freedom.
Bonhoeffer warned us from his prison cell. The question is whether we are listening, or whether we have already decided we know better.
My book “The God I Was Given: Looking for faith after losing my religion” is now available for pre-order in the Kindle edition on Amazon. Look for print and audio editions coming soon. Available August 26th, 2025.