Ignorance of history and anti-Americanism are the two critical ingredients of a "useful idiot" — an individual who serves an immoral political agenda by spreading or embracing falsehoods in that agenda's favor.

I note this because we saw an excellent example of how useful idiots are cultivated when House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., spoke at Howard University in D.C. on Wednesday. It came in the following student statement/question to Pelosi.



President Nicolas Maduro has overwhelming support from poor and black and indigenous people in Venezuela as well as the support of every African government beside the Moroccan monarchy. The Bolivarian revolution has not been friendly to the interests of U.S. oil companies. And the American military is currently trying to intervene. This coup that Trump and the CIA are attempting, other than being an overwhelming failure, seems very similar to 1973 in Chile, where the CIA helped replace the democratically elected Marxist-Leninist president Salvador Allende with the brutally violent dictator, Pinochet. My question is: Where has U.S. intervention improved the material conditions of people and is it moral for the U.S. to overturn governments that don't align with American corporations.



That little rant is a pitch-perfect example of how useful idiots are attracted to a cause. So let's examine it more closely.

Let's start with the false moral baseline right at the start: the claim that Maduro retains overwhelming support "from poor and black and indigenous" people. In a comfy university setting where victimhood is everything, it surely seems like a good argument. If only it were true. In the real world, people's opinions tend to be affected by starvation. Maduro is actually (and understandably) unpopular with most poor Venezuelans today. His gunmen have spent this week killing indigenous people along the Colombian border. Still, by starting with this false premise, the student assumes a moral narrative on which to base his broader point.

Having established that Maduro is a popular victim, the student identifies the villain. And boy, oh boy, is it an original one: "oil companies!" Here we see the easiest trope of any good useful idiot conspiracy theory: the idea that U.S. foreign policy is built around corrupt manipulation and sustained only by violence. It's a powerful trope because it plays off left-wing populist perceptions of two inherently bad things: big corporations and military budgets.

Victim and villain established, next comes the useful idiocy masterstroke: the false history.

The student then compares U.S. efforts to push Maduro from office to the CIA-assisted 1973 Chilean coup that removed Salvador Allende from power — albeit amid the oft-forgotten constitutional crisis that Allende had created by defying Chile's supreme court, for which he also drew a stinging rebuke from the parliament, including his former coalition partners in government. The student uses the dubious morality of Pinochet's coup act to lend credibility to the claimed immorality of ongoing efforts to remove Maduro. He's gambling that the audience won't know that much about either Chile in 1973 or Venezuela in 2019, but for those with short memories, it was only four years ago that Spain's former socialist president, Felipe Gonzalez, compared Maduro's record on human rights to Pinochet's and found Maduro lacking.

Yet up to this point, this student's argument must seem at least plausible. It is only here, as with most battle cries to useful idiocy, that he clearly goes too far.

When he asks, "Where has U.S. intervention improved the material conditions of people ... ?" he fails to recognize the obvious historical examples where it has without doubt. The liberation of Europe and the Indo-Pacific during the Second World War, for example. The protection and economic development of Germany and Japan after the war. The protection of South Korea and Western Europe during the Cold War. And then there's the role of America's capitalist international order in bringing literally billions of people out of poverty, in places as far apart as China and Canada, India and Mexico.

I point to this example first because it shows how a skilled manipulator can use false morality and others' (and perhaps also his own) ignorance of history to guide others toward idiotic conclusions. Second, because it speaks to the natural alignment of anti-Americanism with foreign despotism.

Anyway, you can watch the question below.