Given that socialism has killed roughly 25,000 times more people than the COVID-19 coronavirus has, and that there are a lot more people pushing for socialism than there are for COVID-19, it might seem uncontroversial to insist that socialism is more dangerous than COVID-19. Except for a very few radical environmentalists, COVID-19 doesn’t exactly have anyone cheering it on. Socialism, despite its massive death toll, still enjoys millions of adherents and proponents, many right here in the USA.

Most alarmingly, you’ll find them clustered on our college campuses, where you’d think that people would be smart enough and well-informed enough to understand that 100,000,000 (deaths due to socialism) is a much bigger number than 4,000 (deaths due to COVID-19). But of course you wouldn’t actually think that, because as a devoted consumer of news, you’re undoubtedly aware that our former institutions of higher learning have become hotbeds of dangerous silliness.

That’s why University of Chicago student Evita Duffy found her physical safety under threat for having had the gall to publicly state the obvious to the willfully oblivious.

The university’s Institute of Politics ran an Instagram campaign last week, giving students a chance to fill in the blank after “I vote because…” Duffy can be seen in the video holding a sign that says, “I vote because the coronavirus won’t destroy America, but socialism will.”

You can probably guess what happened next, but it was serious enough that Duffy — who describes herself as a conservative Hispanic woman — had to take it public with an op-ed in the student paper. She wrote that she hoped her “vote” message might “encourage a lively and robust debate on economics,” but instead she received an “onslaught of online hate and threats of violence” from her tolerant, progressive friends.

She continues:

Fellow students attacked my character, my intellect, my family, my appearance, and even threatened me with physical violence, using foul and offensive language. I was called a racist and a xenophobe. Some compared me to animals. Others declared that they would personally stop me from voting, and many defended the personal attacks, saying I deserved to be bullied and that I don’t belong at the University of Chicago on account of my beliefs. I was told by many that I was the most hated person on campus. It was frightening. It was also hurtful, since some of the attacks came from people I considered friends.

It gets worse. Duffy says one commenter warned she should have to face “a brick wall,” which is clearly a euphemism for summary execution, something at which socialists excel. They also told her she must “support a movement [socialism] that eliminates violence on a systemic level or face the consequences.”

I’ll let you try and wrap your head around that sentence while I pour myself a shot of something strong. Needless to say, claiming that you’re eliminating violence on a systemic level by threatening with violence everyone who doesn’t go along…

…you need a drink, too?

We also learned today that if you refer to COVID-19 by its origin point, you’re a racist.

FYI: Calling #COVID19 the "Wuhan Virus" is racist. — 😷 David Gura 🏡 (@davidgura) March 9, 2020

It’s one of those curious historical anomalies that the Spanish Flu — which infected more than a quarter of the globe in 1918 and killed somewhere between 17 million and 100 million people — did not originate in Spain. The current best guess is that the pandemic got its start at Étaples, France, which served as a major hospital and troop staging area during the First World War. But due to wartime censorship across almost all of Europe and the United States, the first country where newspapers were free to report on the horrible outbreak was Spain. Either that or the entire globe conspired to tarnish the reputation of those filthy Spaniards, because racism.

Are you getting the dreadful feeling that I’ve just inadvertently inspired some all-new revisionist history from one of our progressive friends?

The point is, there’s nothing fascist about a college student arguing that she’s more concerned about socialism — and the socialists who threatened her life — than with the COVID-19 virus out of China’s Wuhan province. And there’s also nothing racist about the Chinese themselves labeling a virus from its point of origin, just like people have done with the West Nile virus and many others since time immemorial.

What is fascist — or nationally socialist, if you prefer — is a college movement devoted to the suppression of American liberty. What is racist is privileged Americans, mostly white, trying to tell the Chinese what words they may or may not use.

But these are deeply stupid times we live in, and we could use more smart souls like Evita Duffy to combat the stupid.