Nobody is more sincere than a dupe.

What does it take to be a dupe? Stupidity? Maybe a little; but sometimes a dupe is quite intelligent in one arena, while being very gullible in another. I think a true dupe is really quite sincere. The true dupe is a believer, but a quickly converted believer, who doesn’t need much evidence. Or maybe they need evidence, just enough, and if the evidence is convincing because they are already predisposed towards that idea, then they go for it.

The worst dupes of all are the dupes of political factions. The dupes in the ‘between-the-wars’ period who were enamored of Hitler and his ideas on a better Germany—especially Brits and Americans who supported him and defended him, were monumentally wrong. But even worse than those dupes were the thousands or millions of people living in the free world—remember that phrase? –we don’t use it any more—too bad—it’s still true—who were the dupes of the commies. I knew them. I went to college with them. I taught college with them. Americans, well-to-do Americans with PhDs in history or sociology or political science, or botany, or English lit, living a comfy life, the life of academe, sheltered and perverted as it was, turning their hearts to murderous commie ideologues and regimes. Standing up for them and condemning us. “The USSR has never been an aggressor nation,” she told her history classes semester after semester. What a wicked woman she was. And what I mean is, she was wicked to say that. I also mean, she was committing some hidden wicked little sin, like adultery, that makes people more prone to becoming the dupes of evil empires and ideas.

In fact the worst dupes of all are those who stand up for the ideas and policies of Beelzebub. They defend abortion, and want ZPG (zero population growth) and would kill off millions by starvation to save a patch of nice green forest somewhere. Like Stalin killed his forty million in the Ukraine, the likes of Al Gore want to do the same today in the name of saving the planet. Of course, hypocrisy must have something to do with being a dupe. But that’s another issue.