Dont you drag me into your education problems.
"Don't you drag me into your education problems." ADAM VAN SPRONSEN/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

If you want to see the form that the banality of evil has taken in our times, watch the confirmation hearing for Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of education Betsy DeVos. She is it. There is not one interesting or even socially useful thought in her head. All she has is lots of money, and she can only speak for it in the blandest of terms. But when pushed to make a statement about something that is controversial and does not appear to relate directly to monetary concerns, and therefore might demand a little thinking (and not a little story about her nice mother or wholesome values or her easily broken and often bleeding heart), then she says the kind of dream-logic nonsense you would expect from a person whose mind has been addled by an experimental drug developed by some spy agency.

So, when asked by Chris Murphy, the junior Senator from Connecticut, about her support of Trump's plan to remove gun-free zones from schools, DeVos replied that guns were needed in classrooms to protect students from grizzly bears. By the look of her face, framed by hair styled to hide what she wasn't, a professional, she had no idea that this statement was ridiculous or even comical. It was an idea that entered the chamber of her head and sounded just fine. And because she has money, her own ideas or ideas she agrees with must be right. This has been her whole life. This banality.