What's Fear Got To Do With It?

Don't Disagree With the Thought Police.....

Fear mongering is a political tool used by virtually every form of extremism in the modern world. In the Red Scare elements in the American government terrified its population about communists hiding in every corner of society, while in the Soviet Union fear mongering was commonly used to as a tool to control dissident thought. Little need be said about fear mongering by the various right wing regimes in World War 2 that resulted in mass deaths, or by hard-left regimes in the 1960s and 1970s that resulted in genocide. Fear mongering is a tool favored by extremists to promote a political agenda that might not be attractive to the population.

Examples of fear mongering the US and UK today include the claim that a rape culture exists and that every man is a potential rapist. To make fear mongering work it is necessary to create an 'other,' that is, some class of persons who are different from the norm and thus dangerous to the collective. To sell the idea of rape culture to the American population every man is considered a potential rapist. This despite federal statistics on sexual assault consistently demonstrating that rape is rare and not something that 1 in 3 or 1 in 5 women will experience; rather, something in the neighborhood of 5 in 1000 women will experience, which is obviously too high.

Social Justice regressives define rape culture as a culture that teaches and condones rape. This, obviously, ignores the harsh prison sentences of offenders in the west as well as the way sexual offenders are turned into pariahs even after serving criminal sentences. Why, then, do SJWs continue to push this narrative? Fear mongering is based on a political mythology that only really functions if facts are ignored. Famously, the big lie is easier to sell to the population than small lies as long as the big lie is repeated constantly. Through repetition the big lie becomes the orthodox narrative that, if questioned, turns the skeptic into an other as well. By even writing this I'm likely to be labeled a rape apologist for denying that sexual assault statistics claimed by SJWs and especially by intersectional feminists are remotely accurate.

Fear mongering isn't limited to the concept of rape. In a comical piece of racist propaganda, last summer the Huffington Post reported that white people will be a minority by 2044. This claim is comical especially considering that the white population will still be a numerical majority among all populations for the conceivable future, even if whites constitute less than 50% of the total population at the expected time. But that isn't why this is propaganda; it is propaganda because Huffington Post, possibly the largest media organization in the Social Justice regressive arsenal, then told white people to expect the same treatment from whatever the new majority is expected to be that whites have perpetuated on minority populations in the past, complete with dog bites, fire hoses, systemic racism, and the like. The glee they reported this with would be hilarious if it was satire. The message: conform or die.

Fear is an effective tool in any political arsenal. Ask any of the film makers in the 1950s who were blacklisted by Hollywood because of rumors that they were communist sympathizers. It's plain at this point that fear goes hand in hand with bullying by those with political power or a loud enough voice to force others to push people around. This naturally results not only in fear but anger, which might explain the rise of the AltRight, a political movement in various western countries steeped in racism. One example of this is the online community Stormfront (no, I won't link to them, thank you),a neo-nazi group who responds to the infiltration of critical race theory and intersectional feminism in discourse and politics by channeling classic 1930s and 40s European rage, if you catch my drift. Extremism begets extremism.

This is the look of a man who needs a Snickers bar stat.

Which brings me to the American presidential race. There are two men running for president who bear the classic hallmarks of the political demagogue: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. I'll leave Trump alone because that's just too easy. Sanders does many of Trump's favorite tactics, such as using anger to turn a specific population into the other (for Trump it's Muslims and illegal immigrants, for Sanders it's the wealthy and conservatives). In many ways Sanders is of greater concern because unlike Trump it seems that Sanders is humorless. Beyond that, and of more practical concern, Sanders has the support of young people, which bodes ill for the future of the United States. There is more to politics than simple policy; style and rhetoric are very important with real consequences as well.