Fear as a political weapon
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
— T.S. Eliot In the words of John Lennon, “There are two great motivators: fear and love.” If this is the case, then it’s almost certainly true that the former impulse trumps the latter in 21st century America.
During an interview on “Real Time With Bill Maher,” Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) — one of 10 GOP patriots in the House who voted to impeach President Donald Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection — described how his party stays in power and keeps its sheep riled up: “We’ve learned that we can get elected on a steady diet of fear. Every fundraising email is, ‘Send me five bucks to make sure Nancy Pelosi doesn’t destroy your family.’ ”
It’s not surprising that fear is the dominant influencer for Republicans. Their base of evangelical fundamentalists (aka the Christian Taliban) has been traumatized by a long list of threats — from sex, yoga, satanism, sex, Ouija boards, cross-dressing, witchcraft, Buddhism and sex to any scientific advances discovered since the Middle Ages, including the Big Bang, evolution, psychology and a spherical Earth.
There’s also a great deal of overlap between wingnut “fundies” and QAnon conspiracy theorists. That their wild predictions are always unfulfilled never seems to diminish Q disciples’ faith in the truth of their prophecies or angst over the evil embodied by the “cabal” that has opposed Trump’s America. The reality of what had once seemed to be QAnon paranoia became clear to me when my leftist rantings earned me an invitation to the 2021 Saul Alinsky Banquet, The Cabal’s clandestine, annual gathering to advance the war on decency and plot the ruination of the country.
This year’s festivities began with a cocktail hour, during which liberals congratulated each other for stealing the 2020 election, despite The Donald’s electoral college and popular vote landslide, and we all enjoyed a hearty laugh at our success in rigging the recounts. Accompanied by hors d’oeuvres from Hillary Clinton’s pizzeria/human trafficking bistro, we watched a video showing how groups ranging from Antifa, the Gay Men’s Chorus and Black Lives Matter to The National Endowment for the Arts had seized the Capitol Jan. 6, yet managed to blame it on Trump supporters.
After we sang The Internationale (in Chinese), A.O.C. (D-New York) read aloud from one of Hillary’s 30,000 missing emails. It predicted how Barack Obama, the nation’s first Islamic president, would avoid arrest for Obamagate, a scandal no one has been able to explain, including the conservatives who merely appended the ubiquitous “-gate” suffix onto the name of a Black man they despise.
However, The Cabal isn’t concerned only with the past. After years of hysterical GOP false alarms about how “they’re coming for your guns,” Americans are now more heavily armed than ever, which means Marxists such as “Mao” Biden will be soon coming for all your weapons — from AR-15s and bazookas to Super Soakers and slingshots.
Be afraid. You won’t be able to shoot deer, quails or your neighbor’s gerbils. And you’re going to wish you were better armed to combat the “Jewish space lasers,” which GOP House member Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-Georgia) has so presciently alerted you to. The police won’t be able to protect you, because, for us, “defunding” them means disarming them. Like all liberals, we’re pro-crime, and hope to see police departments not just reformed, but removed.
As the Religious Right has warned, we’re just as anti-God as we are pro-Satan. It’s not enough to have outlawed state-mandated school prayer, we Democrats want to ban even thinking about God in the classroom. Any church that wants to maintain its tax-exempt status better consider franchising a Planned Parenthood clinic next to its baptismal fount, and, although most liberals oppose hunting, your worst fears will be realized this Xmas, when we again declare war on Santa’s reindeer and open season on manger livestock.
The American family has much to fear from The Cabal. Plans are afoot to send hybrid vans filled with gay recruiters, dressed as Jehovah’s Witnesses, into suburban neighborhoods to conduct “conversion therapy” at Sunday dinners. And Democrats are planning to add several more letters to the LGBTQ coalition. We’re considering “C,” “S” and “H” — none of which can be spelled out in a family newspaper. Be afraid. Be very afraid. And, of course, we’re putting the socialism in social distancing by mandating masks and vaccines, whether the patriots and the godly want them or not.
Meanwhile, as part of our infrastructure plan, we’ll be building a six-lane highway from Tijuana to facilitate the entry of illegal aliens (we call them “preAmericans”) through the open borders that all liberals favor. There was initially some debate over how to fund the new buses required; however, we decided the taxpayers should foot the bill, so we can refund to Mexico the millions they paid the Trump administration to build The Wall.
The Cabal banquet ended on a high note. After souvenir bitcoins, with Che Guevara’s face as “heads” and a hammer and sickle on the reverse side, were handed out, investor George Soros gave the benediction — a reading from “Das Capital” — as most of the crowd reflexively dropped to one knee.
OK, so much of the above might be fake news, but how many conservatives would believe nearly every word of it if it were shouted in their faces by an inarticulate game show host with a spray tan, a bad combover and a red MAGA hat. The world’s a scary place, and the unreal stuff is making us even more fearful than reality.