Don’t Be Afraid: Why You Don’t Need to Live Expecting Dictatorship or Occupation

December 23, 2025 // 14 Comments »

If I had one wish for my Democratic friends this holiday season, it would be this: stop being afraid. Don’t allow yourself to be manipulated into fear, and from there into supporting demagogues who pop up to take advantage of your fears.

Politics today can sound like a thriller novel where democratic institutions collapse spectacularly in Chapter 1. Every headline not supporting your own beliefs becomes evidence “democracy is in danger.” Watch especially for the ones which use the word “existential.” Every deployment becomes an “occupation,” and every harsh move, including something as non-important as building a new wing on the White House, is read as the next confirming step of a dictatorship. Every decision becomes something harkening back to the Weimar Republic’s fall.

The Democratic party and the media that orbit it learned powerful narratives get attention and motivate voters and donors. They had some early help; the “Obama is a Muslim” meme and kerfuffle over his birth certificate were crude forerunners of this style of politics, emotional overstatement masquerading as vigilance. Those early efforts failed because they had no throughline; each crazy idea has to quickly be topped with something new and crazier. So a celebrity cancellation or social media scandal has to be quickly replaced with desecration of the People’s House and if the news cycle did not produce something fast enough after that, then it was OK to fall back on the old tropes of Trump being a Russian intelligence asset or an actual pedophile, because what cannot be confirmed can at least be repeated. Fear-based narratives exist across the spectrum; the left’s authoritarian panic and the right’s worries about replacement theory are mirror images of a sort. All that is necessary is to ignore or distill complex developments into emotionally charged slogans. This is a terrible way to live, akin to Orwell’s Two Minutes of Hate scaled up to the 24/7 news cycle.

Over-stimulated labs rats will eat themselves to death. Living as if the worst possible outcome is always inevitable is unhealthy for you and bad for the very democracy fear is eroding. There are reasons to dial back the panic and allow America to get healthy again.

Forget what late night says for a moment and remember the United States still has robust legal and institutional checks that make authoritarian takeover impossible. The American system was built with multiple layers of constraint, including an independent judiciary, a legislature with law-making power, a free press, state governments with their own authority, and a civil service embedded in administrative law. These things are robust enough to have withstood the chaos of founding the nation, a brutal civil war which tore the country apart, and the rise in Europe and Japan of real fascism backed by what were then the most powerful armies in human history. The structures which sustained the United States are not theatrical props. They have proven difficult to dismantle, certainly not via an executive order. The system works; last month saw a string of Democratic election victories, and the midterms next year are expected to be tightly contested. The Congress many fear has stopped being a check and balance can on Election Day change into a vibrant opposition. It has happened many times before and if it does not happen this round, it is because the People did not vote for it. Our system allows for change to the right or left, some which you may not like or support but which comes about righteously. Those warning of dictatorship too easily forget Trump was twice elected through the same system that produced Obama and Biden, and every other president.

Aside from Congress, the courts and existing laws are active brakes on power and always have been. The Posse Comitatus Act, the Insurrection Act, and subsequent case law place very real limits on how the federal government can use the military at home. When administrations have pushed these boundaries, judges and state officials have pushed back and in each instance the feds backed down. The Rule of Law held. The friction has not been noiseless recently, as the both the administration and Democrats have their own reasons for trying to make it look like the system is failing (looking tough on crime and installing fear of authoritarianism.) But these things are not theoretical. They show the system working.

While the precise percentage of the time Trump lost in the lower courts depends on which subset of cases you look at (regulatory challenges, injunctions, district court decisions, major rulings), the consistent finding is that the Trump administration lost in court a large majority of the time, somewhere between about 60 to 90 percent. Recent analysis at Stanford shows lower court judges across the ideological spectrum are ruling against Trump at similar rates. He’s lost in 72 percent of rulings issued by Republican-appointed judges and 80 percent of rulings by Democratic-appointed judges.

It is true, an analysis by the Court Accountability Project found, that among 23 Supreme Court rulings and temporary orders related to Trump‐administration actions, the administration secured favorable outcomes in about 90 percent of those cases. The Court has ruled for Trump 17 out of 23 times in emergency appeals in his second term. That’s notable, but hardly proof of institutional collapse and that a whole branch of government has been disarmed. The muscle-tussle between the Supreme Court and lower courts is baked into the fabric of our democracy; just look at the struggle to enact civil rights and end slavery, or to drive home equality in the 1960s.

A cyclical shift toward a more powerful Executive does not lead to “No More Kings,” or any kings for that matter. The Supreme Court itself shifts based on who happens to be sitting on the bench when a given case arises, that group of justices there based on who the People voted into the Oval Office. Future Courts can overturn earlier ones — remember the Dred Scott decision. Sometimes this fits one’s preferences (for example, the Court recently refusing to reopen the issue of same-sex marriage and allowing that to stand as the law of the land) or not (the Court overturning an earlier decision assuring the right to abortion under the same rules across 50 states.) It is not erosion, just change.

Stop being afraid, but do not become complacent. Polling data show worrying trends in collapsing public trust, which weakens democratic resilience and paves the way for demagogues. A sizable share of Americans express concern about the health of democracy and increasingly question whether opponents play by the rules. That is not to be ignored. But fear that equates every aggressive political act with the end of the republic is marketing to immobilize people instead of motivating legitimate action. When the public constantly sees disaster, it trains people to expect the worst, amplifies fear-based fundraising and media cycles, and ultimately corrodes civic stamina. Energy is diverted into alarmism rather than into voting, reform, and participation. Democracy’s real defense is faith, to gently paraphrase President Obama, not in politicians, but in the institutions and fellow citizens who, time and again, have proven stronger than their own fears.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

I Can’t Sleep

September 28, 2022 // 14 Comments »

When I try to sleep at night, I can’t relax. I blearily turn on the TV. But I can’t change the channel. My TV is telling me I am going to die, maybe by Covid (they say there’s a new variant, you know, called Monkeypox), maybe by climate change because it is likely already too late. Before I drown I’ll be hungry because supply chains don’t work anymore, and inflation is stripping away my purchasing power, and some sort of fascist coup will happen and I’ll probably have to wear all gray clothes all the time like in the dystopian movies. Then there are the TV diseases, bowel disorders and skin problems that medicines I can’t afford might fix except side effects can include blindness, paralysis, saying thingstoofasttounderstandanditallisjustablur of fear. It doesn’t matter I can’t pick out the words, I know what it  means. If only I had that medicine maybe I’d be happy like the people in the commercials, going to farmer’s markets with my racially diverse group of great pals.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Fear and the Virus: We’re All Momo Now

May 2, 2020 // 3 Comments »

 
The COVID-19 virus turned us into a nation of Momo’s.
 

Momo is my old rescue dog. She has BB-like pellets embedded under her skin. She jumps at noises and shivers uncontrollably when I pull my belt from my pants at night. She didn’t have to tell me that story but she did. She invents new fears all the time; like out of nowhere today it was a spray can rattle, last week it was the the coffee machine beep. Momo never gets back to normal.

I don’t think most dogs are self-aware enough for suicide, but Momo might be. Before we got the right kind of leash she would slip off and dart into traffic. There were some close calls. For a dog afraid of everything she has no fear of being run over, so you tell me, because one definition of suicide seems to fit: fearing the consequences of living above those of dying.

Momo knows there are bears in the woods. But her fears have gotten the better of her and she can’t separate real dangers from the rustle of leaves in the wind. Soon enough the grass near the woods has gotten too close and before you know it better to just stay on the couch, alongside the rest of America.
 
We have been practicing to be Momo. With 9/11 we took one terrible day and turned it into a terrible decade. There were real threats, we all saw the Twin Towers fall. But that was… it? We faced a collection of bumbling terrorists with underwear bombs that didn’t work and shoe bombs that didn’t work and dirty bombs that never existed, plus of course the handful of successful homegrowns closer to disgruntled and mentally ill than Islamic and jihadi. If things to be afraid of didn’t exist we’d be forced to invent them. That might help explain how fast all that terror stuff just kinda faded away when it wasn’t needed anymore. ISIS who?

But before that we convinced ourselves of threats abroad that needed lashing out at (Momo has never snapped at anyone. It’s a flaw in this analogy.) That is handy, the lashing out justified by fear, because it means we don’t have any obligation toward self-examination for killing millions of civilians, torturing people to madness, upending nation after nation, yadda yadda. We were scared, you guys! Sure, maybe we’re a little embarrassed for jumping under the table mid-Iraq War when Mom dropped the plate in the kitchen but nobody is going to tell the U.S. of A. it wasn’t justified at the time.

We entered the Age of Trump in the worst of circumstances. Not only were we Momo-ized by 15 years of color-coded smoking guns being a mushroom cloud (and kudos to the author of that Bush-era catch phrase for the retro invocation of the Cold War) but we had honed social media to allow Momo’s across the country to encourage each others’ fears – “Hey, you guys afraid of the smell of pencils? I’ll just leave that here.”

We reprogrammed into one big Crisis News Network, every story reported with a flashlight held under the announcer’s chin. Throw in Americans’ seeming need to be the victim, a nation of special needs people who all have to board first. If you live every day certain you’ll die if they serve one gluten it is easy to get spooked about something actually real. And don’t forget how over-protected we want to be, wiping down the gym like prepping for surgery and reading trigger warnings and dressing like cosplayers with ineffectual soggy cloth masks — this fetish of imagined fears doesn’t stop reality as much as it leaves us poorly prepared to deal with it.

Then we get this Trump guy as a Bond-level super villain who was going to end democracy, make us speak Soviet, send the economy into a tailspin, trigger wars with China, Iran, and North Korea when he wasn’t trying to make peace with them which was somehow just as dangerous. Anyone who wasn’t a Nazi was a Russian ‘bot. Clearly a guy like this is to blame for not stopping cold a global pandemic at our shores. Social media allowed us to micro-personalize fear. Trump was going to end my rights (LGBT, abortion, something about toilets, guns, religion, concentration camps, fill-in-the-blank based on what is hiding under your bed.) We could have signature fears.

You can actually watch it happen in real time. Over on Twitter people noticed Trump retweeted something about liberating Michigan, and using their online law degrees, determined that was the commission of an actual crime of “inciting violence.” A dozen others then tattled to Twitternannyman @jack saying Trump should be banned to save us all. That brought out the historians who decided Trump was trying to start a civil war, which was the trigger for the Constitutional experts to demand the 25th Amendment be used to remove Trump from office that afternoon before the war began. From a retweet to the apocalypse in under three minutes. UPDATE: Nothing happened. All the fears were pointless.
 
But anyway Nothing Would Ever Be the Same Again and that was just for mostly made up stuff. Now we have enough of a real thing. Will we recruit Rosie the Riveter to beat the Nazis? No, we’ll just quarantine until our skin will become translucent for lack of sunlight. The face of this is Karen telling someone self-righteously they need to wear a yellow HAZMAT suit to Safeway or they’ll have her kid’s blood on their hands. People always find a new way to fear not enough — not enough tests, not enough ventilators, not enough beds, not enough food, whatever’s next. It doesn’t matter the fatal shortages did not materialize yet. The virus could mutate! There’s a second wave coming! Best to stay tense, dog, you will never get back to normal.

C’mon, just between us, forget about Trump for a minute. Does a virus falling well behind super killers like car crashes and cancer really really really demand upending literally everything in our life? Shutting down schools? Throwing 22 million people out of work? Stopping down our most basic rights? And if anyone says yes, explain why we didn’t do it for past pandemics like H1N1. Imagine George W. Bush deciding post-9/11 no one could go to work or school for “national security reasons,” that we could not protect all those locations from the terrorists or something. It seems silly in retrospect but we’re doing it today. We’re so afraid we no longer can distinguish between prudence and over-reaction. It just seems easier to stay at home than to see if the woods really have bears in them.

We are somewhat lucky. The most powerful people in our nation just want money. Jeff Bezos has no inherent desire to harm us directly. We still have some value to him, as temporary workers until the robots come and of course to order things. A mild uptick in the market saw Jeff’s net worth leap $24 billion dollars in one day. Fear is currency, and profiting off the pandemic the new status symbol.

Politically, more luck. The next president has limited ambitions. Trump seems content thinking he’s in charge and busting chops, and Joe Biden’s ambition is to um, something. They’re not the kind of people who would really run with this fear thing. They seem content with the status quo of fear, enough to make people compliant, but not so much that they end up chasing each other with pitchforks. But imagine a bad boy in charge like Dick Cheney, Richard Nixon or John Brennan, a strong man to protect us, an evil man who understands the power of fear.
 
I’ve been fortunate enough to live in a number of different countries. They have problems, sometimes serious ones similar to ours. But they don’t seem to have Momo-ized, where they can no longer tell the real dangers from the shadows, or judge the right amount of caution from the panic that shuts down the point of living.

Maybe this is because less is uncertain for them. Most have health care, social nets, pensions, day care, stuff like that. Their people start the day worrying less in general than most Americans. Maybe that has something to do with this. For now, it’s hard to feel excited living in a nation of paranoid agoraphobics passing their remaining time slathered in Purell scolding their neighbor for forgetting his mask when out walking Momo. It’s not a healthy way to live.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Here’s Some Cocoa, America. Tell Me What You’re So Afraid Of.

January 14, 2018 // 13 Comments »

Here’s what I’m afraid of. While fear has always been a tool of the vested interests to retain power, make money, and keep us under control, things may be slipping off the rails. The basic political post-war strategy of the United States power block has metastasized. The old fears deployed – the Commies, the Terrorists – were reliably a fire only a few key people could easily feed fuel into, or cool down, as needed. There was an element of control, evil and insidious, but one that maintained a balance. After all, you want enough fear to make people compliant but no so much that they end up chasing each other with pitchforks. Or driving cars through crowds of protesters.

It is too easy now for too many people to put fuel into the fire. The establishment media, which once thrived on trading information for viewers, now trades on promoting anxiety. Confirmations of our fears no longer show up in scratchy black and white only when the president addresses the nation. They rocket 24/7, unfiltered and unfettered, tailored to match what scares us most. Then we retweet them to like-minded others, to validate our fears and form bonded communities. These are deep waters; imagine an episode of Black Mirror where a device that algorithmically learns your deepest fears falls into the wrong hands.

There’s a history to all this. We first got really scared just as we were emerging as the predominant power on the planet, armed with the world’s only atomic bomb. It seems an odd set of circumstances to have been frightened in, more like one where we would have sat back and enjoyed ourselves. Yet we near-demanded a succession of presidents build the most massive national security state ever known to make us feel safe.

We were instructed to be afraid of all sorts of stuff — communists in government and Hollywood, domino theories, revolutionary movements, a whole basket of Bond villains. Those who supported peace were labeled as working for the enemy. Pretty much anything the people in charge wanted to do — distort civil liberties, raise taxes to pay for weapons, overthrow governments, punish Americans for things they wrote or said — was widely supported because we were afraid what might happen otherwise. Most people now realize the fear was overblown. Almost every American who died from the Cold War died in a fight we picked, inflamed, or dove blindly into. Cancer and car accidents took more lives than Dr. Strangelove. Fear justified terrible actions in our name.

Then we got really scared following September 11, 2001, more than we ever were of the Russians. The terrorists lived among us. They were controlled by masterminds, simultaneously unpredictable and devious plotters playing the long game. They could turn our children into jihadis via MySpace. Pretty much anything the people in charge wanted to do — distort civil liberties, raise taxes to pay for weapons, overthrow governments, punish Americans for things they wrote or said — was widely supported because we were afraid what might happen otherwise. Some people now realize the fear was overblown. Diabetes and ladder falls took more lives than Bin Laden.

For a long time we’ve been acting like a shelter dog when the Bad Man comes into the room. The difference is that we were mostly afraid of the same thing, a mass driven by anxiety more or less in the same direction, a straight line that could not be anything but purposeful.

The nasty twist for 2018 is we live in a world of mainstream media with barely screened ideological bias, backed up by social media of barely contained mental stability. At the same time, we are ever more diverse and equally ever more separated, divided into a thousand incommunicado sub-reddits. It isn’t practical anymore for us to have common fears.

Fear is powerful. A sound triggers a memory that sets off involuntary, subconscious processes: the heart rate jumps, muscles twitch, higher brain functions switch to fight-or-flight. Exist in this state long enough and you end up with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, the inability to control your reaction to certain stimuli. Imagine a whole country that way trying to make good decisions, where fear trumps rational thinking.

Looking at a blog post from a few years ago about what we were afraid of then, there are some familiar names. Putin was going on to invade Europe and Kim Jong Un was going to start a war over a Seth Rogin comedy called The Interview. But there were no mainstream claims the president was unfit at his core; people who feared that were pushed aside as conspiracy theorists, crazy themselves, and made fun of as “birthers.” There was no widespread anxiety democracy was teetering; people who talked about coups and the Reichstag burning were mocked on reality TV as preppers. There was a kind of consensus on what to be afraid of we subscribed to in various degrees of earnestness.

Now there is a fear for everyone. We’re afraid Trump’ll start a war with North Korea (Kim is the sane one). We’re also afraid he won’t start a war and they’ll get us first (Kim is the crazy one.) We’re afraid Trump’s a Russian spy slipped into the White House (end of democracy) and we’re afraid the Democrats are using Mueller to overturn a legitimate election (end of democracy.) We’re worried the fascist government is taking away free speech and we’re worried the government isn’t doing enough to suppress free speech to stop hate. There are too many guns for us to be safe and not enough guns to protect us. Elect more women or women’s rights are finished. If we do elect more women (or POC, LGBTQ) the rest of us are finished.

Bad things no longer just don’t happen, they just haven’t happened yet, and there is never a time when we can exhale. So while the story used to be the tamping down of tensions on the Korean peninsula, the headline now is a mentally ill Trump might just push the nuclear button anyway, maybe even tonight (better check Twitter.) Whatever matters to you — transgender toilet rights, abortion, guns, religion — is under lethal attack and you are not just to help decide how we live in a plurality, but to determine whether we survive at all. It is always condition yellow, fight or flight. Fear is primitive; it doesn’t matter what we fear, as long as we remain afraid.

Trump is not the demagogue you fear, just a cruder version of what has been the norm for decades. The thing to be scared of is what emerges after him. As such, there is still time. His bizarre ascension to the world’s most powerful office could become the argumentum ad absurdum that pulls the curtain back, Oz-like, on the way fear has been used to manipulate us. The risk is Trump may also represent a wake up call of a different sort, to even worse and much smarter people, who will see the potential to cross the line from manipulation into exploitation (the real burning of the Reichstag scenario), from gross but recognizable stasis into chaos.

Frightened enough, people will accept, if not demand, extreme and dangerous solutions to problems whose true direness exists mostly within their anxieties – remember the way fear of invasion following Pearl Harbor led us to unlawfully imprison American citizen shopkeepers and farmers of Japanese origin? Now that’s something to really be afraid of.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

We Are Still Alive (Non-Hacked Russian Stooge and Terrorism Edition)

January 1, 2017 // 39 Comments »

This is a version of last year’s January 1 article, updated to reflect the new fears of the World’s Most Frightened Nation.

I survived. America, and the world, and you, survived. We awoke the first day of 2017 to find that once again, using the extraordinary power of fear, we again held off the terrorists. And Putin. And Trump, nationalists, racists, hackers, alt-Right fascists, CNN, persons of all colors, genders, shapes, sizes, and goddamn religions.

Fear Classic: Terrorism

Hard as it is to persuade a constantly re-frightened American public, there have been less than 100 Americans killed inside the Homeland by so-called Islamic terrorism since 9/11.

Argue the number, hell, go ahead and double or triple it, and it still a tragic, sad, but undeniable drop in the bucket. Throw in a few mysterious “foiled plots” the government never seems to have many specifics on to share and tack on some more to the terror body count. No matter how hard you drive, you just can’t get the number of Americans killed or even in clear danger of being killed to a very large number.

And do spare the tired trope of “well, security measures such as at our airports have saved us from who knows how many attacks.” Leaving aside the idea that the argument itself demands a kind of negative logic (the “who knows” part) to even make sense, a test by the Department of Homeland’s own Inspector General’s Office, posing as travelers, showed 95 percent of contraband, including weapons and explosives, got through during clandestine testings. If a failure rate of 95 percent did not have planes falling from the sky, one must conclude security does little to affect terrorism.

CNN on the Eve told us that almost two million people were in Times Square to see in the New Year, along with 7,000 cops and 65 giant trucks filled with sand to stop the 2016 fad (actually two cases, in Europe) of car/truck driving terrorists. More Americans died of alcohol poisoning (booze terror!) last night than terrorism.

A shout-out here also to a benevolent Allah, who mercifully did not tell any terrorists that while Times Square was secured on the Eve, the rest of the large crowds elsewhere in New York were pretty much not, and a suicide bomber could have ridden in on a camel. Same as the days after New Year’s, when there is the usual lack of any serious security everywhere but at Trump Tower. Luckily ISIS couldn’t figure any of that out. Whew.

Our New Fears for 2017

And despite the new fears, actually two old ones recombined, our such as it is democracy is still hanging around. The new fears are quite creative, lopping together that old standby, The Red Menace and its global evil genius Vlad Putin, and “hacking,” the computer thingie that scares old peoples and is why you need to go home every Thanksgiving and reboot grandpa’s PC so he can play Solitaire again.

We endured the fear-mongering of the autumn that our Very Way of Life was at risk, because John Podesta’s emails were released and because the Electoral College was full of meanie rats who wouldn’t do something something Hamilton and elect Hillary like the script said they should. If only the Russians and FBI and Clinton Foundation and email server and Bernie Sanders and the nine votes cast for Jill Stein and the recounts that actually cost Clinton a few votes and 62 million Americans hadn’t interfered, we would be entering 2017 basking in the warm and eternal glow of Dear Leader Hillary Clinton leading us from bondage. Dammit.

Trump has also failed (so far!) to start any wars with China, Planet Mongo, or Russia by breaking up with Putin and refusing to give the ring back. He has not instituted Sharia law or martial law or the Nuremberg laws or rounded up people who write liberal tweets or made all LGBTQ people marry illegal aliens and wear boring clothing to NASCAR races. That may come, it’s early in 2017, but so far, not yet.

But don’t believe me. “We should be absolutely terrified in 2017—perhaps more than at any other point in the 20th century,” said Robin Kelley, historian of social movements in the U.S. at the University of California Los Angeles.

Or maybe, believe me. It is all panic-mongering, designed to keep us in a state of fear. Fearful people are easy to manipulate. So stop being afraid.

BONUS: Many have written in to ask what I get in return for being a Russian puppet. To be honest, not much, mostly just a hobby. I do get to crash on Snowden’s pull-out when I’m in Moscow for reeducation sessions, and that saves me a few bucks.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Explaining Trump and Clinton to a Global Audience (and to Americans)

April 18, 2016 // 10 Comments »

As the presumptive U.S. presidential nominees emerge, at least for now — Donald Trump for the Republicans and Hillary Clinton for the Democrats — more and more friends from abroad have started asking me to explain how a person like Trump could get so far, so fast, given utter lack of experience.

A few also ask questions about Hillary’s qualifications, mostly centered around the money flow from Wall Street, and the “donations” from foreign governments into the Clinton Foundation. Many from places where corruption is more surfaced recognize what is happening perhaps more clearly than Americans.

What I try to explain is that the success of Trump and Clinton, especially over the candidates they have defeated, is based on the same dark spot inside the American body politic now: our society is motivated by fear, and fear produced the 2016 versions of candidates Trump and Clinton.

For its faults — referring more to the American Soul than the American government — the pre-9/11 United States was a relatively hopeful place. Despite the underbelly of prejudices and the crushing of the middle class, there was a sense that things might get better, or at least not worse. War? The last big one was Desert Storm in 1991. Nobody would claim society was perfect, or even uniformly good, but it was different than now.

Then across the span of a day, September 11, 2001, America changed. We became, as a nation, afraid.

We were afraid of enemies most Americans had heard little about. We were afraid of what might happen next. We were afraid of an attack against the shopping mall, the school, the tiny place in our tiny town that didn’t show up well on most local maps, never mind one bin Laden might use. Our fears were carefully curated by opportunistic people in two successive administrations, who used that fear to manipulate democracy itself. They turned America’s vast spying apparatus inward, imposed a global gulag archipelago of torture sites and secret prisons, and institutionalizing the drone wars.

Amid the various causes and justifications, that it is all about oil, or empire, what it is all about at the root level is fear. Fear of the latest bogeyman, fear screeches of groups on YouTube are real, and that they are ready to strike what we now all call the Homeland. That word never existed in America prior to 9/11.

America lost its guts. We’re scared of scary things we can’t see and can only identify as monsters, like a child alone at night who hears every noise and assumes the worst.

So into that setting emerges the presidential candidates that had to emerge, our first true post-9/11 candidates, the ones who picked up on the fears of Americans as a predator catches a scent.

Donald Trump speaks pointedly to America’s fears — Mexicans swarming to take our jobs, trade agreements that will hand China the keys to the store (“They’re killing us!”), and weaknesses that allow Islamic State, Putin, the Iranians, and all the rest, to wait coiled on our borders. Afraid? Then you need Trump on that wall, you want him on that wall, for it is only because of rough men like him that you’ll be able to once again (“Make America Great Again”) sleep peacefully.

Trump’s form of fear-mongering is basically from the same toolbox every autocrat and dictator has used since government was invented. Trump plays on what one can call “positive fear,” fear of what will befall us if he is not there to stop it.

While Hillary Clinton is no stranger to calling up global demons, the biggest fear she plays on is American’s fear of change.

Clinton is well on her way to defeating Bernie Sanders by convincing Americans they do not want the same comprehensive health care system every other evolved nation on earth has, that they do not want the no-cost higher education most/all of Europe and Asia profits from, and that Americans do not want a political system less subject to influence buying. She told Americans she alone would continue decades of mediocrity, because there really was no other way. Convincing people to vote against their own self-benefit is not easy, but fear is a powerful motivator.

Clinton’s fear-mongering is more subtle than Trump’s. The fear she sells is not so much of something (Islamic State, Putin), but fear of the unknown, a kind of “negative fear.” So, despite the often ineffective health insurance provided under the Affordable Care Act, she tells supporters her opponent might even see that taken away if he reopens a debate with Republicans. She brushes off concerns about big money influence saying if it was good enough for Obama, then why change that?

The rest flows quite naturally. It is little surprise that both candidates are shaping a meme that while you may not like or even wish to support them actively, you should vote for them anyway, for fear that the other one will win.

Barring any unforeseen circumstances, either Trump or Clinton will take the White House, and fan the flames; fear requires regular booster shots, each one bigger than the last. And that should in fact make the rest of us very, very afraid.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

We Are Still Alive (Non-Terrorism Edition)

January 1, 2016 // 11 Comments »

I survived. America, and the world, and you, survived. We awoke the first day of 2016 to find that once again, using the extraordinary power of fear, we defeated the terrorists.


Hard as it is to persuade a constantly re-frightened American public, there have been only 38 Americans killed inside the Homeland by so-called Islamic terrorism since 9/11.

Argue the number, hell, go ahead and double or triple it, and it still a tragic, sad, but undeniable drop in the bucket. Throw in a few mysterious “foiled plots” the government never seems to have many specifics on to share and tack on some more to the terror body count. No matter how hard you drive, you just can’t get the number of Americans killed or even in clear danger of being killed to a very large number.

And do spare the tired trope of “well, security measures such as at our airports have saved us from who knows how many attacks.” Leaving aside the idea that the argument itself demands a kind of negative logic (the “who knows” part) to even make sense, a recent test by the Department of Homeland’s own Inspector General’s Office, posing as travelers, showed 95 percent of contraband, including weapons and explosives, got through during clandestine testings. If a failure rate of 95 percent did not have planes falling from the sky, one must conclude security has little to affect terrorism.

CNN on the Eve told us that over one million people were in Times Square to see in the New Year, along with 6,000 cops. The guest being interviewed helpfully said that meant each cop would have to watch 166 people (actually, the guy said 300-500 to upgrade the worry) for signs that they were terrorists, and worried that the ratio was not enough to protect those out of each bunch of 166 who were not bad guys. Guess what? None of them were. More Americans died of alcohol poisoning (booze terror!) last night than terrorism.

We are not terrorists. No one was hurt. No bombs went off. Almost all of our homegrown lone wolves are all Google and no game. It was all panic, designed to keep us in a state of fear. Fearful people are easy to manipulate.

Stop being afraid.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Top Ten Govt Things to Be Afraid of for Halloween

October 31, 2014 // 1 Comment »

The government’s main function these days is to promote fear among Americans.

Fear is good for our current way of life, allowing your opinion and votes to be manipulated, and to make sure you’ll go along with any terrible things the government wishes to do to you (surveillance, wars, detentions, quarantines, shredding of the bill of rights…)

So, in honor of Halloween, our scariest holiday other than election day, here is the Official Government-Approved List of Fears:

1) ISIS (they’re everywhere!)

2) Ebola (it’s everywhere!)

3) Al Qaeda (still around)

4) People who tell you not to be afraid (they’re working for the terrorists)

5) Something (as in “If you see SOMETHING, say something…”)

6) For Kids: Your hippie parents and Occupy-creepy older siblings (be sure and report them to the nearest friendly Homeland Security personnel, they’ll give you tasty candies!)

7) That Leatherface guy with the chainsaw and Twisty clown from the TV (they may be ISIS)

8) The thing under your bed (could be an ISIS thing, and you’re not imagining it, we believe you)

9) The Boogie-man as you choose to believe in him/her as a higher power (he has ebola and is a Muslim)

10) People who are not like you based on skin color, preferences, religion, politics and everything else all the time everywhere forever, just to be on the safe side!

Citizens remember, fear is your only protection against the forces of whatever, evil, so just stay afraid and you’ll be safe!

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy

Living in Fear: A Fable for Trayvon

July 16, 2013 // 7 Comments »

The Commerce Department in 2012 claimed it suffered a foreign cyberattack that put its entire computer network at risk. It had to do with Trayvon.

Commerce destroyed hardware worth $175,000, stopping only when they ran out of funding. Meanwhile, an outside cybersecurity contractor was hired at $823,000 to implement a $688,000 unneeded “solution.” After that, Commerce bought $1.1 million worth of new computers. The expenses ate up half the department’s technology budget.

A year later, the Commerce Department’s inspector general determined the devastating attack was nothing of the sort, actually just a small malware infection on six computers that could have been erased with off-the shelf anti-virus tools.

What Happened?

Have a look at some of the explanations:

— “In an environment of heightened vulnerability to cyberattacks, once you’re infected you often overact.”

— “You feel violated.”

— “All you feel is somebody’s in my house and I’ve got to get them out. And you get overly conservative.”

— “[Commerce] did not know what it was facing. Under those circumstances, given the cyber risks, one has to be cautious.”

— “It’s a question of which side do you want to err on?”

— “Fear of foreign cyberattacks was so high that the department called in help from the Homeland Security and Energy departments, the National Security Agency and a private cybersecurity contractor.”

— “Fear led the Office of the Chief Information Officer not to question the accuracy of the extent of the malware infection, despite a lack of supporting evidence.”

Lessons Learned?

At first brush this story is just another government screw up. Instead of assessing the situation, incompetent bureaucrats faced with a problem spent taxpayer money, lots of money. Expensive beltway bandit contractors sucked up panic spending cash to implement unneeded solutions. The whole thing was then hidden away until another beleaguered Inspector General stumbled upon it. The story gets reported with an eye-roll, fodder for the Daily Show.

But look a bit deeper for the real lesson. Anyone controlled by fear will act this same way, desperate for solutions to the scary things they think are hiding under the bed. Actions capture more emotion than fact. That’s always the problem, isn’t it, trying to stay inside the lines when you’re boiling inside your heart.

Even in 2001, considerably more Americans died of drowning than from terror attacks. Since then, the odds of an American being killed in a terrorist attack in the U.S. or abroad have been about one in 20 million, even less if you don’t work for the U.S. government or military. This real-world low risk isn’t evidence that homeland security spending has worked: It’s evidence that the terror threat was never as great as we thought.

Indeed, from 2005 to 2010, federal attorneys declined to bring any charges against 67 percent of alleged terrorism-related cases referred to them from law enforcement agencies; the cases just weren’t terrorism.

What you get is a society controlled by its fears. A lot like a guy I knew, Depression Kid, he kept old aluminum foil and shopping bags folded up in the basement, never threw out anything, used to lick the dinner plates clean in the kitchen when he thought nobody was looking. No matter what he achieved, Eagle Scout, college degree, captain’s rank, he could never rest. Nothing was ever, could ever, be enough.

This leads in a direct line to gunning down an unarmed teenager because you fear the way he is dressed or the color of his skin. It leads to an internal spying system that can’t stop itself from trying to vacuum up everything for fear of missing something. It leads to a foreign policy that abandons hundreds of years of standards, norms and morality over a single “fugitive” person. It leads to an endless war on someone (Reds, Terrorists). You ban nail clippers on airplanes and force millions of travelers to trod through airports without shoes.

Once you give in to the fear there is no end to things to be afraid of. When most of those fears turn out to be just made-up shadows– even non-viruses inside a computer network– unreal and unsubstantiated, nothing you can do can make them really go away. They don’t live externally and are not vulnerable to your countermeasures. Safety and security are fleeting, grabbed only in moments before the next threat grows inside you. Armed, you look for targets.

Like an old Twilight Zone episode, the boogie men are inside you. Once you’re infected you often overreact.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.

Posted in Democracy