American Thinker:
Behind anger is fear. For instance, many wealthy people are not greedy — they are terrified of poverty and can never accumulate sufficient wealth to appease that anxiety. Fear and emotions take primacy over logic. George Orwell explained in 1984 how Big Brother employed constant fear to pacify the masses (the “proles”), with vague foreign “threats” that were purely fictitious.
In the Cold War, it was nuclear extinction; in the Iraq War (and still), it was “threat levels.” After 9/11, Americans were cautioned with “threats to the homeland.” Orwell warned not just of Soviet socialism, but of any monolithic government that sought dominance.
Vermont is the national Petri dish for the Orwellian fear-mongers. Visceral quaking by overwrought Vermont “progressives” over firearms was well funded by out-of state interests, and Vermont swiftly shifted from one of the least restrictive Second Amendment havens to one of the most oppressive, employing a “thoughtcrime” that was perfectly timed (post–Sandy Hook) to dupe the electorate: a student was charged with an “attempted” attack on a public school, when there had never been any attempt. Fear trumped logic.
Vermont is one of the most amenable states in the nation to blacks, yet racism and Nazi-fear have been employed by the Vermont attorney general to undermine police efforts to arrest fentanyl-traffickers and to create a panel that labels Vermont a “white supremacist culture” and redrafts Vermont textbooks to inculcate “white guilt” in schoolchildren. Vermont voters embraced Barack Obama more than almost all states, Vermont has the narrowest income disparity between blacks and whites, and Vermont never permitted slavery — but the Legislature has rewritten the state constitution. And “fear” of imagined Kavanaugh-driven changes to Roe v. Wade led to one of the most extremist post-Roe abortion laws in the nation. read more
So. Let’s talk
toat them.I am about ready to edit a few states out of the Union!
Politicians and the elite have been searching for a cause for fear ever since the Soviet Union imploded. Without something to be afraid of, the common folk may exercise …. freedom. That can’t do; we must have a common enemy so we can mobilize the citizenry and induce them to give up rights for the “common good.”
Up to now, these common enemies have proven to be far too transitory. We remembered the Maine, pounded the crap out of the Spanish and the Cubans, and then forgot about them. The Huns ran out of soldiers and resources in 1918, were quiet for 20 years, and then we destroyed the Nazis – although the Nazis proved to be such worthwhile evil enemies that we still invoke their memory. Then we worried about communists, and when the commies obtained nuclear weapons, we worried about nuclear annihilation. Then those damn Soviets imploded, terrorism proved to be overall too iffy, and we were left with searching for another common enemy.
Climate change is, as a common enemy, perfect. The climate has been changing for about four and one-half billion years, and is unlikely to stop changing no matter what we do. We can’t really “fix” it, and to be honest we can’t really destroy the earth (although we can make things more unpleasant for humans). And the cherry on top is the willingness of our media to give unwarranted attention to teenagers with mental issues in order to push their fear.
A reliance on fear to mobilize the population to do what the elites want has been around forever. But just try telling Vermonters to chill a little, and we will get nothing but more scolding and lectures.
The most evil way to control
both man & animal is with fear and pain…