If that’s not enough to make you concerned about the future, we’ve seen marches protesting racism turn into riots in America’s great cities, burning businesses and homes and leaving some people injured and dead. Many of the victims of this rioting were black, but somehow, their lives and livelihoods did not matter. Antifa, the fascist gang absurdly insisting they’re not the fascists, joined in with the rioting, along with physical attacks on police, members of the media, and innocent bystanders. Weapons of choice included balloons filled with urine, and “milk shakes” of wet cement thrown into people’s faces. How progressive!
Next up in the fear porn parade—the Democrats’ “Defund the Police” movement. With riots and groups of disturbed and violent anarchists wandering through American cities and neighborhoods like something out of a horror movie, demonizing law enforcement is the next logical way to throw more gasoline on the fire of the contrived civil unrest.
This is a strategy we will see repeated: teach people to fear the problem and the solution. Then, there is nowhere to run to but unparalleled change. It removes any sense of security for the millions of law-abiding citizens of all races and ethnicities in lawless Democratic cities, and spreads fear throughout the nation watching the mayhem on TV.
The academy also retched onto society “Critical Race Theory.” Initially started as a “movement” at ultraprogressive Harvard in the 1980s and then spreading among law schools around the country as an academic discipline,10 the scourge is now one of the left’s favorite weapons. It targets everyone from children in elementary schools to our military to Fortune 500 companies with race guilt, judgment, and condemnation.11 Serving the core of the left’s fear agenda, Critical Race Theory encourages and conditions people to judge and rank others by the color of their skin. Those on the left apparently do not know the definition of irony, so they believe combatting racism with more racism makes absolute sense. I don’t know about you, but every now and then I expect to see Rod Serling walk around the corner, confirming we’ve crossed over into the Twilight Zone.
To those of us in the real world, none of this makes sense. But it does make us afraid, as it strikes at the core of foundational values and principles a free nation relies upon—free speech, law and order, due process, safety, comity, goodwill, and fairness. This and so much more is bearing down on the American polity like a punishment. And that’s because it is.
This book’s mission is to make it clear, on all these issues and more facing you, your family, and your friends, that you have not lost your minds. The threat of a crumbling civilized society you are witnessing is not normal or inevitable. There is, indeed, a method to the very serious madness consuming the people running our government, our schools and colleges, the left-wing media, and Big Tech. And it’s a madness we can expose and defeat.
Fear in the Minds of Men, Then and Now
Progressives seem strangely but deliberately determined to frighten us into submission by using whatever “good crisis” presents itself. And if they can’t find a crisis, they’ll manufacture it.
Consider Democrat Rahm Emanuel, the former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, congressman, chief of staff for President Barack Obama, and mayor of Chicago. In November 2008, just after the presidential election, Emanuel said the quiet thing out loud when he spoke at a business conference, just as the severity of the nation’s financial collapse was becoming clear. The Wall Street Journal reported on his comments at the time:
“The thing about a crisis—and crisis doesn’t seem too strong a word for the economic mess right now—is that it creates a sense of urgency. . . .” This opportunity isn’t lost on the new president and his team. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s new chief of staff, told a Wall Street Journal conference of top corporate chief executives this week. He elaborated: “Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.”12
Why would a crisis destroying people’s lives be considered an opportunity by cynical politicians? Citizens are rightly skeptical of the government trying things they haven’t tried before, especially on an enormous, disruptive scale. However, a crisis fosters fear, and enough fear will overcome that skepticism about huge social engineering projects. In other words, fear short-circuits your brain.13
Fear is an extensively studied emotion—not just the psychological aspect, but also the physiological changes it causes to the brain itself.14 Discussing how fear and terror “hijack” the brain, Dr. Bruce Perry of the ChildTrauma Academy explains, “When people are terrorized, the smartest parts of our brain tend to shut down,” directly changing the way we think.15
Moreover, Dr. Eric Hollander, professor of psychiatry at Montefiore/Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, tells us that normally we “evaluate situations in a logical and conscious fashion and [consider] the risks and benefits of different behaviors—that gets short-circuited”16 when faced with a frightening situation. When the brain is trying to process information while also dealing with an emotional state like fear, “problem solving becomes more categorical, concrete and emotional [and] we become more vulnerable to reactive and short-sighted solutions.”17 You’ve probably heard the expression “scared out of my wits.” It’s an accurate description of how fear can overpower our intelligence.
No wonder politicians never want to “let a good crisis go to waste.” They know their disastrous policies only have a chance when Americans have had their brains short-circuited. The progressive establishment needs people to be psychologically vulnerable and illogical. If terrifying you gets them what they want, then so be it. Whatever it takes.
The circumstances of this hijacking of our minds are not normal, organic, or new. Philosophers from the ancients to the modern age have contemplated the power of fear, many with a focus on how humanity can overcome fear’s nefarious impact on our thinking. Others saw opportunities to use fear as a psychological bioweapon with which to gain and wield power.18
From the ancient to the modern world—from Plato and Aristotle, to Marcus Aurelius, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Edmund Burke—fear has fascinated philosophers trying to understand the human condition.
In 1532, Machiavelli “elevated fear to a fundamental principle of politics. In his treatise, The Prince, he advised that a political leader should learn how to inspire fear in his subjects. Fear allows political authorities to consolidate their power. . . .”19 Moreover, “Machiavelli steadfastly insists that violence and cruelty are necessary means of effective political action.”20
Yet it is Hobbes’s view that seems most germane for our investigation, as his most influential work, Leviathan, in 1651 describes the establishment of a modern secular state, led by an all-powerful sovereign using fear as the legitimate option to “prevent social unrest.”21 He “recognized fear as a cornerstone of an inherently artificial political order. Such order helped transform individual fears into collective ones. Presented with a choice between fear [as delivered by the uncontrolled and terrorizing state of nature] and subjugation [fear chosen by and controlled by the state], Hobbes was sure people would prefer the second.”22
In the past, governments created fear of the government in order to get the population to obey. Modern governments have figured out how to create fear over everything else to get the population to obey.
This can also be done by creating fear from “outside” the government. Today’s political elite rely on academics and their assorted musings when considering policy and how to implement their agendas. However, there is a revolving door of people moving from government to media to universities and back again, resulting in a hellish merry-go-round that makes collusion and groupthink easier and even natural. It also allows a philosophy meant for debate and contemplation in a university seminar to be mistaken as a prescriptive to be implemented upon actual human beings.
The problem for modern politicians, and their Marxist sycophants who are inspired by Hobbes’s philosophy, is that his premise relies on a contrived “state of nature” as the catalyst for the legitimacy of a state ruled by managed fear. “Life in the state of nature is characterized by insecurity where human behavior is dominated by the instinct of self-preservation . . . when individuals need to defend themselves against others, there is no pleasure in life. . . . Life is short, there is no society that can protect the individual, and violent death is frequent as crime is rife.”23
Hobbes’s seventeenth-century philosophic view of social and civil chaos very well might be mistaken by today’s self-important malcontents as an actual prescription for the method with which to convince human beings to willingly submit to totalitarian terror. Setting cities on fire, condemning people for their rational and reasonable ideas and speech, defunding the police, and allowing violent criminals to roam free—while placing citizens in a position of having to constantly defend themselves literally and figuratively—presents an all-encompassing disorder that true believers relish as a necessary step to progress.
Fortunately for us, Hobbes was not a historian but a philosopher. The American people have the benefit of history to know the failure of revolutions emerging from the academy, and the rot of ideas like Marxism that is the foundation of communism and socialism.
Fear Itself
There is no single concept of fear all disciplines agree on.24 This book focuses on the common sense understanding of the emotion, since that is what public and private tyrants of the past and the present have relied on to control people and gain power over them.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines fear as: “The emotion of pain or uneasiness caused by the sense of impending danger, or by the prospect of some possible evil. Now the general term for all degrees of the emotion; in early use applied to its more violent extremes, now denoted by alarm, terror, fright, dread. In 14th cent. sometimes pleonastically dread and fear.”25
Edmund Burke, who is considered the father of classical conservatism, described fear as “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”26 On the issue of tyranny and despotic governments, his definition of fear explains why political establishments have always been enthusiastic about its use. He explains: “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For fear being an apprehension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain.”27
In Fear, Corey Robin’s seminal book exploring how fear is used to shape our politics and culture, he notes: “Though most modern writers and politicians oppose political fear as the enemy of liberty, reason, and other Enlightenment values, they often embrace it, in spite of themselves, as a source of political vitality.”28 Moreover, “Whether condemning Jacobin terror, Soviet despotism, Balkan genocide, or September 11 terrorism, they [writers and politicians] see opportunities for collective renewal in the fear of these evils.”29
This is what the media, politicians, and the omnipresent establishment apparatchiks likely tell themselves when opting to exploit horrific human tragedies to gain a political edge over the citizenry. There is always an excuse, always an explanation, to soothe even the subconscious when abusing one person or millions of people.
The problem is, if one actually cares about the polity and its people, the inclination would not be to exploit the “strongest emotion,” but to explain, persuade, and engage. Imagine a relationship where a person’s first instinct is to threaten or frighten you into doing something or intimidate you into behaving in a certain way. It might be the quickest way to push you into compliance, but it is certainly not a relationship based on respect and dignity. It is a bully’s answer to life. This helps us understand the extent of the problem with our establishment being awash in bullies, grifters, and frauds who do damage to the country as they obsessively focus on frightening us into silence and surrender.
As a left-wing community organizer for many years focusing on violence against women in general and domestic violence in particular, I’ve been stunned by the undeniable similarities between the crime of domestic violence at the personal level and our ruling establishment’s behavior toward citizens. And yet, I shouldn’t have been so surprised by these similarities. It was my own recent encounter that helped me recognize the connection between the personal and political use of fear to control and manipulate.
Personal Fear Is Political Fear
Those who work to frighten us for political ends and those doing it on a personal level have this in common: they rely on our imaginations giving life to a sometimes vague, or whispered, or even obscure threat. No one can create a fear larger than what our imaginations allow. The tyrants and bullies among us know that. But often, all it takes is clarity and information to burst the controlling bubble of fear and dread.
An event in my own life provided me with this invaluable knowledge.
It was an epiphany I had one night years ago in New York City in, of all places, the middle of Times Square. When I was younger, I was involved in a relationship that was emotionally and sometimes physically abusive. I finally extricated myself from that situation and I eventually understood—after years of therapy—that it had conditioned me into a state of generalized fear and anxiety.
Many of you may be able to relate to this. When you live in an unnatural and negative emotional state day after day, it becomes your normal. Through the benefit of psychotherapy and the support of friends, I was able to confidently overcome and manage the more deleterious effects of that experience and move on from the abusive conditioning to which I was subjected. Or at least, that’s what I thought.
Fast-forward thirty years to New York City, where I was spending a great deal of my time working. For most of the previous fifteen years, this woman was not on my mind, never interrupting my thoughts or life. That changed a few years ago when she again began pursuing and harassing me.
One night, she ended up lying in wait outside of a studio where I was working. When I left the studio that evening to walk home, she stalked me to Times Square, where she accosted me, grabbing my arm. There was a look on her face I recognized from the past abuse, and it frightened me. She had threatened me at various times in the past, so this situation immediately raised many red flags for me about the danger I was facing. Looking back, it was as though a different region of my brain engaged and was guiding my actions. I now know what the fight-or-flight experience genuinely feels like. My frantic flight commenced.
Pulling away from her grip, I ignored her screaming pleas for my attention and ran as fast as I could in the chaos and crush of Times Square during a busy evening. She chased me, and I felt her repeatedly grab the back of my coat. I glanced back and observed her completely unhinged, her face twisted and her mouth open. In a blur, I saw other pedestrians noticing the frenzy, appearing concerned, but I ignored everything and had no idea what to do or where I was going.
At one point feeling I would not be able to get away, sure in my mind I was in physical danger, I remember the instant I actually considered running into traffic to escape her. Then, remarkably, at that moment, I noticed something you never see on a busy night in that area of midtown Manhattan—an available taxi, but it was several streets away. Simultaneously, I saw a traffic enforcement agent in the middle of the busy intersection.
