The Rhetoric of Fear in Yesterday's Horrific Headlines
From Israel v. Iran to Vance Boelter to "PsyOps"
To be honest, the news headlines this morning devastated me.
Benjamin Netanyahu is leading Israel in potentially destroying itself in a full-scale war with Iran that would leave the Iranian people in tatters.
Vance Boelter assassinated two Democrat lawmakers from Minnesota, and Elon Musk, Alex Jones, and the Right-Wing Propaganda machine tried to paint him as a leftist.
Then they pivoted to describing the obvious conservative as a “false flag psy ops,” or a misdirecting psychological operation.
Trump’s using anti-I.C.E. protests in L.A. to justify ramping up his mass deportation efforts in L.A., Chicago, New York, and other “democrat power centers” that “mass migration” has turned into “third world dystopias.”
It’s a lot.
“If it bleeds, it leads,” describes the media’s tendency to focus on the negative and to sensationalize events to sell more newspapers, gain more viewers, and sell more ads. But the rhetoric of fear in this post’s title does not refer to media sensationalism.
The rhetoric of fear occurs when someone depicts a group as a threat from which that person will save you. To defeat the threat, support that person who will take the extraordinary actions necessary.
Netanyahu and the Israeli Right have harped fears of Iran’s nuclear program. Perhaps those fears aren’t unfounded. But they’re certainly being used to justify acts of war that could escalate into Iran taking off the gloves and getting serious.
Vance Boelter took the rhetoric of fear to its logical conclusion and killed some of the enemy. Few people take things into their own hands, but more will if the Right continues to describe Democrats as a dangerous threat — and if the Right continues distorting reality for its most extreme followers, excusing political violence when it’s their side and elevating any violence at a Left-leaning protest to a “riot.”
If immigrants are the threat Trump says they are, then using military personnel to help I.C.E. deport them simply makes sense. Never mind that many of those immigrants are valued members of their communities or even have some form of legal status.
We must push back against the rhetoric of fear. We must reject descriptions that do not match reality. We must insist on truth. And we must remind our Christian brothers and sisters that Jesus Christ and the Resurrection provide our ultimate hope against anything and everything. Threats cannot truly threaten Christians. And our savior is not any politician.