Fear, ignorance, and stupidity

A Michigan football friend — a lawyer — writes:

It’s amazing how much right wing messaging is focused on scaring the old, the uneducated, the unworldly

I listen pretty regularly to the College Sports Radio station on XM radio, especially during football season, so I’m exposed to lots of ads targeting the CFB football fan demographic (which I realize I’m probably not in the dead center of). Nearly every commercial break there are ads (generally for companies that have “Patriots” or some derivation thereof in their name) clearly designed to prey on the fears of their right-leaning listeners by selling them equipment to prepare for the coming (probably inevitable) apocalypse. “MyPatriotSupply.com” offers emergency food rations (lasting up to 25 years! tastes surprisingly good!) so you can survive in your bunker when the BLM radical left lunatics try to invade your town and take over your Cracker Barrel. “4Patriots.com” advises you to buy their solar generators, which look like a briefcase, so you can hide the fact that you and your family have power while everyone else is without … you know, people will do ANYTHING to get their hands on power when the shit goes down, so you will want to have (as they describe it) a “tactical source of power.” And then, of course, there is the ultimate solution to this looming threat, guns, which of course are often used to slaughter school children but *can* be used to protect your family from the new MS13 chapter you hear just opened in Wichita (right next to the Antifa Headline).

This is the message reinforced every day by Trump and his enablers. Chicago is a literal hellscape, the most dangerous place on the earth. Except for maybe LA. Or Washington DC. Or Philadelpia or Detroit. And they pound this message to people whose worlds are so small that they have no way of knowing better. More than 50% of Americans have never had a passport, and 40% have never left the country (not even to mexico or Canada). More than 10% of Americans have never left their home state. These people have no way of knowing what conditions are actually like in Chicago, or LA or Washington DC — much less Barcelona, London or Shanghai — because they have never left rural Kansas, and have no intention to. You can tell those people anything you want and they’ll believe it because it reinforces their already comfortable patterns, and they have no personal experience to show them otherwise.

No real point here, I’m just ranting. But its incredibly frustrating to realize how dumb and naive most of our country is, and how easy it is to manipulate them for profit or political gain.

Donald Trump is threatening to use the Texas National Guard to invade Illinois — this, legally speaking, would be a literal invasion, as there’s no basis in federal law for deploying the National Guard of one state into another state over the latter state’s objection — because Chicago is “the murder capital of the world” according to this career criminal and aspiring dictator.

Chicago isn’t even close to being one of the most violent cities in the US, and in fact violent crime rates there have plummeted this year:

 The fact of the matter is, Chicago has seen, I think, a 40 percent decline in shooting victims this year compared to the same time frame last year. It’s seen a 30-something percent decline in murder. Nationwide, in cities of all sizes, we’re seeing double-digit, 20-something percent declines in murders. So we are seeing these declines occurring pretty much everywhere, including in Chicago.

Here are some cities with much higher — as in at least twice as high — homicide rates than Chicago:

Jackson MS

New Orleans

Little Rock

Baton Rouge

Augusta GA

Must be all the cultural Marxism.

Of course you can prove anything with statistics, which is why it’s very important to distort them as much as possible, by not taking into account that cities with a lot of people are going to have a lot more incidents of pretty much anything than cities with much smaller populations. It also helps to throw in a bunch of random anecdotes.

And of course violent crime rates are much too high in the US compared to developed nations, although they’ve come down drastically over the past 35 years. It would help if the president of the United States were not himself a violent criminal, as I suspect the many women that he’s raped over the years would be willing to testify, if doing so wouldn’t endanger their lives in this increasingly openly fascist nation.