COLUMN: The right is scared, petrified even, of 'The Other'
It seems as if the right is scared of me and almost everyone else.
The reason seems obvious.
We do not support their misinformed idea of America. We don’t support religion’s role in the country. We don't distrust people from different walks of life. We think things should change sometimes. We find flaws in our history.
We reject the notion of making America great again because we can see that America wasn’t all that great for a lot of people.
We support equal pay for equal work, immigration, good healthcare and access to higher education.
Conservatives dislike these ideals and those who hold them, because they are different. It has been beat into the heads of conservative Americans to dislike the very notion of all things new, liberal or fresh.
I call this the fear of "other."
Things may be an understatement, it’s more than that. The other includes people, their ideals and their culture.
This is not by accident. Conservative media constantly resorts to this level of fear mongering. On a number of occasions conservative media has even claimed the left was about to start civil wars.
Three occasions come to mind.
The first one that picked up steam resulted from a joke tweet by Twitter user @KragTNelson.
He wrote, “Can’t wait for November 4th when millions of Antifa super soldiers will behead all white parents and small business owners in the town square.”
The Tweet picked up hilarious traction.
On Nov. 3 Fox News published an article titled: “Antifa apocalypse? Anarchist group’s plan to overthrow Trump ‘regime’ starts Saturday”
The Gateway Pundit published an article with the lede: “Tom Bloke, considered to be one of the leaders of the domestic terrorist group Antifa, took to Twitter today to threaten violence against ‘white parents’ and ‘small business owners’.”
Similar totally legit threats have also been spread by the insanely popular right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Recently, odd threats have trickled down to other, smaller, right-wing media outlets.
Rick Wiles, a Christian broadcaster, said the following after watching Rachel Maddow: “America, you’ve been homosexualized. You’ve been Jewdy-ized. I’m just telling it how it is… She was spewing out, last night, calls for revolution. She was telling the left, ‘Take a deep breath, we’re at the moment, it’s coming, we’re almost there, we’re going to remove him from the White House.’ We’re about 72 hours, possibly 72 hours, from a coup.”
The “fake news” claiming Christian right follows these outlets faithfully.
On several occasions I have had to explain to right-wing relatives “No, Antifa is not going to storm the White House and start a revolution.”
Fear is what is behind these farfetched notions of hostility.
That is the fear of what is unknown, the fear of the other.
