Fear Factor
By J. Mollan © 2006

Listed below are some of the emotional techniques those on the Right have used over the years to frighten the American People into voting for their candidates.

If you don’t vote (our way, usually Republican), a horde of ___choose from list below__ will march down Main Street, invade your home, attack your women and seduce your children.

1862 Shanty (Catholic) Irish
1864 Rebels
1884 Mormons
1888 Union members
1892 Opium-smoking Chinese (yellow peril)
1898 Spanish colonialists in Cuba
1904 Bomb-throwing anarchists
1912 Jews
1916 Swarthy Immigrants
1918 Bearded Bolsheviks
1920 Wobblies
1924 Flappers
1926 Darwinists
1928 Papists
1932 Socialists
1936 Labor agitators
1942 Slant-eyed Japs
1948 Chinese Reds
1950 Reds (not Cincinnati)
1952 North Korean Reds
1954 Reds in the State Department
1956 Nigras
1958 Bearded Beatniks
1960 Russian Reds
1962 Cuban Reds
1964 Black militants
1964 North Vietnamese Reds
1968 Black Panthers and antiwar protestors
1970 VW Bus-driving drug-crazed free-love hippies
1972 Everyone on the White House Enemies List
1980 Rag-head camel jockeys
1982 Nicaraguan Reds
1984 Tax-and-spend liberals
1986 Drug dealers
1988 Escaped black rapists
1992 Lesbian feminists
1996 Abortionists
2000 Atheists who spit on the flag
2002 Islamic Terrorists
2004 Gays (child-molesters) who want to marry
2006 Illegal Aliens (Mexicans), People who hate America (Democrats)

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. H. L. Mencken

Says it all, doesn't it?

They have no power if all their activities are out in the open.

I would be interested from a historical perspective to hear more about the flapper threat. They are some of my favorite people, and always seemed cute and innocent to me.

Most famous flapper: Betty Boop.

TIA, dimbear

Your list left-off one of the most important and successful in 1994,"Left-Wing Gun-Control Freaks." Had it not been for that scare, the majority would not have been lost.

Tell them the "shanty Irish" are BA-A-A-CK!




Mac

You forgot Ann Coulter, Sean "Insanity" Hannity, Joe Scarborough, and the like....for perpetuating and paasing along those "scary" fear-mongering talking points............Conservative-based censorship.......!!

I'm a little confused by the Republican revelation that Democrats are coddling Fascism. Wasn't that the policy Hitler's pal Prescott Bush used to use?