Fear Factor

Killing the public schools has long been a right-wing goal, and today they have a skilled propagandist and a big megaphone.

There are four important people vying for your attention. They have already gotten plenty of attention from the underinformed and chronically suspicious who feel alienated from society, and now they’re aiming for the well-informed, rational and thoughtful among us. They’re very good, and they’ll succeed if we allow them to.

The four are commentator Tucker Carlson, rabble-rousing grifter Steve Bannon, and political consultants Christopher Rufo, and Russ Vought. They’ve each made a lot of money scaring the wits out of about 40% of us. Uninterested in democracy, what these fellows have in common is a desire tear down our institutions in favor of an autocracy they rule.

There’s an old insurance company adage that goes, “hope for gain never sells as much as fear of loss.” That’s why when you see insurance commercials it’s never a happy family; it’s always a terrified family that has escaped a tragic house fire. Mayhem is everywhere, and we should be afraid. Very afraid. That is also these guys’ mantra.

They generate, then play on, the fear they gin up in Americans. They do it in a way that creates an enemy, scares the wits out of its intended audience, and then under the falsest of pretenses, sucks money from their bank accounts. They fed the QAnon conspiracy theories, and in the case of Christopher Rufo, have gotten rich by turning the graduate school study of race relations called critical race theory—CRT—into a bogeyman where none exists. Rufo, today’s focus, inspired the recent spate of book bannings, and now is sounding the alarm over imagined sexual predators in the public school systems.

Let’s back up a little to examine his stated goal—and no, I’m not guessing: Chris Rufo says the quiet thing right out loud in the Salon article: “The guy who brought us CRT panic offers a new far-right agenda: Destroy public education.”

Dismantling the public school system in America is long unrealized goal of the far-right. Acolytes want taxpayer money to go to private and parochial schools where the curriculum does not include a true accounting of history, and where minorities are shunned for their otherness. And of course, they want us to pay for their fever dreams. Rufo is a linguist and propagandist interested in creating a new—old—order of things. An illiberal order things. He has the skill to convince huge numbers of us that democracy has failed. Many who line up behind him want the Supreme Court to end contraception, LGBTQ rights, interracial marriage, and of course, abortion.

For now, their target is the public school system, and their strategy turns on the latest word Rufo is using as a totem. Last time it was CRT. This time it is “grooming.” If you read their literature, and they have generated plenty of it (all, not coincidentally) with a big donate button at the bottom, they will try to convince you that there is a predator in every classroom. Teachers and administrators are not to be trusted, and at least ten percent of American students are under sexual threat in school at any given moment.

Again, not a secret agenda. They are hiding in plain sight, and they are coordinated. If you watched any of the confirmation hearings for justice-elect Katanji Brown Jackson you know that the premeditated scheme on the part of the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee was to sully the reputation of a good judge by saying that she is soft on sexual predation. They know that culture wars resonate with a certain percentage of the population, and they know that these polarizing issues contain strong emotional attachments that have true believers ripping their underwear to get the money out of their pockets.

It’s important that we recognize a small but extremely loud minority who will do what they can to turn back the clock to a time when they had the power to suppress people of color, interracial marriage, contraception, abortion, and books that disagree with their world view. If enough of them hold sway, we will be in for trouble, because we have seen that they have the ability to motivate violence against teachers, administrators, and school board members.

So let’s be on guard. When we hear people talk about book banning, grooming, and public schools that are rife with predators, let’s recognize the pattern, and the people behind it. They are authoritarian anti-democrats (please note the small “d”, this is not about the political party) who wish to rule a society that harkens back to the inglorious days when racism, misogyny, and sexism were the norm. It’s important that we understand their strategy and tactics, and not give them an inch or a penny.

©2022 Jon Sinton