This post is based on 14 fears that dominate many in the MAGA version of the GOP. These fears were mostly gathered from a post by John Pavlovitz over at StuffThatNeedsToBeSaid. It is about how fear can totally paralyze a person’s worldview. There are many reasons to be fearful in this world today and these folks seem determined to find all of them even if they are myth. That is what this post is about.
- fear of an angry god dispensing damnation
- fear of Mexicans stealing their jobs
- fear of immigrants overrunning their borders
- fear of refugees families bringing terrorism in a Trojan Horse
- fear of Muslims smuggling in Sharia Law
- fear of Transgender people lurking in bathrooms
- fear of Atheists assailing their freedoms
- fear of brown people brandishing violence
- fear of Hollywood perverting their children
- fear of a Gay Agenda converting their children
- fear of Science disproving their Bible
- fear of Democrats coming for their guns
- fear of the Media fooling them with fake news
- fear of the Devil coming in the form of reporters, professors, lesbians, and Liberals
I can’t imagine living in a world where everything is scary to you. Where you struggle each day to find another way to validate your worldview. I have enough trouble with my primary fear and that is that #CO3 will do something insanely idiotic even for him and cause another world war. If we can just get through the next 14 months that fear will finally be put in the dustbin as most others have been.
Given how the GOP has bent beyond any recognition I see the above list as being the face of the New GOP. Their accumulated terrors have turned them into what they are now which are perpetually petrified human beings whose disfigured, Frankensteined faith has now turned on them.
Will the more sane conservatives be able to do the seeming impossible task of taking their party back to it fiscally conservative root is a long-shot bordering on impossible in my view. It will be interesting to see what Phoenix will try to arise from the ashes of the old GOP, if that is even possible. I kinda have a hope that some other group will come in to fill the vacuum.
RJ's Corner 
I saw about 10 minutes of the Democratic debate held in Atlanta last night. Bernie Sanders ate up part of that 10 minutes warning us that major cities around the world would be “under water” if climate change wasn’t fixed in the next +/- 8 years. Fear mongering isn’t the exclusive domain of the MAGA crowd. It seems to me that everyone who wants us to think a certain way resorts to fear as a way to shape our thoughts. Advertisers are often guilty of this. How about those pop-ups that tell us our computers have 14,658 active viruses (please call this number immediately)? We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be scared by people we wouldn’t even trust to tell us what time it is.
It’s up to each of us to use our noodles to filter out the mountains of BS we’re fed every day, whether it comes from The Donald or Bernie or AOC or a threatening email scammer. We have to make the effort to think for ourselves instead of letting the fear mongers tell us what’s what.
LikeLike
Thanks for the insight. Yeah, we all have to think for ourselves and question everything, don’t we? That is what it is all about around RJsCorner. You give some good examples about those who want us to swallow their fears or cons. But it does seem that the MAGA folks gulp it down every chance they get. There almost seems to be nothing that they are not afraid of. 🥺
LikeLike
I grew up in a religious Southern Baptist family. While sitting beside our parents in church, we children were, from a young age, subjected to horrific descriptions of the way our skin would crisp in hell, the starvation and depravity we would combat as the “end times” were upon us. These days, that seems like child abuse to me. When asked why I wrote psychological horror in my first books, I always pointed to the summer I spent reading Revelations with my neighbor, whose family also attended our church. We were also taught “with kindness” about the evils of “mixing.” I grew up a fearful child, once convincing myself when my jaw tightened when visiting a friend’s church, that I had lockjaw as punishment for my bad behavior. We were primed to feel fearful of venturing one step away from a constricted view of the Bible’s teaching. That fear caused my father to reject my gay brother for a time. It caused my parents to warn they might not attend my wedding to my Catholic husband as they dared not step into a pagan church. So, I can sort of understand the way fear works on the MAGA crowd, but how do they pervert the teachings as to how we treat others? That I’ll never understand. I don’t think it needs to be said that I’m not Southern Baptist any longer. Nor am I any organized anything. I miss the camaraderie, but I don’t think I’d find much anyway. I feel that when protesting now, though. I’ve stuck by those precepts I learned about standing up for others, strangers among us included.
LikeLike
Linda, thanks for your story and sorry for the late reply. I’ve been busy 😁
I have a post coming out next week that is similar to your story. I hope you get a chance to read it and give me your thoughts. I think there are a lot of stories out there now like ours. For those of us who question everything we find that much of what we were exposed to in our youth but doesn’t stack up.
LikeLike