The Left's Favorite Toy: Scaremongering

What they want you to fear vs. what you should actually fear

One way the Left tries to achieve its goal of taking over your life is by making you afraid, hence feeling the need for “help” from — guess who? — the government. If you make the mistake of reading the newspapers, as I often do, you’ll find it nearly impossible to escape this annoying and dishonest tactic. Here are three of their favorite “are-you-scared-yet” boogeymen:

— Defaulting on the debt will be hell on earth. This one has been the rage over the last several weeks. It’s been all but impossible to escape the stories about how default, which was just over the horizon on account of “far right Republicans” (the phrase that became a staple of WaPo news stories, see, e.g., here), was going to ruin the country if not the world. Massive unemployment. A stock market collapse. International financial panic. Implosion of essential government programs. Kiss your Social Security goodbye! Medicaid patients left on the street to die!

It was all so much bunk. There has never been a default on the country’s debt over the last couple of hundred years and there wasn’t going to be this time either. Moreover, everyone in town knew it. The White House knew it, Congress knew it, the agencies knew it, and certainly the press knew it. So did the stock market; stocks were tepid over the last month or two, but nothing like the panic selling there would have been if the market actually thought there would be a default. Moreover, even if there had been a technical 24 hour “default” while some last-minute compromise was patched together, everyone would know it wasn’t an actual default of the kind where the debt was never going to get paid. The impact would have been minimal if any at all.

All the horror scenarios were from fantasyland. There’s no other honest way to put it.

So why all the scaremongering? That’s easy: To spook the Republicans into a deal more to Biden’s liking. I don’t know Congress well enough to tell how much this worked. The evidence suggests it had limited success; as Paul has noted, Kevin McCarthy punched at his weight or slightly above in the compromise he reached.

— Climate catastrophe. An oldie but a goodie, and still a headliner.

Did you know the oceans are rising and will soon inundate coastal cities like New York, Charleston and Miami? That our crops will dry up, creating food shortages if not worldwide starvation? No? Well then you need to catch up on your reading. You also need to shell out $138,000 to get an EV that has any range much beyond your neighborhood, because that’s what we’re looking at.

I won’t go into the legions of stories about climate doom because (1) you’ve very likely already read them, (2) it’s therefore tiresome and mostly pointless for me to dig them up again, and (3) the degree of their exaggerating as opposed to outright lying is next to impossible for a layman like me to assess and therefore discuss with any authority. What is clear at this point is that, if there is something to them, it’s being massively oversold, and has been for years if not decades, for the purpose of using fear to advance an agenda.

The agenda is no big secret either. It’s the anti-growth, anti-energy independence plank of the Democratic platform. The reason for that, in turn, is to damage the country, and in particular to damage it in its competition with China and other countries that have zero interest in “saving the planet” but plenty of interest in outflanking the United States in industrial capacity and energy production.

— COVID’s gonna getcha! My guess is that most Ringside readers have taken their masks off, are not reluctant to go shopping, and may even show up for work. But this is only because they (1) are willing to kill Grandma and (2) don’t “follow the science,” said “science” being the dark if now almost completely debunked warnings about how COVID is just short of the Black Death, and even if it’s not quite that bad, is still a menace because of “long COVID,” which no one yet has a grasp on — its being, after all, “long” — but which should still keep us masking up and hunkering down and standing six feet away from whatever toxic human being you might happen to want to deal with. And all this should go on until — well, we’re never told that. If there’s an ending date, the COVIDmongers aren’t letting on (and aren’t about to let on).

Again, I’m going to resist the temptation to go through the hundreds if not thousands of scare stories we’ve heard about this disease. It’s true that, at first, a good deal of caution was warranted. We were dealing with a new contagion, and we didn’t know how bad it was. The smart thing was to err on the side of caution. But it wasn’t that long before we understood that its lethal dangers would almost always affect only the elderly and people with serious underlying health conditions, in particular immune-suppression. But while the governing culture’s understanding got better, its cowardice — I’m going to call it what it is — got worse. Yet more depressing, its determination to induce cowardice in the rest of us also got worse, which is why there is still a strong residue of it today, when even the Biden Administration has acknowledged the emergency is over (although in doing so, the NYT story added, with wonderfully revealing if unintended hopefulness, “the nation is not ready for a new pandemic”).

I guess the “new pandemic,” whatever it is, can’t get here fast enough to keep the scaremongers happy. A suspicious person might detect a degree of eagerness for a new public health boogeyman to appear, hence to string out the numerous government mandates on how we will be permitted to live.

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Still, I hope to be, as it’s said, fair and balanced. So while I’ve noted three items where national fear was grossly overhyped (and to an extent, is still being overhyped), I want very briefly to mention three others that actually warrant, but seem not to be getting, significant concern.

First: Iran is building The Big One. It’s been doing this for years, and it can’t be put off forever unless we adopt a much more aggressive strategy than we have now, cf. Paul’s last post. After the mullahs get it, the world will be a much, much more dangerous place, in particular for Israel, Western Europe, and the United States. But I’m hearing less from the MSM about this potentially cataclysmic danger than I am, for example, about how we need to honor George Floyd.

Second: Deadly crime is increasing. Fentanyl trafficking in particular and the resulting overcrowding of the morgue have become rampant — in the tens of thousands. A considerable amount of it is because Biden has lost control, or perhaps more correctly never sought to maintain control, of the southern border. The increase in crime and drug dealing has seen at least a minimal increase in press attention, true, but nothing like what its lethal outcroppings, and its erosion of the quality of urban life, warrant.

Third: The debt bomb keeps getting bigger and keeps ticking. We were told repeatedly during the recent uberangst about lifting the debt ceiling that, yes, big deficits every year are a problem, but the time to deal with that is after we do what’s needed to pay our present bills.

Oh, OK. We did what was needed to pay our present bills. Has anyone seen any serious effort by the Administration to scale back, to even a modest extent, the gargantuan deficits Biden is proposing? Anything? And this is not to mention that the President is continuing to push his proposal for taxpayers to eat another $400 billion in student loan forgiveness — a morally repulsive program that Congress has repudiated and that, obviously, would balloon the deficit that — remember? — we were going to deal with seriously once the ceiling crisis passed.

Perhaps America is to become the first country in history permanently to consume more than it produces. But if that’s not going to happen, which it isn’t, we’re brewing a crisis of national solvency like nothing we’ve ever seen. We owe over thirty trillion dollars with no way to pay it back. With all due respect to long COVID, et al., where’s the alarm about that?