They're Using Fear as a Weapon, How Can We Counter It?
- Josh "Bearheart" Hawk
- 3 days ago
- 9 min read
Growing up in the 80s and 90s in a very Christian conservative household, I was always taught that the Democrats were a group to fear. They were coming for the religion, guns, and freedom that every American should hold dear, and we needed to do everything we could to make sure they didn't get power.
In the first ever presidential election I voted in, I voted for George W. Bush because he was the one who would save us from the terrorists and scary liberals, and in the second election I voted in, I voted via absentee ballot from basic training in Fort Jackson, South Carolina for John McCain because I'd heard from Rush Limbaugh that Obama would be building FEMA camps to hold Republicans in after rounding up all the guns.
Those first 20-25 years of my life were based on that kind of rhetoric. Fear was the name of the game, and there was a lot to be afraid of. If it wasn't real world fear, with an entire political party and groups like "the gays" coming to get me, it was a fear of what would happen when I died if I didn't pray hard enough and to the right deity.
As I grew older, though, and gained more life experience, I realized that the fear I'd grown up with was really overdone.
In the army I came across people from all walks of life and started to understand that my way of thinking was not the only one, and that the people I'd been taught to fear for so many years weren't actually a bogeyman. People from different religious backgrounds, races, political viewpoints, and even those who dared to love someone they weren't supposed to were all represented in my life as I started to come out of the haze of hate I'd been raised in.
It took a few years, and a lot of research and learning things for myself, but by the mid to late 2010s I was a completely different person than the kid who swore an oath and climbed on a plane in October of 2008. I'd learned to care about my fellow human being, to respect people from different walks of life, and to not be afraid of the unknown, but instead to embrace the differences we all have.
A small part of me believed, or maybe hoped, that the epiphany I'd had was one that most people went through in life and that the world wasn't as bad off as some said it was even as we rolled into the 2020s.
I bring all of this up to add some context that I feel is important when discussing the nuance that is needed in the conversations we need to be having right now as a nation.
In November of 2024, the United States elected a man to office that was acting more as a puppet for those around him than an actual thinking, feeling, individual person. He said whatever he felt would get him applause and adulation and surrounded himself with people that represented groups who'd been working for decades to tear down America from the inside and rebuild it in their theocratic image. One of the greatest tools they had in their arsenal was, and still is, fear.
That fear that had been ingrained in me growing up, the feeling I'd overcome as an adult, was one that they were using to its fullest extent. The fear of anyone who might be gay or trans, the fear of anyone who might not be "from here", the fear of those who think differently.
And there's a good reason for that.
Fear is a great motivator. It activates our fight or flight response and gets people to act in ways they wouldn't normally act. Someone who would normally sit on the sidelines and just watch the world change around them would be more apt to go out and vote for someone if they were afraid of something and that person offered a solution to that fear.
And this is where we get into some more recent events and focus on what we can all do to make the world around us better.
First, I'll acknowledge that there are some out there that are trolls who just want to watch the world burn. Maybe they actively hate a specific group of people, or maybe they're just psychopaths that don't care about anyone or anything. These people are never going to change and there isn't any real reason to waste our time or energy on them because they are barely a blip on the radar in the grand scheme of things.
Over the past year in the United States, the president has been sending groups consisting of everything from the national guard to the marines, and more recently immigration and customs enforcement (ICE) into cities around the country that he deems as opposing him. The purpose of this influx of enforcers has been to scare those who would dare stand in the streets and protest, and in every wave, he's pointed to protestors as the enemy. He calls them "paid agitators", and even those around him in his cabinet have gone out of their way to demonize people who are just using their 1st amendment right to show their displeasure with what is happening in their community.
Protesting goes back hundreds of years in this country, with one of the most famous protests of all time being the Boston Tea Party, where a group of individuals disguised themselves, snuck onto a boat in the Boston harbor and dumped hundreds of cases of tea into the water below. This was called an act of treason by the British government and wound up setting off what would eventually become a full-on revolution.
And that's really the point of protests when you stop and think about it. They are a way to promote and encourage change in the world and to right what the people protesting see as wrongs. There were probably a lot of people in the American colonies that saw the Sons of Liberty, the group that carried out the Boston Tea Party, as nothing more than agitators and who would have celebrated the group being captured, but in the end their cause won out.
Protests against the Vietnam War and in favor of Civil Rights can also be seen as huge moments in American history where a divided populace would argue whether the protestors should even be in the streets. These were contentious times, where many saw those holding signs and chanting as a problem, much like some people see protestors today. Some even called for the killing of protestors in these movements, and in now infamous events at Kent State University in 1970 (Wikipedia Contributors, 2019) and in Selma, Alabama in 1965 (NCC Staff, 2021), protestors would actually be shot and killed by the national guard and state police respectively.
Those events would bring both shock and fear to the nation, with some being more emboldened to go out and protest afterward, using the events as a rallying cry, and others being scared into submission as they feared losing their own lives.
And there's that mention of fear again. It's a tool of the state meant to oppress and keep people in line. And now it's being used once more in the same manner, as the people in power use the idea of immigration to scare one side into capitulation and the other into submission.
On the one hand, you have people who are afraid of groups they've been told are coming across the border in droves. This fear isn't warranted, but fear seldom makes sense when you really look at it. Even as crime rates fall (Gramlich, 2024), with immigrants being less likely to commit crimes than natural born citizens (Landgrave & Nowrasteh, 2017), people are afraid of the idea that immigrants might hurt them or steal from them. Immigrants often wind up with fewer labor protections as well, meaning they are more likely to do the worst jobs imaginable for the lowest pay possible, but people are still afraid they are going to "take the jobs".
And that's a pattern that continues as you go down the list of what people think immigrants are going to do. From taking advantage of welfare benefits that they aren't eligible for, to getting into schools and other institutions over those who think they are more deserving, there isn't really an end to what people think could happen.
And here I have to address the elephant in the room and note that some of you might be shouting "that's just racism" even as you're reading these words, and while you're technically right that's not the whole picture and oversimplifies the topic, boiling it back down to "us vs them" and creating the other level of fear experienced by the next group.
The people protesting, lobbying for the rights due to every person that sets foot in the United States are scared of the "other side". They are, in most cases, rightfully scared of the ICE agents flooding the streets of their cities, and worried about the human rights abuses being perpetrated in the name of "national security". They believe in the constitution and want to see all people treated fairly and equally.
And the fear between these groups halts any chance at communication as neither side can see past their preconceived notions because it's easier to label the group opposed to you than to actually sit down and have a discussion. And even when those discussions happen, they are plagued with whataboutisms and strawmen.
So, what's the solution?
What we need to do, no matter where we see ourselves on the issues we're arguing for or against, is to educate ourselves and understand the arguments for and against our positions. We also need to be willing to admit when the positions we hold aren't aligned with reality, and to adjust our views based on the facts.
And that's an idea that has become very contentious in the past few years as so many people now make up their own facts and ignore reality to fortify their bubble rather than let it burst. Even some of the facts about immigrants I listed earlier are brushed off by people who don't want to accept them as true despite the reliability of the sources because they don't fit the narrative they've chosen to believe.
And what do you do when people don't want to accept the facts of reality?
You beat them over the head with those facts until they have no choice but to snap back into the real world.
That sounds a lot worse than it really is, but what I mean is that you continue to push and show them the facts over and over, and you get as many people as you can to do the same. There is strength in numbers. People are part of a social species and most of them want to be a part of the "in" group more than anything else as a matter of survival.
These people, the ones who don't accept reality, have been surrounded by and fed propaganda for years or decades, and that isn't easy to undo. Using my own story from earlier as an example, you can start to see how difficult it might be to get incorrect beliefs out of your life.
The first 20+ years of my life I was fed the same propaganda that many of these people have been hearing for literal decades, going back to their own childhoods, and it took years of stepping outside of my comfort zone and actively challenging my own biases to break free. And that was with me actively working on it and being more comfortable than most people with being proven wrong.
These aren't ideals that are going to be broken down and pushed away overnight, and they aren't concepts that will be forgotten when they hear a slogan or see a sign.
They have to be shown over and over, by sources they trust, that the things they believe are not true. They have to have decades of brainwashing undone, and that kind of thing takes years, and it doesn't happen publicly.
Many people who supported the current president during his campaign have silently backed away, taking down signs and shying away from political conversations where they once were very vocal. These people are in the beginning stages of something known as deconstruction, and while they might not be openly talking things through with many people, they are silently observing what is happening in the world around them and drawing new conclusions. They are the first, but as things keep progressing, they won't be the last to walk away from these dangerous beliefs.
I said before that there are just some that won't ever change their minds out of sheer hatred or inability to be productive members of society, but the majority will eventually come back around when they see the winds shift far enough. They'll watch as the administration crosses lines they have in their minds and they'll move further and further away. They might never support the other side, but they'll stop supporting the hate they once stood unknowingly behind and go back into the polite shadows they once sheltered in.
And that might be frustrating to hear because to some of us the place we are in now was so obviously the destination we were heading for depending on the choice the voters made in November of 2024. But just because it is obvious to you or I that doesn't mean it is obvious to everyone and that's probably the biggest takeaway here.
We can choose hatred and fear, refusing to accept that others think differently and convincing ourselves that they are just beyond our help, or we can choose compassion and understanding and keep pushing forward with a positive message.
I know which one I'm going with, what about you?
References
Gramlich, J. (2024, April 24). What the data says about crime in the U.S. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/
Landgrave, M., & Nowrasteh, A. (2017, March 15). Criminal Immigrants: Their Numbers, Demographics, and Countries of Origin. Cato Institute. https://www.cato.org/publications/immigration-reform-bulletin/criminal-immigrants-their-numbers-demographics-countries?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=85808169&gbraid=0AAAAADusmufn-B9xe-6EARcotbsAiGpBe&gclid=CjwKCAiAvaLLBhBFEiwAYCNTf_OTdDwDUWsMwrDxpoBQ5hxP2qIGG9fnceUvZWD_2flYUWkFIGIozxoCGIQQAvD_BwE
NCC Staff. (2021, March 7). Selma: The Shining Moment in the Conscience Of Man - National Constitution Center. National Constitution Center – Constitutioncenter.org. https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/selma-the-shining-moment-in-the-conscience-of-man
Wikipedia Contributors. (2019, March 9). Kent State shootings. Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings