The Left says, “Do what we say, or terrible and awful [hyperbolic] things will happen.”
Children will spontaneously combust. The earth will cease to support human life. Total Hollywood stuff – looks flashy and sells well. The more extreme, the better it sells.
The Right responds, “When we do what you say, bad things happen in reality.”
Things get more expensive, people lose choices in the market, regulators get more power – bad, but kind of boring things. There’s no flash in these outcomes, little screen potential. They just slowly grind us down, take away our options, make things more expensive, and cause our freedoms to evaporate. It’s a slower process, not the stuff of big budget disaster films.
The Right is generally correct. But the Left has a bag of saleable images, so they have market share.
In the long run, the Left’s hyperbolic fears will never be realized. This is because they never had a real potential for realization – the Left’s dirty little secret. The Left don’t have to actually do anything because no matter what happens, hyperbolic fears are just that – unrealistic fears that will never be real.
All the Left has to do is raise the alarm. Everyone waits to see smoke from the reported fire. We all scan the horizon while the 24/7 news media provides video simulations. The predicted fires never pan out. But wait, there’s another alarm, and then another, and another, and so on forever.
Occasionally something really bad does happen. These are unforeseen events, independent from any of the Left’s prognostications. No matter, that’s what Spin is for. Revisionism – changing the chain of causation in history to something else – plugging the left’s chosen cause in, after the fact, in place of the real cause. And then selling it – get an Affleck or Clooney to sign for the movie, etc.
Is the Right finally waking up to this game? I hope so. It’s happening at every level of government – from our school boards, to our counties, to our states, to our federal government. The Left “wags the dog” with reckless abandon because their ends justify any means.
The Right must stop looking for smoke from those fabled Leftist fires. The Right must keep it real and quit worrying about the optics industry – which they can’t control anyway.
Maybe someday the bulk of humanity will evolve out of their current susceptibility to manipulation through Hollywood optics. But clearly, voting majorities haven’t yet. We can expect they’ll vote for many more ridiculous, absurd, and freedom gobbling policies, taxes, regulations, and people, before they learn.
The Right can help bring that day closer by calling out when the Left leaves the reality reservation.
Democrats gave Republicans an early Christmas present by identifying non-essential fed jobs. House #debtceiling bills should start with them
— Brooks Imperial (@broimp) October 3, 2013