Keeping the U.S. in the Dark
By directing America's attention toward fictional boogeymen, Donald Trump scores political points and masks his own inability to deal with genuine threats.
There’s a scene in The Bad and the Beautiful, the 1953 potboiler about behind-the-scenes Hollywood, in which Kirk Douglas and Barry Sullivan have been assigned to make a B-movie horror picture called “The Duel of the Cat Men.” A crusty old costumer is trying to convince Douglas and Sullivan, as producer and director, that having actors dressed in raggedy old cat costumes is enough to fill the audience with terror.
But Douglas’ and Sullivan’s characters come to the conclusion that audiences will be much more afraid if they never even see the cat people, because it’s human nature to be more fearful of the unknown than it is to be afraid of what is visible. The premise is that people’s imaginations fill in the blanks with far more terrifying things than anything that might be spelled out for them.
The Kirk Douglas/Barry Sullivan scene is likely to be loosely based around a similar decision between Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur, when they were making Cat People (1942). But I digress.
It kind of makes me wonder if perhaps Cat People was one of the pivotal movies of Donald Trump’s childhood, because he has repeatedly used the fear of the unknown to manipulate the electorate. He seems to have mastered the technique of using unseen and non-existent things to manufacture fear.
For example, the vast majority of people in the United States have never seen or even been within a mile of a member of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang whose reach Donald Trump has wildly exaggerated to frighten people into supporting his draconian approach to deportation. In fact, Venezuelan migrants fleeing the dictatorship in Venezuela are themselves the most likely targets of Tren de Aragua violence. But Trump has conflated immigrant families trying to make a safer life for themselves with the violent gang members who are victimizing them.
But facts be damned! In the minds of his followers, he has put undocumented farm workers in the same category as murderers and rapists. (Remember that first campaign speech in 2016 where he accused Mexico of sending us their rapists? That was just the opening salvo.)
Adding fuel to the fire, Trump and his followers have characterized anyone who thinks undocumented people deserve due process as advocates for open borders. Aside from the obvious constitutional issues involved, it’s all part of the demonization of anyone who doesn’t think and act exactly like “dear leader.”
In addition to inciting race-based hatred among certain segments of the population, using the “invisible cat people” approach to dealing with gang activity to gain political favor actually diverts crime fighting resources and public focus away from removing actual gang members from circulation.
Here’s another example of Trump and the MAGA crowd stoking fear of something that people can’t see. (In this case, they can’t see it because it basically doesn’t exist.) I’m referring to the demonization of trans people as sexual predators.
The absurdity and outright stupidity of this fear-mongering would be laugh-out-loud funny if trans people’s lives weren’t put at risk as a consequence of this particular brand of demonization. Those on the right have somewhat successfully convinced voters that cisgender women’s safety is at risk if they are forced to share bathrooms with trans women. They’ve concocted a scenario in which male rapists somehow would go to the trouble of dressing as women simply to slip unnoticed into women’s restrooms to assault unsuspecting cisgender women.
It’s hard to imagine a position that is further away from the truth. With sickening frequency, trans women are the victims of sexual violence, not the perpetrators of it.
There’s an even more ridiculous example of Trump and the folks on the right fomenting fear of something that doesn’t exist. Remember all the noise that was made about middle schools being required to supply litter boxes for students who “identified” as cats? Yeah, that never happened.
It was an urban myth that got picked up by several Republican politicians, repeated as a talking point, and magnified by right-wing media.
Let me repeat: There were no litter boxes in classrooms. No students “identified” as cats. It was sheer fabrication.
At first blush, it may seem innocuous and silly. But, at its core, it’s just another manifestation of the right-wing’s obsession with trans people. It’s utterly dismissive of the process that trans people go through in evolving to their correct gender.
But the folks who have made this claim are hardly the first to invent something stupid out of thin air in an attempt to score right-wing political points. Remember Iowa Congressman Steve King claiming, in the wake of the Obergefell Supreme Court decision, that he was now entitled to marry his lawnmower? (In case there’s any doubt, he wasn’t.). But, for a certain portion of the population, King cheapened the concept and dismissed the legitimacy of marriage equality — a right that LGBTQ folks had fought for decades to achieve.
What do all these things have in common — besides the hyperbole or outright falsehoods?
The lies get spread or the reality gets distorted with the complicity of a right-wing media machine that generates billions of dollars in revenue by propagating these talking points.
They warp our public discourse, focusing the nation’s attention on imaginary or distorted fears while distracting from the very real and often dangerous issues that go unaddressed.
They all have a negative impact on already disenfranchised segments of the population. They all “punch down.”
Simpleton that he is, Donald Trump and his minions reduce issues to inaccurate, bias-filled talking points, because Trump doesn’t possess the political skill and acumen to do the complex and sometimes tedious work of governing. Instead, he hides his shortcomings behind a façade of bluster, bigotry, and falsehoods.
That façade is even less convincing than those ratty looking cat costumes that Kirk Douglas and Barry Sullivan rejected.