What Scares Right Wingers to the Bone?

By: Mike Hersh

What scares right wingers to the bone? Freedom. Free speech. Free thoughts. Free people. Why? They feel insecure in an uncertain universe. Right wingers crave order and simplicity, and will impose these things where it is not and should never be.

Dissent threatens right wingers' fragile sense of security. They demand that everyone believes whatever they believe - even if that belief changes at the whim of their superiors - because. Well just because! And don't ask questions! They believe whatever their superiors tell them to believe, because their insecurity and fear of the unknown prevents them from defying tradition or thinking in new ways.

I'd say right wingers demand that everyone thinks whatever they think but right wingers don't think. They listen and obey. Free thinking threatens right wingers. It weakens their precarious hold on their make-believe world.

Everyone clings to the familiar and fears the unknown to some degree. What makes right wingers different? It's their unwillingness to face these fears and strike out into the wider world. No right winger ever came up with a new idea. No right winger developed a medical cure, discovered a new territory, or envisioned a new approach to anything. In fact, right wingers oppose all of that.

In 1776 right wingers attacked Adam Smith in England, and right wingers in America supported King George III against valid criticisms from the patriots. Right wingers support George W. Bush against valid criticisms from the patriots today.

Right wingers always opposed reforms which protect and invigorate capitalism - anti-trust, fair trade practices, SEC regulations, protections for consumers, investors, workers, and the environment. Bush scorned these life-saving and economy expanding reforms in his State of the Union Address, demonstrating text-book right wing support for power over fairness and abuse over progress.

Right wingers dislike education and they loath science. New information and the uncertainty fostered by a flow of fresh thinking undermine their sense of stability. They are still in denial about evolution! Education may lead to progress and new ideas. Science uncovers new facts. Therefore, right wingers fear learning and research. Progress threatens their precious predictable status quo.

Right wingers believe superstitions and embrace propaganda. They ignore information that challenges their prejudices and preconceptions. They therefore lack judgment and eschew conception. Right wingers care about their feelings, not facts. Facts must either support rigid right wing beliefs, or else the facts must be wrong. Those who present facts which contradict right wing dogma must be evil.

Right wingers believe in absurd contradictions, impervious to logic or education. Right wingers flock to cults of personality. Right wingers cling to known "misleaders" like Reagan, Bush, and Bush, deifying the undeserving. Meanwhile they hate champions of social progress who seek to help them attain wealth, health, and wisdom.

Right wingers flock to propagandists like "Rush" Limbaugh, and eagerly participate in their own brain washing. They accept as religious doctrine that the corrupt, inept Reagan - who had 140 criminals in his White House, blocked research and education on AIDS, and supported death squads who killed Nuns and terrorists who killed 240 U.S. Marines - was moral, but Bill and Hillary Clinton are evil incarnate.

Right wingers support idiotic, even fatal policies because they place nonsense over knowledge. They think racism is OK, but pointing out racism is "playing the race card". They believe using condoms increases the chance of pregnancy and STD's. Poor white male right wingers blame poor non-whites and non-males for the injustices rich white males commit.

Right wingers support the policies which comprise class warfare, but whine when anyone demonstrates the injustice of robbing the needy to enrich the greedy. Poor and working class right wingers believe increasing their taxes makes them richer, if Enron and Bill Gates get huge tax cuts.

Right wingers support theocracy and fascism - actually craving a unified authority over their lives and even their afterlives! They support censorship. They want to impose their religious views on everyone. They want to punish anyone who strays from the fold. They brutally suppress anyone who questions authority, and they always obey abusive controllers. They are afraid of their own freedom. They are even more afraid of yours.

None of this would really matter, except for the tendency of right wingers to burn books, burn crosses in front yards, burn people at the stake - although they tend not to do that so much any more. Lately they beat to death gays, firebomb nightclubs and women's clinics, assassinate doctors, and vote for other right wingers.

What scares right wingers to the bone? Essays like this, people like me who write them, and people like you who read them, publish them, and pass them on.