Propaganda and Fear Turns Free People into Bugs
By Will Alexander, Feb 07, 2022

Democrats and leftists are using propaganda and fear about COVID, climate change, cancel culture, crime, and color so effectively that many no longer need new laws, mandates, or threats to fall in line.

They’re being trained like elephants and fleas to act like processionary caterpillars.

Elephants can grow to 13 feet tall, weigh up to seven tons, and their trunks alone are packed with 40,000 muscles (the human body has 600). But if you train an elephant early enough, it can be conditioned to believe that a flimsy rope tied around its leg to a stake in the ground is unbreakable.

Fleas are wingless insects with powerful hind legs that can jump up to 150 times their body length. If you put them in a jar and screw a lid on, they’ll bang their heads against the lid over and over again to escape. But after three days, the head-banging stops and they’ll only jump to just below the level of the lid. That’s the sign that their wills are broken. Even when you remove the lid, fleas capable of jumping 150 times their body length never attempt to escape the jar for the rest of their lives.

Worse, if they reproduce in the jar, their offspring – masterful jumpers by nature – will never jump above the level of the lid. Three days is all it takes to make a flea believe that escape is impossible.

Prolonged deception trains elephants and fleas – powerful by nature – to act like processionary caterpillars which, by nature, is one of Earth’s most slavish bugs.

French entomologist Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre (1823-1915) wanted to test just how sheep-like these critters could be. He arranged the caterpillars around the lip of a flowerpot until they followed each other in an unbroken circle, then he put their favorite food close enough for them to pick up the scent. Fabre watched for hours, then days, then a week as caterpillars dropped dead from exhaustion and starvation, with food just inches away.

“The caterpillars, in distress, starved, shelterless, chilled with cold at night, cling obstinately to the silk ribbon covered hundreds of times, because they lack the rudimentary glimmers of reason which would advise them to abandon it,” Fabre wrote in The Life of the Caterpillar. “The ordeal of a five hundred yards’ march and three to four hundred turns teach them nothing.”

Sound familiar?

The ordeal of seeing America destroyed, especially over the past two years, has taught processionary Democrats nothing. Despite the suffering caused by their repressive COVID response, defunding the police, institutionalizing a systemic black supremacy post-George Floyd, criminalizing political differences, weaponizing cancel culture, and deliberately facilitating the flow of millions of illegals across our borders – Democrats and leftists still cling obstinately to policies that are literally destroying people’s lives.

Worse, through propaganda and fear, Americans have been conditioned either to freely participate in the dismantling, to sit back and watch, or to just “tune out” altogether as institutions crumble. And as horrendous and dumb as Democrat-leftist propaganda is, it’s been effective because they keep it simple and the same tired slogans are repeated day-in and day-out, year after year by the leftist media, ignorant celebrities, pathological politicians, and left-leaning activists.

“You’re a white supremacist.” "You’re homophobic.” “You’re Islamophobic.” “My body, my choice.” “Black Lives Matter.” “Defund the police.” “America was founded on racism.” “Men can get pregnant.” “You’re a climate change denier.” “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” “Climate change is an existential threat.” “Voter ID is voter suppression.” “No justice, no peace.” “Stay at home; save lives.” “It’s time for infrastructure equity.”

Knowingly or not, they’ve followed the playbook of Joseph Goebbels himself, chief propagandist of the Nazi Party. Here’s what he said about propaganda which explains in part how, over time, even the freest people who ever lived, can be deeply manipulated:

-- “Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.”

-- “This is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it.”

-- “...the rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious.”

-- “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

-- “Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.”

-- “That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent; its task is to lead to success.”

The slavish behavior toward overtly ridiculous policies can also be explained by the “Asch Conformity Experiment,” first conducted in the late ‘50s by gestalt psychologist Solomon Asch. The experiment demonstrated how quickly people will deny what they see with their own eyes and yield to group pressure. They yielded for two reasons: 1) They genuinely believed that the group knew better and, 2) They wanted to avoid the pain of being social outcasts.

Social psychologist Stanley Milgram took the Asch Conformity Experiment even further. A Jew, he wanted to account for group behavior that justified the butchery of the Holocaust. He conducted tests to see whether ordinary people would use shock to inflict pain on innocent people at the behest of an authority who told them it was for the greater good.

“The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation,” Milgram wrote in 1974. “With numbing regularity, good people were seen to knuckle under to the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter’s definition of the situation into performing harsh acts.”

As shocked as we are at how quickly America has deteriorated, it’s time for patriots to snap out of it. This is not an experiment. We are not elephants or bugs. Laws are openly being broken at every level of government, and real people have suffered, lost their livelihoods, and their lives. Unprecedented propaganda and fear are being used to paralyze people who would otherwise take action against truly dangerous and tyrannical policies.

Eventually, even some of Fabre’s caterpillars broke away to feast on pine needles and find their way home. But not before suffering exhaustion, cold and near-starvation after circling the pot 335 times for 84 hours.

There are signs that Americans have had enough of the division, fear, suffering, and propaganda. Because leftist policies are doomed to fail – as history has clearly shown – it’s only a matter of time when the America we all know will break away and find its way back home.

https://townhall.com/columnists/willalex...o-bugs-n2602918