There is a threat in America, my friends, that only a certain group can see, that only a certain group can define, and one that only they can supposedly save us from.
It is the Bugaboo.
The Bugaboo has many names, many faces, many forms, but it all comes from the same group, from the same political faction, and it is designed to make the rest of us afraid of it.
The Bugaboo can be red, white, brown, black, or yellow. It can be Native American, Italian, Irish, Gypsy, Jewish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, German, Roman Catholic, Atheist, Satanist, Muslim, Latin American, or LGBTQ+. They can come riding in on horseback, drive in on lowriders, or walk across the border. Hell, they can even be medical practitioners now. And they are coming for your women, your children, your grandchildren, your guns, your burgers, your bibles, and your masculinity.
And what makes the Bugaboo so notorious, so dangerous, so threatening to civilized society is that it can only be seen by and identified by one political faction. Just one. The American conservatives. They are the only ones that can see this Bugaboo and say what it is and pass legislation and regulation against it. They have exclusive control over what the Bugaboo is at any given time, because obviously it changes. What the Bugaboo used to be a decade ago doesn’t really apply today.
We used to be afraid of witches and Satanists. So much so that we would imprison, torture, and brutally execute people accused of being in league with Satan. Hell, we used to slaughter little kitties because some bible-thumper claimed they were tools of the Devil... which is ridiculous, because if anyone saw the “Omen” series, you’d know that the Devil prefers Dobermans and German Shepherds and bulldogs. We would laugh it off, but then we got afraid of them all over again in the 1980’s because of pedophilia accusations concerning day care workers.
We made Native Americans “the enemy” in cowboy stories, preying on old colonial fears that went back centuries.
We imprisoned whole groups of Americans in the 1940’s simply because they were Japanese, Italian, or German. We were afraid of Axis spies. That was our domestic Bugaboo of the time.
Then it became the “threat” of Communism. And not just a global threat, but the Bugaboo was twisted inward thanks to the dishonorable and disrespectful Senator Joseph McCarthy and his ilk. A threat that only he and his ilk could define, based off a “list” that he fabricated out of thin air. A threat that even went after comic books because Superman wore a red cape and Batman had Robin as a sidekick.
Remember “the gay agenda”? That was another Bugaboo. The supposed threat that homosexuality would be contagious, spread like the flu. Same with AIDS in the 1980’s. We were banning people over toilet seats and drinking fountains.
Remember the supposed threat of “Sharia Law”? Never happened, did it? Even when their most hated enemy, Barack Obama, became President of the United States, it never happened, despite the conservatives screaming and wailing and throwing Walmart temper-tantrums over the supposed fear of it. Hell, they still call now-former-President Obama a Muslim, even though he’s always been a Christian.
A certain dishonorable member of Congress still in office today once made a stink about a supposed “travel plan” that would have pregnant Muslim women come to the United States to have their babies, and then return with supposed “future American terrorists”. And when pressed for proof of this supposed thing, he’d only repeat the same accusation louder and louder.
Last year the Asians became a Bugaboo, because of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Or, as the conservatives continually claimed, it was the “CHY-NA flu”. Asians in America were viciously assaulted because of it. They were being blamed for a virus that they themselves had nothing to do with.
And now it’s the supposed “Critical Race Theory”. Again, only the conservatives could raise the supposed alarm over it. Only they could identify it. Only they can outlaw it.
But when you look at the legislation or regulation they try to enact, you don’t see mention of what they are trying to outlaw. Only they will know it when they see it. Only them.
Again, it’s just the Bugaboo.
Do you know what a Bugaboo really is? It’s an imaginary object of fear. Look it up if you don’t believe me.
It’s a fraud.
Let’s get brutally honest here... all of these Bugaboos that only the conservatives can see, that only the conservatives can define, that only the conservatives can supposedly “protect” us from... are all frauds.
It’s a con game, from a faction notorious for fearmongering in order to gain political power to gain control over the rest of us. It’s really the only thing they know.
Michael Douglas best summed up the Bugaboo con in the 1995 film “The American President”. He said that you gather together a group of middle-aged, middle-class, middle-income voters – often white – who seem to think that life was easier and/or simpler in the past, and then you talk about family and American values and character. And then you bring up the Bugaboo and you scream about patriotism and of lost glory and you tell them that the Bugaboo is to blame for their current problems, and you go on television and condemn the Bugaboo and demand it be outlawed and defunded and otherwise zoned and regulated into oblivion. Actually, Douglas’s character had a more graphic description of the bugaboo of the time, which was his character’s girlfriend, but you get the picture.
The Bugaboo is not exclusive to America, but the conservatives in America have long relied on it for their power, to a point where they don’t even need a platform... only fear.
If there is a threat that only one group of people can see, only this same group of people can define, and only this same group can supposedly stop, if they’re genuine about it we call that a collective delusion, and they need serious help. But if they’re not genuine about it, then they need to be called out for their con-game, because they are the real threat to America.
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