Every once in a while a seemingly trivial event happens that not only exposes the modus operandi of a group of people, but actually stands as a metaphor for who they are and what defines them.
That event happened last week at Princeton University when conservative student Francisco Nava called 911 and hysterically reported he had been attacked by two masked men. He had cuts and bruises on his face, and insisted his attackers had been people who had been making death threats against him because of his conservative views on sex.
Nava, a supposedly pious Mormon, belongs to a society on campus that promotes abstinence and condemns the university's policy of providing condoms to students requesting them.
Conservative university activists and commentators like Robert George and David Horowitz, as well as a number of conservative bloggers came to his defense and implied this "hate crime" proved how much the left hated religious students who speak up for their beliefs.
The only problem was that Nava eventually admitted he made the whole thing up. The death threats had been fabricated and the wounds were self-inflicted.
So what does the fabricated story of one obviously demented young person represent in terms of the bigger picture?
First of all, it represents the extreme paranoia of the radical right. From the feared takeover of America by Communism in the fifties, to the hysteria over hippies and sexual expression in the sixties, to the fear of "liberal courts" in the seventies, to the fear of AIDS and homosexuals in the eighties, to the fear of Clinton in the nineties, to the fear of "Islamofascists," liberals, and illegal immigrants today, the one thing that unites extremists on the right is either actual fear of what they see as one or another "demonic" movement, fueling the activities or beliefs of other human beings – often their fellow citizens - or the use of fear to score political points. Either way, real or cynically hyped fear of some horrible fate has defined radical conservatives for over fifty years. It is what fuels the continuing support of the war against a nation that did not attack us (because in their minds it could have) as well the assertion that there is a "war on Christmas" (which they see as one battle in the war against Christians).
Secondly, it represents the willingness to blatantly lie to achieve your ends. Whether we are talking about a deranged college student with a fear of sex manufacturing death threats and actual attacks against himself, or the president of the United States and his paranoid vice president concocting a fantasy of aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds, radical conservatives who live on fear demand absolute power over their fellow citizens, and to achieve and maintain power they will lie, fabricate, distort the facts, and even hide and destroy contrary evidence.
Fear is such a terrible thing to live with on a daily basis. It keeps the body in a state of alert unnecessarily, because most of what we fear simply does not come true. All but a handful of the things we feared as children were irrational and most of us who achieved some level of maturity grew out of those fears. That doesn't mean no bad things happen in life. Of course bad things happen, but interestingly enough most of those bad things surprise us. The things we obsess about, however, are usually things that never come to pass. Conservatives spent decades worrying that the Soviet Union would start a nuclear war with us, and it never happened. On the other hand, no one seemed worried that planes could crash into buildings and kill thousands of people, yet today we live with the terrible memories of the surprise attacks of 9/11.
Yes, there was a Soviet Union whose leader said "We will bury you," but those were words. The reality is that ultimately the Soviet Union buried itself. And as much as some religious conservatives want to fret about it, homosexuals are not ruining marriage, antiwar citizens are not going to "defeat" America, the courts are not going to outlaw Christianity, and no one is waging war on Christmas.
Either radical conservatives have completely lost their minds, or this is all a very calculated move on their part to scare people into giving up their rights, their ideas, and their freedoms in order to change America into a place where they can once again be spoiled children, demanding that mommy give them everything they want, and having temper tantrums when they have to face something they don't like and don't understand.
We liberals, who are the target of their attacks, their lies, and their fears, are simply ordinary people who look at the world differently than they do. We aren't liberal because we want to take away anyone's freedoms. We are liberal because we believe in equality and freedom for all, not just for the white or the wealthy. We aren't liberal because we are trying to steal anyone's hard earned money. We are liberal because we believe in the power of a community coming together and pooling some of their resources for the benefit of all. We don't condone sexual promiscuity, but we also don't want to see the spread of sexually transmitted diseases or an increase in abortions because young people give in to powerful sexual urges and have unprotected sex. I could go on and on, but the point is really simple. We may differ on some ways to go about building a better society, but we are not the enemy.
We also don't use violence to achieve our ends and never have. We use words and legal means to get our points across. We don't attack people physically and we aren't trying to destroy morality or society. Those who look for physical attacks, falsely report physical attacks, or see the threat of nuclear annihilation or societal decay around every corner, whether they are Francisco Nava or Dick Cheney or Mike Huckabee, who seems to have his own irrational fears about sex, writing in 1998 that "it is now difficult to keep track of the vast array of publicly endorsed and institutionally supported aberrations—from homosexuality and pedophilia to sadomasochism and necrophilia," have something seriously wrong with them psychologically.
They should, of course, be afforded the same freedom of speech as the rest of us, but the American people should educate themselves, see how irrational they are, and consign them to the fringes of society.
