China!

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor S orry … did I scare you? I mean, that China sure is scary, right?

At least that’s what we’re being told by, well, just about everyone these days it seems. China is the new “boogeyman” for those who would like to stir up things here in America. There are Chinese spies, the Chinese military is building up, the Chinese government is planning war, our entire economy is slowly being taken over by dependency on China, Chinese scientists manufactured the COVID-19 virus as a form of population control or as a biological warfare agent… or both (it’s hard to keep track of).

Politicians have been using China to scare voters for the past several years. They’re interfering in our elections. They’re interfering in what we can and can’t put in our movies (no, really). And, of course, they’re using TikTok to collect valuable sensitive data to steal our personal information and use it to… well, something, I’m sure. And I’ll bet it’s nothing good.

Look, I won’t sit here and tell you that we should have zero concerns about a possible threat posed by what is probably the second-most powerful nation on the planet behind the United States (I guess with some combination of Russia, the UK, Japan and India also in the mix in some order). But “threat” is a pretty general term. We hear about the “threat” from places like Iran and North Korea too, even Mexico because of the border “crisis” that’s also always in the news lately.

China is growing. There’s no doubt about that. China is basically the last bastion of Cold War-era Communism. Also true. But China struggles to feed itself. China is far more concerned with maintaining what it has than trying to conquer the world.

Really, we’re seeing “China” just used as a “scare word” by politicians who know it will get a response. You see this sort of thing all the time. What will get the public’s attention? What will rile people up? Then that’s what I’ll say. You’ve got to know you’re audience.

“Socialism” is one such word that was getting tossed around a lot a few years ago. Same with “Fascist”… oh, and adding “extremist” to any kind of otherwise innocuous label: feminist extremist, liberal extremist, environmental extremist, etc. You can make anything sound bad if you add “extremist” to it. I’m a Sunday afternoon nap extremist.

And what to China, socialists, liberals and such all want to do? That’s right … indoctrination. That’s another boogeyman word. That’s why we can’t have certain books in our libraries. That’s why we can’t teach Critical Race Theory in schools. That’s why all this LGBTQ stuff is so bad. That danged ol’ indoctrination. Because “they” don’t want to indoctrinate you and me. It’s too late for us.

They want to indoctrinate our children. (dun, dun, duuuun!)

They have to get into the schools and the college campuses and onto the TV shows and movies and internet sites and brainwash the upcoming generations with whatever agenda it is that one politician or another wants you to think is being subliminally inserted into the young folks’ minds through Taylor Swift music or the Barbie movie or through TikTok.

Of course, nowadays we have the scariest scare word of all that encapsulates all of those fear-mongering boogeyman ideas into one easy-to-digest Frankenstein, Freddy Krueger, Hail Satan hybrid monster…

“Woke.” Oh, boy. Hold on to your pearls, ladies. Forget about the coronavirus. What you really don’t want to catch is a bad case of the Woke. We’ve been through a lot over the past several years, what with all the mass shootings and global pandemics and economic downturns. If you want to scare folks here in 2024, you’ve got to get creative. And what’s more creative than an imaginary force that you can’t really define but you know it’s out there trying to dismantle and destroy the very fabric of your way of life?

Don’t get me wrong. There are fringe groups out there trying to push some weird ideas out there (I will never grasp the animal persona lifestyle known as being a “furry,” for example) but there’s really just no concerted effort to destroy the American way of life by the Woke Mob underway. It really just seems to be a number of historically marginalized groups of people who would just really, really like to be able to live their lives in a way that the “normal” people do without being threatened, ostracized or discriminated against. Is that too “woke” for America?

Sounds to me like “equality extremists” at work.