November 15, 2018
(I wrote this as a column for an outlet that chose not to use it, so I am sharing it here.)
While the Democrats won an impressive victory this month, it is still distressing so that many people were willing to vote for openly racist xenophobic Republicans. Furthermore, Donald Trump’s bizarre stunt of hyping a “caravan” of asylum seekers walking up through Mexico from Central America apparently worked. Millions of people rushed to the polls to vote Republican, thinking that Donald Trump was the only force to protect our country from this invasion.
Apparently, there are tens of millions of people who believe any idiocy that Trump puts out and is then repeated and amplified on Fox News. These people either do not pay attention to other news sources or consider them all to be “FAKE NEWS.”
It is difficult to reach these people through normal channels. They either will not listen at all to arguments from non-believers or they will view them as lies, like global warming, cooked up as part some grand conspiracy to deceive them.
If we can’t reach these people through reasoned argument, we can try a different route. We can try to reach them through their pocketbook.
Suppose we got a progressive millionaire or billionaire to offer “caravan insurance.” For a modest sum, say $300 a year, caravan insurance would compensate people for damage to their property or any physical harm they or their family suffered from any people on the refugee caravan that entered the country.
Given the enormous fear that Trump and his friends at Fox have built up around the caravan, this should sound like a very attractive offer. After all, being protected from an “invasion” for just a few hundred dollars sounds pretty good.
The obvious way to market caravan insurance would be by advertising directly to the target audience on Fox News. After all, Fox News viewers are the ones worried about the caravan.
If the idea of giving money to Fox sounds repugnant, consider the issue from their side. Are they going to allow a commercial break ridiculing the threat from the caravan right after Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Jeanine Pirro, or some other Fox heavyweight has just gone on a tirade about the dire threat posed by these refugees?
We don’t have to limit our con job to caravan insurance. We can also offer MS-13 insurance that will protect family members and property from this widely hyped gang. If we got $100 a year from millions of fearful Fox viewers, it should make for a pretty good profit.
The same would be true for Ebola insurance. Fox was touting the threat from Ebola just before the November 2014 election. A grand total of 2 people (both medical workers who cared for an Ebola patient) were infected with the disease in the United States; nonetheless, Fox felt the Ebola threat warranted virtually nonstop coverage.
We could even offer supplements to insurance policies to take further advantage of Fox viewers’ prejudices and ignorance. Suppose that we made an offer to insurance subscribers, that for an extra fee of $100, they could get a refund of their per capita tax payment to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), the federal government’s main cash welfare program.
At $16.2 billion last year, TANF spending came to roughly $50 per person in 2018, so a $100 payment would net our wealthy progressive $50 for each sucker. Of course, it is not just Fox viewers who are confused about the small size of spending on TANF, SNAP, and other social programs, many New York Times and NPR listeners would be equally confused.
The reason for this widespread confusion is that reporters tend to express these spending figures as huge numbers: tens of billions of dollars. These numbers are meaningless to almost everyone that sees or hears them since no one will ever see this sort of money in their lifetimes. While reporters and editors know that their audience doesn’t understand these huge numbers, they nonetheless refuse to report them in a context which would make them meaningful. As a result, on this issue, many highly educated people are as ignorant as Fox New viewers.
But we can leave out the budget education for now. The key point is that if right-wingers are determined to believe nonsense about threats that immigrants or other non-whites pose to them, there are great profitmaking opportunities. Why should Donald Trump be the only one to profit from these illusory fears?
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