Democrats need fear. Without it, a lot of their points fall flat.
Look back over the course of the past few decades, and you can see many instances yourself. The KKK is lurking around every corner, climate change is going to kill us all the day after tomorrow, gays and lesbians are always just one Republican president away from being thrown into a shock therapy camp.
Yet, Republican presidents come and go, and none of that ever happens.
With Trump being sworn in on Monday, you can be the Democrats are ratcheting up their fearmongering to 11. They've been warning everyone that Trump is going to be a dictator, using the military to round up and neutralize anyone who disagrees with him. Women will lose their rights, black people will go back to chains, and any transgender person will be shot on sight.
Oh, and you can kiss all your rights goodbye.
The usual suspects are leading the charge, including a woman who continues to somehow get elected despite proving that she's not the brightest bulb in the box.
AOC posted to her Instagram, telling everyone "we are on the eve of an authoritarian administration," and that "this is what 21st century fascism is starting to look like."
You might be thinking she'd explain what it is she's talking about, or what Trump has done that is fascist, but she quickly moves on and tells us that Republicans model themselves on Victor Orban's Hungary. What she isn't telling you is that Orban isn't actually a fascist, and that he's done exactly as his electorate commanded him to do, securing Hungary's border and refusing to allow in African and Middle-Eastern migrants, which earned him the ire of the press.
Orban also modernized the country's judiciary system, a relic leftover from the communist era that wasn't just inefficient, it had corrupted actors, and leftists across the globe didn't like that change much either. However, critics do say that the changes to the court system only allowed Orban to solidify his control over the country.
Trump doesn't have that kind of power. Though he can appoint judges, he can't just change up the judicial system, so AOC's comment is absurd. She's taking similarities, such as a focus on border security, and making the entire thing into a dictator's paradise.
AOC also says Trump will try to control the media. There's been no such indication that he's actually trying to do that at all. His saving of TikTok is the closest thing to a state-run media source, but even then, we're still waiting for clarification of what 50 percent U.S. ownership means.
The New York congresswoman goes on to say that this is a time of "experimentation" and that people "can still use platforms" and encourages people to go to Bluesky.
As if you didn't need more reason to take her less seriously.
If you needed any more reason to think AOC is worth ignoring, she's encouraging everyone to move to Bluesky because Trump will be a dictator. pic.twitter.com/lS5L4EHn5J
— Brandon Morse (@TheBrandonMorse) January 20, 2025
What AOC is doing is the time-honored Democrat tradition of purposefully attempting to scare people, and this worked out very well for them for a very long time, but the issue is that back then, the Democrats actually had narrative control. They don't anymore. Elon Musk saw to that.
At this point, with every declaration that the sky is falling and the cries of "wolf," people are going to take the Democrats less and less seriously.
Christopher Rufo on X put it well when he said:
"The public will heavily discount this rhetoric moving forward. The people shrieking “Orange Hitler” will be speaking to an increasingly narrow audience, like washed-up musicians playing the casino circuit."
He's not wrong. The constant gnashing and rending of teeth is tiresome, and increasingly boring.
It makes me think back to my high school days. I knew a girl named Anna, whose primary method of getting attention was to consistently talk about how horrible everything was for her, and she told anyone who would listen that she was going to hurt herself. She never gave off real signs of depression, and it always seemed more like an act. Almost like she got a kick out of it. She never did harm herself, of course. It was all about making people react to and pay attention to her.
There's not much difference between her and the Democrats. They like to declare that everything is awful, and the attention it got only encouraged them to do it more. After you figure out it's an act, you kind of start tuning out. It becomes exhausting attending to people that like, because in the end, they don't really care about the care you give them, it just feeds into a manipulative mindset.
Fear is a form of control, after all.
My hope is that Trump really does knock this term out of the park and proves to people that Democrats are just a bunch of drama-centric, tiresome, Chicken Little's.
The sky is demonstrably not falling.
