“I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power,” the Attorney General of the United States, Jeff Sessions said in an interview on Mark Levin’s conservative radio talk show. The reaction on social media has been a mixture of righteous outrage and dumbfounded ridicule that the Attorney General could be so dumb as to be amazed by this event. While the statement is self-evidently ridiculous, dismissing the Attorney General’s remark as dumb words from a dumb guy is naive.

I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power – Jeff Sessions

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III has worked in government for more than forty years. He was initially hired as an Assistant United States Attorney in 1975. He has a college degree. He is a graduate of the University of Alabama School of Law which has produced numerous federal judges. The role of the judiciary as a check on executive power does not come as a surprise to him. Sessions is familiar with Marbury v. Madison, the landmark case before the Supreme Court in 1803 which established the basis for judicial review. Further, he is familiar with the Constitution itself, whose Supremacy Clause establishes the rights and obligations set out in the Constitution as having greater authority than federal law and executive orders.

The State of Hawaii joined the Union fifty seven years ago. Sessions was 13. I’m sure he remembers when the flag added a fiftieth star. Prior to that it had been a United States territory since before Sessions’s father was born. Calling it merely “an island in the Pacific” is a way to make the Americans who live there separate from us, distant from “real America.” It’s a deliberate rhetorical choice to downplay our common heritage and an implicit appeal to white supremacy. It marks those “pacific islanders” as not like the rest of us. Language has power. Jeff Sessions well knows that that “island in the Pacific” is one of the United States, and the judges there have the same duty and authority to enforce the Constitution as those in his native Alabama.

This is not an issue of Sessions being unfamiliar with the law nor with confusion over his new role as attorney general compared to senator. He did not make this argument dismissing the authority of a federal judge in a court of law where it would be unconvincing in the face of centuries of precedent. Rather, Sessions was speaking through a conservative radio show to an audience of partisans. He was not stating a sincere belief in the judge’s lack of legal authority. He was rallying conservatives around the idea that any opponents of the current administration are illegitimate, even sitting federal judges exercising their authority under the Constitution of the United States.

The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned! – February 4, 2017

Sessions’s remark is part of a pattern to undermine the authority of the opposition. In the aftermath of the failed Muslim ban, the president himself attacked the federal judges who ruled against it, calling their legitimacy into question.  He raged on Twitter, calling Judge James Robart, who was appointed by George W. Bush and confirmed by the Senate a “so-called judge” and promising that the ruling would be overturned. Presidential advisor Stephen Miller went so far as to say that the powers of the president “will not be questioned.” The administration wants to be seen as having supreme authority and any limits to be invalid. These are not off-the-cuff statements made without thought, but a deliberate effort to undermine the checks and balances placed on the presidency. Former CIA officer Evan McMullin compared these efforts to his first hand experience with foreign autocrats. All Americans should be similarly concerned.

John McCain voted to end the filibuster today. He claimed to do so with great regret. He claimed to have no choice.

Lindsey Graham voted to end the filibuster today. He said they had “no other option.”

The Republican party has long claimed to stand for personal responsibility. The words are enshrined in the name of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. The idea is a core tenet of the 90s Republican Contract with America. Personal responsibility is apparently a virtue among people struggling to feed their families. Strangely it seems not to apply to Senators who talk out of both sides of their mouths and refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions.

McCain, Graham, and others consistently criticize the president’s choices and actions publicly and then vote to support his agenda in the Senate. If an action is necessary however unpopular, our representatives owe it to us to have the courage to defend it publicly, to explain their support for it. Yet these Senators want headlines for speaking out against the president while they quietly vote to support him and hope he takes the blame for actions they aided.That isn’t personal responsibility. That is conduct unbecoming of a United States Senator.

I’ve written previously about my experiences with government benefits. I was on Medicaid as a child. I’ve been on welfare. I’ve lived in neighborhoods that people are warned about. My education was bought in part with grants and loans from the United States government. Today I have a degree, a job with a very good salary, and I own a home. By all accounts I’m a success story for government aid. But today I don’t want to talk about how government aid gave me a ladder to success, but the people for whom it is a lifeline to keep from drowning.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a man who will make $174,000 this year, went on CNN to talk up the Republican healthcare plan. He told America, “Rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own health care. They’ve got to make those decisions themselves.” There are so many things wrong with that statement, but I’m going to focus on one insidious idea: that people use government aid because they squander their money on iPhones and T-bone steaks and Cadillacs. It’s a compelling myth. It makes us feel good about our own financial choices. It saves us from feeling bad about people living in poverty. It allows us to feel like the universe is in some way fair – that you and I are successful because of our morality and righteousness, and those who are living in poverty are profligates who deserve it. The easiest stories to believe are the ones that let us feel like we’re better than other people. But just because something makes you feel good doesn’t make it true. Stories that make you feel good are how salesmen get you to make bad decisions. Tell someone he looks like the kind of man who knows how to impress and would never cheap out on his wife, and he just may walk out of the store with a diamond twice as big as he intended. These kind of stories have power even when they’re lies.

So let me tell you a different story, one that isn’t a lie even though some details have been changed for the sake of anonymity. A few years ago, when my spouse and I bought our house, we were getting rid of some furniture before we moved. One thing we no longer needed was a large chest freezer that we kept in the basement. We could have gotten a little money for it, but it was faster and easier to put it up on Craigslist for free, as long as we didn’t have to deliver it. These are the kinds of decisions you can make when you do not need to worry about $20. That weekend a man and his family came to get it. I’m going to call him Mitch because that’s a generic white guy name and because of the senior senator from Kentucky.

Mitch and his family arrived in a full-size van that was nearly as old as I am. At the time we were living in a place in the middle of the city.  It wasn’t a bad place to live, but it had seen better days, and those better days were probably before the First World War. Nevertheless, his daughter told me with wide-eyed sincerity that our home was beautiful.  Mitch and I talked while we tried to figure out the best way to move the freezer up from the basement. He gushed about how we were a blessing and thanked us several times. He talked about how times were tough and how hard it was to take care of a family. That’s when Mitch told us what his plan was for the freezer. He was going to buy meat in bulk from the meat packing plant, and the expiring clearance-priced food from the supermarket to save money. He didn’t have an iPhone 7 or a leased Audi. He was going to Safeway to buy expiring meat so he could freeze it and feed his family.

I know it’s tempting to say that stories like this are the exception and that most people in poverty just don’t work hard enough or save enough to escape. It’s tempting to believe the lie. There are many hard-working Americans whom Obamacare already does not do enough to help. They need more than a lifeline; they need the kind of ladder out of poverty I had. The Republican replacement – what they’re calling the World’s Best Healthcare Plan of 2017 in some kind of cruel joke – leaves these people behind completely. It takes the opportunity to buy healthcare and replaces it with a tax cut for multimillionaires. One surgery. One tumor. One car accident. That’s all it takes to lose everything, no matter how hard they work.

Since the inauguration, members of Congress have found themselves beset by angry constituents and protesters at town hall meetings, fund-raisers, and luncheons.  Republicans especially have found themselves the objects of anger in response to the president’s executive orders around immigration, the president’s alleged ties to Russia, and the movement to defund and repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).

At his recent town hall meeting in Salt Lake City, Rep. Jason Chaffetz received an angry reception from the audience. After leaving early he described it as a “paid attempt to bully and intimidate,” and insisted that audience members were brought in from out of state. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, Colorado Senator Cory Gardner, among others, have repeated the same allegation. All offer no evidence of this paid conspiracy.

There have been dozens of such confrontations, but lets take a look at the Chaffetz town hall in Salt Lake City since it’s been the most widely reported.  According to multiple reports there were “hundreds of people” outside the Chaffetz event. And, local news reports estimate the attendance inside the auditorium at 1,000. Reporters have been unable to identify anyone who was paid to protest or disrupt the event.

Look at the Numbers

If we assume that only half of the audience are paid agitators, and the entire protest delegation outside, and we assume there were only 200 protesters outside, that’s 700 paid protesters. Now we need to estimate the price of a paid protester. If the payment were $50 or $100, you’re not going to buy any loyalty with that. We’ve seen that happen before, and the individuals involved readily admit to reporters that they were hired to be there.  Also, you have to consider that these people didn’t just show up to a town hall to jeer. Many of them had spent time making signs to express their frustrations. That alone takes a few hours of work. To get this quality of actor – that’s who you would have to get – who can look engaged and enraged, put in the prep work for their sign and costume, and also refuse to admit to being paid to be there, it’s going to cost quite a lot of money. I’ll conservatively estimate it at $1,000.

700 protesters * $1000 = $700,000

And that $700k is just for this one town hall. And that doesn’t include all the associated expenses, lawyers to draft the non-disclosure agreements, transportation costs to bring in actors from outside the area.  And it would have to be done in cash to avoid the attention of the IRS and the FEC, so now you need security to protect all that cash. We’re well over a million dollars at this point.  One million dollars, conservatively, per town hall protest.  There have been dozens of them across the country: Iowa, Ohio, California, Utah, Colorado.

$1,000,000

Who is paying for all of this?  The Democratic National Committee doesn’t have the resources for this, and if they did, they would focus it on winning elections in 2018. They don’t care about getting existing Representatives to vote one way or another, and they’re certainly not going to waste that kind of money on deep red districts in red states they’ll never win. Not just to embarrass Jason Chaffetz, nobody knew who he was last month.  And despite what you may have heard from your conspiracy theorist friends, George Soros may throw some money at liberal non-profits, but he does not have a shadowy secret police force that could pull this off.

It’s not just probability. It’s reality.

There are millions of Americans who will lose their healthcare when the ACA is repealed, and more who oppose the executive orders put forth by this president or are suspicious of his fondness and praise for Vladimir Putin.  They are angry, and they are demanding that their elected congressional representatives provide the check on the presidency that is the constitutional duty. There is no secret army of spies funded by the Illuminati fomenting protests at last minute congressional town hall meetings. The only reason our elected representatives keep blaming “paid protesters” is because they don’t want to say “I don’t care about my constituents.” Don’t let them off the hook.

This weekend, while speaking (four years prematurely) at a campaign event, the president said “You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden.” Of course, nothing of note had happened in Sweden. The Bowling Green Massacre. The millions of illegal voters. The largest inauguration audience. Misstatements. Errors. Lies.

The inaccuracy of these assertions is brazen and obvious. His opponents repeat them with contempt and ridicule, but they have no good way to counter them. How do you fact check something that is obviously false? If he says the sky is green or the Earth is flat, countering that with a link to the New York Times or Wikipedia is pointless. Two people cannot debate or discuss solutions when they have fundamentally different understandings of the facts. It’s like having a debate about the best way to regulate domestic airlines with someone who believes that human flight is impossible. The cascade of falsity has already overwhelmed some of his opponents. Since opposition seems pointless, they close ranks with like-minded friends and avoid engaging with anyone operating under “alternative facts.”

With every successive untruth, the president and his spokespersons offer their supporters a choice between a world where there was no Bowling Green Massacre and one where the president they chose is both honest and credible. Most of these supporters dig in their heels. They come up with explanations and excuses and share them broadly. Some even choose to accept and believe the lies. Like hard liquor, every time you accept or rationalize a lie, the next one becomes easier to swallow, and you end up just as drunk.

Human beings naturally gather ourselves into groups. And, we are inclined to support, defend, and think well of those who are in our group and think badly of those who oppose our group. You see this illustrated when Red Sox fans decry the Yankees for their outlandish spending on free agents, but defend Boston taking the same actions. We don’t want to think that someone in our group is lying to us, whether our family or political party. It’s painful, so we act in a way to minimize that pain, by rationalizing, by making excuses, and by choosing to believe the lie. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug.

I’m not saying it’s part of his evil plan, but it is very effective at driving a deeper wedge between Americans, and a deeply divided people is easier to control and to set against one another.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, Washington D.C.

The current president and his advisors want us to be afraid. The president sends out ominous tweets about “bad dudes” and assigning blame if “something happens.”  He has portrayed American cities as “crime-infested,” filled with “carnage,” and “falling apart.” The president went on to claim – falsely –  that the murder rate has reached a 47 year high. Presidential Counselor Kellyanne Conway recently even invented a nonexistent terrorist attack in Kentucky. And Press Secretary Sean Spicer has claimed that the media are engaged in a cover-up of terrorist attacks.  Murders! Made-up terrorist attacks! Media cover-up! They want us to be afraid.

Together, all these things raise the question of why the president and his allies would want us to be full of fear. I don’t have the ability to look at what’s in the president’s heart. But, I can look at history: People who are afraid have been all too eager to increase government power and to restrict the civil liberties of others. In the 18th century, the British Parliament used a fear of protest and of economic losses to seize rights from American colonists. They granted direct control of the colony of Massachusetts to the crown and closed the port of Boston.  Sixty years later, the state of Virginia exploited the fear of slave rebellion to apply even greater restrictions upon a people already enslaved.  Virginia forbade African Americans, even those who were free, from freely practicing religion, or learning to read or write. And all of us are aware of how German nationalists exploited fear and hatred to commit the greatest atrocity of the 20th century.  Nazi leader Hermann Göring explained this strategy explicitly during the Nuremberg Trials:

Why, of course, the people don’t want war. … Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But … the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. – Hermann Göring, 1945

Fear is a powerful motivator, but a poor guide. When we allow fear to rule, we make poor decisions. We lash out at innocent people. We make mistakes. We even compromise our core values.

Throughout history and literature are warnings against being manipulated by fear and propaganda. The totalitarian government in George Orwell’s 1984 controls the population by manipulating their fear and hatred of arbitrary enemies. The central conflict in Dune, Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic, is a young man manipulating fears and prejudices to take leadership and to bring down an empire. Herbert calls fear “the mindkiller,” and that’s not wrong. When overcome by fear for our safety and our families, we’re all too eager to ignore evidence and reason. Letting fear choose our course can have tragic consequences not only where states and empires are concerned, but at the personal level as when Iago uses fear to manipulate Othello in Shakespeare’s play of the same name.

In 1941, before the entry of the United States into the Second World War, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt included this statement in his Four Freedoms speech before a join session of Congress:

Every realist knows that the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world—assailed either by arms, or by secret spreading of poisonous propaganda by those who seek to destroy unity and promote discord in nations that are still at peace. – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1941

To me, that seems as relevant here in the 21st century as on the eve of World War II. This administration is exploiting fear in order to divide us from each other and to give even more power to those who seek to curtail the liberties of the vulnerable and in doing so to render hollow the liberties enjoyed by the rest. There is nothing to fear. Don’t believe me? Look to your own life. How many people do you actually know who are victims of Muslim terrorists? Has there been any such attack in your town? Your state? Compare that to the number of car accidents you know of, or cases of domestic violence. No one is being killed by refugees. Our Muslim neighbors are not a danger to us. The murder rate is going down. You are not going to be killed by a terrorist and neither am I.

Don’t be manipulated by lies, propaganda, and fear.  If you won’t listen to me, listen to God:

Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness. – Isaiah 41:10

Or if you’re not interested in God, listen to Paul Atreides:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain. – Litany Against Fear