“Cooties” are something that many of us encountered in childhood. From the link:
Cooties is a fictitious childhood disease, commonly represented as childlore. It is used in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines as a rejection term and an infection tag game (such as Humans vs. Zombies). It is similar to the British 'dreaded lurgi', and to terms used in the Nordic countries, in Italy, India and Iraq.[1] A child is said to "catch" cooties through close contact with an "infected" person or from an opposite-sex child of a similar age.
Authoritarian movements like the Republican Party need a continuing supply of threats to keep their base afraid, angry — and dependent on their ‘leaders’ who are the only ones who can possibly defend them from those ‘threats’.
To be sure there are real threats in the world, but Republicans have a fundamental problem with them. Nothing in their ideology actually works against them. So, they are constantly coming up with imaginary threats to keep the base churned up while offering ‘solutions’ that aren’t, and blaming the lack of results on Democrats and any other target of opportunity.
It fits right in with conspiracy theories, which have the added benefit of being impossible to disprove — because minds that have been conditioned to paranoia about everything except their trusted leaders and the information bubbles they inhabit are impervious. Try to give them facts to counteract their delusions, and it just shows you are part of the conspiracy against them.
Anything can be framed as a Republican cootie threat - here’s a partial list:
- BLM — how dare people of color demand not to be killed?
- Drag Queens — it might be catching!
- Trans People — it might be catching!
- LGBTQ — it might be catching!
- Gender Studies — there are only Men and Women. Anything else is just wrong.
- Muslims — any of them could be a terrorist!
- Immigrants — they’re coming with crime and disease to steal jobs.
- Abortion — women want too much control over sex, also we need more babies.
- Librarians — because allowing children free access to anything but carefully screened books might expose them to who knows what.
- Teachers — they know too much, and keep trying to share it.
- Liberals/Democrats — they hate America and are destroying it.
- Big (Democratic) Government — coming to steal your freedom
- Climate Change — a hoax that will wreck the economy
- Inequality — doing anything about it would be “Socialism”, a mega-cootie!
- Wokeness — whatever it is, it’s bad.
- DEI — bad because actual Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion would change everything.
- ESG — because investors who care about the Environment, Social Concerns and Governance are Socialists/Communists and anti-Capitalism
- CRT — because actual history has nothing to do with today. Bad!
- Covid measures — they will kill you and steal your freedom!
- National debt — it will bankrupt us all and crash the government — which we also hate!
- Social Security — it's a Ponzi scheme!
You get the idea — the list is ever-changing, and cootie threats are cycled in and out depending on the needs of the moment.
What makes cootie threats especially pernicious is that they are designed to provoke an emotional response in the believers, can seldom be addressed by any rational measures, and often involve ‘alternative facts’ and CT rabbit holes.
Cootie prevention would be aided if the mainstream media didn’t report right wing cooties as legitimate concerns. It’s why the right wing is trying to destroy public education, turn universities into indoctrination centers, and have built a media bubble to incubate them and release them on the world.
The threat from the way the right wing uses cooties is real, even if the cooties themselves are dubious. It’s important to recognize that, and find ways to push back against them. Perhaps it would help if we started framing every new Republican faux outrage openly as “the latest cootie outbreak on the right.”
Charles P. Pierce reports on one Democratic Legislator in Nebraska who is engaged in serious pushback against GOP cooties. I’m going to quote the whole Pierce article here because I think it’s that important and what Machaela Cavanaugh is doing needs more exposure.
In Nebraska's unicameral legislature (beloved as it is by pub trivia teams from coast to coast), there are 17 Democrats. There are 32 Republicans, many of whom are new and, at best, MAGA-curious. The math means the 17 Democrats have no means to stop rancid legislation except by throwing their bodies against the machine. A state senator named Machaela Cavanaugh has decided to be first in line.
The legislative year had hardly begun when the new Republican majority advanced the modern conservative wish list: a fetal "heartbeat" bill; a permitless "concealed carry" gun bill; and, most grotesque of all, Legislative Bill 574, which would forbid health-care workers from providing gender-affirming care to anyone under the age of 19. Facing this stampede of Fox News hobby-horses, Sen. Cavanaugh rose during the debate over a property-tax bill and explained to the unicameral that she intended to do everything she could to monkey-wrench the whole process. And she did so with refreshing frankness. Unless the heartbeat and anti-trans bills are withdrawn, she intends to filibuster, well, everything.
“If this legislature collectively decides that legislating hate against children is our priority, then I am going to make it painful; painful for everyone. Because if you want to inflict pain upon our children, I am going to inflict pain upon this body. I have nothing, nothing but time. And I am going to use all of it. You cannot stop me. I will not be stopped. If LB574 gets an early floor debate and moves forward, it will be very painful for this body. And if people are like, ‘Is she threatening us?’ Let me be clear: Yes, I am threatening you."
This is one way to do it, especially when one apparently has no other way. You make these people own their actions. You draw attention to the true nature of what's being done to constituents in ways that they and their donors find inconvenient. You slow down the process so that everybody gets a really good look at it. And with any luck at all (and we haven't had much of that these days), they hate what they see. Sen. Cavanaugh is welcome in this shebeen any time.
Thoughts?
Update: Bonus exercise for extra credit. Take some boilerplate GOP diatribe against some ‘threat’ and try replacing every mention of it (i.e. ESG, CRT, BLM, DEI, LGBTQ) with the word “cooties” and see what the result looks like.