A Fever in America: How Fearmongers Want to Steal Your Freedom, and What You Can Do About It

I recently finished reading Timothy Egan’s book A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them. Egan describes how the Ku Klux Klan’s most loyal supporters were white Protestant people calling themselves Christians. Led by their ministers, they painted God as a white supremacist, confused power with religion, and justified bigotry by claiming it was God's will.

Eerie parallels exist between the strategies employed by the Ku Klux Klan and the strategies of today’s Trump politicians and Trump religious leaders, both nationally and locally.

Three shared strategies stand out. The first key shared strategy of fearmongering involves gaining support by whipping up fear of the Other to a fever pitch and then posing as saviors from that fear. The Other can be a woman who has full freedom of choice. The Other can be an immigrant choosing to seek protection from harm. The Other can be a member of the LGBTQ+ community who chooses to love authentically. And so on.

A second shared strategy of then and now is to deprive those branded as dangerous of freedom. While the fearmongers want us to believe that certain “lifestyles” or certain people are scary, what actually scares them is the freedom of those they fear, demonize, and want to control.

When fearmongers rail against a woman’s freedom of reproductive choice, incl. the choice to have or not have an abortion, they do not just want to control choice around this particular issue but choice in general. They are scared of women’s freedom.

When fearmongers want to give absolute control to parents over every detail of their children’s schooling, what they really want is to prevent children from developing their own minds and their own freedom to choose who they are in differentiation from their parents. No religious or political cult wants children with a mind of their own. Psychologically, however, differentiating from parents is a crucial developmental task for children in order to grow into responsible adults with a secure sense of self. Policies that style parents up as omniscient and omnipotent gods are highly detrimental to the lasting mental and moral health of children (and communities) because they prevent children from growing into adults capable of making their own free and empathic choices. Fearmongers are scared of children becoming their own free persons because then these children would, as adults, be unafraid of fearmongers.

Fearmongers fear the freedom of others. They try to deal with their fear by spreading fear and curtailing the freedom of others. When they rail against immigrants by hyping up anecdotal examples of violence by immigrants that are being committed similarly by non-immigrants, they are looking for a scapegoat to distract from the problems their own policies (e.g., around an unjust economic system or around guns) have created for non-immigrants and immigrants alike.

The preferred weapon fearmongers past and present use is morality, with a heavy dose of gaslighting. This brings us to the third shared strategy: hypocritical moralistic warfare. The Ku Klux Klan used its alleged moral fight against alcohol and “sexual immorality” to fill its ranks with church members. I say “alleged” because the very downfall of the Klan in Indiana in the 1920s was its hypocrisy. The fall of D. C. Stephenson, the notorious Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Clan in Indiana, resulted from him violently raping Madge Oberholtzer while he was drunk. Stephenson had grown the Klan into one of the strongest in the nation, with over 400,000 members, using the defense of “morality” as a key weapon. Among the Klansmen he recruited were the Indiana Governor and most members of the state legislature. While dying from the wounds Stephenson had inflicted on her during the rape, Oberholtzer gave witness testimony to stop Stephenson from doing the same to other women in the future. Stephenson was imprisoned in Noblesville, Indiana.

Like today’s politicians, Stephenson used gaslighting to deny racism and prejudice when it was clear for all to see. He claimed that “the Klan is not based on racial, religious or other prejudice” (Egan, A Fever in the Heartland, p. 144). Today, the Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Indiana, Micah Beckwith, pastors a church in Noblesville and uses political strategies of fearmongering and moralistic warfare (see my interview and my Op-Ed in The Indianapolis Star) reminiscent of Stephenson, even as he, too, denies any explicit similarity. As Shakespeare would say, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

In our time, we witness a similar hypocrisy to the one that characterized the Ku Klux Klan’s alleged defense of morality. While Trump's evangelical leaders, such as Franklin Graham or Robert Jeffress, portray him as “God’s choice” and guarantee for protecting people from all kinds of immoralities, Trump himself has been convicted of rape. As Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who oversaw the trial of E. Jean Carroll v. Donald J. Trump, wrote after the guilty verdict to counter Trump’s attempt at gaslighting the nation: “the jury implicitly found that Mr. Trump deliberately and forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll's vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm." Kaplan added that the “jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly” what people “commonly understand the word ‘rape’” to mean.

If fearmongering and moral gaslighting by wolves in sheep’s clothing take aim at the freedom of those they villainize, we have to realize that, in the end, everyone’s freedom will be targeted, including our own, if it hasn’t already.

We cannot afford to wait a moment longer to act to counter the fearmongering. We must act now with our vote and active support to elect compassionate leaders who will protect those targeted and cultivate a trusting and inclusive community for all. We counter fearmongering not out of fear but because it is the right and human thing to do. We have to make a choice for our common humanity now. That is the most important thing to do in this moment of history.

The famous words of Martin Niemöller, the Lutheran pastor under Nazi Germany who transformed from a Nazi sympathizer who had once referred to Hitler as an ‘instrument sent by God’ into a Nazi critic interned in the Dachau concentration camp for years, can inspire us to action and engage in compassionate voting whether or not we are directly one of today’s groups targeted by fearmongering. Because sooner or later we will be targeted merely for our humanity if we do not stop the fever now.

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Social Democrats
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Social Democrat
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
             Martin Niemöller

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