Fight Fear With Fear
If people are doing something out of fear, then stop them by making them even more afraid of what will happen if they continue to do it
By David Wilaru* (David Wilaru’s bio appears at the end of this story)
My Name Is Wilaru, David Wilaru. I Carry A Pen.
In my capacity as a Staff Reporter for the American Inquisitor Weekly News Magazine I meet all kinds of unusual people. They seek me out with their theories, stories, and revelations. Along with alien abductions and UFO babies, the second often following close on the heels of the first, they are my bread and butter, sometimes even my toast and jam.
And so, when Dr. Eugene Nutall wandered into our Silicon City offices one bright, Spring morning, I was both excited and intrigued.
“Wilaru,” my editor, Leslie Lumbago, called, then crooked her boney finger, turned and walked away. I saved the draft of my exposé of the perils of GMO dog biscuits and headed for her office.
Just inside the door stood a stoop-shouldered man wearing a tweed sport coat, blue and white striped shirt and a string tie.
“Plantar fasciitis,” he said noticing as my eyes glanced down at his scuffed white sneakers. “Doctor Eugene Nutall,” he added then, after a brief pause, stuck out his hand.
“Doctor of. . . ?”
“Sit down, Wilaru. We’ll get to that,” Leslie ordered waving Nutall and I to the two director’s chairs crammed into the tiny space in front of her desk. I took the one labeled “Francis Ford Coppola.” Nutall wiggled his rump down in the other marked with the legend: “Coffee Boy.”
“Dr. Nutall here is a psychologist,” Leslie continued. “He’s got some ideas on this gun control thing.”
“Is he an expert on the ‘Guns as a penis substitute’ theory?” I asked, turning to Nutall with a hopeful smile. A headline containing the words “guns” and “penis” is always a big seller.
“I–”
“Nothing like that, Wilaru,” Leslie interrupted. “Dr. Nutall here has come up with a new tactic on how to turn around the ‘All guns all the time’ people.”
“But, I thought the Inquisitor’s established position was that gun registration was a communist plot designed to destroy America.”
“That was our policy, Wilaru, until we got the new poll numbers. Sixty-seven percent of our core subscribers now think that something needs to be done.”
“What?” I asked.
“They don’t know. Something. Our new cloud-based Artificial Intelligence Advisor thinks it’s time for us to pivot in a new direction, get ahead of the curve, so to speak, with stories that will be aimed at doing something about guns. This is a hot topic for our readers.
“So last week I asked Dr. Nutall to noodle around with the issue and see what he could come up with.”
“And he’s figured out a solution?”
“Who’d have guessed, right? But there it is. Doctor, why don’t you fill Wilaru in on your plan.”
“Well, yes, thank you, Ms. Lumbago,” Nutall stammered, then wiggled his chair around to face me. “You see, Mr. Wilaru, this whole gun controversy is really an emotional reaction to societal stimuli.”
Nutall gave me a hopeful stare.
“Quite so,” I agreed. “Please, continue.”
“Ummm, well, since the positions, the philosophies, of the pro-gun people are emotionally grounded, they can only be changed by establishing a new and different emotional matrix. Change the emotional context from which the opinion springs and you will change the person’s point of view. How do we do that?
“As we all know, the most effective emotion and the one most easily created is fear.”
“Of course, of course,” I muttered. “But I’m anxious to hear the practical details of your plan.”
“Practical details, yes, all right. First, Mr. Wilaru, we need to ask ourselves, ‘Who are the most dedicated proponents of “All guns all the time”’?
“Our research shows that the core supporters are high-school-educated white males who live in rural areas or small towns.
“Since fear is to be our motivator for change, we next ask, ‘What upsets. frightens or worries this demographic the most?’”
“A tsunami of immigrants flooding across our southern border?” I suggested.
“Well, yes,” Nutall admitted, “but I was thinking more of an internal threat. It used to be communists,” he continued in a pedantic tone, “but commies don’t frighten people the way they used to. Now they’re most afraid of being shot, invaded, or attacked by violent and scary black people.
“So, my conclusion was that if we had a large, highly-publicized spike in gun-ownership by black people, especially Muslim black people, that would scare the pants off the Second Amendment proponents who say they want everyone to own a gun because, you see, they assumed that the gun owners would all be white.
“If the 2nd-Amendment people in a small county in Alabama where thirty or forty percent of the population is black suddenly discovered out that all the black people in town were stocking up on AK-47s that would be an unexpected turn of events.
“Pretty soon the Mayor would be telling the City Council, ‘Hey, we need to get control of this dangerous [black] gun situation and get all these [black people’s] guns registered and licensed. Under our new Safety Ordinance we need every [black] gun owner to fill out this eleven page form and get a license AND pay an annual Gun License Fee AND produce a certificate from a psychiatrist who lives in this county attesting that they are not suffering from any sort of mental illness. What, they can’t do that? OK, then, no guns for them.’
“So, if we want to get moving at top speed on this new trend, we need to make sure there are plenty of stories published about the formation of thousands of new black gangs and Muslim terrorist cells. Then we’ll need to post lots of videos of determined black people blasting away with AR-15s and AK-47s at pictures of people wearing KKK robes.
“We’ll need a face for this I’m Black & I’ve Got A Gun movement. I’m sure we could find an actor to fill the role of the fictional character Tyrone Tiger, TT, the movement’s self-appointed leader.
“TT could periodically issue provocative statements along the line of: “I’m Proud, I’m Black, And I’ve Got A Gun”; “Shoot Whitey First, Ask Questions Never”; “Black Lives, White Payback” and the catch phrase, “It’s Payback Time.”
“Every week or so we could run a story about a group of armed black men marching through the streets of some town chanting: “WOW — Watch Out Whitey — WOW — Watch Out Whitey.”
“If we do this right, in a few months we’ll have all kinds of gun registration and licensing laws sailing through the Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas legislatures.
“The gun-control people tried reason. They tried logic. They tried common sense. Bupkis! Stupid. The way you motivate angry, frightened people is with even more anger and more fear.
“If you want them to be for registering guns then you’ve got to make them more afraid of the other guy having a gun than they are of themselves not having a gun.
“What do you think, Mr. Wilaru?”
Well, what could I say? It was brilliant political jujitsu, turn the other person’s strength against them — use the same emotion, fear, that’s driving them in one direction to make them go the other way.
“Brilliant,” I said. “So, Leslie, who’s going to do this organizing and all the rest of it?”
“Well, as a professional writer, Wilaru, I think that you would–”
“I couldn’t possibly do something like that,” I said, rising from my chair.
“Why not?”
“Health reasons.”
“What health reasons?” Leslie asked.
“Putting myself into the middle of a dispute between two opposing groups of emotional men armed with semi-automatic weapons would absolutely be very, very bad for my health,” I told her just before I hurried from the room and straight out the front door.
When I returned to work a week later Leslie gave me a three second stink-eye then turned away.
She never again mentioned Dr. Nutall, but a few weeks later I noticed a post on Facebook about the rise of a new organization whose supposed goal was to redress the historic mistreatment of Black People by White People.
Its leader was a guy named Tyrone Tiger. The story contained a picture of him smiling and holding an AK-47 across his chest.
The headline read, “It’s Payback Time.”
— David Wilaru (Dwilaru@gmail.com)
David Grace is sometimes alleged to be Mr. Wilaru’s alter-ego (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
To see a searchable list of all David Grace’s columns in chronological order, CLICK HERE
To see a list of David Grace’s columns sorted by topic/subject matter, CLICK HERE.
To see all of David Grace’s Wilaru stories, CLICK HERE
All 50 of David Wilaru’s columns are collected in The Wilaru Chronicles
*David G. Wilaru, A Brief Biography
David Wilaru’s early employment was in the creative paperwork allocation and re-allocation sector, but he always knew that his true calling was to be a Wordsmith.
After his divorce from his wife, Sharon, whom Mr. Wilaru once described as: “…as frigid as a penguin in a KitchenAid,” he pursued his dream of a writing career with a stint drafting product manuals for Godzilla Brothers, Inc., penning the user manuals for such cutting-edge Godzilla Brothers’ products as the Delilah Magic Hedge Trimmer, the Trident Electric Fork and Wordbuster, the world’s first solar powered fountain pen.
After leaving Godzilla Brother following his unfortunate involvement with Dr. Werner Buick’s Thirty Day Plan and overcome with ennui, Mr. Wilaru founded SCRAP, The Surrender Company Representing All People, a project that, unfortunately, led to his brief confinement in the Feldman-Margolis Memorial Psychiatric Ward where he edited the patient newsletter, Four Soft Walls.
After his release from the Feldman-Margolis Center, Mr. Wilaru accepted a position as a slogan writer with the 1001 Adult Greeting Cards For All Occasions Company of East Los Angeles, Inc. where he diligently honed his creative talents.
Thereafter, Mr. Wilaru went on to hold a senior public relations position with the Silicon City medical appliances company, BodySpares, Inc. where he directed the marketing effort for the Mirage Artificial Pancreas 690 RG.
After BodySpares’ unfortunate difficulties with the SEC, Mr. Wilaru joined the start-up, Xcitement, Inc., where he designed the marketing campaign for the Xcitement Confidential Adviser (popularly known as “The Brain Box”) and single-handedly coined the slogan “Get Sane At Warp Speed.”
After Xcitement’s sudden bankruptcy, Mr. Wilaru took over as the head of Marketing and Public Relations for Memories-R-Us, Inc. where he directed the advertising strategy for The Dog Box and other Memories-R-Us products.
It was during this high-tech marketing period that, in his spare time, Mr. Wilaru wrote his first paperback novel, the moderately successful Grip Melman, Garbage Detective: The Case Of The Hostess In The Can.
After the unfortunate litigation generated by the book’s Second-Printing Party, Mr. Wilaru obtained a position as a free-lance writer and later as a staff reporter for The American Inquisitor Weekly News Magazine, a post which he still holds today.
A self-described obsessive-compulsive Wordsmith, Mr. Wilaru regularly writes about subjects of topical interest including Gay Marriage, Hollywood Culture, the rapid growth of Amnesiaiology, the Patriot Act, Middle East Developments, and his specialty, UFO Babies, together with other matters of broad general appeal.
