fentanyl in candy and other stupid shit to keep the rubes distracted

you’ll never guess who’s behind this panic

Halloween is upon us — which means that in households all over America, parents will be losing their shit over fentanyl in candy.

and you’ll never guess who’s behind this panic.

“Right now, the cartels are dressing this stuff up like candy rainbow fentanyl and I know we’re all going to be vigilant and protect our kids this Halloween but shame on Mark Kelly for us having to do that,” Blake Masters, the Republican Senate candidate for Arizona, said at a campaign event Friday.

here we have the perfect wingnut noise machine scare story. it has everything: your children in danger. deadly drugs. cartels. immigrants streaming across the border. do-nothing Democrats.

there’s just one small problem — “candy rainbow fentanyl” is totally not a thing.

It was startlingly easy to debunk panic over rainbow fentanyl. As it turns out, drug dealers have plenty of willing adult customers. So why would they try to lure children, a customer base with no money of their own? And why would dealers give away valuable stock to do so?

the chance that little Alistair or Wilhelmina will be coming home tonight with a bag full of drug-laced sweets is a rounding error away from zero.

but that isn’t stopping Fox News from hyping the fuck out of this non-story, just as they do every year.

what we have here is the standard conservative playbook: keep the rubes riled up over imaginary shit and they won’t notice that the plutocrats are picking their pockets.

and oh boy, have the wingnuts ever perfected this grift.

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forty years of Fox News and their imitators — and a generation of schools that have failed to teach critical thinking — has left us with a populace so gaslighted that they no longer have any fucking clue which end is up.

here’s a chart that’s been going around. look at the big yawning gulf between what Americans believe about their country and reality:

up and down that list, with one statistic after another, the average doofus hasn’t a clue.

the wingnut outrage ecosystem has done such a good job of stoking paranoia and hatred for their audience’s perceived enemies — the blacks, the Muslims, the gays, the immigrants, the Jews — that your average goofball thinks America is a fucking hellhole overrun with swarthy crossdressing hordes.

but if they’d only think about it for five seconds, they’d realize that none of these perceptions make any fucking sense.

look at the statistic for transgender. Americans believe that trans people are 21% of society.

now just think about that for one second. that’s 21 people out of every 100. roughly 1 person out of every five.

seriously?

one person out of every five is trans? as you go about your business, shopping at the supermarket, going to the hardware store, one out of every five people you encounter is trans? is that what you’re seeing? seriously?

how about some critical thinking, people?

(an aside: so what if 21% of Americans really were transgender? how would that affect your life? leave these people the fuck alone already, they just want to live their lives in peace.)

you can thank the right-wing screech-monkeys for literally blowing these quote-unquote “problems” out of proportion.

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decades ago, Ms. Spouse and I kept a small cabin in the Catskills that we used as a weekend getaway.

our nearest neighbor was a guy named Ed.

Ed was the nicest guy in the world, and if he liked you, he would do anything for you. but Ed also hoarded weapons, because he honestly believed that after the imminent collapse of civilization, roving gangs of The Blacks™ from New York City would be coming north to take “his land and his women” (his actual words). he was convinced that this was going to happen any day now — and this was long before Fox News existed.

I haven’t seen Ed in at least 40 years, but if he’s still alive, I’m sure he’s still sitting on his front porch, rifle in his lap, convinced tomorrow will be The Day All Hell Breaks Loose.

and I would not at all be surprised if fentanyl-toting immigrants have been added to Ed’s hate-list.