Political parties increasingly function by ginning up panic. \u00a0The Right has become a past master of this with weekly hysterias about Lattegate, Benghazi, and, most egregiously last fall, the Great Ebola Panic, which evaporated at exactly the same moment the elections ended, but which saw the most deranged in GOP leadership\u00a0calling for mass executions of ebola victims<\/a> and, of course, Something to Be Done about Obama, who was somehow to blame for it. \u00a0The purpose of such panics is, of course, to keep the flock agitated and fearful\u2013and then to tell the flock that unless it throws its support to the Fearmonger, nothing can save them from the horrors that await should The Other Side have its way.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a method that has worked for ages, and only works better as an increasingly ignorant populace leaves off the business of thinking in terms of the common good and instead thinks only in terms of tribal loyalties. \u00a0The Other becomes, in such a politics, a sort of subhuman bogeyman capable of almost any heinous evil. \u00a0So during the Great Ebola Panic, the Tea Party seriously proposed that \u00a0Obama was seeking<\/em> an ebola epidemic on our shores.<\/a>\u00a0 Why? \u00a0Because he\u2019s just that evil and only Our Team can save you from him. \u00a0The base was well and truly ginned up by this idiotic lie because they *wanted* to believe that. \u00a0The self-sustaining fusion reaction of lies and hatred worked like a charm until it was no longer needed and the Noise Machine controllers shut it down.<\/p>\n But, of course, the GOP isn\u2019t the only party capable of ginning up moral panics to stampede the herd. \u00a0A very successful one is under way against Indiana right now. \u00a0It seems the state passed a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, pretty much like ones on the books in 19 other states<\/a>, as well as one signed into law by the currently-fake-outraged\u00a0Hillary Clinton\u2019s husband in 1993.<\/a>\u00a0 Indeed, not long ago, noted gay persecutor Barack Obama had no problem with such legislation<\/a>.<\/p>\n So why the sudden moral panic that the state of Indiana is just about to march gays into theocratic concentration camps and rename itself the Republic of Gilead? Because it\u2019s useful and because moral panics are a quick and dirty way to stampede people, rather in this vein:<\/p>\n