Don’t panic is rotten advice,” Peggy Noonan advised in her column in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal. A stream of similar opinions in the New York Times and from CNN, reminded me of Machiavelli’s historical observation that “whoever controls the people’s fears becomes master of their souls.”
The formula for achieving such mastery has not changed in millennia: stoke any fear, turn the fear to hate of whomever and whatever you accuse of standing in the way of safety, and make yourself the agent of that hate.
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