How Rightwing Hysteria Goes Viral
From Satanic panic to critical race theory, one psychological phenomenon helps explain why the right gets so riled up so fast.
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A year ago, almost nobody knew what critical race theory was. This arcane academic niche was the dominion of a tiny group of left-leaning legal scholars until very recently. Today, it’s practically all conservatives talk about. Pundits rail against it from their bully pulpits on cable news. Right-wingers shout about CRT at school board meetings and roadside demonstrations.
This is the doing of a single slick reactionary named Chris Rufo, who manufactured the panic out of whole cloth.
In a New Yorker article, Rufo explained how he conjured the right’s new favorite bogeyman. It all started when he was looking at the materials for an antiracism training put on by the city of Seattle.
Rufo checked out the antiracist authors referenced in the training documents then looked at who they were citing. He traced their intellectual lineage back to critical race theorists like Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw.
After researching critical race theory for a bit, he suddenly started seeing it everywhere. In an appearance on Tucker Carlson last fall, Rufo issued a dire warning that “critical race theory has pervaded every aspect of the federal government.”
This is an example of what psychologists call the frequency illusion. When you first learn about something new, you start to notice it more often, creating a false sense that it is suddenly omnipresent.
The effect is even greater if this new thing is billed as an “existential threat to the United States,” which is how Rufo described critical race theory on Tucker.
Frequency illusion explains how these things metastasize so quickly. In dozens of subsequent appearances and articles, Rufo clued conservatives in on a whole range of terminology that he claimed was associated with critical race theory.
He produced a primer for the Heritage Foundation titled “How to Identify Critical Race Theory: Knowing Critical Race Theory When You See It and Fighting It When You Can.”
Here’s an excerpt:
5. Equity Replaces Equality: “Equity” sounds like “equality”, but under critical race theory, it has become its functional opposite. “Equality” means equal treatment of all Americans under the law. CRT’s “equity” demands race-based discrimination
Rufo then invites readers to “become a whistleblower” and “submit documentation of CRT training at your school or workplace.”
He published the ones that had the most potential to generate mockery or outrage.
The result was an endless feedback loop. The more examples of “critical race theory” people saw, the more they looked for it. The more they looked for it, the more they found it.
Frequency illusion plays a distinctive role in conservative psychology and the generation of reactionary moral panics.
Some studies suggest that conservatives are more vulnerable to the perception of threat. Conservatives are especially susceptible to narratives of a “creeping menace.”
From the Red Scare of 1917 and McCarthyism to 21st century hysteria about terrorist “sleeper cells” and “cultural Marxism,” conservatives have a persistent feeling of anxiety about some subterranean force gaining power under their noses.
This fear is activated by the frequency illusion. When conservatives become suddenly aware of this menace they never heard of before, they immediately feel outnumbered and encircled by it as well.
The only way to keep conservatives active and mobilized is to make them feel like they are constantly under threat even when they’re in power. That’s exactly what Rufo was doing when he said “even under Trump, [the bureaucracy] is being weaponized against core American values.”
There’s a certain insidious genius in the way that Rufo plays on these tendencies. He was able to craft a “new” threat that touched on all the conservatives’ existing collective neurosis.
All conservative moral panics work essentially the same way. The right is alerted to something new to be afraid of and then they start finding it everywhere. In the 1980s and early 1990s, it was Satanism and Dungeons & Dragons.
QAnon, in particular, feeds off frequency illusion. QAnon believers are provided with an endless series of obscure codes and symbols that they are meant to seek out and assign meaning to.
So, if you want to get conservatives whipped up into a frenzy, there’s a simple formula to follow.
First, take some things they’re already scared of — communism, immigrants, Black people, etc. — and come up with a new concept that integrates that stuff, ex. “cultural Marxism” or “critical race theory.”
Then go on Tucker Carlson and tell them this new thing is being used to indoctrinate your kids.
It’s easy.
