A Threat to Our Democracy™

I first became aware of the phrase A Threat to Our Democracy™ during covid. There’s a clip, which I can no longer find, of scores of News™ channels trotting this phrase out like The Stepford Wives to describe all of those naughty, naughty, people who didn’t agree with the official government pack of lies narrative on covid.

They weren’t being Messiahs, or even very naughty boys. No, they were being A Threat to Our Democracy™ (ATTOD).

It has since become another one of those slogans - those meaningless words and phrases - that fall under the broad category of “anything I don’t like is an X”.

We had similar targeted programs of these propagandistic slogans throughout covid. We had campaigns of

• I wish I’d taken the vaccine

• Nobody is safe until everybody is safe

• Horse paste

• Pandemic of the unvaccinated

And so on.

ATTOD has since, like the phrase “rooted in white supremacy”, been appended to all sorts of things.

If you’re having an anti-racist sort of day you can use the latter :

• Doing your own research is rooted in white supremacy

Or, if you’ve woken up feeling like your government needs a bit of a pep :

• Doing your own research is A Threat to Our Democracy™

Having your own extensive set of mix ‘n’ match slogans is essential for the modern woke warrior. Rather than the term “woke”, which many dismiss, perhaps we should just call these microwits The Slogan People.

Because that’s all they seem to be :

A semi-sentient walking septic tank of slogans

Without their slogans they’d be nothing. Physicists spend millions trying to create near-perfect vacuums in their labs. If only we could just take the head of one of The Slogan People and remove the slogans; you’d have the most perfect vacuum nature has ever known.

In a world of surreal it doesn’t come much more surreal than the EU controlling the means and content of democratic discourse in order to “protect” democracy. This set of ideas, this little acceptable bundle here, this is democracy. Everything else is ATTOD.

There’s a specific set of slogans to be used when justifying totalitarianism like this. For example, you can claim safety, saying that misinformation is dangerous. This is a very popular technique in other areas. Sir, Sir, Jock McBigotFace in the next cubicle said a very nasty thing and now I feel unsafe. Make me safe. Please, make me safe.

You can always ramp it up by claiming you’re protecting children. Damn useful Trojan Horses those kids - because everyone agrees that kids should be protected and safe from some of the mind-bending crap on the internet. But not from porn, or learning how to stick things up their arses, apparently - that’s all perfectly fine according to modern education and pleasure-positive sex-ed approaches.

It’s perfectly fine for your daughter to learn that the way to eternal bliss and happiness is to have her tits surgically removed, but not OK to talk about capitalism as anything but the worst evil ever invented. One of these things is safe and beautiful and wonderful - and the other is just hateful and, well, another of those ATTODs.

What they really mean, of course, whenever they trot out a phrase like ATTOD is

A Threat to Our Demagoguery

It’s a bizarre world. In the opening part of a speech the average politician will thunder and orate about Democracy™ and how it needs to be protected, and in the second half of the speech remonstrate against populism - which is popular sentiment the politician doesn’t like.

Democracy, it seems, is a bloody wonderful idea until people start liking The Wrong Thing™.

I reached out to Donald Trump, but he was unavailable for comment. He’s being prosecuted for saying The Wrong Thing™, lots of times, and is the biggest ATTOD since, well, ever.

One of Biden’s carers aides was more forthcoming. He claimed the President had this to say :

Cupcake is demonstracky, gooey, refrigerator, purple. Look away now. And my house nearly burned down, don’t you know. Is it time for my hot chocolate?

The Slogan People are, admittedly, the nicest, most compassionate, most tolerant and loving people on the planet. They would never, ever, round on a group of Jewish students and chase them until they had to lock themselves in the college library for their protection, for example. No, they would never do such a thing.

Apparently, the librarians told the Jewish students to go upstairs and hide. Up the Anne Frank stairway, one presumes.

A spokesthing for The Slogan People said “we were decolonizing the campus, because diversity is our trans rights for climate and reproductive justice and nobody is safe until Jews aren’t”

In other places of higher “education” students are being offered extra credit for every Pro-Palestinian slogan they can write down¹ - preferably on a large banner to take on their next protest (attendance at which also gets you extra credit)

These students were given two extra credits for demonstrating their mastery of mix ‘n’ match sloganizing

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the fundamentalist Islamic world, gays were happily throwing themselves off buildings in order to support Palestine - at least that’s the version of events presented by Imam AlFrothyMouth of Hackthehandsoffistan. He awarded them extra credit (to be redeemed in Paradise).

I still recall, some time ago now, one Muslim cleric attributing the (alleged) rise in earthquakes to the promiscuity of women. Later studies showed that this was, in fact, due to Climate Change™.

Not to be outdone by mere Islamic fundamentalism, Reverend Bonkers McKnob of the Church of Get Back in the Kitchen, applauded the hard-line stance against homosexuality taken by the the Islamists and called for the construction of higher buildings.

All of the outrageous and over the top snark aside, we do have something of a problem. Our lives are being slowly, but surely, constrained. There are extra physical constraints on our freedom of association, we’re going to have to demonstrate our worthiness to be part of society if the EU and the WHO get their way with their digital health passport proposals. There are rising constraints on our money and, potentially, on how we are allowed to spend it. There are increasing constraints on the kind of food we’re going to be allowed to eat. There are increasing constraints on our ability to travel - even within our own neighbourhoods as a result of things like 15 minute cities and ULEZ zones. We won’t be able to send private messages to anyone (because we might send a meme that hurts someone, for example).

There are increasing constraints on our ability to resist demagoguery through the unholy coupling of Big Tech and Big Government who seek to Protect Democracy™ by squashing the very tools and expression of democracy. The Slogan People seek to constrain our moral perspectives, through the simple expedient of sloganizing everything they don’t like as some form of hatred.

And so I will finish this piece, which I hope has offered some dark humour to enjoy with your morning coffee, with a recognition that everything I’ve written here is

A Threat to Our Democracy™

1. I made that up - but students are being awarded extra credit for going on anti-Jewish protests