Dear Editor,
At 12 years of age I got a one-shot immunization against Republican propaganda, let me tell you about it. My old man had two distinct characteristics, he was a hunter, and he was a Democrat. Our family moved from the city to the country in 1964, so that dad would have more time to hunt. One bird season, he and his setters headed out every day but two: his goddaughter got married that fall and there was an early winter blizzard.
1994 was an election year and I heard something very strange at school, a classmate was saying that Democrats wanted to confiscate guns.
Dad laughed when I told him. He explained that lots of people never get over giving up their belief in the Tooth-fairy and the Easter Bunny, so they created a bogey-woman, “Confiscation Connie,” who lurks outside their door, hungering for their guns.
When I asked Grandpa about CC he had to chuck, and I realized that Connie was an inside joke between the World War veterans, dad and his pop. Grandpa said I had stumbled onto what was called a “whispering campaign,” an effective but misleading message that politicians were embarrassed to express publicly.
That embarrassment disappeared in 1988 when the Fairness Doctrine was rescinded. Confiscation Connie become the propaganda template, the dread spreading mother of all Conservative conspiracies and misinformation, as FOX News and talk radio successfully demonized the political Left.
Jesse Laurentius,
Perryville
