Fear

If one had to describe what it’s like waking up in February 2025, the most common word would likely be “panic”. You either panic because you think the traditional values that help you identify your personhood with the nation state you reside in are under attack, or you panic because you think some threat actor over which you have no control, is dismantling the social fabric of the place you call home. Either way, I don’t know many people who wake up and think everything is just “fine”. They might use positive words to describe how they feel when someone they identify as a protagonist seemingly “owns”, “destroys” “humiliates” or otherwise “attacks” the side of the social struggle they view as an antagonist, but very few, if any people in the United States right now would say that everything is going well in the absence of advocacy or negative actions that positively affect their “tribe”.

I grew up in a separatist cult. It wasn’t one that registered high on the scale of counterculture groups that predicted the end of the world in the 90s. It was poor, mainly white, rural under educated and fearful people trying to find community. We went from meeting in the gymnasium of a public school in Painesville, Ohio to meeting in a renovated barn on the border of Lake and Geauga Counties. The property was selected mainly because it was far from federal interstates and had multiple access points to well water. We were taught to fear the government, fear other religions, fear neighbors that weren’t members of our group and to stockpile food, water, fuel, and most importantly, firearms. We weren’t waiting for the end of the world, we hoped for it via the dissolution of the American government at the time so it could be replaced by a theocracy that forced the nation to follow Christian principles. Again, this was the 90s.

Fear is an important factor in the manipulation of the human psyche. It’s not, in and of itself, an emotion that anyone just has, it is almost always the result of or reaction to anger, insecurity, anxiety, regret, ignorance and in most cases the absence of healthy relationships that make the lives of both people involved better. Fear is contagious. It spreads faster than almost any other social connectivity device. I watched fear destroy my father’s mind. He grew up a member of the baby boomer generation. His father was an American GI and his mother was a German “war bride” that met my grandfather on VE Day in Frankfurt and fell in love. She was also a Nazi. My grandfather mainly ignored her foundational belief system because for his generation, in opposition to that of his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, they operated out of hope and enthusiasm. As a result my grandmother never really spoke of Hitler or her Nazi worldview in his presence. The feeling that the world is getting better is so much more powerful than the fear that it is getting worse.

My father grew up in relative comfort. He lived on a farm that wasn’t needed to be operated as a farm for the family to survive. My grandfather liked living in the countryside, but he worked in the city of Cleveland for the Plain Dealer newspaper. My father’s childhood wasn’t necessarily healthy. His mother struggled with alcoholism and drug abuse and his father was eccentric to the point of it being a liability. In spite of these negative imprints, they never almost lost their house, they never missed any meals, they had cars and pets and clothes and all the other things you associate with the generation raised following World War II. My father attended a well-funded public school and married briefly at the age of 18. The divorce was almost immediate, and he wouldn’t marry again until after his lifestyle had already taken him to Europe, Jamaica, Canada and across the United States several times. He never worried about his credit score and he worked only when he needed money and casually toured marijuana hotspots when he needed a break from factory work. The one thing absent from his childhood, was the fear of a worse future.

He met my mother when they were both in their 30s and married almost immediately. To the point of both their families’ assuming it was due to an unplanned pregnancy. It wasn’t. They just didn’t have much to fear at the time. The result of a changing world and my mother’s experiences as a child pushed my family into a cycle of fear a generation earlier than the rest of America. The contagion is pretty easy for me to see as a pattern, and has defined my political ideologies later in my life. My mother’s parents got divorced in the 1960s. A full generation and a half before it became more accepted in society to come from a single parent home. Back when it was still firmly described as a broken home. My mother’s father was a paranoid schizophrenic who struggled with PTSD and depression. He left when she was a young teenager and wouldn’t appear in her story again until my own fourth birthday when he knocked unsolicited on the door of my childhood home. His departure gave my mother a lifelong insecurity of being abandoned or poor. She spent most of my early childhood making sure I knew that we weren’t “hillbillies” or the dreaded “white trash”. She also spent the rest of her life looking for a replacement for the father figure she lost when her dad skipped town.

Not all children of divorce find themselves in a situation of insecurity, but when a child is insecure, they are more likely to assume a worldview of fear and negativity than one of hope and confidence. My mother brought this to her relationship with my father and both spiraled into a world of fear that eventually led our household to exposure to what is now commonplace but was novel and fringe in the 1990s and 00s. My father was always susceptible to conspiracy and hidden meaning. Our mailbox was usually stuffed with newsletters espousing the secrets of the illuminati, masonic lodge, a need to return to the gold standard, FEMA as a tool of genocide, lizard people, biblical giants, flat earth, the dangers of vaccines and occasionally, the coming race war. His love of feeling like reality was not all it appeared to be and the desire to find the real truth was connected to my grandmother’s need to justify the realities of World War II by blaming it on everyone but her own party and Adolf Hitler.

My grandmother’s beliefs about race were ridiculous to me as a child. My father had a closer connection to the idea of why we should fear the other. I regularly did my homework while my father listened to his shortwave radio and believed every word that was broadcast out of North Dakota, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming separatists’ compounds preaching the idea of sovereign citizens and the unconstitutionality of income and property taxes. As I type this, I’m transported back to the smell of freshly erased math homework while sounds of paranoia wafted through the atmosphere as I would chuckle, not realizing that my reaction was that of a child determining something adult was indeed childish.

My mother would roll her eyes at my father’s extracurricular conspiratorial activities unless they were related directly to our religion. She was concerned when he joined “the Ohio militia” and would tell him to calm down when he would overreact to broadcasts about what would become LGBTQIA+ rights or women’s health issues. She wasn’t comfortable unless my father was being led in his paranoia by a leader of which she approved. There was a comfort for her in having a designated religious leader put his stamp of approval on irrational acts of fear and anger. If my father had told us that we would spend Saturday mornings holding pictures of aborted fetuses in front of planned parenthood clinics in downtown Cleveland, she would’ve told him that was too much for kids to be exposed to, but because the leader of our cult mandated it, it was our duty to participate. If my father said that he wanted to buy an above ground fuel tank and military grade generator, she would’ve protested the expenses. But because Pastor Phil demanded it of the members of our group, it became our mandate as the chosen of God and so there was room on the credit cards to make sure we were obedient followers.

My father found a deep well of belief in this weaponized version of evangelical Christianity. A good primer to understand the environment in which I was raised would be Tara Westover’s “Educated”. Our group invested years of preparation and money into the hope that the Y2K computer virus would send society back to the 19th century. My father believed so completely that it would be the result that he did not speak about it after the turn of the millennia for about a month and it was only after he convinced himself that it did destroy civilization and the appearance that it had not was a conspiracy in itself. Many of the mainstream policies of the conservative right were foundational beliefs of our church. God and guns, anti homosexual, anti abortion, anti women’s liberation, anti UN, anti globalization and anti science. It was such an extreme fringe of the Christian Right that we made other Christians in the area uncomfortable and built in the rejection of mainstream Christian thought as a cornerstone of our identity.

The only reason to allow yourself to be manipulated in such a fundamental way, as so often extreme ideologies are capable of, is because of fear. “I don’t want to be left out, left behind, subject to punishment, or worse, left to make my own decisions.” These fear responses have proliferated as the world became, on average, safer. We are more well fed, and exposed to more luxury and comfort than at any other period in human history. I can fly anywhere in the world on money that I don’t have and experience cultures, cuisines and geography that previously were only permitted through acts of war or forceful international diplomacy. Our access to information, entertainment, knowledge and even love are available without getting out of bed, whenever we want, for as little as a couple dollars a day. And we all hate and fear more as a result of it. Our access to comfort is making us less optimistic and more afraid than any other moment in the history of the modern world. We have franchised the fear that before was only associated with the threat of nuclear war and applied that same level of uncertainty to whether the world is, indeed, round.

My life and worldview is much different from most others. I’ve lived in places that some only dream of. I speak a second language that is often used as a hyperbolic example of confusion itself. I’ve worked with some of the wealthiest people in the world, in some of the most oppressive countries currently in existent. I’ve been brainwashed, radicalized and deprogrammed. I went from a homeschooled alt right cult member to winning the Beijing LGBT Center’s Ally of the Year, multiple years in a row. I’ve been detained for suspected drug trafficking, placed in medical concentration facilities, accused of acts of hubris, disloyalty, and abomination by those from whom I desired love and acceptance from the most. Looking forward from my youth into the future, it would be hard to describe what my justification was for not marching on the capital on January 6th, or why I’m not a card-carrying member of a conservative secret society bent on achieving a Christian theocracy.

The only thing I can point to that explains how and why I am where I am in and the state of mind I’ve found myself in, is because at a certain point, through the kindness of others, I decided to not be afraid. I hope through this outlet of writing about my background and experiences others can also realize that fear leads to the absence of things and there is more yet to be done in America than there is to fear.

Even more importantly, you can’t shame the fearful into being unafraid. Only through patience and understanding can you pull someone away from the fringe and back into a realm of rational and logical participation in society. You have to listen to them, regardless of how ridiculous they sound, and maybe as a result they will listen to you in return. Hopefully someone who is currently in the position I found myself in 20 years ago finds a hook in what I write about, and it pulls them back to what used to be described as reality.