HESTON, MAINE — Chet Lindley has been a Republican strategist in upper northeast of the United States for twenty-two years. In that time he says he has watched his party both win and lose presidential elections, and he can tell, he says, that many of the candidates for the GOP might bin “a little bit of trouble” in the primary, as he puts it.
“You see, in order for a Republican to win his party’s nomination these days, the candidate must employ a delicate balance of a potent cocktail of fears to gin up,” Lindley told our interiviewer. “In other words,” he said later, “they must use the right mix of phobias to win the primary. I’m not too sure any of them have found just the right recipe for fear-based paranoia that will drive the scared white folks to the polls in big enough droves to win the nomination, but I’m sure they’ll keep trying.”
Lindley outlined for us the main phobias that he says any successful Republican candidate must play to in their base in order to win the nomination and face the Democrats in the fall. “First, Islamaphobia. It never hurts to remind Republicans about 9/11 every chance you get, and with the rise of ISIS, you have ample opportunity to ring the terrorism bell,” he said. Lindley said a good Republican candidate will “sound the xenophobia alarm by talking a lot about illegal immigration” and that “implying that all undocumented people are from Mexico, no matter where they’re actually from” is “huge-balls to Republicans.”
“The culture wars are a real thing to Republicans,” Lindley said, “so a good, healthy amount of American homophobia is a great way to tap into that.” Lindley said that if candidates “make off color and ignorant remarks about transgender people and the bathrooms they use” it scores “almost infinite brownie points with the base.” Mr. Lindley said that candidates like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum have done a “tremendous job banging the gays hard, banging the gays often, and banging the gays without apology,” and that the top-tier candidates should adopt some of their rhetoric as their own, in order to capitalize on their position in the polls.
What Lindley describes as “blackaphobia” is the next irrational fear that he says is vital for a good Republican candidate to play into. “Willie Horton,” Lindley said, “the Southern Strategy. Welfare queens. The Knockout Game. Pretty much all of BET’s programming. This is the stuff that Republican candidates can toss out like candy to their base.” Lindey said that “This feeling, this blacka phobia, it is pervasive among conservatives, even as they ooh and ah over them in professional sporting and hip-hop performance arenas.”
“Blackaphobia is the fear of black people somehow overcoming their overwhelming statistical, economic, and societal minority status and get one over on whites. And it used to be able to guarantee a Republican the White House, not just the nomination, but hey, use what you got, right,” Lindley said rhetorically. The last phobia he said, is the one that is the very most important to “fan the flames of hatred” for — Liberalaphobia.
“You absolutely have to play on conservatives’ fear of a Marxist Coup on both the government and the beautiful, heavenly-ordained free market,” Lindley said, adding that, “a great candidate will have Republican voters convinced the Democrats will be aborting babies and forcing Christian couples to get divorced and gay married while swearing allegiance to communism and Sharia law by the end of the first debate.”
Lindley said that there is still time, but that none of the candidates have quite “gotten the right ratio of ingredients quite right.” He has confidence someone will, or at the very least, “they’ll give us someone to vote for that we think is at least better than the libtard the Democrats put up.”
