nanny state

4.21 note: prolly neglected, but feed maw with constant fear/hype of what gubmint is gonna take, guns, burgers, gas....

see dependence devil term weak unmanly

see RACISM, MISOGYNY, COASTAL ELITE

see plantation, NOTE GINGRICH DEVIL TERMS POLAR

https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-says-democratic-party-coalition-includes-resentful-government-addicted

KIRK (HOST): And so that gives me hope. The ordinary man. The muscular class. Our movement long term is stronger than the Democrats. The Democrats, they are atemporary coalition between permanent, resentful, government addicted minorities and WHITE? people that want government benefits, Xanax and chardonnay wine moms, and resentful college educated white, liberal women who complain about everything withsingle women, and oligarchs. WORD SALAD? That's the Democrat Party.

Republicans are a multi-racial, small business, parents party, entrepreneurs, Hispanics, Blacks, all across the board. The Republican Party is a healthier party. Not left versus right, but top versus bottom. And that might not, that might not manifest itself this election. I'm just going to be honest. No guarantee. But if the Republican Party keeps this pace up as artificial intelligence starts to displace millions of jobs, as the technocrats try to redesign society, the Democrat coalition is going to shrink and shrink. All they have left is fringe social issues of trans zealots and as we say frequently the Aspen ski lift women who care so much about abortion that's all they vote on. I think it's a Potemkin village. I think it's a house of cards. I think it's an unsustainable political coalition.

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mma

February 6, 2025, edition of Fox News' America Reports

JOHN ROBERTS (ANCHOR): So Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana who writes about this in the National Review. He says in part, numerous studies show human beings are happier and healthier when employed. Long-term joblessness associated with higher rates of cardiovascular disease, depression, and anxiety. One study even recommended employment as a quote critical mental health intervention.

He says there are 15 million able-bodied adults without children on Medicaid who could probably reenter the workforce. This is kind of like the idea that we saw back in the Clinton administration of welfare to work.

DR. MARC SIEGEL (FOX CONTRIBUTOR): Or bridge to jobs. And I completely agree with everything you just said. It is 15 million that have been identified, John.

In the Trump 1 administration 13 states received approval for just this kind of program and another 9 were applying for it when the Biden administration came in and nixed it. So, this is something on the table for a while.

I agree with the issue it improves health. I also think, by the way, that's its tied in with something else you are going to ask me about, which is people using Medicaid in the wrong way. They might have a way to make money, but they don’t tie it in with their health insurance so essentially Medicaid is part of a nanny state.

You know, the vast majority of people in this country get their insurance by working for it and they are proud of it and might even take a job a little less and they want in order to get the health insurance to provide for their family. With Medicaid it's uncoupled and the federal government pays 70% of Medicaid across the board, so even though it's a state-administered program to a large extent it is a federally-funded program and fraud and abuse and misuse of Medicaid is a federal crime.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/republicans-fantasy/

in the real world, there are real problems that serious people are worried about: global pandemic, climate change, economic inequality, systematic racism, mass shootings, and gendered violence, just to name a few. The problem for Republicans, of course, is that they are, quite literally, on the wrong side of pretty much each of those issues, and spend their time either actively making problems worse or getting in the way of people who want to fix things. Outside of sociopaths, Fox News hosts, and people with "Pepe" memes in their Twitter profiles, however, few people want to look in the mirror and see a villain gazing back at them. So right-wing media, which has always been addicted to selling its audiences on imaginary threats and preposterous fairy tales of conservative victimhood, has only been escalating such nonsense in recent months as the Republican policy agenda has been increasingly exposed to be nonexistent.

If your "team" is on the side of the Capitol insurrectionists and Derek Chauvin, it's hard to suppress the haunting fear that you're the baddies. So Fox News is on hand to spoon out alluring fantasies that recast liberals as the bad guys and conservatives as the long-suffering heroes.Tucker Carlson — a Fox News host who clearly relishes being a cartoon villain (think: "Dan White Society") — coughed up an almost too-perfect sample of the form Monday night, when he encouraged his audience of millions to harass ordinary people minding their own business under the guise of "helping."

Using as cover the recent reports that much of outdoor masking is unnecessary to prevent the transmission of COVID-19, Carlson told his audience that people wearing masks outside are "the aggressors" and that "the next time you see someone in a mask on the sidewalk or on the bike path, do not hesitate" to get in their face and demand they remove the mask. Carlson claimed this can be done "politely but firmly," but of course, it's categorically impossible to "politely" boss other people around about choices that simply do not affect you. And no, his story about how masks "prevent intimacy and human contact" is not enough. Strangers on the street do not owe you "intimacy," despite what creeps who follow women around and demand smiles might wish to believe.

Carlson then escalated by asking his viewers to call the police when they see children wearing masks because it "should be illegal." [call cops and cps till they show] Of course, Carlson also knows full well how dangerous such nuisance calls (which are *actually* illegal) can be if the target is a person of color — and likely, he's counting on it, Derek Chauvin defender that he is.

Skipping a mask outside does, indeed, seem to be mostly harmless, which means that the common-sense response is to simply leave other people alone while you also do what you want. But conservatives want revenge because they've been made to wear masks where it is necessary. Carlson is only too happy to feed them a narrative that allows them to pretend to be heroes while continuing to be jerks for no good reason whatsoever.

Over the weekend, we saw another comically over-the-top example of right-wing fake victimhood narratives when a totally fake — and obviously fake — conspiracy theory about President Joe Biden imposing severe beef rations tore through the right-wing media and exploded on social media.

Jon Skolnik explained here at Salon how right-wing media distorted a study about reducing meat consumption to impact climate change, pretended it somehow was part of Biden's infrastructure plan and ran wild with it. But what was truly remarkable wasn't just that the folks at Fox News and other outlets deliberately misled the public with false claims that Biden planned to "limit" beef consumption to four pounds a year. It was how this lie managed to spread rapidly, infecting every corner of the country, in record time.

"It's tempting to dismiss this attack as too absurd to be believed," Dan Pfeiffer wrote in his Message Box newsletter, but warned that, "But too often, Democrats focus on the absurdity of the specifics and ignore the believability of the general impression."

Indeed, watching the "Biden's banning beef" lie spread out over social media, boosted by supposedly "apolitical" Instagram influencers and other such conduits, it was easy to see how this worked. Many people — possibly most — had wholly emotional reactions when they heard or read the lie, and were too focused on lashing out angrily to think critically about the story. So many reactions online were variations of "how dare you criticize me" and "fake meat tastes bad," instead of the more helpful "is this even true?"

The best right-wing B.S. works in this way, by activating people's pre-existing guilt and making them feel defensive. A lot of Americans, even on the right, already feel bad about how much beef they eat. It's not just because it's bad for the environment, but because they know it's bad for their health, and American discourse around food and health tends to be highly moralistic. The Biden beef lie works first by activating that sense of shame and then giving people a story that makes them feel better about themselves, about how they're actually the good guys here. They get so focused on trying to make their defensive feelings go away that they don't stop to search Snopesor Politifact and find out if it's even true.

Carlson is playing the same game with his mask nonsense.

Conservatives obviously have a lot of sublimated guilt over refusing to take the pandemic seriously and are therefore on a hair-trigger for defensive reactions. So they're ready to hear how someone else wearing a mask is a judgment on them, about how they're the "real" victims, and mask-wearers are the "real" bad guys. Truth and common sense are crowded out by these over-the-top emotional reactions, driven by their own — in many cases, completely earned — sense of shame.

As Pfeiffer notes, the only way to push back on nonsense like this is for ordinary people to confront those who are spreading it on social media. The problem is that these right-wing freakouts are fueled by conservatives feeling angry, ashamed, and judged — frankly often because they deserve to feel bad about their behavior. Unfortunately, that means that the smarter reactions are ones that turn the temperature down, not up. It can help a lot for interlocutors to focus on facts, instead of moral judgments about things like mask-wearing or beef-eating, and save the moral discussion for another time, when folks are in a less defensive mindset.

Either way, the amount of culture war debris that the right-wing media will be churning out is going to be immense over the next few years. Conservatives have a lot of guilt for their terrible behavior and beliefs, and therefore will be easy marks for any and every story that lets them believe they're the victims and not the victimizers. Right-wing media, as these examples show, is incredibly good at kicking up fake controversies that feed off those defensive feelings. Conservatives are addicted to these lies, and like most addicts, they need increasingly stronger stuff to get their fix. Be prepared.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

5. ‘Tyranny’ depends on who governs, not how

In many of the events across different states, protesters objected to what they called “tyranny,” and held up the Revolution-era “Don’t Tread On Me” Gadsden flag to symbolize their resistance to government rules. They were not objecting to President Donald Trump’s April 13 declaration that, as president, his “authority is total” over the nation.

Instead they were objecting to governors’ lockdown rules, which they highlighted as overreaching their power. Many protesters likened the government’s behavior to Nazis, with protesters adding “Heil” before Democratic governors’ names.

No male governor was targeted as viciously and overtly as female Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. A widely circulated poster depicted her dressed as Adolf Hitler, giving a Nazi salute beside a swastika. Other demonstrators talked about Whitmer as though she were mothering them instead of governing them, like one who insisted, “We’re not her children!”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanny_state

Nanny state is a term of British origin that conveys a view that a government or its policies are overprotective or interfering unduly with personal choice.^[1] The term "nanny state" likens government to the role that a nanny has in child rearing. An early usage of the term comes from Conservative British Member of Parliament Iain Macleod who referred to "what I like to call the nanny state" in the 3 December 1965 edition of The Spectator.^[2]

The term was popularised by the British and American tobacco industry – especially by their touring celebrity-lobbyists Bernard Levin ^[3] and Auberon Waugh ^[4] – and later by PM Margaret Thatcher.

Uses of term

...

United States[

Although the term is undefined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, it has entered use in the United States over the past decade by some political commentators. For example, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research think tank used the term in 2006 to describe conservative policies that protect the income of the rich.^[17]

Conversely, the term is also used in an at-large sense against the legislative tendencies of contemporary liberal political ideology, with examples such as progressive banishment of tobacco smoking and the enactment of mandatory bicycle helmet laws.^[18]

David Harsanyi used the term to describe food labeling regulations, the legal drinking age and socially conservative government policies.^[19] Another example of criticism was the response^[16] to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's May 2012 proposal to restrict the sale of soft drinks in venues, restaurants and sidewalk carts to 16 ounces.^[20]

James Bennett and the Tobacco Industry

Bennett has staged media campaigns and co-authored books funded by tobacco companies withThomas DiLorenzo of George Mason University. In 1990, Bennett and DiLorenzo submitted a $150'000 project proposal to RJR, the objective of which was "to discredit the voluntary health agencies in the minds of the public." [2]

In 1995, they billed RJR $100,000 [3] to produce a book a called Cancerscam: the diversion of federal cancer funds to politics, that attacked health charities for spending what the authors deemed a disproportionate amount of their income on political advocacy. The authors argued the money should be spent on research instead.The Cancerscam book comported perfectly with a 1993 Philip Morris internal Corporate Affairs plan to work towards constraining health charities by restricting how much of their funds could be spent on research and capping the amount the charities could spend on salaries and lobbying. Bates Page -6028 of the 119 page plan

Books co-authored by James Bennett and Thomas DiLorenzo

Underground Government: The Off-Budget Public Sector (Softcover) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. Dilorenzo, Cato Institute, 1983.
Destroying Democracy: How Government Funds Partisan Politics (Hardcober) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. Dilorenzo, Cato Institute, 1986.
Unfair Competition: The Profits of Nonprofits (Hardcover) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. Dilorenzo,Hamilton Press, 1989.
Official Lies: How Washington Misleads Us (Hardcover) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. Dilorenzo, Attitude Media, 1992.
Unhealthy Charities: Hazardous to Your Health and Wealth (Paperback) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Basic Books, June 1995.
Cancer Scam: Diversion of Federal Cancer Funds to Politics (Hardcover) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. Dilorenzo, Transaction Publishers, 1997
The Food & Drink Police: America's Nannies, Busybodies & Petty Tyrants (Paperback) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. Dilorenzo, Transaction Publishers, 1999.
Public Health Profiteering(Hardcover) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Transaction Publishers, August 2001.
From Pathology to Politics: Public Health in America (Paperback) by James T. Bennett, Thomas J. Dilorenzo, Transaction Publishers, 2008.

Related SourceWatch Resources

**Capital Research Center**and the tobacco industry
Thomas DiLorenzo (co-authored pro-tobacco industry books with James T. Bennett]]

nanny state

Uses of term

United States[

See also:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

The Nanny State | Cato Institute

America's 'Nanny State' Laws - CNBC.com

NANNY STATE | definition in the Cambridge English Dictionary

Nanny State Index | The best and worst countries to eat, drink ...

10 Worst Nanny State Policies - IPA - The Voice For Freedom

nanny state - Urban Dictionary

Nanny state | Definition of Nanny state at Dictionary.com

California: The Ultimate Nanny State - The Federalist

James Bennett and the Tobacco Industry

Books co-authored by James Bennett and Thomas DiLorenzo

Related SourceWatch Resources

Related Links