The Fringe

Right and left. Have you ever been stuck with your mouth open upon hearing a longtime next-door neighbor proclaim that the only way to reduce crime is to defund or eliminate the police, or that vaccines kill more than they help, to which he or she will insist statistics bear this or that out and claim that everyone but you know these are facts? If anything like this has happened to you, you’ve been “fringed”.

A “fringe” is an in-your-face, absurd statement propagated by a “fringer” on the right or left to shock the fringed into speechlessness, disbelief, and submission, or maybe just to get attention by stirring the pot with dogma venom. Fringe is derived from the far ends of political ideology found swirling at the edges of reason – “the fringes”. As such, fringe is no longer a noun, verb, or any other part of speech. It’s something new that we have never as a country experienced before.

Extremists fringe, embracing rumors as truths to be passed on as facts. The shock of blank disbelief in the eyes of the fringed is the reward, perhaps momentarily satisfying the fringer’s craving for feelings of superiority.

The fringer’s moral compass is not set to anything. Fringing isn’t a struggle for ideas that make our world better. It’s about power for its own sake, over others, over us.

Fringe is like the “ick” factor. Even if a fringer doesn’t touch you, you still have to wash the fringe off. Two hot showers may be necessary after 10 minutes of AOC’s progressive wish list, or five minutes of Tucker Carlson and replacement theory. Fringers smell like ambition.

The more preposterous the fringe, the more aggressive the presentation – little dog stuff. The stain from a fringer’s insistence that Biden lost the election may never wash off.

The pious displays of Trump and Cruz are fringe miracles. I could throw in some of the far-out leftfield positions of Sanders and opt for the illusion of even-handedness but that would be a fringe stretch against my left-leaning bias, though there’s enough fringe on both sides to share some of the blame for the mess we’re in.

Fringers are never wrong, and angry, very angry. Watch a fringer on TV with the sound turned off and see for yourself. The self-righteous display of contained rage is the foundation upon which fringe intimidation rests, the most effective tool in the fringer’s bag of gotchas. A Fringer’s anger likely preceded any and all partisan talking points. The anger was always there, waiting.

Highly educated people can be fringers, proof of the gap that sometimes exists between smarts and intelligence. A fringer could be a Ph.D. who claims there’s evidence that vaccines contain microchips that, once injected, track us on behalf of liberal elites. It’s always a surprise when someone we thought was very bright fringes, thus providing evidence to the contrary.

Whenever I see a police uniform I feel safer. But when I see armed fringers at right or left protests I feel threatened, fringed. Their ideology is questionable to me, bullying more likely the objective, perhaps seeking out the hapless look of fear on some they encounter, measuring whether friend or foe by the reaction, at times flaunting their intentions with a constitutional smokescreen of trendy political verbiage that their purpose is to protect us. Against who, me, you, the government, where? It’s empty. There is no added peace of mind, just fringe, with bullets. Scary fringe. I am a gun owner whose target is badly needed regulation.

Fringers hang together puffing one another up discussing the latest pieces of doctrine or conspiracy theory in minute detail as though they really exist. They may not believe half of what they say but insist you swallow the fringe whole. All conviction, no essence.

Fringers on both sides talk “at” anyone who isn’t in agreement. Compromise may be impossible because conflict is the objective. They feed on discord and their appetite is endless. Disagreement with a militant fringer can result in a verbal storm of very personal, condescending innuendoes and outright slights completely independent of the discussion at hand. Your right to freedom of speech will no longer apply. An uncomfortable physical threat may hang in the air.

Watch out for fringettes, know-it-all burgeoning fringers under the age of 35, the threshold to run for presidential office. Just the same, they are otherwise unqualified due to their impractical, glib solutions for all the ills that plague us. A mega-fringe is a mob of like-minded fringers up to no good.

To summarize: If you’ve bought into the myth that January 6 was a gathering of patriotic tourists you’ve been fringed. Equally absurd are fringes that push for open borders, offering up a thoughtless catastrophe guaranteed to yield chaos right on the surface. Fringers, everywhere.

Fortunately, it’s easy to erase fringe. Just trust your eyes and good common sense instead. The high ground isn’t at the fringes. It’s in the middle.

Jay Buckner
Warren County