Remember the Aesop story of the boy who cried “wolf!” The fable goes that a bored shepherd boy, anxious for a little action, cried “wolf!” to the villagers.
Concerned for their flocks, the villagers ran to the boy only to realize the shepherd boy’s game.
The boy got a kick out of this, and after a few weeks had passed, he cried out even louder, “Wolf! Wolf!” Once again the villagers came, and once again they realized they had been duped.
Then one night, a wolf actually appeared. The boy cried “wolf,” only the villagers didn’t come. They wouldn’t be duped again. Only this time, their sheep fell prey to the beast.
Anyone with half a brain could find the moral to this story. If you cry wolf too many times, and the wolf doesn’t show, people tend to not bother—even when real danger approaches.
The American political debate has included far too many instances of crying wolf.
Only it looks a little different.
“Nancy Pelosi warns ‘hundreds of thousands of people will die’ if GOP health bill passes,” CBS headline, June 26, 2017
Federal agencies are “banned from making policy recommendations that are inconvenient for Trump…And many Americans will die as a result,” from Paul Krugman essay entitled, “Donald Trump wants you to die,” January 24, 2025
“’People Will Die’ from Trump’s Trans Prisoner Crackdown, Experts Warn,” headline from The Appeal, January 22, 2025 (That one has to be true. After all, it comes from “the experts.”
Trump’s spending freeze will result in “chaos that will kill,” and “a death sentence for millions.” Indivisible website
“Let us be clear and this is not trying to be overly dramatic: Thousands of people will die if the Republican health care bill becomes law,” Senator Bernie Sanders, June 2017 tweet.
“Overturning Roe and outlawing abortions will never make them go away…It only makes them more dangerous, especially for the poor [and] marginalized. People will die because of this decision,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Business Insider, June 24, 2022.
“’Women are going to die’: Hillary Clinton on Supreme Court’s overturning Roe v. Wade ruling on abortion rights,” headline, CBS News, June 28, 2022
“It’s estimated that 200 million people will die by the time I finish this talk,” Joe Biden, Sept 20, 2020
Republican Representative Michelle Buchanan once argued that Obamacare “literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens.”
“Biden warns of winter of ‘severe illness and death’ for unvaccinated due to Omicron,” CNN Headline, December 16, 2021
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Warns, ‘World Is Going to End in 12 Years,’ Reiterating Claims of Recent U.N. Climate Change Report,” headline, Newsweek, January 22, 2019.
Republican Senator Tom Coburn, on the passage of the Affordable Care Act, “you’re going to die soon.”
“’Millions will die,’ Catholic humanitarian organizations warn, if halt in US aid continues,” RNS headline, Feb 13, 2025
If the left feels the rest of the world isn’t listening to their “People will die” arguments, it’s because we’re not.
In past posts, I argued that throwing around the word “Nazi” to describe someone with whom you don’t agree is actually dangerous because it desensitizes us to the term. God forbid if Nazism resurfaces as a legitimate political movement, the public will be blunted to it: “Nazi? Is that the group of people who refused to get the COVID vaccine? Meh.”
Such is the problem with crying wolf. Speaking of COVID, do you remember the panic it instilled in the general public? Policies were mandated by unelected officials that changed at will. Experts were predicting the apocalypse. Social media was shutting down posts from real virologists going against the narrative, who were even threatened with having their medical licenses being taken away. Governments were assigning fines (most of which were overturned). People lost their careers for refusing the shot. Schools were shut down (five years later, we’re still feeling the effects of that in education). People were treated as second class citizens. The concept of the “Karen” was born. For crying out loud, there was a run on toilet paper.
All because of a largely recoverable, raspatory disease.
I remembered then thinking, “What happens when a REAL pandemic hits—one that doesn’t have a 97% recovery rate among the majority of the population, one that has, say, only a 30% recovery rate? Like, say, a new strain of Ebola or even the plague.”
Nobody will listen. They bought in to the narrative once before; they’re going to be skeptical when it happens again. They won’t respond until it is too late.
This is the caution against “crying wolf.” When a real emergency arises in the world, the public will simply brush it off until it becomes too late.
Use that line sparingly and with wisdom.
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