The Danger of Hyperbole

It's literally the worst thing ever.

As conservatives, we feel a sense of urgency about the state of our society. We see the penumbras of socialism and totalitarianism just around the corner, and we are motivated to warn our neighbors and energize a movement to save freedom and liberty.

Yet it’s easy to let that urgency go too far. Like debt hawks who have been warning since 1990 that the mother of all crashes is coming any moment, or climate alarmists who predict melting ice caps every spring, we have to be careful not to let hyperbole drown out our message. The more our outlandish predictions fail to materialize—and the more out of touch we sound—the more voters will tune us out.

I believe the COVID-19 lockdowns were the most obvious and legitimate examples of creeping totalitarianism we’ve seen in our lifetimes. They motivated many good people to become more involved in the political process to ensure such a thing never happened again. However, I think a side effect has been a tendency to cast every political debate in the same apocalyptic terms. Whether it’s saying we lost a little bit of our Republic because of the operation to capture Nicolás Maduro, or warning that Idaho is on the verge of turning into Nazi Germany, this kind of rhetoric—while appealing to a small base—actively turns off a majority of voters.

My interview series with Republican legislative primary candidates in 2024 was a very educational experience for me. I found that, especially in eastern Idaho, self-described conservative challengers often talked about high-level ideas: following the Constitution, maintaining Idaho’s sovereignty from both the federal government and multinational organizations like the UN, WHO, and WEF, and returning to the ideals of the Founding Fathers. None of these things are necessarily wrong, but I realized that they were not making much of an impact with voters. On the other hand, those I would describe as more moderate incumbents—when they were willing to talk with me—tended to focus on tangible issues like water rights, jobs, and schools.

Former Idaho GOP chair Trent Clark once told me that nobody will ever defeat someone like Sen. Kevin Cook in District 32 by calling him a RINO, because that implicitly indicts the voters who have supported him in the past as RINOs as well. This makes a lot of sense. If your elected lawmaker has been doing what you want, how would you react to a challenger coming along and saying he’s a villain?

One of the most impressive campaigns in the 2024 primary was that of Josh Keyser, who defeated Senate President Pro Tempore Chuck Winder in Meridian. Keyser didn’t run a scorched-earth campaign against the incumbent by calling him a liberal or a RINO. Instead, he presented himself as a calm, even-tempered successor. Outside groups like Young Americans for Liberty and its Make Liberty Win PAC did hammer Winder, but that did not necessarily create a negative impression of the challenger himself.

The truth is that things aren’t that bad in the grand scheme of things. Yesterday afternoon, I walked into my local Albertsons and looked around. Shelves were stocked with all sorts of food at reasonable prices. Ground beef is still a bit higher than I’d like it to be, but the price of eggs has come down. There for the choosing were cuts of beef, pork, chicken, and even lamb, alongside a vast selection of fresh fruits and vegetables, baked goods, cheese, chocolate, and all manner of processed foods.

Sometimes it’s good to step back and remember what it was like for Boris Yeltsin to visit a Texas grocery store in 1989 and realize that Americans took for granted things that were out of reach for Soviet elites.

When I visited the store, I did so without fear that I would be stopped, mugged, or otherwise accosted. I did not have to worry about carrying enough cash to bribe guards or store employees making unofficial markups. I left my car in the parking lot without fear that it would be vandalized or stolen while I was gone. I did so while my elder children were at school and my younger children were at home with my wife, and I did not fear that any of them would be taken by agents of the state because of things I had written or said.

One of the most impactful books I read in 2025 was The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil by Michael Malice. Malice, who was born in the former USSR, narrates the rise of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe and the horrors that came with it. Citizens of the Soviet Union, and of Communist Bloc states following World War II, faced terrors that you and I can scarcely imagine:

• More people were imprisoned in concentration camps following the Bolshevik Revolution than under the Tsars.

• The Cheka, the Soviet secret police, had near-unilateral authority to arrest, torture, and execute anyone it suspected of disloyalty.

• Ukrainian peasants had grain stolen at gunpoint so it could be exported even as they were starving.

• Gulags were deliberately structured to kill off as many prisoners as possible.

• Citizens were encouraged to inform on neighbors and family members to save themselves.

• Children were taken from their parents and raised in communal environments, where many were horrifically abused.

Watch the trailer video for the book over on YouTube:

Near the beginning of the book, Malice quotes Ayn Rand, another author who escaped the Soviet Union for America:

It’s almost impossible to convey to a free people what it’s like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. I can tell you a lot of details. I can never completely convince you because you are free, and it’s in a way good that you can’t even conceive of what it’s like. Certainly they have friends and mother-in-laws. They try to live a human life, but you understand that it is totally inhuman. Now try to imagine what it’s like if you are in constant terror from morning to night and at night you are waiting for a doorbell to ring, if you are afraid of everything and everybody, if you live in a country where human life is nothing, less than nothing, and you know it. You don’t know who when is going to do what to you because you may offend someone, where there is no law and no rights of any kind.

Even those among us whose ancestors lived through communism, the Holocaust, or other horrific periods in history must find it difficult to fully understand what life was like. 21st century America—especially in a state like Idaho—is one of the safest and most prosperous times and places in all of human history. We live far away from where the laws of the jungle, red in tooth and claw, still reign.

Over the weekend, I saw a tweet by Jeff Kazin, former head of Cargill’s refined oils trading division, that has garnered more than three million views. He shared his company’s experiences in Venezuela, which I’ve tidied up in formatting for readability:

Cargill was/is the leading producer of critical staple ingredients such as flour, pasta, vegetable oil, and rice in VZ. I am not saying I agree with grabbing the dictator, but I did have a front row seat to the damage a kleptocracy did to innocent people.

1. The government took over our “minute rice” facility at gunpoint because we were “gouging” the nation’s poor. The government was never able to run the plant. It never ran again. It was returned years later with no equipment inside.

2. There are 1000’s of generals in the army. They are each given a slice of the economy to loot. The large number of generals made it difficult to organize a coup against the regime.

3. The government opened grocery stores and sold staples below the cost we sold them to the government. In theory they used petro oil money to lower grocery prices. Our regular grocery outlets were forced out of business. When the government demanded we sell them products below cost we simply had to shut down. The populous became ever more dependent on the government handouts.
   (PS this is the mayor of New York City’s proposal.)

4. Dollars — We needed dollars to go buy raw materials like wheat from places like the US and Canada. The government would periodically allocate us some dollars that could only be spent for raw materials and freight. Eventually only the local companies that can and would pay bribes got dollar allocations. We had several facilities closed for lack of raw material.

5. My employees liked working for Cargill. The office was an armed compound with access to a gym, high speed internet, global communications, and a weekly box of basic staples. Cargill provided a safe and secure environment if only for the working hours.

6. Employees became very close to others inside the apartment building. Going out on the street with a desperate population was not advisable.

7. I needed wood pallets for feed. We tried to export wood pallets to swap for grain. We refused to pay the bribes it would take to export the pallets.

8. I once tried to set up a closed loop wheat planting to flour mill supply chain.

   1. They came and stole all the seed wheat for food.

   2. When we tried to ship in seed wheat in containers via US donors there was no way to get it out of the port without it being stolen.

9. Livestock — Our feed business completely collapsed. Even if you could raise a pig, you couldn’t defend it from being stolen. People with guns were hungry.

10. Employees — In the end my highly skilled team alone with other highly educated people chose to leave. Cargill often found jobs for them in other Latin countries. The regime was more than happy to see the well-educated leave the country. Setting these employees up with high quality stable jobs after fleeing remains one of the best things I ever did in my career. No one remembers millions in trading earnings.

This is a short list. In my opinion the first money spent needs to happen now and it needs to be food. The US is already on the clock. The current regime does not care if it starves the population. The orgy of theft will actually accelerate if they believe their days are numbered. VZ should be an outstanding customer of US grown ag products. Rice, bread wheat, veg oil ect. Feed the people first.

Most of us who play the role of armchair general while following the Venezuela operation cannot fully understand what it was like living under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. It certainly makes our own concerns feel like first-world problems. Literally.

We absolutely have problems in our society that need solving. There are many policies our government has embraced that, if left unchecked, will take us down very bad roads. Many of those policies have been baked in for generations, which means reversing course will likely take a great deal of time and patience.

But life isn’t a movie where the heroes solve every problem in a climactic battle after two hours of buildup. Life goes on—slowly but surely—which means that in between fighting socialism and creeping totalitarianism, we must still go to work, raise our families, maintain our homes, and put food on the table. Count your blessings that most of us can still do those things unimpeded. Our fellow human beings in Venezuela, Cuba, China, North Korea, and many other places on God’s green earth are not so lucky.

Conservatives must do more than simply react out of fear of what the left is planning. That attitude abdicates agency to the other side, allowing them to dictate the narrative. Instead, we need to maintain a positive vision for what our future can be with good policies and good governance—a real alternative to the slide into socialism and totalitarianism that we rightly fear. Initiatives like the Idaho Freedom Foundation’s Freedom & Family Agenda and the Idaho Freedom Caucus’ New Vision to Strengthen Idaho are good examples of this kind of positive vision.

As we head into the 2026 session and the primary campaigns that will follow, I recommend maintaining our focus on what is real and tangible. We are right to keep our eyes on the big picture—I’ve been preaching that for years—but excessive hyperbole only causes voters to tune us out and listen instead to those addressing their real concerns.

Feature image created with Microsoft Copilot.