The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

The line distills a recurring theme in Chomsky’s political commentary: that governing and economic elites can manage public opinion by amplifying social anxieties and directing them toward stigmatized targets. The specific cluster—“drugs and crime,” “welfare mothers,” “immigrants and aliens”—evokes U.S. late‑20th‑century culture-war and “law and order” rhetoric, where fear is used to justify punitive policy, weaken solidarity, and distract from structural causes of insecurity (e.g., inequality, labor precarity). The claim is not merely that fear exists, but that it can be strategically cultivated to produce compliance: frightened populations are more likely to accept surveillance, policing, and restrictions, and less likely to organize collectively against concentrated power.