This is my first post on Medium. As will become evident, if there are any interesting points below, they mostly belong to the political scientist, Professor Lindsey Cormack, my colleague and friend at the Stevens Institute of Technology. You should follow her on Twitter @CongressSaysWha.

Last week I had a flashback.

My wife had just sent me a news article, which recounted how the stock prices of Alpha Pro Tech, a maker of protective face masks, and Lakeland Industries, a maker of HAZMAT suits, had skyrocketed, Alpha Pro Tech by 33%, Lakeland by 47%. Suddenly I was hurdled back, unwillingly, to the first weeks and months after 9/11.

Source: Reuters

At that time, I was undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. One day several weeks after 9/11, after the Anthrax attacks had hit the news, I went to the army surplus store on Neil St. in Champaign. I wanted to price trail shoes.

In my Gruen Effect shopping stupor, I did not realize that I had stumbled into a crowd in the back of the store, until I found that I was surrounded. People were pressing around a counter, and behind that counter hung gas masks. I was in the middle of a fear-driven shopping frenzy.

Terror filled the people’s eyes. You could smell it on them. The store had hung cheaply printed signs behind the counter announcing that the masks would not work against chemical and biological weapons and the clerks kept loudly proclaiming the same point, but the frightened people cared not. They wanted their masks, and they wanted them now. I remember backing out of the place as quickly as I could, crossing the street, and lighting up a cigarette as I watched people walking in and out of the store, many of them looking for protection that the shop could not offer. The experience spooked me, and I have rarely shared it with anyone since.

Those weeks and months and now years were a confusing time for everyone. It was understandable that people were afraid (though largely not rational to be that way, since you will most likely die from a sick heart or some other completely mundane thing). But it was also clear that some politicians, mostly Republicans, were playing on our fears during that period. The clearest case was the famous color-coded threat level system, known as the Homeland Security Advisory system, perhaps the least effective tool for risk communication ever conceived by human beings. It really only wound people up; it communicated almost nothing. The Obama Administration retired the threat level tool soon after taking power.

The Bush Administration’s active manipulation of the public’s fears was clear to anyone who paid attention. In 2004, the journal, Social Research, did a special issue titled, Fear: Its Political Uses and Abuses. Contributors wrote about the sociology, psychology, and biology of fear and examined cases where politicians had manipulated fears for political gain. The volume included an essay by Al Gore about the George W. Bush Administration’s fear campaign leading up to the Iraq War. Can you say “Weapons of Mass Destruction?”

Social scientists have known for generations that fear is an essential part of conservatism. When Theodor Adorno et al conducted the fatally-flawed but still interesting authoritarian personality studies in the late 1940s, they found that authoritarians were shot through with anxieties of all sorts. More recently, in his book The Republican Brain and related writings, the journalist Chris Mooney has examined what psychologists and other social scientists know about conservative psychology. Again, fear plays a major role.

Then came Ebola.

Unlike the Homeland Security Advisory System, there has been a great deal of excellent risk communication around ebola. Virologists, public health experts, and others have explained how ebola is spread and how relatively difficult it is to pass from one person to another. Moreover, we have public health systems in place that will keep ebola from becoming a major problem in the United States.

And plenty of people have pointed out how overblown ebola fears in the United States are.

A meme that went around Facebook, perhaps originally posted by Aasif Mandvi

But no amount of science communication or humor is capable of breaking through conservative fears of the other. As some have pointed out, ebola plays into a long history of racist discourse about a dirty and diseased Africa as well as into nationalist fantasies of locking down the border. Part of this fear has to do with ignorance. (I would love to see a survey that examines the propensity of individual Americans to have the howling ebola fantods against their likelihood of being climate skeptics. The education level of ebola-fearing climate skeptics could then be compared to the general population.) But ignorance doesn’t explain everything.

What has become increasingly clear is that some politicians have started using ebola as political weapon. I’m not just talking about conspiracy-theory dealing nuts or Rush Limbaugh saying that Obama is letting ebola into the country as atonement for our history of slavery. Even though experts have repeatedly opposed travel bans, politicians, like House Speaker John Boehner, have continued to call for bans.

The GOP has a Boehner for Your Ebola Fears

A New York Times post last week suggested that “Republicans Hint at Ebola as an Election Issue,” but as Politico digital editor Blake Hounshell wrote on Twitter,

Last night, Republican Senator Ted Cruz’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Nick Muzin, Tweeted,

Muzin later apologized, claiming that it had been a bad joke.

All of this was more or less anecdotal, however. We don’t have a good picture of how many Republicans are using ebola as a political football or whether they are talking about the disease any more often than Democrats.

But then I started talking to my colleague and friend, Lindsey Cormack, a professor of political science at Stevens Institute of Technology. Lindsey got her PhD in political science from New York University, where she wrote her dissertation on how members of Congress communicate to their constituents. To do this, Lindsey signed up for every available e-newsletter that members of Congress sent out. The result is a huge database. As Lindsey explains, “All legislators are given resources to produce and maintain an official website and send official e-messages. The full dataset that I created as a source for my dissertation and maintain to this day contains every official e-newsletter and Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feed from every US Representative and Senator that employs these communications (90%+). The corpus contains over 190,000 messages dating back to August 2009.” On her Twitter feed (@CongressSaysWha), Lindsey often posts the top words from Congressional newsletters in the last 24 hours, giving some sense of the pushbutton issues of the moment.

What Lindsey has found, when she examines Congressional communications to constituents about ebola and controls for the fact that there are more Republicans in Congress, is that Republicans are mentioning ebola nearly three times as often as Democrats. (Republicans use the word ‘ebola’ in 19% of their communications since August 6, 2014, where Democrats only use it 7% of the time.)

The question: How many people have to die before American politicians start talking about ebola? The answer: One person in the United States. The green line is total global deaths from ebola. The vertical red line is the date that Eric Duncan died in Dallas. The blue line tracks total mentions of ebola in Lindsey Cormack’s dataset since 8/6/2014. The red line tracks the mentions of ebola made by Republicans. Notice how closely the red line hugs the blue one. Source: Lindsey Cormack. If you use this, you should really cite her.

Lindsey also took a look at other diseases that frightened the American public. She points out that, since 2009, there have only been 43 overall mentions in her database of anthrax, the disease that sent people scurrying for gas masks back in 2001. Republicans made 67% percent of those anthrax mentions. The party’s willingness to play on our fears is well-established, I think.

In 1941, an American president was bold enough to say that citizens should be guaranteed a “Freedom from Fear.” What would it take to get back to such a hope? Sure, it would mean that the CDC and other agencies need to ensure that no more healthcare workers in the United States get ebola, and we can always do a better job of propping up our public health system. But returning to such hope would also entail us standing up to and shouting down any politicians who would manipulate our deepest worries.

Thanks once more to Lindsey Cormack for sharing her great research.