If you turned on US cable news at any point last week, you might have thought this July 4 holiday would be our last weekend on earth – the supposed terrorist masterminds in Isis and their alleged vast sleeper cell army were going to descend upon America like the aliens in Independence Day and destroy us all.

CNN has led the pack in whipping Americans into a panic over the Isis threat, running story after story with government officials and terrorism industry money-makers hyping the threat, played against the backdrop of scary b-roll of terrorist training camps. Former CIA deputy director Mike Morell ominously told CBS last week that “I wouldn’t be surprised if we weren’t sitting here a week from today talking about an attack over the weekend in the United States.” MSNBC and Fox joined in too, using graphics and maps right out of Stephen Colbert’s satirical “Doom Bunker,” suggesting World War III was just on the verge of reaching America’s shores.

Nothing happened, of course. But it was an abject lesson in how irrational government fear-mongering still controls our public discourse, even when there wasn’t a shred of hard evidence for any sort of attack, only a feeling that one might happen.

The media totally bought into this frenzy, despite the fact that the FBI and other intelligence agencies openly admitted they did not have any “specific” or “credible” threat information to hinge the holiday-weekend warnings on. Naturally, we didn’t find this out until several paragraphs down in any of the articles about the subject, and on television it sometimes wasn’t mentioned at all. Even when it was, the lack of push-back or questioning was startling. For example, this report from NBC News:

Authorities told NBC News that they are unaware of any specific or credible threat inside the country. But the dangers are more complex and unpredictable than ever.

You almost have to appreciate the amount of discipline it takes to write two back-to-back sentences like that without expressing even a hint of skepticism: we have no evidence proving you’re in danger, but you absolutely should be very afraid!

It was an incredible turnaround from just a week before, even for the American fear-mongering machine. Following the tragedy in Charleston, where a white supremacist terrorist killed nine innocent churchgoers, there was – finally! – widespread acknowledgement that the Islamic terrorism threat in this country is vastly exaggerated, and that white supremacists actually kill many more Americans than Muslim extremists do.

As Glenn Greenwald wrote at the time, you are more likely to be struck by lightning, stung to death by bees or killed your own falling furniture on you than you are by a Muslim terrorist. Yet there we were, less than a week later, back to an “Isis is going to kill us all” mentality.

DEVELOPING NOW: literally nothing pic.twitter.com/C26B3eMG6J — Adam Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) July 4, 2015

Bill Maher complained this weekend that, “Cable news is Isis’ best ally.” And he’s absolutely right. While CNN was by far the loudest and most idiotic – the dildo-laden Isis flag at London’s gay pride parade was only a particularly laughable taste of the network’s alarmism – all the cable news channels have happily played along. Yet hardly any of the talking-head “experts” bothered to ask whether our military’s continued bombing of the Middle East might be exacerbating the chances of a terrorist attack on US soil, rather than dissipating it.

Journalist Adam Johnson went back a decade and found 40 other times the FBI and Homeland Security have issued similar threats around national holidays or major events, none of which actually was followed by a terrorist attack. It’s more than a little disturbing how much CNN and others have seemingly grown to rely on these nebulous warnings to keep viewers hooked. As Johnson quipped on Twitter earlier this week, “Can the FBI break its terror-predicting 0-40 losing streak this weekend? Tune into CNN to find out!”

All of this doesn’t mean that a terrorist attack on US won’t eventually happen. Simple math tells us that, no matter the precautions taken or the civil liberties taken away, one may get through. But it is a rare event, and one which human beings have lived with throughout our history. By magnifying it and terrifying everyone, we’re only doing the terrorists’ job for them.

No one is suggesting we ignore the existence of Isis. The savage attack on civilians in Tunisia was a deplorable tragedy, and the group actively threatens many people in the Middle East. But even as we mourn the victims and steel our resolve, the idea that we should upend our way of life based on an extremely remote possibility that we, in the end, have no ability to control is absurd.

As for those vague terror warnings that didn’t materialize over the weekend? They’ve been extended.