Well there’s only three days left until Halloween 2023 and, unless something changes dramatically, it doesn’t seem like drug dealers or other malefactors are going to be packaging expensive colorful synthetic opioids in little baggies and handing them out to suburban trick-or-treaters on Tuesday.

How do we know this? Well, we don’t. It could very well be that maybe Mexican drug cartels and/or ChiCom fifth columnists are in fact planning a massive coordinated attack on American children by distributing rainbow fentanyl pills from their doorsteps on Halloween and later next week we could be picking up story after story about the tragic death toll of such horror. But probably not.

And in that almost certain event, the “reports” – if meaning actual instances of distribution, ingestion, overdose, death, etc – could not “plummet” any further than they did from last Halloween because there were zero such cases reported in the national media in early November 2022.

What actually plummeted this year was Fox News and other right wing media outlets’ “reports” warning about rainbow fentanyl disguised as Halloween candy. Last year Media Matters counted 80 mentions of the colorful death pills from August 30 to November 1, 2022. A search of Fox News closed captions captured by Archive.org shows zero occurrences for the same period in 2023.

Normally this is the kind of thing we’d write with our trademark tedious sarcastic naivety, but sometimes these sort of things are just way too fucking obvious to make any such effort worth the time putting together or – more importantly – for our readers to consume. Even more pointless would be putting the effort in to call out this gap as a solely the product of differing political circumstance when Ronna Not-Romney McDaniel did it herself during the above Fox News interview last year.

There are better self-owns out there in the history of politics. Not a lot of them though. Even fewer fully transpired within approximately 15 seconds and on live television. She just walked right into it, reacting to Bill Clinton talking about how Republicans always hype some made-up bullshit in the home stretch before big elections by immediately hyping some made-up bullshit (that, as if it wasn’t ready stupid enough, definitionally could only transpire a week before election day).

Now, to be completely fair, Ronna and Fox News were not the first ones to warn that rainbow fentanyl could be mistaken for candy, intentionally or otherwise. It was the Biden Administration, specifically the DEA, who put out a press release on August 30th, 2022, warning:

The press release is fucking stupid as its emphasis on “selling” the pills to children seems to speak to a mindset still stuck in the early-90s Nickelodeon Ad Council spots with some spiky-haired, leather-jacketed douchebag middle school drug dealer hustling “good” kids in the hallway between classes. Still, there’s no mention of Halloween or trick-or-treating it it, which meant it was all on Fox to very naturally bridge rainbow fentanyl together with the even more dated and overhyped trope of razorblades (and drugs) being hidden in Halloween candy distributed by malicious actors.

Which, as is already abundantly clear, was good enough for a party trying to recapture suburban voters after a few rough election cycles, even if certain candidates were too stupid and incompetent to fully comprehend and thus communicate it to the voters it was designed to appeal to.

And apparently why nobody on Fox News or in the Republican Party gives a shit about it this October, even if rainbow fentanyl and Halloween are independently as real as they were last year.

There is something to be said however about the Republican Party and the politics of fear. We don’t need to tell you how absurd and obnoxious and hilarious and fucking maddening it is to be bombarded with this kind of stupid bullshit every single election year. You know that. What’s interesting however, if you step back far enough to look at from the outside, is how constant it is as the mainstay of their messaging. Political science 101 says your messaging for defense should be your accomplishments and your messaging for offense is the incumbent’s lack thereof. Simple enough on matters of say, tax and infrastructure policy where you can point to the numbers to make your case either for yourself or against the other guy’s. Fear makes it more complicated.

Fear itself is an extremely effective tool in politics, one that we have no illusions about its utility in messaging whether a candidate or party is in power or not. For decades Democrats warned voters Republicans were going to take away womens’ rights to reproductive health and look what happened. Republicans warned that the Democrats were going to impeach Trump if they took the House in 2018 and look what happened. It’s these comically exaggerated personal threats to life and limb like rainbow fentanyl in Halloween candy, an Antifa thug breaking into an old lady’s house and murdering her while she’s placed on hold with 911 because Joe Biden defunded the police as depicted in the Trump 2020 campaign ad above, critical race theory indoctrinating kids in schools, “Faucism” taking away your bodily autonomy, Caravans from Mexico, forced gender transitions, kids identifying as cats, “pornographic” library books, so on and so forth that you can set a watch to.

It’s always those kinds of fears. Every single goddamned cycle, whether they’re on offense or defense they act like they’re the only ones who can defeat these evil forces, even the ones they plainly failed to stop them when they supposedly had the power to do so. Nothing would scare them more than an October in which enough voters finally have the bandwidth to understand that.

Maybe if rainbow fentanyl suddenly makes a roaring comeback next October they might realize how odd it was that the cartels inexplicably took a year off from it. But probably not. More likely it’ll mean the GOP overall is in serious fucking trouble and they’ll be recycling old bullshit out of sheer desperation. Then you can look forward to seeing your crazy MAGA uncle crying on Thanksgiving.

Side note that we couldn’t find a place to fit in above: You should still absolutely inspect your kids’ candy after they’re done trick-or-treating. There was an incident in Winnipeg, Canada last Halloween when some idiot stoners were arrested after they, apparently accidentally, gave away edibles packaged like bootleg versions of normal retail sweets.Just last week some asshole in Florida got arrested in possession of not just weed edibles like the one in the pic above but also reportedly cocaine in it too. We’re not saying people are going to be giving this (undoubtedly expensive) shit away on purpose so much as they might just be too fucked up to tell the difference between the real and the fake candy.