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{{trope}}
[[File:windmill 7488.jpg|link=I Drew This|
A Windmill is a quite different creature from its distant cousin, the [[Strawman Political|Strawman]].
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# Any [[The Only Righteous Index of Fanatics|fanatic]] who needs excuses to make his beliefs socially relevant. This may be an overlap between the first two alternatives, since the fanatic is likely to honestly believe everything that doesn’t fit his narrow worldview to be actual threats as well as being hypocritical enough to [[Utopia Justifies the Means|lie and tell himself that it’s the only way to make people see the truth]].
Compare [[Gravity Is Only a Theory]] and [[Dead Unicorn Trope]]. Contrast with [[No Mere Windmill]] for something that is not a windmill but gets mistaken for one
Compare and contrast [[The Scapegoat]]: This character gets wrongly blamed for a real problem, while a windmill gets blamed for a problem that isn't real in itself - but might be used to explain away a real problem. For example, the Nazi attitude towards the Jews was two levels of scapegoat with one level of windmill in between. Ordinary Jewish citizens got [[The Scapegoat|blamed]] for the evil actions of the non-existent "global Jewish conspiracy", and that conspiracy was in turn given the [[The Scapegoat|blame]] for why Germany lost the previous war.
No [[Real Life]] examples. [[Poe's Law|While there are some people with views so extreme it's hard to believe they're not a joke]], this is not the place to settle what threats are real and what threats are windmills. Stick to how Windmills are portrayed. If we don't, the windmills are going to come and take away our children in the night.▼
{{examples}}▼
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▲{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==
* The "Cannon Fodder" short in [[Katsuhiro Otomo]]'s [[Memories]] shows a society whose sole apparent motivation for life and development is to attack an unseen enemy using cannons.
== Comic Books ==▼
* In ''Ernie'' (also known as ''The Piranha Club''), Uncle Sid makes a lot of money selling insurance against black holes. (And no, the comic doesn't feature space travel or immortality, merely regular people living on Earth.)▼
* In the ''[[Bone]]'' comic series, Phoney Bone does the [[Manipulative Bastard]] version of this: he convinces the people of Barrelhaven that they need to be protected from the (actually harmless) dragons, and capitalizes on his new role as the Dragon Slayer to win a bet.▼
== Film ==
* ''Der Untergang'' (''[[Downfall (film)|Downfall]]'') is one of the many works that take this view on the concept of a global Jewish conspiracy: It was a total windmill crackpot hoax and delusion, but Hitler and his followers honestly believed in it — making them [[Windmill Crusader]]s.
* Paul in ''[[The Last Temptation of Christ]]'' is briefly portrayed as the misguided kind of [[Windmill Crusader]]. However, he is quickly deconstructed as a [[Straw Hypocrite]] who simply don’t care if the gospel he preaches is true or not.
▲== Comic Books ==
* While also playing it straight sometimes, ''[[Dilbert]]'' is famous for a deconstruction of this trope: Dogbert openly advises people to pick a harmless person and make him seem like a threat. Then destroy him, and have people reward you for saving you from the "threat". (The deconstruction part is that Dogbert is completely open and public with his cynicism, thus defeating the purpose.)▼
** It doesn't defeat the purpose when everyone around him is [[Too Dumb to Live]], which is most of the time.▼
▲* In ''Ernie'' (also known as ''The Piranha Club''), Uncle Sid makes a lot of money selling insurance against black holes. (And no, the comic doesn't feature space travel or immortality, merely regular people living on Earth.)
* In [[Pearls Before Swine]], the cynical Rat invokes this trope by campaigning against rainbows.▼
▲* In the Bone comic series, Phoney Bone does the [[Manipulative Bastard]] version of this: he convinces the people of Barrelhaven that they need to be protected from the (actually harmless) dragons, and capitalizes on his new role as the Dragon Slayer to win a bet.
== Literature ==
* ''[[Don Quixote]]'' is the [[Trope Namer]] as well as the ur-example. The main character mistakes literal windmills for literal gigantic hostile humanoids. Even when he is a deluded fanboy and not a politician, this trope really applies to Don Quixote. At Part I Chapter I, Don Quixote praises the giant Morgante, because he is the only good giant he has encountered in his chivalry books. All other giants are evil because “the giant breed which is always arrogant and ill-conditioned” [[Moral Dissonance|Therefore, for a Knight, is perfectly honorable to attack giants without provocation, kill them all, and rob them of their possessions.]] The fact that Don Quixote at Part I, Chapter VIII, gets caught in one of the windmill sails could be interpreted by the reader as a funny event, a tragic failure, or the [[Laser-Guided Karma|deserved fate of an
{{quote|At this point they came in sight of thirty forty windmills that there are on plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, "Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God's good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth."}}
* In the YA novel ''[[The King of Dragons]]'', the hero's father is a severe PTSD case of [[Windmill Crusader]]. His PTSD from military service causes him to believe that the government is out to get him and that terrible things will happen if he and his son are found by the authorities, so he gives the boy Survival [[Training from Hell]]. At the end of the book, the father is recovering, and tells his son, "I mistook molehills for mountains, but I taught you how to climb mountains."
* According to ''The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved'' from 1975, the danger of [[The Bermuda Triangle]] is a simple hoax. [[wikipedia:Bermuda triangle|There is no special danger associated with traveling in that area.]]
* In ''[[Harry Potter and
** In ''
** In [[
* In ''[[Animal Farm]]'', Farmer Jones, his spies, and
* In ''[[Nineteen Eighty-Four
** On the other hand, the same is true of Big Brother.
{{quote|'''Winston:''' Does he exists as you and I exist?
'''O'Brian:''' [[Unperson|You do not exist.]] }}
* In the ''[[Bionicle]]'' novel "Island of Doom", the villains use a Type 2 example in order to convince the Matoran that they're really the good guys by using their powers to create a fake monster which they then "defeat."▼
▲== Live Action TV ==
* In the [[Miniseries]] [[Remake]] of ''[[The Prisoner]]'', Number 2 convinces the Village that black holes appearing everywhere are because people do not have enough pigs to provide stability, and encourages villagers to buy more pigs.
* A heroic example. In a fourth season episode of ''[[Babylon 5]]'', Sheridan creates an imaginary threat in the form of mysterious aliens who are invisible to all but the White Star fleet. He does this by, among other things, denying the existence of said invaders, and having Ivanova state on her news program that [[Suspiciously Specific Denial|nothing at all happened in a particular region of space that day]]. All this serves to amp the alien ambassadors' normal paranoia [[Up to Eleven]]. Note that this isn't done to gain personal power, but rather to get the alien races to allow the White Star fleet to patrol their respective territories (and thus protect them from ''real'' threats), something they would never do normally because the afore-mentioned paranoia could cause them to assume ulterior motives.
== Newspaper Comics ==
▲* While also playing it straight sometimes, ''[[Dilbert]]'' is famous for a deconstruction of this trope: Dogbert openly advises people to pick a harmless person and make him seem like a threat. Then destroy him, and have people reward you for saving you from the "threat". (The deconstruction part is that Dogbert is completely open and public with his cynicism, thus defeating the purpose.)
▲** It doesn't defeat the purpose when everyone around him is [[Too Dumb to Live]], which is most of the time.
▲* In ''[[Pearls Before Swine]]'', the cynical Rat invokes this trope by campaigning against rainbows.
== Tabletop Games ==
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** The Commies started out this way; they'd disappeared long before Alpha Complex was built, but The Computer mistook civil defense files from 1957 as being up to date. Then some citizens became so fed up with The Computer that they decided to become [[Forbidden Fruit|the thing It hated most]], even knowing nothing else about it.
** The International Workers of the World were founded by Troubleshooters who had been sent to infiltrate them, after several previous groups of Troubleshooters had been summarily executed for failing to find proof of the non-existent group. The Wobblies continue to be run entirely by Troubleshooters sent to infiltrate the organization.
▲* In the Bionicle novel Island of Doom, the villains use a Type 2 example in order to convince the Matoran that they're really the good guys by using their powers to create a fake monster which they then "defeat."
== Video Games ==
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* 90% of the bad stuff [[Big Bad Wannabe|Loghain]] [[Fallen Hero|Mac Tir]] does over the course of [[Dragon Age]] he mentally justifies to himself as [[Shoot the Dog|Shooting the Dog]] to protect Ferelden from an [[Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys|Orlesian]] invasion. Too bad Orlais just isn't that interested anymore, as opposed to the giant [[Exclusively Evil|Darkspawn horde]] on his doorstep.
** [[Word of God]] states that Loghain's paranoia about Orlais isn't ''quite'' just a windmill. However, the Darkspawn were a more immediate problem.
== Web Comics ==
* In [https://web.archive.org/web/20120205075312/http://www.idrewthis.org/d/20040825.
* In ''[[Kevin and Kell]]'', a group of predators try to disguise the fact that they're controlling a Rabbit Council candidate by convincing rabbits that the real threat is rabbits whose ears point in the opposite direction.
== Western Animation ==
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