Originally published via Armageddon Prose Substack:
“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”
-Mayer Anselm Rothschild, 1790
Mainstream Republican discourse, in the vein of consummate toolbag Sean Hannity, or any such similar stooge serving as controlled opposition, is a total shitshow.
Woe unto he who absorbs it uncritically as a font of truth or wisdom or virtue.
Mesmerize your hypnotized fans with a football painted red, white and blue (made in China, probably with lead paint) tossed around the set, grunt some Reagan-era talking points, toss in a little war propaganda to pad your portfolio with Raytheon, and bam! You have an hour of propaganda (well, forty minute plus commercials) to feed to your boomer audience — which, at the end, has learned nothing of value but has had all of their vague hatreds of the communists and the Islamics and whatever confirmed. Their lizard brains are titillated and their consumer instincts honed.
USA! USA! USA!
Meanwhile — untouched by any of this as people like Sean Hannity are in his Manhattan penthouse — America’s middle class is sucked dry from within, nothing is done about the bleeding border (even by the GOP leadership, which offers nothing but talking points while it takes the cash from the Chamber of Commerce that represents the interests profiting off of said bleeding border), the population is soft-killed with a thousand poisons for the benefit of the medical industry and depopulationists, etc.
But hey — let’s blame the public school groomers, Antifa, and BLM, and whatever, and somehow everything will get better! Such is the GOP platform it sells to the rubes election cycle after election cycle.
Well, Americans began to catch on to the scam in 2015 with the rise of Trump, and that awareness has only accelerated in recent years, under the stewardship of figures like Tucker Carlson — once a stalwart stenographer of the establishment, by his own admission — who strayed from the neoliberal plantation to become an unvarnished truth-teller (the reason he no longer has a fox News show).
Related: Tucker Carlson Is Public Enemy #1 Because He Challenges Real Power
Check out what Tucker had to say about the banks and the growing inefficacy on both the left and right of their culture war games recently with Jack Posobiec:
“It’s all about tranny this or tranny that, or white people are bad or whatever. But underneath all of those distractions is the fact that people are getting much poorer. And the one thing you’re really not allowed to say, for real, after the foreign policy stuff, which is obviously verboten, but domestically, the one thing you can’t say is the banks are kind of — why are the banks our friends? They’re not. And they’re getting, you know, the finance world is getting taxed at half the rate as the people who work like you and me. I get paid a lot, so it’s, I guess it’s fine, but it’s still offensive that they pay half the rate. Why should they pay half the rate? Are they twice as virtuous as I am or anyone else with a job? They’re not, actually, they’re a little less virtuous…
That’s, and [the oligarchs are] desperately like, like, oh no, ‘it’s the whites’ fault. Hate the whites.’ It’s like some guy making 50 grand a year in Iowa. He’s the problem. And you know that, it’s clearly very effective, and a lot of people do hate the whites because they believe the propaganda. But underneath it all, I think they hate the banks more. And the hate the white stuff is, I don’t think it can last forever. Someone’s gonna be like, all right, okay, you hate the whites, great. Whites are bad, but the banks are really bad. Another reason you don’t have a house or a car. Well, this is why.”
Posobiec chimes in: “To your point though, this is why you see, like, Citibank and Bank of America, and they’re all funding what? Black Lives Matter, of course.”
Via Bank of America:
“Bank of America announced today that it is making a $1 billion, four-year commitment of additional support to help local communities address economic and racial inequality accelerated by a global pandemic. The programs will be focused on assisting people and communities of color that have experienced a greater impact from the health crisis.
‘Underlying economic and social disparities that exist have accelerated and intensified during the global pandemic,’ said CEO Brian Moynihan. ‘The events of the past week have created a sense of true urgency that has arisen across our nation, particularly in view of the racial injustices we have seen in the communities where we work and live. We all need to do more.’
The work builds on economic mobility and workforce development programs Bank of America already supports in local markets, but will sharpen the focus of that work, accelerate the resources, and add a particular emphasis on health services during the pandemic. The announcement is aligned with the company’s commitment to responsible growth for clients, shareholders, employees and communities.”
Distracting the electorate with the old opium of the masses — the culture war — isn’t going to cut the mustard anymore. The shell game can’t work much longer.
All it takes is a sizeable minority of the population — a mere third of the colonists during the American Revolution were nominally sympathetic to the revolution, and even less actively participated — to get the inertia going to really get the right kinds of heads rolling around here.
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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