Originally published via The Daily Bell:
We live in a failed state. There’s no baby formula GMO feed on shelves for hungry infants. Inflation is out of control. Supply lines are collapsed. Those are just a handful of the legion of ills.
Meanwhile, instead of addressing those crises, the ruling class is most interested in fixing “racist hair discrimination”:
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“Lawmakers passed the bill, titled the Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair, or CROWN, Act, largely along party lines, 235-189…
Proponents of the measure argued that formally banning hair discrimination is necessary because Black people are often penalized under workplace and school dress code policies.”
The usual suspects sponsored and promoted the partisan bill — including “Squad” starlet Rep. Ayanna Pressley and unelected New York Governor Kathy Hochul.
Above is a perfect microcosm, again, of what the failed Western state does. It offers low-stakes culture war distractions to set the population against itself. In the fog of war, the vampiric elites extract the national wealth and civil society crumbles.
The CROWN Act is one of many culture war inflection points. Critical race theory (CRT) has become a standard feature of public school curricula. Explicitly and unapologetically racist hiring policies in the federal government are the new normal. The list goes on.
These constitute classic divide and conquer in the tradition of the Roman and British empires. The divide and conquer phenomenon references the elites’ intentional fracturing of power coalitions that might grow out of popular discontent.
When such popular coalitions emerge and coalesce, they could potentially rival the existing power structure. The intended effect of divide and conquer is to stem a budding insurrection before it becomes a threat:
“British rule was certainly to a large extent based upon dividing the local population. Therefore, the empire de facto benefited from the hostile and rivalrous relations between two communities…. Tertius gaudens literally means a rejoicing third that is, a party that benefits from a conflict between two other parties.”
In addition to having historical precedent, the divide and conquer culture war is all also simple cause and effect. There’s nothing sophisticated about it — just pandering to the basest instincts of the human animal.
By distracting the populace with trivial culture war wedge issues, the elites hope you don’t notice your middle-class wealth disappear — if you were lucky enough to accumulate any in the first place. That function is why the multinational corporations that now control government pour fuel on the culture war fire. It allows them to retain power, in the shadows, safely out of the crosshairs of populist rage.
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The top-down Culture War need not necessarily be a conspiracy reaching back centuries. It requires no smoke-filled backroom meetings. The powers that be didn’t plot the current conflicts surrounding “hair discrimination” 400 years ago when introducing slavery to the colonies.
They simply capitalize on pre-existing social wounds and rub salt into them for private gain.
“Never let a good crisis go to waste” is the enduring elite mantra. As Biden recently explained in the context of leveraging record gas prices to enforce carbon neutrality, they make lemons out of lemonade.
Your enemy is not your neighbor. They might be misguided. They might buttress the corporate state’s agenda even while absurdly declaring themselves “The Resistance.” But they are not the source of our collective misery. Look up for that.
Ben Bartee is a Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose, Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter. Please support his independent operations however you can.
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