well I would lead in with that and maybe ask a few more hourly employees but that’s not as sexy a story as blaming the lowest paid workers for the troubles they’re causing the rich folks by refusing to work for scraps in a pandemic hotbox
take a wild trip with me. I want to go step by step through how a right wing narrative is engineered from embryo to playground. c’mon it’ll be fun! <it won’t be fun>
so about two weeks ago, bill anderson, owner of dale’s diner in waterville, ohio, gets a micro-burst of stories in the news on his diner’s pending closure; three different headline variants through the same outlet
now bill anderson is not just “a dude”. he’s an ex-corporate executive from a family in a long line of ohio agriculture & industry magnates.
there will be all kinds of “was this a great/terrible move” takes but that’s talking past the main point. by all accounts, the pentagon’s preferred plan was literally just stay in afghanistan forever in some varying capacity
I don’t know how you make a coherent argument against total exit when the alternative proposal is just unbound perpetual troop presence for a myriad of hypothetical scenarios
no defined metrics, no achievable deliverables, no timeframes, no measurable objectives. just stick around because bad shit will happen if we don’t and that’s how it’ll always be
I don’t throw this out lightly, q: into the storm may deserve to end up standing as the greatest full bodied work of journalism from this era. it is a requisite touchstone for future historical reference. the unraveling it accomplishes is a feat that should have been impossible
I followed this shit in realtime & knew the players & the game not as well as some but far better than is probably healthy. I knew the lineage, the events, the connections. but actually *documenting* them *and then weaving them together coherently* is an entirely different animal
and my god the perception and foresight to have been pointing cameras at these people from the outset. beyond remarkable. miraculous even. the reveals are airtight, the new info shocking even to those who were looped in already.