I regret to inform you that even if the government is violently overthrown and blood runs in the street that leading publications are still going to feature articles worrying over “troubling trends on college campuses” and “the Left’s illiberal wokism.”
There’s too much money to be made in catering to populations worried about social change, too much in advertising, too much cache in creating a sense of “impartiality.”
Not to mention, the leading publications are owned by the wealthy who want to avoid any substantive change.
Again, the Left/Right, Liberal/Conservative paradigm you’ve been forcefed is nonsensical.
These publications run these articles because they have a huge incentive to stifle anything from actually changing. That would mean risking wealth and power.
Not to mention, the depiction of institutions like college campuses as “liberal hotbeds” is a complete absurdity. Anybody working on a campus knows the entire thing has been corporatized and overrun by a capitalist, administrative class.
These stories are nonsense.
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Republican politicians banning mandates and ensuring their constituents will suffer and die, all to garner a brief thumbs up from Fox News, aid big business, and troll the opposition, is a truth that is so wildly horrific it’s almost impossible to really sit with for long.
Confronted with the fact that most of the GOP leadership and media class are vaccinated and enjoy the safety of mandates is a horror. It charges us to remember that so many of our crises are choices of pure greed and opportunism that override concern, empathy, and logic.
On tomorrow’s Muckrake Podcast we talk about rising fascism as corresponding with the wealthy seeing profit opportunities in marketing niches. And that’s what it comes down to. Grifters and opportunists prioritizing wealth and power over human lives.
From the very beginning, Manchin and Sinema have been taking advantage of how our media treats politics like spectacle and entertainment, using their dissenting votes as an opportunity to gain attention and fundraise through lobbyists looking to affect their decisions.
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By focusing on incidents like Sinema being followed into a bathroom, attention has been shifted from the legislation which will actually make lives better for living, breathing people into mini-scenes of morality and ethics.
If anything is going to change, national races have to start building around the concept of movements. All this lipservice about cooperation and bipartisanship on the Left has to go out the window.
Stated plans. Mandates. Broad, sweeping wins making governance possible.
And, to do this, Democrats have to at least start moving beyond neoliberalism and reject these anchors who reinforce austerity and special interests.
This, of course, isn’t something this party is capable of doing as it’s constituted. Which makes all this practically moot.
The smart move here is for Biden to use this absolute catastrophe and say to the people, look at this mess, I need more people to achieve X, Y, and Z. The problem is putting together that agenda, being bold, and accepting the GOP will call it tyranny and socialism.
I've talked recently about Manchin and Sinema and how they are bought and sold by special interests in order to derail anything that might help Americans.
What they represent is a massive effort to keep redistributing our wealth from the bottom up.
It helps to remember, regardless of the perception that they’re all politically left-leaning, that our media is a wealthy class with incredible wealth and power and so it is naturally, and even sometimes unconsciously, terrified of the status quo being interrupted.
Throughout history we see it happen over and over again. Even liberals and leftists can grow terrified of their established wealth and power and influence declining should things change, and so they’ll often partner with the Far Right to put down reformers.
When the “liberal media” spends so much time talking to Trump supporters and GOP members who promote conspiracies or worrying over “cancel culture,” remember they have a financial and political stake in things staying the same and in protecting their own wealth and positions.
It’s incredible that the Democratic Party can’t even come together to pass common-sense, firmly moderate and necessary legislation to begin making up for decades’ worth of austerity and inaction and you’ve still got Republicans calling them communists with a straight face.
The whole trend of labeling moderate Democrats as socialists and communists goes back to the 1990’s, when Newt Gingrich realized Clinton and the Republicans were in almost complete economic agreement and then just said screw it, keep calling them radicals.
And it totally worked.
It would be pretty incredible to see what the GOP would do with actual socialists or communists. You have to imagine their circuit boards would just spazz out and shoot so many sparks. And meanwhile, center-right to centrist Democrats are painted with the hammer and sickle.