We are all separated by common dysfunctional habits.
The Left has no moral or cultural alternative to Consumerism. Their “solution” is simply to impoverish us all involuntarily, while doing no such thing to themselves. The impoverishment will include all but the 1% of the 1%, who seem to control most of what happens politically in the world.
The 1% propaganda meme (which originated in Canada, if memory serves, relatively recently, in or just prior to the Obama era, which is when the tension and rhetoric kicked up a few gears) in fact, was most likely ultimately created by people who–most likely without knowing it–were working for the 1% of the 1%. Or triple or quadruple that. The 1 in a million. The 1 in 100 million. Several hundred people on a planet of nearly 8 billion.
That elite has nothing to fear from anti-Capitalist rhetoric, or higher tax rates. They won’t pay them, and in any event make huge sums of money, directly and indirectly, from the system itself. They pay for what people say, and so are easily able to remain hidden. The spotlights they ask to be pointed on others darken the shadows where they live.
In fact, the more time people spend shouting about the “rich”, the less visible they are. Very few people are ABLE to grasp why rich people would pay for anti-rich rhetoric. The simple fact is the 1% is really not that wealthy. The people I am talking about START maybe at a billion dollars, and go up from there. As I have said before there are most likely families, like the Rockefellers and Rothschilds and Schiffs and others, who are de facto trillionaires. Why would they advertise this? They would put all their assets in an endless array of holding companies and fronts so no one could hope to calculate their net worth.
Such people are not affected by tax policy, and they write the laws.
They keep Republicans in the fold with the fear of war–which amounts to threats on the manhood of men who take such things seriously–and pretending they want smaller government.
Abortion is another nice wedge issue, which pushes people on both sides into political alignments they may not otherwise choose and which, since it is polarizing, suits their purposes well. They probably paid for Roe v. Wade, which on the surface was tactically undertaken mainly by the ACLU, if memory serves. But the ACLU is broken, is it not? If they ever stood for something, they don’t now, do they? Have you heard their name once in all of this? I may have heard a whisper, long ago, but no more, and certainly nothing in the past year or so.
And of course universities are not hard to buy, not with donations as small as tens of millions of dollars, which is chump change. As a meme I recently posted put it, 97% of academics are happy to agree with whomever provides their funding.
And I have to wonder if more public health experts have not called BS on this COVID nonsense for the specific reason that pressure was brought to bear on Administrators to keep them silent. I am thinking of Cal in particular, whose behavior has been nothing less than shameful. THEY ARE NOT THAT STUPID.
Yes, the office people are, the bloviating, hard core ideologues. But the people who study policy, who understand pandemics, who know how we rid the world of smallpox, and how we fight cholera and dysentery, who know what masks will and will not do, who understand the importance of nutritional immunosufficiency: those people have largely been silent, and it is not hard to believe they have been SILENCED. Speak up and lose your job. Speak up and lose your funding. Speak up and a mob of zombified wolves will show up at your doorstep. Speak up and your name will be dragged through the mud systematically, such that your own family–if they believe any of it–will disown you. SPEAK UP AND YOU WILL BE HATED.