Will’s Honest Opinion – Triggered Happy – 6-1-18
I took a ride downtown via Uber the other day, and somehow, as seems to be the norm these days, the conversation took a turn into Trump territory. I do find it ironic how 10 years ago the odd person in the cab usually was the rider, but now it’s the driver who has signed on for the monthly tinfoil hat collection. But I digress. Eventually the dialogue shifted into race politics and the driver said “I think whites should be treated like everyone else.” Although I knew what he was trying to say, I swiftly and respectfully disagreed.
I disagreed because a statement like could suggest that whites are mistreated. Whites are not. Minorities are, and comparing whites to minorities in that sense is a backwards sentiment. Frankly we’ve been seeing this in the news a lot lately. False equivalencies and race based division politics. One side backs their team regardless of the hypocritical stance followed by the same side only days later. Either you’re a kneeler or a stander. Either you use the bathroom and buy something or you’re just loitering. Either your tweets are racist or just “bad jokes”. It’s identity politics at it’s worse. There seems to be an excuse for every “misunderstood” moral ambiguity, but it’s transparency is crystal clear. The news wants you to believe there are only two side. There aren’t. It’s easier to compartmentalize these happenings into a simple good and bad ideology. However, the world is not as easy as black and white.
The world is grey.
If you read either The New Yorker, or Atlantic Monthly, or listen to NPR, it’s verbose nature caters to it’s ultra bleeding heart liberal crowd. If you watch Info Wars, Tomi Lahren, or read the Drudge Report, you’re most likely on the extreme right. (Sorry for the false equivalent view skew, but I’m trying to make a point.) And that point is in recognizing the extremes in stance picking and reporting. The idea is very literally to split sides. Your options are Doves or Hawks. When you divide your opponent, you conquer them, and the public is currently being played like the largest fiddle since the commoners of medieval times. The masses are falling into the trap minute by minute. We’re too busy fighting each other instead of joining forces and fighting the real issues put forth by our true oppressors.
Time for a history lesson. When the monarchs of the middle ages wanted to rule with an iron fist, they knew they needed to distract and demoralize their peasants by dividing them and enforcing belittling laws to dishearten them. They did this with over taxation, and race division to name a few. As a way to split the farmers amongst themselves they would tell the white farmers “at least you’re not black” so they could take their land and the whites would still feel as though they weren’t being completely upstaged by their kings and landowners. By being “white” they were still apart of the “nobility class”, and this lessened the blow of being undercut. The Romans would go a step further with their crowd control and offer games and sports to occupy the denizens time in an attempt to stave off rebellion. The biggest, toughest ones were courted for gladiatorial duties and Spartans as a way to employ and mitigate the biggest threats. The Egyptians would create large construction projects to keep slaves busy, and all countries would practice a blind nationalism like people do when they pick a favorite sports team.
These were all methods of control. Does any of this sound familiar? How many people have two game systems, a go nowhere job, and feel like their race is marginalized in some way? It’s all by design. All of you self proclaimed “woke” SJW’s need to read Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent”. None of this is by accident. It’s hundreds of years of perfected tactics used to control it’s population. And these incidents of fake news like Roseanne tweets and AR10 girl on Kent State Campus are no different. They are trying to divide you and you are letting them by choosing sides.
Lets talk about the AR10 girl on the Kent State Campus for a moment. When this story broke, you couldn’t go two comments into any post without seeing the words “white privilege” uttered in some way, shape or form. This is not white privilege. White privilege would be if this girl went to campus, used her gun for target practice and wasn’t arrested because she was white. In that instance, that would be a privilege of being white. The definition of “privilege” states that normal rules don’t apply to you. Carrying her gun on campus is a protected law. It’s a right, not a privilege. (Whether you may like it or not.) This girl followed the rules and laws and was chastised for it by people who regularly feel marginalized, and would undoubtedly be treated differently for doing the exact same thing. If you have an issue with that, that’s not the girl’s fault. It’s societies fault for allowing it. That’s who’s to blame. From an oppressed viewpoint it’s easy to perceive this as privilege, but it’s not. So what happens? Class divide. Arguing. Infighting. We now are listening to why we need tighter gun laws, when really that was never really an argument in this scenario. (Although it should be the ONLY argument.) And although many of these issues are most likely good valid points, the concepts and ideals are conflated into something grotesque. Instead of fighting towards a common goal, we argue amongst each other through nonsensical semantics and emotion based knee jerk reactions. Nobody is willing to listen to the other side because they’ve already made up their mind on the position at hand.
Now let’s talk about Roseanne. Roseanne is an idiot. Should have she been fired though? That’s really an interesting question. That firing, although seems obvious, is actually kind of out of character for many networks; but not ABC. It’s especially irksome when you consider there were 200 other jobs on the line. And Roseanne tweeting something racist and belittling isn’t anything new. Why give a show deal to a woman who’s been known to do this regularly? When Bill Maher joked about being a “house n-word” on air, he apologized a week later and we all moved on. This too was a joke gone wrong, but when is it a joke and when is it something political? Obviously referring to an African American as a monkey is clearly goes beyond being a joke into blatant racism, but what if Bill Maher called Trump the n-word? Is this a joke the American public would laugh and get behind? His audience may have jeered, and his conservative counterparts may have berated him even further for such a statement. Would have HBO fired him for that? It’s hard to know. Maher was also fired from ABC in 2002 for his statements about 911. The perception of public opinion is a fickle thing and flows back and forth like a wavy palm on a Pacific island. And network television hasn’t been the edgiest place to be since “All in the Family” aired from ’71 to ’79.
When I was on the Movie Review Extravaganza a few months ago, I suggested that the hype and glorified marketing behind films like ‘Black Panther’ could lead the charge in drilling race based politics into the consciousnesses of young Americans in this country; specifically ones who are looking for any reason to be angry and justify acts of violence. This isn’t the movie’s fault, but rather the forced political push behind it. I was scoffed at when I suggested it could lead to something like a school shooting. Well since the Santa Fe High school shooting happened, neo nazis have claimed the shooter as one of their own. Now this isn’t directly blaming Black Panther’s marketing per se, but have no illusions that the two are absolutely intertwined. A deep seeded resentment is edging it’s way into this country and using alt-right politics to mobilize it. The targeting of minorities in the waffle-house shooting wasn’t a coincidence either, and the spin the media uses to sensationalize these events are all part of a larger push to divide the masses.
This is not a conspiracy. This is institutional analysis, and it’s been done before.
Right now the world is being held in an information dependent state. Kim in the White House discussing prison reform is the highest form of nontroversy. It’s nontent through and through. It’s deliberate in it’s attempt to get people talking about something that doesn’t matter, and is used to obfuscate from the truths that are happening all around us every day. When the Monica Lewinsky controversy went into full effect in ’96, the real story about the CIA running drugs into the US in the 70’s and 80’s was pushed to the back of the New York Times. The Contra war in Nicaragua is another topic Chomsky references and should be taken with serious consideration when attempting to hide the truth. They’re capitalizing on lowered attention spans and over inundation of fake news. So in turn, don’t let it consume you. Don’t be apart of it. They are trying to divide us and they are winning. It’s class warfare and we’re waging it on ourselves.
And now with internet politics growing out of control, the races and classes are eating each other in feeble attempts to justify racism and push an agenda; which, although sometimes is the right stance, generally tends to undermine the real controversy at hand. It distracts in it’s attempt to justify faux virtue signaling. It gives internet personalities like Ben Shapiro and Stefan Molyneux a soapbox to prattle on about using reductionist based reasoning, and offers low key suggestions that minorities are the real problem. Earlier I said, I didn’t think whites should be treated like everyone else. I still stand by that statement, and the truth is much simpler than that. The oppression needs to end. Whites should not be treated like minorities. Minorities need to start being treated like whites.
-Will Valle
