blm – True American Radar

There seems to be no shortage of upset and outrage these days. On a positive note, people do seem to want justice and equality. However, each person seems to have their own definition of justice and equality. Each side is going to war with an enemy that exists only in their own mind. The left is possibly more active than ever before, or so it seems, yet they are not solving any of the issues they are protesting. Police fatally shooting minorities is still just as large a problem, Occupy wall street is now a laughing stock of the elites and inequality is soaring. What happened to the MLK civil rights era style organizing? Obviously we will never have another MLK, but that is no reason to throw out effective tactics. Both sides have lessons to learn and responsibility to bear for our current state.

With all the outrage on both sides we need to back up and see where we have all gone off the rails on common sense, and honest effectiveness. Honest effectiveness is included because if we are objectively honest with ourselves, trying to gut each other on social media is not actually an effective or successful political strategy. You will never, and have never brought voters to your point of view from argument, this is a psychological concept, you trigger people to dig their heels in. With that being said, common sense tells us to occasionally get out of the trenches and check out the big picture. The classic business line- “there is a difference between working in a business and working on a business. If you only work in the business you can’t work on the business.” We all seem very angry and highly motivated, we’re going at it everyday online, but to what end? From the left and the right, it’s easy to see neither are making progress, even where there is overlap like in the case of a second stimulus package. So how is our energy and political engagement being diverted from what we want? More importantly, why don’t we care?

The idea of Check-Box Activism is based on a psychological concept of Jaques Lacan about why we engage in empty or symbolic gestures, or actions that have no real consequence. Think about the fact that we give and value gifts based on their uselessness- repurposing an old tool into artwork that hangs on the wall. All of our actions are actually directed towards this symbolic realm the messages we are sending are more like this, “I’m not really giving you an expensive or useful gift, but a priceless gift that I worked on to let you know that I care about you and our friendship, the gift is just a medium” And to the receiver we see the a grandparent receiving a piece of artwork from a grandchild, they will hang it up where it will be on display to proudly tell visitors, “my grandchild made that for me, it took hours and hours” with the real meaning “My grandchild made that for me because I am that special and because they love me that much.”

Prior to social media, if you wanted to take a symbolic gesture that signals to everyone what you believe, you could go organize or actually volunteer. The only actions available were in private(inaction) or public acts of expression and engagement with the Government. Now we have a “Brave New World” style apparatus in social media that is doing a classic Bruce Lee redirect of our energy against us. Before social media to calm that internal desire to take action, and to clear your conscience you had to take action. Now we see tragedy and want justice, so we go online and retweet about climate change, we take our bags to the store, and an internal switch flips that says “I have done my part”. We feel internal pressure release with an “ahh” and hear the CHECK of crossing an item off a list. On its face it appears that we are lazy, yet that simply is not the case.

So why do we spend our time in frivolous ways? Every person feels societal pressures in some way, it just depends on your upbringing and specific family culture. If you are a young person in virtually any group, you feel the pressure to go to college, get a great job, buy a house, get married, and possibly have kids. While pressures mount personally, we see constant news about climate change, wildfires, refugee crisis, migrant crisis, sex trafficking billionaires, big money taking over politics, completely public corruption, you fill in the blank. Not only are all of these legitimate, they are being forced down our throats at a rate never seen before with social media. What could the effects be on a brain constantly exposed to emergency and tragedy? Prior to the media, the bad news received was to the extent of your neighborhood. Then with Newspapers and eventually TV, you start getting non-local news. This beckons the question, are we capable of emotionally handling an entire country’s tragedies? We certainly didn’t evolve that way, now we are asking ourselves to not get overwhelmed knowing every tragedy on earth. Oh yeah, and there is an algorithm studying which topics will engage you the most and put it in your face 24-7.

There are so many people and causes screaming in our face to take action that an active tension is built on a daily basis. This makes you feel guilty, anxious that one day you could look back and regret not taking some action. And then…… you make a Facebook post, bashing real people. When we look out at potential options for being active, the only thing we see is that social media icon, and it is so effective because it clears your guilt as if you took action or stood up to a bully defending something innocent. This is Check-Box Activism, of all the things on the list of pressure-

Get a house
Volunteer more
Ask for a raise
Do something about climate change
Exercise more
Do something about racism

The two vague, yet threatening items serve as a distraction from our immediate life and they can be crossed off from the couch. With one post about what you believe and what you’re against, your conscience clears and endorphins flow. CHECK

We in no way condone violence. TAR is strongly supportive of non-violence.

“I wanna war between the rich and the poor. I wanna fight, and know what I’m fighting for.“

What are we fighting for? Promotion of anti-racism? To completely snub out small town fools and cancel celebrities? An economy where “nothing changes” like Joe Biden has told his donors?

Here’s an unpopular opinion- We will get nowhere believing the Democrats are with the people. These are extraordinarily wealthy people, with extremely powerful donors. You did not grow up with people like this. That conservative “rich” business owner from your hometown is not even 1/10th the status of this class. Your doctor making $250,000/year is not in this group. Most people have never actually met a top 1%er, yet they are writing the rules and laws that influence your life.

So who are these people and how did we end up on their team? And aren’t the Republicans the wealthy corrupt party? It is hard to say exactly when this change occurred to the democrats, but a good guess is in the Jimmy Carter administration. This is the beginning of corporate Democrats and the first step of walking away from white working class voters. Many of the lobbyists we see in the Ragan administration were in the Carter administration as well.

We then see Richard Nixon(with the aid of Pat Buchanan) start speaking the language of the working class. Nixon upended and destroyed the Democrats dominance they had since FDR and the New Deal by literally adopting it’s talking points. Nixon bridged the gap between the 1% and the workers, they now felt like they were one in the same, a trend that is extremely evident with Trump. The left has been playing a dual game of imitation and catch up ever since, relying on celebrity “special flower” candidates to win.(Clinton, Obama, Mayor Pete)

Once the Democrats started losing this working class ground, they actively turned around and ran from their working class constituents. Sprinting into the arms of the white college educated elites that occupy the suburbs. Truly showing their colors, they never cared about advancing workers rights, they were simply using poor whites and poor minority groups to win elections. After all workers are not in their class, they don’t live a life anywhere close to an actual American. They could already speak the super woke language of affluent suburban whites, and their donors hated labor more than anything on earth anyways. This was more than an easy transition, it was a new job with a big raise. Serving the technocrat college educated class is great, they have all the money and work for our donors!

In the same way that the Trump tax cut didn’t help any of his actual voters, the Democrats engage on culture war topics that will never actually help their voters. Yet if they can just come out and say Black Lives Matter and support the protest, they will never have to actually fight for the economic rights of the protesters. And they don’t want to, the elitist Dem voters who work at technology companies are their bread and butter, and these people are on the winning side of massive inequality.

Random fact: Nixon did more than almost any President to protect the environment.

So you’re a member of the working poor, or a union worker, why would you be with the Democrats? They haven’t raised your wages? They let your union collapse? They signed disastrous trade deals that closed your factory? Sadly fewer and fewer people are finding a good answer to that question. The Democrats have abandoned economic populism, they will do everything in their power to never have an economic agenda again. This was evident in the fact that the Democrats are more united in their hatred of Bernie Sanders than of Donald Trump.

So what choice do we really have? The class war started long ago, you just had no idea your side was losing so badly. The upper class has already taken over both political parties and divided all of the workers on fad cultural issues. Perhaps the battle worth focusing on is the class war within our respective parties, realizing that you have much more in common with a Trump voter than you do Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Never forget, every working American is on your actual team, from MAGA hat wearers to fast food workers. Never forget the success of the ultra wealthy can only come at the expense of workers.

Tag: blm

Class War