Look for the People Who Are Helping

I’ve been about 90% of the way to this conclusion for years, but I’m increasingly convinced that all corporate media is simply weaponized. It exists to manipulate and shape, not to inform or inspire. I know, I know, but let’s still say it explicitly to get the ball rolling. I’ll return to this point.

The big split in alternative media is the division between the people who think our ruling class is full of incompetent fools who are accidentally destroying everything they touch and the people who think our ruling class is cleverly executing a plan to deliberately destroy everything they touch.

I think this division is more and more easily bridged by the view that they’re deliberately destroying everything they touch because they think they have a clever plan to replace it all, but they’re roughly a hundred trillion times dumber than they think they are, and none of it is ever going to work the way they think it will. It’s incompetence and a plan: They’re incompetent fools who are deliberately executing a plan that they incorrectly think is smart, destroying because they think they’re building.¹ They put the panel discussions at Davos on YouTube, in case you doubt me. Hubris summons nemesis, but overcredentialed hubris summons the shit out of nemesis. “Oh, man,” nemesis says, really sensing a full day at work.

So.

There’s a story going around.

America is divided, you see, between the sophisticated people in blue-zone cities and the toothless crackers in flyover country who are consumed with mindless hate and rage. The book is Version.1(a) of this argument, choosing the narrative approach that rural places are withering because of “late capitalism,” but stupid white people are irrationally angry at brown people and leftists instead of capitalism. Hillary Clinton deploys the other major version of this argument, in which there is only success, but rural whites hate it because they fear progress. It’s still mostly the same argument: irrational rural whites, full of rage but they don’t know why.

Anyone who reads this book and finds it interesting or serious is a tedious fool, and you can disregard that person’s opinion forever.

But the more important thing is this: The book is pretending to be an explanation, but it’s just a social, cultural, political, and economic weapon. The story it tells is a tactical maneuver in a long war with an obvious strategy. The publication of White Rural Rage is a battle, an attack across no man’s land. It’s meant to polarize, atomize, and isolate — to drive a salient into enemy lines and divide elements of the enemy forces. Us vs. them. Rural whites against the good people.

Why should you take a Covid-19 vaccine? Because if you don’t, you’re low-status. You don’t believe in science, and that’s being lower-class and uneducated. It’s unfashionable, and people like you get shitty jobs and low-status spouses. Schaller and Waldman open the book with a set of supposed observations about the white trash in flyover country, and this is one of them: The white people are anti-science, and they don’t believe in the vaccines, and that’s part of their stupidity and their crudeness and their whiteness.

But science is showing us that the vaccines are garbage. The protein-folding paper. The IgG4 shift paper. The now-long-acknowledged reality that the “vaccines” never stopped transmission or infection.

So what’s the point of the loud and repeated declaration that doubting Moderna and Pfizer product is low-status behavior, the marker of bad character and disreputable identities? The point is that it’s a barricade. It prevents discussion. Saying “ohh, you don’t believe in science!” prevents discussion of…science. It protects the interests of the corporate-state blob, shielding the vacation estates of both the Anthony Faucis and the Albert Bourlas. It’s anti-information, moral and intellectual prophylaxis.

Now, here’s another piece of the barrier, from the shamefully stupid introduction to this repulsive trash about white rural America:

Every sentence of this is a strawman, but my favorite is the “faraway, scary cities”: “Cities, they are told, are both nightmares of depravity and a threat to rural Americans.” Dumb-ass Cletus out there in his pick-’em-up truck thinks cities are depraved, because the far-right propaganda machine feeds him that insane conspiracy theory.

Ladies and gentlemen, I live in Los Angeles. Our cities are really screwed up. If rural whites think cities are depraved, they’re…paying attention? So when people tell you, as prophylaxis, that crime is down, cities are doing well, and the far-right propaganda machine is telling you that cities are troubled, remember a few names.

Seneca Scott is a community activist in Oakland. The heart of his activism is that he walks around, so you can see what the city has become under failed leadership and an ideology of ruin:

Kevin Dahlgren is a street journalist who walks West Coast cities, doing face-to-face interviews with homeless drug addicts and drug dealers to reveal the madness of progressive urban policy — and the agony in the lives of the people it harms. He’s kind, calm, persistent, and relentlessly unsentimental.

Tara Faul — “Garbage Ghost” — is a Portland street photographer who documents the reality of a declining city, and talks to people with kindness and courage.

And Deon Joseph is a longtime LAPD officer who has spent his career on Skid Row, trying to drive out drug dealers and convince people to try to escape addiction and homelessness. He speaks with tremendous impatience for ideological bullshit, and tells direct and clear stories from the street. His approach isn’t what you think when you hear that he’s an LAPD officer patrolling Skid Row.

You have to choose who to listen to with your finite time and patience. There are people who are making narratives to serve a manipulative agenda, and people who are walking in the street and telling you what they see there. Look for the people who speak for life and truth. They exist. Don’t give up on finding them. Go up and re-read that excerpt from White Rural Rage to remember the tone and style of people you should never listen to.

1. We shoot all the kulaks, see, and then we collectivize their land, and then….paradise on earth!