Plutocrats like Thiel are constantly thinking about the fact that ordinary people vastly outnumber them and can kill them at any time. They think about it way more often than ordinary people do. It’s a point that they are acutely aware of at all times. It consumes their attention. They are always working on manipulating public consciousness to ensure that we don’t think as much as they do about how many more of us there are of them, and how we don’t have to put up with their domination of our society if we don’t want to.
As Michael Parenti once put it:
“I tell students when they say, ‘Oh they don’t care what we think. They ignore us’, and all that, and I say, ‘Oh no, no. That’s the only thing they care about you. The only thing they care about you is what you’re thinking. They don’t care if you eat correctly, they don’t care how your living conditions are, they don’t care that they’ve built up an inhuman and irrational traffic system that’s strangulating us and polluting our air, they don’t care about anything. The only thing about you they care about is what you’re thinking. In the morning, they start, ‘What’s going to be the story today? How do we manipulate, how do we control, how do we contain, how do we influence, how do we act upon what it is that they have in their minds?’”
Manipulating public consciousness is of existential importance to the ruling class, because no matter how many billions of dollars you amass, at the end of the day you’re still a soft skin sack of blood and bones like anybody else, and you share a society with huge numbers of people who can very easily hurt you if they want to. That’s why our minds are constantly being hammered with propaganda into accepting the status quo politics upon which our rulers have built their kingdoms.
Who’s “they”?
Lol, fair. That’s the problem, I don’t know. I and colleagues love to play the prediction game but I don’t know. Declaring Luigi a terrorist doesn’t feel like something that organically came from our government, at least not inside the context of the prior years and all the shooters therein.
There are problems in our government, big problems, many of which directly grew from the 1981-2020 American experiment of removing subsidy from working class in favor of subsidizing corporate. That is why there’s a disappeared middle class, among other things, and corporate has grown so large.
The 1950s affluence is what subsidizing the middle class looked like, granted, with a heavy lean on white. That was American federal policy FDR-1981.
What does subsidizing the middle class and extending it to both women and POC look like? We don’t know, we haven’t done that experiment yet. What we have now is an odd mix of pushing rules for legal under the law for everyone but with no working class subsidy. But I’ve already digressed too far.
Today, since November, we have open, blatant corporate win. The king of corporate, the man with the most wealth, is now having an entire government body being created for him to cut what he likes, and he’s proven through action that he doesn’t like the American worker.
Trump doesn’t like guns. He played to his base, but he’s on record as disliking guns very much, well before that kid from his base tried to shoot him. Enter the CEO/corporate cloud of people he’s surrounded with right now combined with the public reaction to Luigi. Suddenly, Luigi is declared a terrorist.
My prior belief was an act intended to influence or upset our governing body was required for the terrorist label. I don’t know how a for private health care insurance company qualifies as a government body, but here we are. With CEOs running scared I think we know why this is now a terrorist act.
This is new. Authoritarian government, open corporate/CEO running of our government, and Luigi. The line has blurred and we’re seeing a blatant showing of who is in charge of us now.
As such. I don’t know who is coming for our guns since this government transition isn’t fully complete yet. But the possibility does feel real now within the context of current events, the slow trod on the backs of working class for 40yrs, and that first domino from Mr Luigi.
Prior, that statement was an eyeroll and laugh as ridiculous. Now, I don’t think so.
But hey, I’m just one person sitting in an armchair playing prediction games. What do you think?
I don’t mean to oversimplify, but it’s late and I’m tired. People seem to love their guns more than their children across a large swath of this country, so I guess we find out when we find out.
My first thought is that a safe full of guns won’t protect you from a hellfire missile coming through the front door. My second thought is that rural America will collectively lose their shit if Trump comes for their guns to soften up the populace for whatever follows. Then again he also might deputize a bunch of jackboots, which almost seems guaranteed at this point.
Who’s to say what happens next.