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.
Yep. They really will be coming for our guns.
no they won’t. it’s too integral to the system of white supremacy holding the system up in the first place
I don’t understand, are they paying you to run interference? America is having a moment of class consciousness and you’re still hammering the racial identity politics? It’s the supremacy of capital, we’d all do well to remember that.
There’s more guns than people in America. This is what people don’t understand when they say “you can’t stop a drone with an AR” yeah, sure. But there’s only a handful of drones/drone operators in America. 250 million people with 350 million guns are going to win in the end. Full stop.
Edit: there’s not enough cops/agency people in the country to take guns forcefully in America. With the coming cuts to government agencies, there will be even less, both in enforcement and in discovery.
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 believe this crap for a second - they can afford all the security they need to protect themselves. I think this is an attempt at manipulation to keep us at bay for a while until we cool off & resume living like before this happened, so they can continue doing what they’ve been doing all the while knowing that they shouldn’t push much further for now.
Let’s face it - human attention spans are short, and in three months or so this will be pushed back in most people’s minds as they continue dealing with their day-to-day struggles. This messaging is designed to make us feel “heard” so we wait to see what happens rather than risk our lives on taking further action, but after a while nothing will have changed & it’ll all be the same as before.
Remember two things:
- Their security are working class, no matter how you slice it. They only way you can avoid them turning on you/abandoning you is if they have undying loyalty to you. And that is very rare and very hard to maintain.
- Capitalism is inherently unsustainable. So collapse can only be delayed, not avoided. Eventually, the plethora of self-defeating aspects of Capitalism will become more than any of the elite can suppress or mitigate. Hopefully labor is ready at that point to rise up and take back what has been stolen, and recreate the institutions as a socialist structure, owned and controlled by the workers.
I think you’re underestimating the amount of Luigies there are. And I think this probably has woke a lot of them up.
This is the real answer. The rich know it’s just like school shootings. One can trigger several in a short period and they’re terrified of that.
They’re not worried only about stochastic terrorism. They’re also worried that we’ll become an organized & militant labor movement and gain some political power. Or worse still, that we’ll seize the means of production and depose them.
I don’t believe this crap for a second
Which crap don’t you believe?
This messaging is designed to make us feel “heard”
Whose messaging? Michael Parenti’s? Caitlin Johnstone’s? Peter Thiel’s? Piers Morgan’s?
after a while nothing will have changed & it’ll all be the same as before.
As I’ve already said elsewhere in this post, one difference will be that the expansion of the security state/police state will be accelerated.
Having been both military and security, I will tell you that while military, my position was MUCH harder for me to ignore. As security, I could easily say “fuck this, it isnt worth it.” In the military, the job (in ones head) is the security of the nation and the people around you. As security, you’re more likely to have a family, and at some point you’re like “I wanna see my family again, $20/hr isn’t worth not seeing my kid again”. As security, you’re essentially a mercenary. You have no ideological points for it, it’s just a check. Security almost never has a situation where it becomes “this issue is something worth dying for”. That’s simply absurd. Even if I’m making $50/hr for Jeff bezos, there’s an amount of discontent that I’m not willing to deal with just for his safety, and that’s before you consider your own personal opinions/ideals/objections. Historically speaking, buying security is iffy at best.
It’s really telling that their fear is causing them to spend so much on security and separating themselves from the masses rather than, I don’t know, acknowledging the grievances of the masses and spending a paltry percentage of their wealth to solve some widely recognized societal issues that government can’t or won’t address.
Seriously, the cognitive dissonance on display is mind boggling when so much of the population sees you and your kind as greedy leeches, and your response is, “They’re simply wrong!” as you pump obscene amounts of money towards your security, bunkers, and electing politicians who will protect your widely despised position in the world.
He knows they’ve crossed a line into the most indefensible of behavior. He knows that they’re killing us for profit, and he’s begging us to stop defending ourselves.
The mask is off. They’re now openly asking us to die for their wealth.
They’re scared but they’re scared nowhere near enough.
