So I actually read a bit about those books. Is the gist that the culture war is partly manufactured to create a sense of an enemy (LGBT+, immigrants, Marxists) for people to blame for the failures of capitalism and redirect their focus on?
I guess people hating Obama for being Black is just an effect of that influence, working exactly as intended.
Kinda, that’s like scraping the surface though. The overall gist is that there is an obscene amount of money being spent on propaganda in the form of Think Tanks, NGOs, Accredited University Courses, Entertainment, even School Supplies like free worksheets teachers get for Labor Day and shit, etc… that are pushing individualist, pro-capitalism, anti-regulation, anti-union, anti-public schools, anti-worker ideas. The culture war shit is really like the low hanging fruit while they flood the corporate media with news stories and studies that shape our world in pretty much the same way the CIA does but on a much larger scale. Basically they supply the content needed to Manufacture Consent to normalize neoliberalism while funding the politicians who will place their judges and supply opposition.
One of the big “recent” examples, was The Great Barrington Declaration that attacked masking and lockdowns in 2020 that gave corporate media the ammo they needed to kill all the ‘Flatten the curve’ discourse. It was totally backed by Koch and other billionaires, as has been a bunch of other anti-mask and anti-vax events.
There’s a third book I usually recommend with those two books which is Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank which gives the history of how the Democratic party abandoned the working class… which was done with the help of the Koch Brothers who were on the board of the Democratic Leadership Council that got Bill Clinton elected. Between those three books you can get a really good handle on how neoliberalism took over the world.
These are two great excerpts from Listen, Liberal if you’re interested.
So I actually read a bit about those books. Is the gist that the culture war is partly manufactured to create a sense of an enemy (LGBT+, immigrants, Marxists) for people to blame for the failures of capitalism and redirect their focus on?
I guess people hating Obama for being Black is just an effect of that influence, working exactly as intended.
Kinda, that’s like scraping the surface though. The overall gist is that there is an obscene amount of money being spent on propaganda in the form of Think Tanks, NGOs, Accredited University Courses, Entertainment, even School Supplies like free worksheets teachers get for Labor Day and shit, etc… that are pushing individualist, pro-capitalism, anti-regulation, anti-union, anti-public schools, anti-worker ideas. The culture war shit is really like the low hanging fruit while they flood the corporate media with news stories and studies that shape our world in pretty much the same way the CIA does but on a much larger scale. Basically they supply the content needed to Manufacture Consent to normalize neoliberalism while funding the politicians who will place their judges and supply opposition.
One of the big “recent” examples, was The Great Barrington Declaration that attacked masking and lockdowns in 2020 that gave corporate media the ammo they needed to kill all the ‘Flatten the curve’ discourse. It was totally backed by Koch and other billionaires, as has been a bunch of other anti-mask and anti-vax events.
There’s a third book I usually recommend with those two books which is Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank which gives the history of how the Democratic party abandoned the working class… which was done with the help of the Koch Brothers who were on the board of the Democratic Leadership Council that got Bill Clinton elected. Between those three books you can get a really good handle on how neoliberalism took over the world.
These are two great excerpts from Listen, Liberal if you’re interested.
https://tomdispatch.com/thomas-frank-the-inequality-sweepstakes/ The Blue State Model - How the Democrats Created a “Liberalism of the Rich”
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/nor-a-lender-be/ Hillary Clinton, liberal virtue, and the cult of the microloan