Disrupt The Culture Wars

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

AUG 4, 2023

One of the great challenges faced by westerners who oppose the political status quo today is the way the narrative managers of both mainstream factions continuously divert all political energy away from issues which threaten the interests of the powerful like economic injustice, war, militarism, authoritarianism, corruption, capitalism and ecocide and toward issues which don’t threaten the powerful at all like abortion, racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

This method of social control serves the powerful in some very obvious ways, and is being used very effectively. As long as it remains effective, it will continue to be used. The worse things get the more urgent the need to fight the class war will become, and the more urgent the need to fight the class war becomes the more vitriolic and intense the artificial culture war will become in order to prevent political changes which inconvenience the powerful. This is 100 percent guaranteed. And what’s tricky is that all the vitriolic intensity will create the illusion that the culture war has gotten more important, when in reality the class war has.

It’s just a straightforward fact that the more miserable, impoverished and disempowered the public becomes, the more hateful and all-consuming the artificial culture war will be made to prevent revolution. That’s what’s been happening, and that’s what will continue to happen. You can hate hearing it, and you can hate me for saying it. But it is a fact, and I think we all pretty much know it’s a fact.

So what’s to be done about this? Obviously it’s not an option to just throw disempowered groups to the wolves and ignore the abuses they’re suffering under the directed hatred coming after them from the right. And obviously it’s not an option to run to the other side of the artificial partisan divide and play along with the mainstream faction which says we should focus only on culture war issues, as in Hillary Clinton famously arguing that breaking up the banks won’t end racism and sexism.

As with most problems, the first step toward finding a solution is to bring consciousness to what’s happening. Draw attention to the fact that marginalized groups are being used and abused by mainstream narrative managers to keep the public from turning their gaze on the abuses of their rulers. Draw attention to the way rightist narrative managers direct hatred toward marginalized groups to keep hatred away from our rulers, and to the way liberal narrative managers seize on that to direct their herd away from issues that can inconvenience the powerful and toward exclusive focus on the culture war.

Stop letting people get sucked up into the performance, and instead draw attention to what’s really going on here. Act like a loud jerk at a movie theatre who keeps yelling “None of this is real! Those are actors on a movie set!” 

Can you imagine how hard it would be to get lost in the narrative of a movie if somebody was constantly doing that to you? After a while you’d stop seeing Oppenheimer and you’d only be able to see Cillian Murphy.

Basically all you’re trying to do is take all the emotional heat that’s being diverted into partisan feuding over issues whose outcomes will never inconvenience power in the slightest, and steer that emotional heat toward the people who are directing all this. This is both easy to do and completely honest, because how fucked up is it that they’re doing this? How fucked up is it that the most influential voices in our society on both sides of the mainstream partisan divide are facilitating the abuse of marginalized groups in order to protect the powerful? 

It’s about as loathsome a thing as you could possibly come up with. They’re pitting human against human at the expense of society’s most vulnerable members and watching them fight from on high like Greek gods. Can you think of anything more vile?

Draw attention to how disgusting what they’re doing is. Draw attention to how deeply evil this behaviour is. Keep shouting in that movie theatre and drawing attention to what’s really going on to highlight how profoundly depraved these monsters really are.

Draw people’s attention to this dynamic wherever you see it. When right wing “populists” babble about LGBTQ conspiracies and shriek about wokeness, mock them for the ridiculous sheep they are for playing into a dynamic that directly serves the elite power structures they claim to oppose. When liberals are ignoring economic injustice, war, militarism, authoritarianism, corruption, capitalism and ecocide to focus on culture war battles whose outcomes will never even slightly inconvenience the powerful, highlight the disgusting way they themselves are feeding into a dynamic that imperils the marginalized communities they claim to defend.

People on both sides of the divide will object to this message. The source of their objection is the exact programming I just described. The truth hides just beneath that objection. On some level you all know this is happening.

Keep breaking the spell and drawing attention to what’s really going on, and you can stomp out the abuse at its source.

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

 

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Crybullies.                                                            Keith Porteous  

crybully: noun, plural cry·bul·lies.

a person who self-righteously harasses or intimidates others while playing the victim, especially of a perceived social injustice: “It’s just another group of crybullies who can’t cope with anyone’s views but their own.”

Like most publications, The Islands Grapevine (TIG) has an editorial policy that supports the censorship of hate-speech, incitements to violence, and the use of pejorative language to smear or denigrate a private citizen. This policy mostly mirrors Canadian speech, slander, and libel laws, where there are limits to freedom of speech. TIG does not “print just about anything”, nor does it accept letters to the editor or opinion pieces without editorial review, and sometimes asks contributors to revise their submissions based on its publicly defined editorial policies, and these views are independent of the personal views of TIG’s editor.

More than 90% of TIG’s public health content has been contributed without controversy, and is sourced from government advisories. Some of that information turned out to be false, but TIG’s editor assumes that these errors and false claims were made in good faith. In other words, the public health experts and advocates making these false claims did so in their belief that they were true, even in the absence of later correcting themselves. But now that the available mainstream scientific and documented evidence has evolved, not all of TIG’s critics have accepted these facts, even falsely smearing the paper and making threats to boycott or pull advertising as a form of protest. I’ll be writing about this in more detail at a later date.

The biggest insult carried in the smears and threats, is the assumption that they will have an effect on TIG’s editorial policy. Apparently, those who have not revised their beliefs, based on the current mainstream documented scientific evidence relating to public health policy, think that TIG’s publisher is so lacking in his convictions that the editorial policy will be changed if an ad is withdrawn, or when someone claims they will no longer read the paper or contribute content. And these threats are also made in relation to other letters and opinions TIG has published. TIG has even received emails from people accessing taxpayer supported funds for public benefit, threatening to withdraw it from TIG advertising and redirect it elsewhere, based on their personal views. This is a clear form of corruption, and a conflict of interest.

It should also be said that TIG receives an enormous amount of support from its readership and advertisers, often quietly and privately, noting the social cost of speaking up against the crybullies. So what is all this really about? It’s not an issue of what is true, but an issue of who controls the messaging, and a mirror of the corporate media model that has been employed over the last 20 plus years. The corporate business model is now one that picks a lane and sticks to it, by telling its audience what it wants to hear, and nothing of what it doesn’t want to hear. This is true of both FOXNews and CBCNews. There is an expectation under this corporate model that you will rarely hear a perspective that you don’t like and don’t agree with. In independent media, there is a much wider inclusion of different perspectives, and less exclusion of perspectives that don’t mirror the dominant narratives as presented by government and corporate media. TIG is an independent and democratic free press that holds firmly to the principles of its editorial policies.

When yesterday’s “misinformation” becomes today’s accepted fact, we should take pause to ask the simple question, “who gets to determine what is true?” Apparently governments and corporate media believe that they do, while public trust in these institutions is at a historical low point. Legacy media is literally dying, while the political leadership’s favourability ratings are at an all time low. Most recently, based on the documented evidence and testimony of whistleblowers and independent journalists, a U.S. Federal Court judge ordered the Executive Branch of the U.S. government, including all of its law enforcement and security apparatus, to stop making contact with social media companies in order to suppress and censor information they don’t like, the so-called “malinformation” that carries inconvenient truths. Most widespread “disinformation” isn’t coming from “conspiracy theorists” and Russia, it’s coming from Western governments and their corporate media allies.

The Islands Grapevine is a community newspaper in the traditional sense, in that it mostly publishes information relating to community events, uncontroversial issues that reflect local culture and activities, advertising local businesses and independent services, with classifieds and crosswords and cartoons, and with a few letters to the editor and a couple of opinion pieces. It’s a locally owned small business that employs a few people, seeking to grow its engagement with the island communities it serves. TIG also prints The Flagstone monthly, at a below market cost. The readers and writers who publicly criticize TIG are often carried in its weekly issues, as a reflection of its commitment to a free press philosophy. Those who make empty threats and foolish accusations are merely the crybullies. If what you are looking for is the single lane idea of corporate media, or the echo chambered silos of your social media, you are still invited to read The Islands Grapevine free of charge, and turn the page if you see something you don’t like.