Quote: (03-17-2015 10:50 PM)speakeasy Wrote:
Are you guys fucking kidding me dragging Obama into this? Are you guys such Obama haters that any bad thing a black person does ultimately traces back to Obama policies? A few years ago Rush Limbaugh set a precedent for shit shit by showed a clip of a black kid beating up a white kid on a bus and declaring that "this is Obama's America". What's next? Are we going to blame this attack on Obamacare? Guys this shit is pure demagoguery and it's gotten out of control.
I know in conservative circles they think Obama is the reincarnation of Malcolm X meets Karl Marx, but the reality is, while he is popular amongst blacks(and well pretty much everywhere on the planet except white Americans, Russians and Israelis), black people generally don't feel he has done much of anything during his term to address socioeconomic inequalities amongst races in any measurable way. He is most definitely NOT in our pocket. Black president or not, the power structure in this country is pretty much 100% white. Those that fund campaigns, lobbyists, shot callers, think tanks, policymakers. It's pretty much all whites that run America behind the scenes. Our half black president has confines he has to maneuver within and powerful people he has to answer to, like all presidents. And these are not black people. Black people basically have ZERO power in this country. I mean real power, not starting some fight on a playground. All those gleaming towers you see on the Manhattan skyline, that shit is not run by us. It's not black money lobbying the white house to get what it wants. It's not black think tanks writing our laws for us. The major wealth in this country isn't owned by us. So when I hear people talking like black people have taken over the damn country because of Obama I really have to wonder what reality they live in.
Ever since Obama started running for president, certain parts of right-wing media have pushed the idea of Blacks Behaving Badly. In particular, every schoolyard fight, every bus driver incident, every mugging on video with black perpetrators gets prominent position on
The Drudge Report. Drudge sets the agenda for other media, like Fox. What he places gets repeated on right-wing blogs, message boards, Twitter, etc. As mentioned, Rush Limbaugh is also flogging this theme.
Drudge and Limbaugh explicitly link these incidents to "Obama's America," as if these things didn't happen before (in my experience, they happened more in Nixon's/Ford's/Carter's America). On Drudge right now, there are two items to stoke white Americans' racial resentment and fear:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/.../70302194/ - Headlined as "GOOGLE FUNDS CODE2040... 'Year population of minorities expected to overtake whites'..."
http://www.businessinsider.com/dick-chen...iew-2015-3 - Headlined as "Cheney Slams Obama In PLAYBOY Interview... President 'playing race card'..."
Drudge and Limbaugh are media agents of the Republican Party. The object is to promote a kind of tribal politics, get the old white ladies riled up and scared with tales of niggers gone wild in McDonalds, cheating on welfare, etc.
They pick local incidents (like the one in the OP) in a huge country of 320 million and make them national and linked to the opposition. The question to ask yourself is: How come I never see videos of Whites Behaving Badly linked on Drudge? We know whites do behave badly on occasion.
The base of the Republican party is rural, southern, suburban whites. The Republican media push a metanarrative of whites being besieged and threatened. As a redneck guy I knew in the Army put it back in 1977, "NATO" (Niggers Are Taking Over).
The Democrats and their media do the same thing. The most prominent recent example is the "War on Women" and the bullshit about the rape epidemic, Sandra Fluke, Sen. Gillibrand and Mattress Girl, etc. The rapists are going to take over if the Republicans win.
The worst example I can remember on the Democratic side is the Clinton/Gore administration raising fear and suspicion about church burnings in the year leading up to the 1996 election. Some black churches in the south and elsewhere had been burned. Maybe one was found to be racially motivated. When the rest of the burnings were investigated, it turned out that the churches were burned by pyromaniacs (pyromaniacs love churches - large wooden structures which are empty of people most of the time), disgruntled deacons, and things like electrical faults. But Clinton had press conferences, pushed the Attorney General out there to say she was "investigating," whipped up black leaders about it, tried to make it seem like the KKK was torching all of the black churches in the country. The story is summarized here:
http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/in-es...fires-time
These things are all about mobilizing your own voter base and creating a climate of us vs. them. Expect to see a lot of it in the next year and a half leading up to the 2016 election.
Part of escaping the Matrix is understanding the use of media to push metapolitical narratives which have no or only partial relationship to the broad reality.