If you read this site, you know that I am always talking about how the media and the government seek to divide the country. That’s their primary means of clinging to power. They make us fight amongst one another so that we can never unite against them.
If you go back to the start of this century, there have been three primary subjects the elites have used to divide America:
- Terrorism and the War on Terror. Are you pro-war or anti-war?
- Race: Are you racist or anti-racist?
- Covid: Are you pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine?
Now obviously the biggest divide in the country is and has always been left vs. right, or Democrat vs. Republican.
But in terms of which specific issues have been the most divisive among the American people over the past 20 years, I would say it has been the War on Terror, Race, and Covid.
It has all been by design.
However, my theory is that the shift to dividing the nation by race was done as a means moving the country away from the class divide, a raging debate that had been cracked wide open by the Great Recession of 2008.
If you remember back to those years, there was a considerable amount of attention being paid to the 1% vs. the 99%. The Occupy Wall Street protests were the embodiment of the growing economic unrest in the country.
It is my view that, when combined with the Tea Party protests against “Too Big To Fail,” high taxes, out-of-control government spending, the soaring national debt, and to some extent even the policies of central banks, the ruling class viewed both movements as having the potential to be a significant threat to their rule.
The ruling class cannot tolerate economic unrest. That’s real. That’s something that could bring down the whole system.
The public had basically caught on to the scheme by 2009. They realized Wall Street highly irresponsible, wrecked the whole economy, the regulators didn’t give a shit about any of it, and that the taxpayers were forced to bail out the banks after their greedy schemes blew up.
While on the surface the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street were different, in reality, they were quite similar. The left was angry at the billionaire class and about income inequality. The right was angry about the government’s inexcusable (many would say deliberate) mismanagement of the economy and the federal budget, and also the fact that the taxpayers were on the hook for massive bailouts of the banking sector.
They were both about money at heart.
There was a phrase going around on the right around that time along the lines of “the elites want privatized gains and socialized losses.”
Sure, back then, most conservatives were naive and happily came to the defense of the wealthy 1%, Wall Street and Multinational Corporations. They scoffed at liberals protesting capitalism, calling them idiotic socialists who had no idea how economics worked.
But the elite saw the growing economic discontent as a serious risk to the stability of the political system, and sought to divert attention away from it. They had to find another “issue” to turn the public’s attention to.
That’s when the Race War became their #1 priority.
If we look on Google Trends, we can see that “police brutality” experienced a surge in popularity starting around 2014:
2014 is when the Ferguson stuff was happening over Michael Brown.
I had to narrow the range of the chart to exclude George Floyd, because it made everything else look insignificant:
But there was a clear increase in interest in police brutality starting around 2014.
Prior to 2014, though, the public didn’t really care too much about police brutality. It was more concerned with the top 1%:
That massive spike was in 2011, during the Occupy Wall Street days.
Searches for “income inequality” also started rising in 2009, as did searches for “billionaires”:
But we can see how quickly interest in Occupy Wall Street died out:
A major spike in 2011, then a steep fall-off, and then it basically disappeared from the public radar.
My theory is that the media tried to turn the public’s attention away from class issues and on to racial issues, starting with Trayvon Martin in 2012.
I could be wrong, but I just don’t remember the media emphasizing racial issues all that much prior to 2012.
I’m going to list off some of the most high-profile killings of black people that have dominated headlines in recent memory, and the common denominator is that basically all of them have happened post-2012:
- Trayvon Martin, 2012
- Michael Brown, 2014
- Eric Garner, 2014
- Tamir Rice, 2014
- Freddie Gray, 2015
- Philando Castile, 2016
- George Floyd, 2020
- Breonna Taylor, 2020
- Jacob Blake, 2020 (survived)
It’s difficult to find any information on high-profile police killings of black people (or any other sort of perceived wrongful killing of black people, i.e. Trayvon Martin who wasn’t killed by police but rather a neighborhood vigilante George Zimmerman).
Now I’m not saying the police never killed any black people prior to 2014. I’m saying the media didn’t care about it until 2014.
Al-Jazeera has an interactive list called “Know Their Names: Black people killed by police in the US.”
Wouldn’t you know it, it only goes back to 2014. As if no black people were ever killed by police prior to 2014.
Every list I can find only goes back to 2014.
This website “Stacker” has a what it calls a comprehensive and in-depth timeline of police violence in America. It’s a very long and thorough article that goes all the way back to slave patrols in the early 1700s.
Here are the incidents I found from pre-Trayvon Martin:
- Rodney King, 1992
- Amadou Diallo, 1999
- Timothy Thomas, 2001
- Kathryn Harris Johnston, 2006
- Sean Bell, 2006
- Aiyana Jones, 2010
- Anthony Lamar Smith, 2011
I was too young to remember a lot of these incidents, but to my knowledge, other than Rodney King, which was highly publicized and ended up causing massive race riots in LA, there was nowhere near as much media coverage surrounding these incidents as there was given to the post-Trayvon Martin incidents.
The Trayvon Martin incident happened February 26, 2012. I remember it being a huge national news story for a long time back in 2012, at least a month or two. And then it got brought up again in 2013 when George Zimmerman was acquitted.
However, I don’t remember it being an issue in the 2012 election. I really don’t remember any sort of racial debate happening during that election.
I remember the 2012 as being a fight between the supposedly pro-Middle Class Obama, and the pro-Corporation/wealthy elitist Mitt Romney.
I think the media and the political class was able to successfully channel all the class-based angst in the country into the election, directing all the anti-wealthy elite rage at Mitt Romney (Remember “Rmoney”). In other words, the elite was able to redirect the anger of the Occupy Wall Street crowd towards Mitt Romney, the living embodiment of the 1%.
But Trayvon Martin also played a role in diverting the public’s attention away from the 1% and towards something that would divide the people amongst themselves. They wanted minorities and white liberals to side with Trayvon, and conservatives to side with Zimmerman.
But once the 2012 election was over, I think they really began to focus on race as the #1 dividing issue.
This article goes in-depth on the stark change in the media’s coverage of race since 2012, but I’ll include a few charts just to illustrate the point:
Starting around 2012, the number of news articles mentioning “white privilege” started to skyrocket.
This is specific to the New York Times, but you can see very clearly that between 2012-2015, mentions of “racism” shot up.
This Reddit post goes even further back, all the way to the 1800s:
I would really recommend going to the link above and checking out all the charts they have, the author does quite a thorough job of showing just how hard the media began pushing “racial issues” and identity politics right around 2012.
And that’s my whole point here: it was all deliberate.
The purpose was to divert the public’s attention away from matters like corporate greed and income inequality.
They saw that they had a class war on their hands, and so they quickly moved to turn the public’s rage away from themselves.
This is how we went from class war to a race war.
All this stuff you’ve been seeing lately about race, whiteness, privilege, police brutality–it’s all designed to take your attention away from the fact that the billionaire class is plundering the rest of us.