Racial strife in the US today is not a ‘grassroots phenomenon’ born out of exasperated relations between blacks and whites. It is a manufactured crisis being foisted upon the public at a time when populist ideas are in the air.
Ask the average person on Main Street to describe the biggest news story of 2020 and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests will probably take a close second place just behind the Covid-19 pandemic. That answer, however, is more of a reflection of the US media’s unmatched power for shaping the public narrative than an honest assessment of the real problems confronting Americans. Indeed, far more worrisome than racial tensions, and a virus with a 99.75 percent survival rate, is the colossal transfer of wealth to the golden 0.01 percent.
Ever since Covid-19 made landfall in January of 2020, America’s 664 billionaires saw their collective worth explode to $4.2 trillion, a staggering 44 percent increase from just one year earlier. If ever there was a media story worth pursuing this was it. After all, that historic money grab was fueled by millions of hardworking Americans suddenly being ordered to shelter in place as their small businesses went up in proverbial flames. At the same time, monster companies like Amazon, WalMart and Louis Vuitton, ranked “essential” and apparently impervious to pandemic, happily filled the void.
Instead of providing a critical assessment of that corporate takeover, the media ran defense for the robber barons, indulging the CEOs as though they were Roman emperors returning home in triumph from military plunder abroad. US News & World Report, for example, apparently confusing the outbreak of a deadly disease with a sporting event, called guys like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates “the biggest winners of the coronavirus pandemic.” So much for critical journalism.
Incidentally, the reason it was deemed necessary for small business owners to lay down and play dead, the ‘experts’ crowed, was to“save grandma” from the ravages of Covid-19 (in the most consequential presidential election cycle in many decades, no less). Yet, strangely, nobody bothered to ask grandma her opinion on the matter, nor did such concerns prevent infected senior citizens from being dispatched to nursing homes, which quickly became the main incubator for coronavirus deaths in the nation. But I digress.
As cruel fate would have it, at the same time that the already insanely rich were counting their newfound bullion, George Floyd had the life crushed out of him under the knee of a white police officer. At this point, the media industrial complex could have navigated that tragedy into safe harbor, away from a proverbial shit storm, or straight into the rocks. Predictably, it chose the latter course, blaming Floyd’s death on ‘systemic racism,’ as opposed to other more probable explanations, like poorly trained and overworked police officers who are simply unprepared for the myriad challenges they face every day on the job. What followed was a prime example of the elite, with the complicity of the media, actively promoting civil strife to conceal the rapidly growing wealth divide.
US corporations – the very same entities that were doing gangbuster business amid the pandemic – began stuffing the war chests of various social justice groups, notably Black Lives Matter. The financier George Soros, who never met a social uprising he didn’t like, also opened his wallet to the tune of $220 million. The question must be asked: why would corporations sponsor BLM at the very same time the latter was destroying and looting Main Street, USA as part of their “mostly peaceful” protests? Wouldn’t those donations have been better spent rebuilding the urban centers and SMALL BUSINESSES across the nation that BLM ransacked? Perhaps, but that would have clashed with the media-forged narrative, predicated on the myth of ‘systemic racism,’ that is working to deflect attention away from an anti-establishment mood that has settled on the nation.
Another method being employed to foment racial tensions is known as ‘critical race theory’ (CRT), by far one of the most sinister ideas to emerge from the liberal asylum of academia in a long time. In a nutshell, CRT postulates the notion that all white people, even if they don’t know it, have an inborn sense of racial superiority, which manifests itself in racism, the oppression of minority groups and card-carrying membership in some white supremacist group (at this point, take a moment and ask yourself how many ‘white supremacists’ you know). Banned by Donald Trump last year after it was discovered that CRT was being taught to government employees, President Joe Biden made it one of his first acts as president to reinstate the radical progressive legislation.
Now CRT is back in the spotlight with a vengeance. Just this month it was discovered that Coca-Cola is instructing its employees to “be less white,” while a Buffalo, New York school district announced it will teach its pupils that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism.” In short, here we have another one of those radical progressive ideas, much like the transgender movement, which is based more on raw emotions and feelings than any sound science. After all, are black people free of the purported chromosome that has motivated the loathsome white man to oppress minority groups over the centuries? Well, when it is considered that America’s first black president, Barack Obama, dropped over 26,000 bombs on seven foreign countries in his last year in office, while a number of other African Americans, including, but not limited to, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Susan Rice have also been very casual about oppressing and killing foreigners, then the so-called ‘science’ behind CRT looks more like sheer quackery.
So, what is really going on with regards to race relations in the United States? It is the opinion here, as stated earlier, that the elite, in an effort to deflect attention away from the greatest wealth heist in US history, are hyping ‘systemic racism’ lest the people start asking pesky questions about economic justice, which is certainly in shorter supply now than ever before. Thus, there is a concerted effort by corporations, media, academia and even Hollywood to arouse tensions between blacks and whites when in reality there is very little. That’s certainly not to suggest that racism does not exist in the United States. Of course it does. But to believe that it has reached epidemic levels is simply outlandish and unsupported by the realities on the ground.
A rising tide of populism is swelling in the United States and the elite will do absolutely everything in its power, up to and including aggravating racial tensions, to keep the torches and pitchforks at bay.
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream. @Robert_Bridge