Last night I tuned into CNN to watch an hour-long special report, ‘The Divided States of America’ produced and narrated by another Harvard-educated spieler, Fareed Zakaria. Actually, the report itself was only 30 of the 60 minutes allotted for this show, the other half-hour was given over to ads for diet plans, skin creams, lawn-care products - TV has become just another venue for buying crap you don’t need.
The narrative started and ended, of course, with film clips of the riot which occurred on the Capitol on January 6th. And the theme, repeated endlessly by Zakaria, is how ‘divided’ we have become – a social, cultural, and political division first exploited by Newt Gingrich in 1994 but now the way we define and use political messaging on both sides.
We have become two countries. One country is urban, culturally, and racially diverse, educated beyond high school, professional, white-collar, and liberal, of course. The other country is small-town, White only, works with their hands, conservative, angry at the elite and pissed off because they have been ‘left behind.’
This anger, according to Zakaria (and just about every other liberal opinion-maker) has become a threat to our democracy, the proof of this threat is what happened on January 6th. This anger can also be manipulated by a pretend populist like Donald Trump, something he’s been doing since he first started spreading the lie about where Obama was born. Election fraud? Obama born who knows where? There’s no difference when all is said and done.
Incidentally, Zakaria is hardly the most extreme or inflammatory example of finger-pointing by the Left against the Right. The editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Jeffrey Goldberg, has fashioned an entire media presence around the idea that we are headed for a ‘civil war.’ How a news magazine founded to promote the abolition of slavery could stoop to nothing more than a sensationalist broadsheet promoting the looniest and most fractious liberal beliefs is beyond me.
Know what was interesting about January 6th? The fact that not one, single dope who ran up the Capitol stairs and invaded the building was carrying a gun. I don’t know the ins and outs of every insurrectionist movement that has ever taken place, but I can’t think of another unarmed insurrection that has occurred, certainly not in the United States.
The lack of guns in the hands of January 6th rioters might not be worthy of comment were it not for the fact that the groups which have been identified as planning and organizing the riot (e.g., QAnon, Proud Boys, et. al.) always have their guns at the ready when they appear anywhere else. Weren’t the Nazis carrying their AR-15’s at Charlottesville? Weren’t the Proud Boys who trotted up the state capitol steps in Michigan and Virginia toting their guns?
In fact, one of the January 6th demonstrators was quoted (I can’t find the specific link) as saying that they were ‘told’ to leave their guns home. They were ‘told.’ Exactly who told them to stage an unarmed riot isn’t yet known. But they were ‘told.’
With all due respect to Zakaria, Goldberg and all the other liberal know-it-alls who agree that things are totally and completely out of control, I find myself unable to get all hot and bothered about an impending civil war in which the leaders of the rebellion tell their army to show up on the battlefield without their guns.
If the Confederate Army led by General P. T. Beauregard had come out to fight the Army of the Potomac on July 21, 1861 without carrying guns, the Union would have won the first Battle of Bull Run. And that would have been the end of the ‘War of the Rebellion,’ as the Civil War is officially known.
When and if the liberal noise machine stops competing with the remnants of the Trump MAGA chorus and starts saying something that is rooted in any reality at all, maybe I’ll stay up until 10 p.m. again to watch CNN.
If not, there’s always the Super Bowl.
Its all about selling subscriptions, airtime, and clickbait.