You never realized that you have been hoodwinked until you fall hook, line and kitchen-sinker into the abyss of tribulation. If hindsight is the greatest professor, which it most definitely is, getting mugged by reality and being shaken out of cognitive dissonance are the professor’s twin teaching assistants. It is with the benefits of hindsight and wisdom gained through adversity that I present this article before you.
This weekend, Mueller’s “bombshell report”—which was in reality no hat and no cattle—was submitted to the Attorney General and the summary of his findings was released to Congress. What we know now is what independent journalists and political observers have been saying all along even though we were drowned out by the echo chamber of yellow journalists like Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Joy Reid and their cohorts in mainstream “press”.
I will spare you the details of the findings and how the establishment are busy trying to explain away their fraudulence at this exact moment. Instead, I want to focus your attention no so much on the Mueller report but the reason why the special counsel was impaneled to begin with. You see, while Americans—divided as we are by the tribes of identity and ideology—have been busy declaring wars on each other as we fight over Donald Trump, the ruling class have been laughing at us all along.
Our emotional reaction is precisely what they wanted.
At the risk of sounding like Sophia from Golden Girls, I want you to picture 2010 during Barack Obama’s first term. Donald Trump catapulted to prominence in the Republican circles by latching on to the bigoted birther movement. Back then, I was incensed that the nation’s “first black president” was having his Americanism questioned and in the process being otherized by “conservatives”. Intent on fighting hate with anger, I turned to divisive rhetoric; the more they pushed the birther line, the more I promoted the idea that “white” people are the reason why there is injustice in the world.
Presto! With that, I fell right into the trap that both Democrats and Republicans were setting before us. What I realize now, thanks to professor hard knocks and his assistant hardship, is that both parties and the entire political establishment were intentionally bolstering the birtherism conspiracy theory. Don’t believe Michele Obama for a minute when she says that she’ll never forgive Trump for pushing that narrative; to the contrary, I would not be surprised in the least if she is sending him a dozen orange roses monthly and texting him thank you notes on a regular basis while Obama is swimming in his Netflix currency.
I know this sounds counterintuitive; I mean Obama was “viciously assailed for eight years” by racist Republicans for goodness sake. Not so fast my friends! Both sides were just playing off each other as they were gaming all of us. As long as the focus was on personality driven conflicts, we were easily distracted from understanding how both sides were fleecing all of us. Obama was able to escape scrutiny of his economic and foreign policy decisions by hiding behind his skin tone and using the legacy of racism as a human shield to protect him from criticism. This is why he was selected after all. Likewise, Republicans pretended to be working against Obama, but when the time came to transfer wealth to the 1% or blitzkrieg another nation, the GOP worked lockstep with Obama and the Democrats.
Ask yourself, if Obama wanted to shut the birther movement down, why did he wait more than three years before he finally released his long-form birth certificate? Are we to believe that this omni-observant and all prying government that can pinpoint people anywhere around the world and trace money effortlessly could not find Obama’s birth certificate for almost the entirety of Obama’s first term? The truth is that Obama was overjoyed the minute his opponents decided to follow the advice of Rush Limbaugh in an attempt to segregate Obama and blacken his agenda. He gave his haters the space and time to inject their bigotry into the public square and then released his birth-certificate right as the presidential election season starts—how convenient. Birtherism took the heat off Obama and placed the onus on his political foes.
Had he chosen to, Donald Trump could have made serious inroads by denouncing Obama on the merits of his policies instead of attacking him based on his personality. So why did he choose to go the latter route instead of pursuing a course that could have coalesced disaffected Obama supporters and conservatives looking for an alternative to the deception of Obama. Simple, the status quo depends on our division so he had to shatter America down color and ideological lines in order to gain access to corporate media. By reverting to bigoted, and at times outright racist allegations, Trump cultivated a following based on ethnicity and earned the devotion of mainstream media. This is what politicians and media personalities do; they will gladly burn Rome down if that means they keep their place in the limelight.
Let me call your attention to how the game is played in DC: the two political parties and their enablers in media play this sick game of “good cop/bad cop” to hide the fact that all of them are crooks who bleed the planet with their unending greed. Instead of discussing the way Obama shoveled over 14 trillion dollars to the same criminals who bled the global economy in 2008 while giving the middle-finger to their victims or debating his malicious policy of assassinating American citizens without habeas corpus, we were all collectively bamboozled by identity politics.
They polarize us, we conquer ourselves
You have to give it to them, the ruling class are called the establishment for a reason. They established themselves as the “capstone” of society by keeping us grounded at the bottom through emotional manipulation. Parenthetically, let me take a quick detour to show you how they are spiteful as they are cunning. A capstone is the apex of a pyramid; politicians, pundits and media personalities—all working assiduously for their corporate masters—are saying that they are atop all of us. They then turn around and call the rest of humanity their base, as in the rest of us are beneath them. Sadly, too many are so transfixed on worshiping their idols or conditioned by social constructs that they gladly accept insulting labels as points of pride. Such are the dangers of tribalism and identity/ideological politics, they blind us from seeking truth by getting us to consume indoctrination.
The same way that Obama benefited greatly from birtherism, Trump likewise has been popping champagnes at Mar-a-Lago for the past two years as mainstream media hounds focused on a non-story that is Russiagate. Instead of inspecting Trump’s continuation of Obama’s foreign policies or debating the merit of giving the same criminal class who bled our economy in 2008 another $1.5 trillion dollar boondoggle after Obama showered them with nearly ten times as much through monetary scams, we have been fighting over a xenophobic propaganda campaign hatched by neoliberals to rationalize why Dick Cheney in pantsuits, aka Hillary Clinton, lost to the current Commander-in-Grift.
This bullshit media narrative was gladly embraced by Donald Trump and the right wing zealots; they pretended to be fighting it while all along they were propagating the story line. Both sides of the aisle and the media-politico complex as a whole knew that Mueller’s “investigation” was never going anywhere. If you really believe that the status quo would topple Trump and risk having the American people see just how incestuously nepotistic DC is by having a truly independent investigator look into their shenanigans, my friend I have a bridge on Uranus to sell you.
Mueller, who is to an honorable American as Caligula is to virginity, was never in this to expose the malevolence of Trump. After all, this is the same Mueller who gave legal cover to the crimes against humanity that was the Iraq War. To believe he was some crusader out to save America from subversive agents is akin to sipping Kool-Aid from red cups. If Mueller wanted to root out treasonous actors, he would have started on K Street, Wall Street and the billionaires who subvert our republic by weaponizing their cash and hijacking our governance.
Politicians across the spectrum sank their grubby claws into Russiagate for a reason; it was a way to splinter America into tribes and ghettoize the nation along political, identity and sectarian lines. This is the reason I have given up on the idea of change happening by way of the ballot box, people who call themselves public servants get commandeered by the institutions they serve and end up selling their souls in order to husband their status, riches and access to power. Democrats and Republicans alike, every one of them, don’t care about America nor the people who suffer in silence, what they care about is retaining their seats.
I asked Cynthia McKinney, a former Congresswoman who I wrote about in the past, about the months and years following September 11th and the treatment she received for daring to question media narratives. Cynthia noted:
“It was a lonely road for me at that time. Everyone said, “Now is not the time.” But darn it, when you’re in the middle of a huge government lie, when IS the time?? After the lie has worked and everyone is completely subjugated?”
Those who play nice are showered with cash, accorded status and retain their clout. People who seek truth and try to expose the malfeasance of the establishment are drummed out of the halls of power and live out the rest of their lives in the political wilderness. This is why elected officials and media personalities get along to go along; talk to them off the record and they will acknowledge the scope of this article to be true. Not only was McKinney primaried and shortly thereafter unceremoniously ejected from Congress, she is now being treated as a persona non-grata by the establishment. Meanwhile, the president who lied us into the Iraq War and the president who gave trillions of dollars to the banking cabal that bled our economy are both living the life of neo-aristocrats.
“Democracy” aborted our republic.
What Mueller provided Trump was breathing space from public scrutiny of his domestic and foreign policies. As for mainstream media, they went along for the ride and gladly aided and abetted this fraudulence because they know a cash cow when they see it. Supposed “journalists” and media personality cravenly jumped on this patently absurd narrative because it was a ratings and revenue bonanza. Journalism, a profession that was supposed to be the last line of defense between freedom and tyranny is now the vanguard of corporate totalitarianism.
For the record, this shell game of politics and the treachery of the establishment did not start in 2008; they have been practicing this subterfuge a long time before Obama swept into office and hoodwinked his loyalists. Shortly after Bush was elected, 9/11 took place; the truth of that day only God knows. However, let’s not forget that the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) mentioned that a “catastrophic and catalyzing event” needed to take place in order to use that tragedy as a pretext to start wars in the Middle East five years before the Twin Towers fell. During Clinton’s first term, he was embroiled in one controversy after another. Almost immediately after George H. Bush was elected, he invaded Panama. Reagan was caught up in the Iran-Contra affair, a crisis that “threatened” his presidency and glued millions of Americans to their televisions.
Not only did each president get away without so much as a scratch, they went on to make fortunes after their tenures ended. These manufactured crises are nothing more than interference campaigns, ways to divert the public’s attention as the permanent state implements policies without our consent. The occupants of the White House are nothing more than puppets, glorified mannequins presented as kings when in reality they are laser shows meant to continually side track us. The ironic thing is that this bankrupt government keeps declaring wars around the world in the name of “democracy” even though we have none of it here in America. Sadly, we the people are so addicted to politics and the cult of personality we have become that we allow heinous things to be done in our names. Rude awakening is not too far in the distance; my fellow Americans, the boil cometh.
Con artists know that the hardest part of pulling off a scam is to get their targets to trust them implicitly. They eventually earn the trust of their victims by emotionally manipulating them and playing on their fears. This is what Stockholm syndrome is about, victims learn to trust and then depend on their oppressors. Forget Stockholm syndrome, DC disorder is a thousand times worse. The sad part is that victims on all sides of the political divide look across the social chasms and sneer at others who got duped not realizing that they themselves are getting played. Politics is practiced by the ruling class; the rest of us are either gamed by it or we refuse to partake in our own repression. #RussiagateIsBirtherism Click To Tweet
“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.” ~ John F. Kennedy
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Lij Teodrose Fikremariam
Originally from Ethiopia with roots to Atse Tewodros II, Lij Teodrose is a former community organizer whose writing was incorporated into Barack Obama's South Carolina primary victory speech in 2008. He pivoted away from politics and decided to stand for collective justice after experiencing the reality of the forgotten masses. His writing defies conventional wisdom and challenges readers to look outside the constraints of labels and ideologies that serve to splinter the people. Lij Teodrose uses his pen to give a voice to the voiceless and to speak truth to power.
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