The weaponization of institutions and groups against other groups and institutions is forcing people to pick sides.  Nothing good will come of this.

February 19, 2024

By: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP

Comedians are often the canaries in the coalmine for what is or isn’t acceptable in a free society. If you look back at the role of court jesters, they were very intelligent, astute individuals hired to keep the royalty and gentry humble. If they couldn’t laugh at themselves, that was the indication that they might be getting too big for their britches.

The cancellation, rage, and often violence people such as Dave Chapelle, Anne Coulter, and the various professors being threatened with termination for their differing views on foreign policy suggests that our ability to handle differences of opinion has withered immensely.

If, during feudal times, the King was the most exalted in the land, and he could take a joke, it begs the question of to what level are people elevating themselves, their “identities”, and their political positions to make them above reproach or criticism?

Free speech is encoded in US laws, but it is phrased in a way that says you can’t suffer legal repercussions for your expressions. The government cannot ban you, silence you, or in any way litigate you for speaking freely. That’s what it says, but how it’s been practiced is a different story.

The US has “Constitution Free Zones”, it has “Free Speech Zones”, it has “hate speech laws”, and of course it’s been working with private industry to silence groups they don’t like.

Provided these retributory acts are imposed on “someone we don’t like or agree with”, it’s passed off as justice.

Alex Jones was fined $1Billion for espousing his theories about the Sandy Hook shooting. He never incited violence. He just harped on his suspicions that the whole thing was a hoax. His listeners did in fact take it upon themselves to harass the parents of the children, however:

Relatives of the school shooting victims testified at the trials about being harassed and threatened by Jones’ believers, who sent threats and even confronted the grieving families in person, accusing them of being “crisis actors” whose children never existed.

Rather than hold them accountable for their actions, they came for Jones for defamation. He was not allowed to present his case for his beliefs, as the official accounting of that event was accepted as fact.

A similar charge was leveled against Trump in that his call to “peacefully and patriotically” march on the capitol was somehow a dogwhistle for an insurrection on January 6th, 2021.

Interestingly enough, and what is often something people chuckle about rather than admonish, is how a similar phenomenon can be observed with Taylor Swift. I know. Just hear me out.

If anyone is “mean” to her, she writes a song about it, which mobilizes her online fans. She does NOT incite violence in her lyrics or her posts. She simply gives her skewed side of things, and her fans descend on the target.

This happened with John Meyer, Kanye West, and Scooter Braun, to name a few. You hear her side of things, she was done dirty. You hear their side, however, and you get a completely different accounting.

John Meyer dated her for a few months and got dragged on the internet. Kanye West sought her permission for the song “Famous” and got it! She later retracted after she saw that the outrage was to her benefit. Kanye was smart enough to record that conversation, but even then, it wasn’t enough. Scooter Braun legally purchased the rights to her masters, and needed to get additional protection from her fans.

Do these people have a defamation case against Swift too? Regardless of what side you fall on, these are the same thing: fans responding to the message of a highly influential media personality. Do we hold the mob accountable for their actions as individuals? Or do we just assume they can’t control themselves and blame the celebrity?

It’s not that the influencer told them to go out and do anything. It was the perceived injustice done to their royalty that ultimately compelled them to act on their behalf. It’s no different than your little brother coming home and saying “So and so took my lunch money.” He didn’t ask the older brother to do anything, but he does it anyway out of a sense of justice and feilty to his younger brother. So is the younger brother then culpable for his older brother’s response to an accounting of an event?

Donald Trump was the POTUS, which allowed him to declassify documents. He’s still being prosecuted for this. But Joe Biden also had documents for which he did NOT have the power to declassify. He was recently declared incompetent to stand trial… oddly still “competent” to be POTUS. Hillary Clinton also had a whole server of documents, which she destroyed, and will not stand trial for this.

When hoards of protesters lit up cities across the US, including government buildings, they were just exercising their First Amendment rights to protest and redress grievances. When protesters went to the capitol on January 6th, 2021, however, that was an insurrection. They were treated much differently. They were prosecuted. People who weren’t even at the protest, are serving over 20 year sentences for being associated with them. The one man, Ray Epps, who was caught on camera literally inciting violence, was sentenced to a year probation.

There’s the things that happen in the upper echelons and there’s everyone else. And when everyone else has had enough, things take a very interesting turn. It’s the moment the ants realize they outnumber the crickets. When things become overtly rigged for or against someone, you will see a silent majority step up.

Truckers and farmers are that group. The media will have you thinking it’s suburban housewives. It’s not. Truckers and farmers mostly keep their heads down and do their thankless work feeding and supplying all those who would demean them as uneducated hicks.

Over the years, the people you heard from the most politically were teachers, union leaders, to some degree small business associations and bureaus. Of course you hear plenty from drug and gun lobbies on both ends for and against. But truckers and farmers? That’s not who normally shows up to these functions.

Look at what got them to drop their work and turn out though? Mandatory vaccines and mandatory climate change policies. Two things that posed existential threats to their livelihoods, and by extension everyone else who depends on them to keep doing what they are doing.

The truckers in the US are once again taking their stand, and this time it’s over the sentence former president Donald Trump received in New York. According to LiveMint:

A New York judge ordered Donald Trump to pay $355 million over fraud allegations and banned him from running companies in the state for three years. Truck drivers who support former US President Donald Trump have reportedly turned down shipments coming to New York City.

This article in Zerohedge offers a list of posts from truckers and the trends of the hashtag #BoyCottNewYork.

There’s a difference between saying, “I don’t like you or what you say, and I won’t associate with you anymore” and mobilizing large groups of people, compelling large corporations, or weaponizing a system against someone in this way. And if it’s going to take large groups to combat large groups, then it will eventually land us in a civil war. That’s definitionally what a civil war is.

Chunks of working class Americans have born the brunt of elite policies that gut their livelihoods. Trade agreements where the regulations are not equally applied, environmental policies that make doing business more expensive and cost prohibitive, taxes and expensive union deals that ultimately lead to layoffs to make the numbers work.

The slow chipping away of the working class and middle America has come to a head when the man who claims to represent them is being persecuted for things no other president or politician has. He’s being martyred and that’s going to have massive implications socially and culturally.

No one benefits in the long run from these sorts of social disputes; and it’s worse when the double standards become undeniable. What it ultimately shows is that people are unable to self-regulate. Instead, it shows how power-hungry people really are and how eager they are to exert it over others. People are tyrants of little to no real principle.

This is a massive election year across the world, not just the US. How these civil disagreements go — whether they are escalated or defused — and what influence they have on these elections will indicate the direction the world is heading in.