As we approach 2024, I am reminded of comments by a man who said that as a young kid, he and his friends collected jars of black ants and jars of red ants. They would then put the red and black ants in the same jar. Initially, nothing much happened.
They would then shake the jar vigorously and dump all the ants onto the ground. Something amazing would then occur. Although the red and black ants were not adversarial in the jar, they violently attacked each other. These ants literally went to war: they would cripple each other and bite off each other's heads if they could. They would fight to the death.
He learned later that black ants and red ants are not adversarial. In nature, they are not natural enemies, and they do not attack each other. They go about their daily routines, almost impervious to the other group.
Who is the Real Enemy?
Clearly, the vigorous jar shaking and dumping them on the ground puts all of the ants into a frenzy such that they become mortal enemies. Who is the true enemy, however? It is not the black ants or the red ants themselves; the larger forces shake the jar.
The mainstream media, a plague upon us, are our jar shakers. While both left-based and right-based media engage in jar-shaking tactics, the left has refined the art. They revel in stirring up dissension between groups, especially when such squabbles would not necessarily be occurring.
Our leftist-driven mainstream media has a proverbial jar for white people, Black people, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American people, and so on. They maintain jars for LGBTQ and for heterosexuals. They have jars for the military, police, first responders, and everyone else who puts their life on the line.
They have well-stocked jars for the young and the old. They have jars for wealthy Americans, middle class Americans, and poor Americans. They maintain jars for Christians, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, atheists, and agnostics.
The Secret Sauce
These media manipulators are skilled at stuffing various groups into the same jar, violently shaking it, and dumping it all, knowing that their tactics have pitted one group against another, propagated controversies out of whole cloth, and inflamed situations, even resulting in riots and even death.
Worst of all, they never let up. Each day, they mix and shake jars depending on where they wish to increase friction, confrontation, and turmoil. Their supporting tools include censoring, underreporting, overreporting, intentional misreporting, and gaslighting – what one wise sage calls “fake news.” They fabricate and contort at will. They willfully dupe their followers and enrage their political and ideological opponents.
They no longer hide their seething hatred of people who do not agree with their views. Are they liberal, tolerant, and fair-minded? Not in the least. They revel in their hypocrisy as long as it gets a desired result. They zealously, reflexively justify their activities among themselves because they know they are supporting a righteous cause.
Unending Schemes
Their jar shaking schemes over the past few years have resulted in Trump-Russia collusion blather, Black Lives Matter, largely peaceful protests, drag queen story hours, death to Israel marches, cancel culture, and on and on.
They seek more George Floyd incidents with which to drive a wedge between Black and white unlike anything we've experienced in 50 years. They seek any incidents of white violence on Black, even though Black on white violence is seven times greater in raw numbers, and as much as 40 times greater, adjusted for each groups’ percentage of our population.
They constantly seek to confirm that the U.S. was a racist country, always will be, and needs to be dismantled from the ground up, even as reality reveals otherwise.
Our Greatest Enemy
As we enter a new year, our highly subjective press has taken over has the greatest enemy to our representative republic. With a press that maintains some semblance of integrity, many of the movements and squabbles we’ve witnessed in recent years simply would not have occurred. With a reasonably fair and slightly more objective press, the right and the left might actually agree on some issues and resolve them.
The twisted path that the jar-shaking, mainstream press is committed to treading seems irreversible. Perhaps in a few years, viable alternatives to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the major television networks will emerge. Until then, we have a snowball's chance in hell of finding common ground, strengthening our union, and ensuring a successful future.
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