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Succinct and trenchant as always and, I fear, way over the heads of the sleepy little munchkins who get their news from the usual MSM suspects.

It’s so disheartening to take your important ideas to those people, who simply won’t understand that identity politics is the worst kind of social engineering.

Christian Parenti was on Katie Halper’s show recently with his take on the subject. How can a movement that calls itself ‘woke’ be so irretrievably somnolent?

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The State Department, in a classified memo to Rex Tillerson (subsequently leaked) spelled it out in black and white.

The United States cares about human rights only to the extent that they provide a stick with which to beat countries the United States doesn't like, while ignoring far worse violations by countries that we do like.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.com/amp/story/2017/12/19/tillerson-state-human-rights-304118

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After years of my urging, a liberal friend of mine recently started reading Chris Hedges. One of her first comments was to remark on how much he hates the Democrats. My reply, “Well, they are the problem. Open enemies, like the Republicans, don’t need to be pointed out as much, because we expect them to be terrible. Democrats, on the other hand, are, as Glenn Ford said, the more effective evil. Their window dressing is mere smoke and mirrors. They never fix anything because they are the problem.”

She’s in some Biden women’s support group on Facebook, which doesn’t help. I can’t get her to break away from MSM, either. Although she is starting to see some problems with NPR. She insists that Democracy Now is biased because they don’t present “the other side” (she’s never watched it). But at least she’s reading CH now, so that’s progress!

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Excellent analysis

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This piece started out encouraging, but then "We live under a species of corporate colonialism. The engines of white supremacy, which constructed the forms of institutional and economic racism that keep the poor poor."

Really? Do well identifying and criticizing the woke rot that works its way throughout our institutions and society, and then pull out one of the their foundational tropes. It is like a recovered addict having good things to say about meth... yet again.

Come on Chris. Pick a principled stand here. Either you buy into the fake scholarship critical theory colonialism and white supremacy hogwash that - in my clear view simply serves as a deflection from the accountability of the elite moneyed political chattering class for all the terrible crap they have done to the economy and society and continue doubling down on the same today - or you come back to owning a standard liberal view that nothing should matter except the demonstrated character and capability of each individual.

Unless I am really missing something here, you appear to be trying to swim in the deep end of the pool while still clutching the shallow end.

What frosts me to no end these days is that my center-left liberal friends have bought into this woke crap as part of their quiver of rhetorical weapons... only because they see it helping their Democrat party prevail. They use the weapons, and then shrink to claim they are for free speech and don't support cancel culture. Sorry, no getting it both ways there. And this is JUST way the corporatist Uniparty cabal wants... to have left and right at each other's throats so they, the cabal, can keep looting the country and world to an empty shell.

Jesus we have an easy to grasp shared interest in turning the economy around away from the Wall Street-powered big corporate master (and the big government master that backs it), and back to the independent producer, the small business the independent worker.

We have to re-industrialize. We have to decentralize. We have to de-consolidate.

But then they have Democrats invested in the cult of climate change. Again, another global project of the WEF and Great Reset to beat down the US and other Western industrial powerhouses so that the people can be dominated, controlled and mastered.

The problems in the black community are 100% caused by the crash in middle-class economic opportunity that followed the stupid policy allowing China into the WTO, NAFTA, CRA, etc... Right at the time we should have seen blacks ascent into the middle class, we cut out the economic paths. And immigration is a problem too... because we have flooded the nation with millions of low-skill, low education workers that have competed for the fewer remaining jobs.

If we want to fix the "problem with policing", we need to fix the black community. If we want to fix the black community, we need to implement policies that raise the earned standard of living (not the handout standard of living) for the people in those communities.

I am involved in that work... attempting to bring in more small business to these minority labor surplus areas. But there is little support for that work from my uppity liberal friends living in their gated communities blocking new housing development and luxury virtue signaling that they stand with BLM.

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One can only hope, that the 'Woke' will wake up upon reading this.

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Identity politics masks the operation of power. Dem's use it to provide cover for a pro-corporate economic agenda. Nancy Fraser coined the label: "Progressive Neoliberalism".

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The concept of “identity” politics has been hijacked by liberal elites to capture its meaning and turn it against those who coined the phrase.

Black, socialist,queer women used the phrase in their Combahee River Declaration. They asked how to best begin organizing the masses? Their conclusion was that people were ripe for organizing at their greatest point of oppression.

For Blacks, this might be racism. For women it might be sexism. For queer black women it might be intersectional. But they never argued that this was anything more than an entry point for organizing. They argued against essentialism and for coalition politics. And while they supported socialism, they argued that the anti-imperialist left needed to do more work on issues of race, sex and gender.

But they never argued that these conditions replaced the centrality of class struggle.

We need to confront the liberal media on their intentional use of identity politics as a means to obscure its real meaning and instead place people into separate, silos of disconnected political experiences.

This is simply a sophisticated psyopps strategy of divide and conquer. Let’s start saying identity struggles rather than indenting politics.

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I always without exception feel erupted in the most profound gut wrenching emotions when I read anything written by Chris Hedges. I struggle to keep hope alive as it is truly difficult with the stark and accurate description of the realities of our "democratic "world. When I think it can't get any worse, it does. Thank you for continuing to fight. I truly can't believe someone hasn't at the very least threatened your life. I am only one person and can't fix everything... but as one person, I can something.

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Painfully realistic description of our current dilemma. It amazes me how few people wish to confront this reality and how easy it is to distract the masses from even the slightest effort to combat our impending demise. Sigh 😌.

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founding

Fantastic, yes woke ideology is being manipulated by the corporations to try to be "cool with the kids", but actually they're just covering up horrible crimes.

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Can't say there's much I disagree with here. Re: the Glen Ford and Cornel West quotes. Much to our chagrin, we should remember that it was West's 1990 essay "The New Cultural Politics of Difference" that blew the doors open on diversity narratives. I'm sure the good doctor didn't intend for his insights to be grossly misconstrued like they are today, but that's how radical politics are neutralized in the corporate caliphate: they get co-opted and deployed to nefarious ends.

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"Terrible predatory forces are eating away at the country." Amen. From the cost of heating fuel to Internet, cable, cell phone, food, education, and medical care the insatiable forces of financial capitalism are weakening this country, hollowing it out from the inside. Do not be fooled. Do not be misled. Do not be tricked. Name the beast: class warfare. We're losing. We don't even have the language to fight back, although Hedges has been giving it to us for nearly three decades.

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Brilliant!

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Hedges crushing it as usual!

Just to clarify: there were two other officers involved in the beating of Nichols for a total of seven (7) & at least one of them was white. As of yesterday, the known white cop was fired, but no charges have been filed against him. He's lawyered up & cooperating w/ the criminal investigation.

This horrendous murder gets weirder by the minute! It's sickening!

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You hit a home run Chris. This scathing and indicting polemic is absolutely required and to be on perpetual instant replay!

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