The Fuckhead Chronicles

[soggymilkchronicles]

Lockdown protests are shameless astroturfing, and the establishment makes #FloridaMorons of us all

           Stuck at home with your HBO account and food delivery apps? Looking for something to be pissed off about? Wonderful! The mainstream media would like to direct your attention to a coordinated string of right-wing protests for an end to the lockdown, and away from— well, whatever it is the people who cut their checks are up to. Conservatives in power, like Betsy Devos, whose family funded the protest against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s Stay at Home order, and Trump, who’s brazenly encouraged the demonstrations, are attempting to shift our baleful gaze to local government, the Democrats, and the Chinese. Authoritarians, they cry! Communists! Elitists! The Democratic elite, through the megaphone of mainstream media outlets they keep in their pocket, would like to convince you it’s the Conservatives’ fault. Racists! Philistines! “Why is it the right-wingers always seem to need their screws tightened?” one man wrote in a tweet about the Michigan protests. And so it goes. As long as you remain in the stands, watching the Reds and Blues bat blame back and forth like a tired tennis ball and cheering for your favorite team, you’re right where they want you. 

          Both parties would like you to believe they’re ardent champions of the working man, their efforts hampered only by the self-serving interference of the opposite side— and, crucially, the ordinary people who elected them. Who they really want us to blame is ourselves. Didn’t vote Clinton in 2016? Might wanna wash the blood off your hands. Not social distancing? Don’t have a mask? This is your fault, and you must be punished (for the safety of the American people, of course). In Philadelphia, a man was physically pulled off a bus by several police officers for not wearing a mask. A New York woman was arrested for not social distancing and thrown in a cell with two dozen others for 36 hours. These are far from isolated incidents. The government primes us to accept them by painting our fellow working people (and the migrants, the Chinese, the Russians, et al., depending on your political leanings) as the enemy they’re protecting us from. If we stay divided, frightened, and vengeful, we remain prey to the real enemy— our American aristocracy. Distracting us with political white noise ensures that the current system won’t be held responsible for the violence it caused. 

         The re-opening protests being pushed in our face are a perfect example of this. The protests are a sloppy spectacle of astroturfing— the practice of concealing the sponsors of a movement so it appears to have grassroots origin and mass support. In other words, something that seems like a spontaneous expression of the zeitgeist but is actually a few rich pricks using their immense wealth to change our perception of the political landscape. Americans on both sides of the party line are falling for it. 

          If it seems like this movement popped up overnight, it’s because it did: tech-savvy Redditor sleuths discovered that the protest websites (reopen[state abbreviation].com, although in some cases this re-directs to a page on a different website, like minnesotagunrights.org, the domain always registered to the same LLC) can be traced to at least two professional astroturfing firms (or, as they call themselves, “digital advocacy solutions”). The sites for PA, MN, IA, VA, WI, and OH— all presidential election swing states— were made by OneClickPolitics, and the sites for MD, MJ, and NJ were made by UJoin. Strategies like this can be incredibly impactful; digital astroturfing was employed by AggregateIQ/Cambridge Analytica in the Brexit campaign, for instance. If you’re confused about what exactly these companies do, that makes two of us— but you can get an idea from OCP’s website: 

“Are you launching a new coalition or association and need more members now? Want 10,000 signatures for your petition from residents of a certain state? Are you battling a legislative issue in a location where you don't have enough advocates, who are constituents of the legislators you are attempting to influence? Or would you like to impress your boss by reporting a 15% growth in membership in less than 90 days? If your answer is yes, keep reading!

OneClick Acquisition is your solution for generating immediate legislative actions from new supporters within mere days. We deliver “on demand, organic supporters” through our proprietary digital ad placement technology.”

          It’s unknown who’s paying for these campaigns, but I could hazard some guesses. After all, Republican puppetmasters are making less effort to hide than ever before— FreedomWorks, the thinktank behind the Tea Party movement, is “holding weekly virtual town halls with members of Congress, igniting an activist base of thousands of supporters across the nation to back up the effort,” according to an Associated Press article titled “Powerful GOP allies propel Trump effort to reopen economy”: history repeating itself as farce. Besides DeVos, these “powerful allies” include The Heritage Foundation and Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity. 

          Americans have become so reverent of wealth and power, so blind to class distinctions, that they see billionaire chessmasters as their “allies” protecting their inalienable “right to work”: the right to sacrifice themselves at the altar of capital so their families get some Eucharistic breadcrumbs. It’s incredible that elites funding supposedly populist political maneuvers can be construed as a good thing— a philanthropic thing, even. In case it isn’t obvious, not only is the ruling class not acting in our best interest, or trying to keep us healthy, or preserve our freedom, they are acting in their best interest, which is to limit our freedom and maximize our productivity as much as possible. And before you go and tweet about those MAGA hat-clad #FloridaMorons, you should consider the elites you’re prepared to trust— like, I don’t know, richest man in the world Bill Gates, or certified worst person in the world Nancy Pelosi and the “experts” bearing her seal of approval. 

         Whether you’re out protesting in your truck with an American flag or at home with your gourmet ice cream tweeting angrily about it, the establishment is laughing all the way to the bank (they just auctioned your liberty and privacy off to the highest bidder!). Wake up, sheeple. It’s 2020. The two party system is a joke. It doesn’t really matter who’s behind the astroturfing, because the only lines that matter right now are class lines: it’s not Enlightened Democrats vs. The Trumpian Troglodytes, it’s Normal People vs. the rapidly dystopic Big-Data-Big-Pharma-Privatized-Government Orwellian Technocracy of the new world order. Uniting under our shared interests is our only hope. Well, that and Bill Gates, of course.