... this obsession with trying to appear to be an impartial middle of the road person is ridiculous.
the "far-right" are just older liberals who are not ok with child grooming.
The forced left-wing/right-wing polarization, the forced dichotomy between competing populist ideologies over largely irrelevant domestic matters, is a divide-and-conquer strategy employed by the oligarchs. Its purpose is to keep people discussing and mainstreaming trivial matters while ignoring the bigger picture.
Our psychopathic oligarchs released a virus and a poisonous bioweapon masquerading as a vaccine to disrupt an election, conceal a liquidity crisis, kill off would-be pensioners close to retirement who would draw money from an utterly insolvent social security system, and to usher in a military-intelligence-pharma biosecurity paradigm to ID, tag and trace every human on the surface of the planet like animals.
What do they have people debating about in the public square instead of the aforementioned things? Books in school libraries with frank discussions of gay fellatio in them. Olympic opening ceremonies with drag queens. Taylor Swift's latest breakup. Being told, to your face, "Hey, your government tried to straight-up
kill you to save a little money and reduce humanity's carbon footprint," is much,
much less palatable than being told, "Hey, your kids' teachers are plying them with sexually explicit reading materials," you see.
The latter topics are eminently more agreeable to the vast majority as topics of debate. They can be compartmentalized into a few external categories of things that cause outrage. The really important, big-picture, international issues that cover areas of national security, finance, foreign policy, and the economy are not the same. Confronting those issues requires, in many cases, interrogating one's own entire worldview and their personal relationship to the State.
The propagandists pushing political polarization in the US
know damn well that
my local school is grooming my kids is a much easier sell than
my country tried murdering me with bioweapons. They exploit that, ruthlessly. They open up the Overton Window to include domestic wedge issues and keep people distracted, while still excluding those issues that they deem national-security-sensitive. In this case, "national security" doesn't mean protecting the citizenry from foreign attack. It means using perception management and psywar tactics to protect the oligarchs' property from angry and immiserated civilians. The oligarchs' property, in this case, is everything they use to extract rents from people.
The far-right concept of "clown world" is actually one of the most accurate depictions of this tendency, and is more properly codified in Adam Curtis's documentary on "hypernormalization", which is where technocrats invent a simplified, Manichean, Truman Show-like fake world for people to live in, just to exclude the vast majority of the population from political participation.
en.wikipedia.org
The word
hypernormalisation was coined by
Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in
Leningrad and later went to teach at the
University of California, Berkeley. He introduced the word in his book
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of
Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s.
[3][4] He says that everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine an alternative to the
status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society.
[5] Over time, this delusion became a
self-fulfilling prophecy and the fakeness was accepted by everyone as real, an effect that Yurchak termed
hypernormalisation.
[6]
