Class war continues to go unnoticed by half of the people waging it

Can the liberal-left really not see it?

I studiously avoided media coverage of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial these last few weeks, even as it exploded all over my social media channels.

But I followed the story from last year when the shootings happened. From that, I found out that one of the men Rittenhouse shot was a convicted rapist of multiple boys aged between 9 and 11. I learned, from watching the videos that were all over Twitter at the time, that Rittenhouse was attacked, chased, beaten and had a gun pulled on him, and had his weapon pulled away from him, before he fired his rifle, killing two men and wounding another.

This information was widely circulated and easily confirmed if you took even a few seconds to search. Last year.

So by the time the trial came round, I simply did not have the stomach to watch a young person’s life be destroyed for political purposes while jeering online mobs vomited lies about a clearly traumatised kid.

And I thought to myself: I’m not gonna write about this story. It’s too awful.

Then I woke up this morning to a social media full of earnest protestations from my peers about white supremacy and how “the system” is rigged in favour of white boys with guns. And by my peers, I mean middle and upper middle class Americans, with white collar jobs and university educations. People I know well, and therefore I know they mean well.

But goddamn, they are blind. They do not see the blinding, glaring, obvious class dynamics at play here.

Media coverage of this story was so egregiously biased that even the deepest blue Clintonista, AOC-loving college girl should have picked up on the cacophony of wrong notes being played. For a full breakdown, see Glenn Greenwald’s Rumble channel.

Just one, small, very small, example: in the fall of 2020, The New York Times sent a reporter to find out how the Kenosha riots (which Rittenhouse was trying, ill-advisedly, to mitigate the effects of) were being perceived on the ground. The reporter, Nellie Bowles, found that the narrative being promulgated among our elites — that property destruction from the riots was no big thing — was incorrect. In fact, the riots were hurting lower-middle class, working class and immigrant communities. These people were having their livelihoods destroyed in ways that were not easy to remedy. (The fact that this was ever even in question kind of makes me laugh in a rueful, scornful way.)

Among the young, white-collar, salaried, upper-middle classes, who are not responsible for generating the cash that pays for their lives, this burning of property was insouciantly brushed aside as a mere administrative matter. Insurance will cover it! They collectively shrugged.

But as Nellie Bowles reported:

“There’s a huge divide between the replacement cost and the insured cost,” said Heather Wessling Grosz, the vice president of the Kenosha Area Business Alliance. “The ability to replace those buildings on those blocks will be very difficult. It is out of reach for most of them.”

Many small businesses choose insurance that covers the cash value of their building or products rather than the actual replacement cost, which can be considerably higher.

“Let’s say you have a 10-year-old washing machine, and maybe it was $500 to buy and a new one would cost $600, but it’s depreciated, so now it would have a value of $50,” said Mr. Kochenburger, the insurance law professor. “So you’re not getting either the cost you paid for it or what it would cost to replace it. That’s what happens.

“It costs more to get replacement coverage, so this issue is going to bear more of an impact on lower-income folks where every dime really counts, and they opted for the less expensive plan,” Mr. Kochenburger said. “It is not intuitive how this works.”

The most telling part of this article was not that Times readers needed a primer in how small business insurance claims work, or that many people find it extremely difficult — surprise, surprise — to rebuild after criminals burn down the businesses it took them years to build. I mean, how are rich kids supposed to know that, amirite? They don’t teach that at Columbia. Lol.

The real tell was that was that the Times editors didn’t find space for the story in the paper until after the 2020 election.

“Something odd happened with that story after I filed it. It didn’t run. It sat and sat,” Bowles wrote last week. “A few weeks after I filed, an editor told me: The Times wouldn’t be able to run my Kenosha insurance debacle piece until after the 2020 election, so sorry.”

She continued:

“Eventually the election passed. Biden was in the White House. And my Kenosha story ran. Whatever the reason for holding the piece, covering the suffering after the riots was not a priority. The reality that brought Kyle Rittenhouse into the streets was one we reporters were meant to ignore.”

Can you really not see it, liberals? Can you really not see the wood from the trees here? Can you really not see that the everything-is-white-supremacy argument isn’t just divisive, it’s inaccurate and unjust as well?

The socio-economic class cleavage currently dividing the United States is getting more and more dangerous with every passing media-induced witch-hunt du jour. And yet the folks who are supposedly the enlightened, the virtuous, the defenders of the vulnerable, refuse to see it. Not only do they refuse to see it, they engage in it, punching down continuously.

See this charming sample of Tweets about Kyle’s mother Wendy, a single mom/peasant who works as a nurses assistant.

Hahahaha let’s laugh at the dumb, fat poors because the corporate media told us to.

Question Rittenhouse’s judgment all you want. Weep for the child rapist he killed all you want. But the facts are that Kyle is a working-class kid from a blue-collar town, being raised by a single mom in a low-status, low-income, physical labour job. And guess what? People like that are often pro-gun, pro-Trump and pro-police. The comfortable, computer-tapping elites are committing a serious category error — despite their pricey educations — in conflating these groups.

For one thing, they are wilfully overlooking the working class people of colour who are also Trump-supporting, pro-gun and pro-police.

Guess what, white liberals? These people exist! Don’t take my word for it — just ask Jericho Green. (Or any of the South Bronx and Queens Trump voters in the 2020 election.)

At this point, if you are still hewing to a progressive/liberal narrative of being on the side of the little guy; if you are still taking at face value the reporting done by all of the ‘mainstream’ media and letting them provide the entire evidentiary basis for your worldview, then your worldview is based on lies, toxic agendas and misrepresentations so egregious that you are, de facto, a part of the problem.

Oh, the irony. The demographic that has been calling people out for the last 5 years for being ‘part of the problem’, is itself the problem.