#TakeAKnee Vs. #BoycottNFL Is Vapid Establishment Wedge Politics
by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,
ZeroHedge.com
Sep 25, 2017
It baffles me how some people can continue to say that Donald Trump is politically inept and doesn’t understand how Washington works.
He crushed both the Bush and Clinton dynasties on his path to election, he’s got a significant and heavily-armed support base willing to literally fight and die for him if he’s ever impeached, and his ability to use wedge issues to manipulate support puts even David Brock to shame. His political bullshitting IQ is off the charts. He was born for this.
A wedge issue is a heavily politicized topic emphasized with the goal of splitting a sector of the population and rendering them politically impotent. While wedge politics can sometimes be used by political parties to try and sow division within a rival party, in America it’s far more common to see them used to neuter anti-establishment sentiment within both parties simultaneously. Since America is a corporatist oligarchy and both parties are more or less controlled by the same plutocrats, the goal is not to ensure victory of one party or another but to disrupt all anti-establishment sentiment.
Donald Trump does not give a shit about whether or not anyone stands, kneels, sits or urinates on the American flag, and neither do any of his plutocratic allies. What they care about is and always has been power, and by rallying the masses into a debate along establishment-dictated partisan lines, they help ensure that they keep that going. As a result of Trump’s deliberately inflammatory tweets, anti-establishment conservatives who’ve been critical of his healthcare failures and perpetuation of Obama’s corporatist and interventionist policies are standing on his side, angrily shaking their fists at their unpatriotic enemies.
And as always the GOP’s pretend opponents are doing the exact same thing, rallying anti-establishment leftists against Trump’s incendiary remarks and hopefully shepherding them into the partisan box they’re meant to remain in. The Democratic party, who was completely worthless throughout eight years of Obama in fighting the militarized police brutality that Colin Kaepernick and his supporters have been protesting, is now fanatically rallying behind viral hashtags and quotable talking points against the president’s remarks. Don’t take my word for it; let’s hear from a few of our favorite Clintonist pundits:
The Rest…HERE
