TLDR 2.2 – The Anger Vote

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Hey there folks I’m a little teapot short and stout and my name is John Henry from johnhenry.us, welcome to TLDR – “Too Long; Didn’t Read” – let’s have a short conversation about “the anger vote.”

Ran across this meme from Michigan Republicans posted via motivational speaker Matt Fol…er, sorry, that’s Matt Hall, who as it happens is my state representative.

The original post adds a comment about an “extreme partisan agenda” and a comment about “Big Labor,” with a link to more empty verbiage built to make you angry and stop you from asking about the details.

So first things first: “big labor” is you and me. Working people trying to get a living wage and dignified compensation and conditions for their work. That’s who he’s really pushing against here. Us.

Second, there are assertions made here that aren’t supported anywhere in the related text or links – “taking money away from the classrooms,” “giving it to corrupt (also unsupported) union bosses.” There’s no direct information path from this graphic to the substance of the issues he’s yammering about; you have to dig into the comments, follow the link to the Michigan GOP’s website article, read all the way through it, almost at the bottom you find the actual bill numbers.

Then you have to google and go read them, just to find out none of what he’s saying is true. For instance one of the bills he’s talking about repeals a law preventing state agencies from processing union dues as a payroll deduction, making it as annoying as possible to pay union dues.

Make the lie loud and clear. Make the truth hard to find.

You aren’t supposed to notice folks like Matt taking money away from public classrooms and giving it to churches and other private school operators, all of whom make political donations and in-kind contributions. You aren’t supposed to notice that’s an end-run around the establishment clause used to con the government into funding religious instruction.

Eventually you can take religion out completely and pretend you’re just a plucky entrepreneur “improving” education for everyone by privatizing it and monetizing it, and we’ll just ignore that you’re also destroying it and perpetuating outrageous abuses of power and elitism and reinforcements of systemic imbalances of power like racism and sexism…and most importantly, capitalism.

When I was a kid you had to pay out of pocket to access that privilege, now you just have to know the right people and fill out the right forms and the state will pay it for you – essentially giving you the same thing you were getting directly from the state 40 years ago, except it costs fifty times as much because of all the middle-men taking their cut along the way to pay folks like Matt here, plus it’s been split into separate systems, one for the privileged and one for the rest, and the privileged have stationed themselves as brokers and middle-men all along the way to get paid.

Told y’all when they started outsourcing the lunch lady to save a buck (which it never did) that it wouldn’t be long before they outsourced the whole school. People like Matt sneered and laughed from his van down by the river, just like they’ll sneer and laugh now because they think he cleverly avoided this whole conversation by simply saying “classrooms,” which helps hide the fact that what he’s really talking about is those privately owned classrooms that ultimately help fund his political career.

THOSE are the classrooms he’s really worried about money being taken away from – the classrooms that pay for his campaigns.

Then of course there’s the whole anti-union framing which is normal GOP politics and I won’t go into here other than to notice it.

What Matt here wants to motivate you to do is ignore the facts and feel like you and your kids are being attacked and robbed. There’s no evidence of that, there’s not even anyone credibly suggesting it, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is you go for the emotion and that bypasses the critical thinking and boom, half of southwest Michigan is pissed at the Democrats for stealing their schools.

It works the same everywhere. Stop falling for it. Cultivate emotional detachment from these issues and you’ll be able to see them more clearly.

That’s it for me I’m John Henry from JohnHenry.US reminding you that I stay independent by being crowdfunded, and that means everything I do here depends on you so remember to like, share, subscribe, and spread the word, and if you can please drop by johnhenry.us/money and you’ll find a range of one-time and ongoing weekly or monthly support options to help pay the bills and buy the gear that makes all this happen.