“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half” – Jay Gould.

The strategy of “divide and conquer” is as old as warfare itself. When attacking a larger and more powerful enemy, separate that enemy into smaller groups, then eliminate them one at a time. Never engage the enemy in its entirety.

Never allow that enemy to unite.

This tactic was centuries old long before railroad tycoon Jay Gould said the quiet part out loud in the 1890s, and it is still the wealth class’s game plan today. Seek out the enemy’s differences, exploit them, drive the enemy apart, then gobble up the wealth left behind on the battlefield. Rinse, then repeat. It’s not complex, but it’s a strategy with a perfect historical batting average. Every time the rich swing it, it connects. So, every time we hear about the latest success story – on the economy, or jobs, or the return of US manufacturing – the right responds with scary sounding terms like “Critical Race Theory” or anti-vaxxer hysteria or some other such nonsense. Anything to make you hate your neighbor because hate is all they ever have to offer. Rage candy force fed to scared people who are usually wondering how they’re going to pay for prescriptions or daycare or college – and often all of these at once. The fear never doesn’t work.

And while the rich have been playing this game for centuries, the current state of division in America is not entirely their fault. They are certainly exposing our weaknesses to drive us apart, but we don’t exactly make this difficult. I mean, while there are entire television and social media networks built and maintained solely for the purpose of dividing America for profit, we watch those networks, share those memes, and dive headlong into the fray every time we are invited to do so. And no matter how clever or well-intentioned we are, we almost always make these divisions larger. It’s time to stop. It’s time to unite under a banner that exposes the real problem and the core sickness at the heart of the American experiment. That sickness is greed, and solidarity is the cure.

The “divide and conquer” strategy used by the rich for centuries exposes its own weakness in its very definition by admitting that it is almost always used to defeat a superior force. Whether it’s the union busters at Amazon or Starbucks, the executives at Fox News, or the CEO of any Fortune 500 company, all are aware that the working class is the most powerful political force in America, and should we ever recognize that simple fact, all of America will change immediately after. This is why Jay Gould felt the need to hire half of us to kill the other half, and it’s why the cowards at Fox and Facebook spend so much time and effort slicing and dicing us by race, gender, religion, etc. It’s the only thing that can keep us from holding them accountable for generations of thievery. And their success in doing so is why Jeff Bezos can launch a penis rocket into space, thank his poverty-adjacent workers for paying for it, and not be tarred and feathered for his stunning arrogance.

That said, the situation is far from hopeless, and workers are showing us the way. All over America, working people of all backgrounds are coming together to reshape America one small piece at a time by democratizing one workplace after another. In almost every instance, people from all the sliced and diced groups set aside our differences and fight together for better wages, hours, and conditions, and in doing so, we are seeing the very beginnings of our immense power. We are beginning to understand why they fight so hard to divide us; it’s because we are, first and foremost, a Union.

Brett Pransky is a writer, an English professor, and the Executive Producer of The Rick Smith Show. When not in the classroom, Brett uses his graduate degrees in Rhetoric and Business to help people understand the dangers associated with increasing corporate control over the levers of government and how to confront the deception used by those who profit from that control. Brett calls Columbus, Ohio home, and he hates writing about himself in the third person. He would also like everyone in America to download The Rick Smith Show podcast HERE.

Sifting through the settled dust of the Virginia elections and the mind-numbing postmortem shouting from every wannabe pundit with a Twitter account, I can’t help but feel as if those of us on the left can be counted on to consistently and sometimes acrobatically miss the point. Rather than working within the confines of what the data tells us about any given public argument, left leaning voices tend to speak to a created world that operates “as it should” rather than a real world that operates as it does. This is why, even with months to counter the GOP created panic over Critical Race Theory, Democrats simply stood on the tracks and let the train roll right over them, then blamed the usual suspects afterward. And this twirling mass of ineptitude is at its most obvious and most self-serving when we encounter this dead horse of a sentence: Democrats are bad at “messaging.”

This old trope is as certain a thing as there is in American political discussion, as certain as the right foaming about socialism or the NRA showing up on the third day after a mass shooting to tell us about “good guys with guns.” But much like many other simple and knowable facts, like we are not on a slippery slope toward communism, and AR-15s do not make anyone safer, we also know that the “Dems messaging problem” stuff is simply nonsense. The real problem is what it has been for about the last 40 years, a lack of access. We can’t reach people who are not in the room to be reached, and right-wing media has successfully placed half of the electorate in their own personal media silos.

Put simply, Dems make cogent, reasonable arguments that would work if only anyone persuadable were present to hear them. To be clear, it is not that no one listens to these arguments. Many do. The problem is that this communication happens almost entirely outside the silo. The people hearing the message already believe it, and those who don’t can’t be found. Even tired old cliches like “preaching to the choir” do not accurately describe just how much the left-leaning media environment has become a self-serving feedback loop. It sounds good, but it does very little work beyond giving Democrats a platform to impress each other and turn pretty words into better and more profitable gigs.

On the right, however, this is not the case. Sure, the GOP and its corporate money have created a mighty media juggernaut; this is not new information. But what many don’t understand is that the right not only controls its own media empire, but it also controls those who try (honestly or not) to compete with their noise. Evidence of this is everywhere. For example, on a Monday morning a short time ago, an op-ed appeared in the Washington Post. It called on Joe Biden to “respect” Trump’s executive privilege and not force Mark Meadows – Trump’s former chief of staff – to testify before the January 6 commission. The piece was written by one of the lawyers representing Meadows, yet no one seemed to think this was a conflict-of-interest worthy of a little scrutiny, so the liberal bastion of journalistic fairness ran the piece, and the right-wing media machine pitched its tent right in its opposition’s backyard.

Even on Twitter, which is probably about a D+40 environment, a new attack trends every day. A few days ago, it was #RacistJoeBiden, and shortly after they trended one of their favorite bits of projection as the term “pedo” became a national thing for a day. Tomorrow it will be something equally nonsensical, but it will trend anyway, because the right-wing machine controls it all.

The left defends itself, sometimes well and sometimes not, but it always and only defends. There is no offensive game in progressive media. None whatsoever. If there were, then right wing space would occasionally have left leaning voices present, losing often but sometimes winning and always at least arguing. But this does not happen, and the mere thought of it is almost laughable. The right chooses the ground for every fight, and exists in every competitive space, while at the same time walling off its own territory entirely and without even a hint of a challenge from anyone on the left, or the center for that matter. This has been the case for well over 40 years, beginning with the complete domination of the radio waves, and growing from there. The left now competes with entire generations who grew up on propaganda, and while the propagandists are to blame, so are those who surrendered their lunch money to right-wing bullies half a century ago, and who have made no real attempt to get it back.

So, when Democrats tried to tell well-meaning Virginians that they were being lied to about critical race theory, and that Youngkin is so much more like Trump than he pretends (which he certainly is), it had no effect. When the train of high-profile Democrats, Obama included, came to town to help, it had no effect. Democrats lost the 2021 Virginia Governor’s race over 40 years ago, when they chose to stop competing for anyone who didn’t already agree with them. This is why, when 2022 arrives, the result will be the same. And when that dust settles, and the bloodbath is fully realized, pundits and wannabe influencers will moan and quake about “messaging problems” without ever realizing that literally no one who needs to hear the message is listening.

They’re not even in the room.

Brett Pransky is a writer, an English professor, and the Executive Producer of The Rick Smith Show. When not in the classroom, Brett uses his graduate degrees in Rhetoric and Business to help people understand the dangers associated with increasing corporate control over the levers of government and how to confront the deception used by those who profit from that control. Brett calls Columbus, Ohio home, and he hates writing about himself in the third person.

While I hate to be the bringer of bad news at a time when people are finally beginning to secure a few wins in the workplace, we need to talk about what’s coming, about how working people are about to be on the receiving end of yet another attack from corporate power and the elite politicians they own.

While October has been renamed #Striketober due to the increasing number of labor actions going on across the country, and the coverage of those actions has been fairly positive, this trend simply can’t continue, and there are a number of very simple reasons why.

The legislative response to the strikes is a key indicator here. In the video below, Rick talks about two proposals meant to “address” the shortage of labor not by addressing the real shortage (which is in substandard wages & conditions) but by attacking worker safety and finding new ways to exploit the working class. One bill calls for a lowering of the minimum age for CDL drivers from 21 to 18, and the other intends to make it legal for children as young 14 to work until 11pm at night. Both will harm worker safety, and very likely drop wages as well.

To batter an overused cliche’, these proposals are the canary in the coal mine, and they signal the coming turn in how the fight for better wages, hours, and conditions is presented to the American people. This is not a prediction. It is a certainty.

Rick: “If we do hit an era, a period of of high, inflation, I can see it coming – and mark it on your calendar that I said it today – this is going to turn around and be blamed on all of the striking workers who are demanding better wages hours and conditions.

This is going to be put on all the people who marched out of jobs and said ‘No, we’re not working in this service industry for crummy wages. We’re not working without health security or retirement security. We demand better for ourselves and for our fellow workers.”

I guarantee you that the message will be ‘Well see – they got what they wanted. They wanted higher wages and they got higher wages and it ends up costing you – you the consumer … end up costing you more.’

I can see this coming as clear as day.”

As I said before, this is a certainty, one of several, actually. When it happens, the language used will be exactly what it always is. The words used to describe working people will be “them” and the words used to describe the corporate marks will be “you” and even though “you” and “them” are economically identical members of the same team, the corporate wedge will try to divide us. And this division will come from everywhere, including the more trusted media sources. After all, every single one of them is owned by the same people who have been dragging down wages for 50 years, and fairness and objectivity left journalism a long time ago.

And if history tells us anything on this subject, it tells us that corporate power wins this fight every single time. But unlike the certainties mentioned above, this outcome has not yet happened this time around, so we can still choose to stick together and support working people through the attacks that we all know are coming.

I’m not saying we will, because I don’t believe we will. But we could, we should, and I choose to believe that people can still surprise me.

Brett Pransky is a writer, an English professor, and the Executive Producer of The Rick Smith Show. When not in the classroom, Brett uses his graduate degrees in Rhetoric and Business to help people understand the dangers associated with increasing corporate control over the levers of government and how to confront the deception used by those who profit from that control. Brett calls Columbus, Ohio home, and he hates writing about himself in the third person.