by Caitlin Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone:

Abusive relationships where the abuser is a transparently horrible monster don’t tend to last long, because it becomes obvious to the victim very quickly that they need to head for the door. The ones that last are the ones where the abuser is an adept manipulator, who is able to elicit sympathy and attachment in the victim while constructing a prison of mental narratives in their head.

The hardest of these to escape from is the “nice guy” abuser, the kind of abuser whose manipulations revolve around framing themselves as good and virtuous while squeezing the psychological noose on the victim tighter and tighter. These are difficult to escape because by design they are hard to recognize as abusive while you’re in them, even while you’re being drained of life, liberty and happiness to the abuser’s benefit.

To escape from a nice guy abuser, it helps to actively push for things that they can’t say no to without blowing their cover. If he presents himself as a woke and sexually liberated feminist, for example, you can begin disrupting the web of nice guy narratives by saying you’d like to stop having sex with him, or that you want financial independence. Anything they desperately want to control but can’t say “no” to without the nice face mask slipping off. Their desperate attempts to manipulate you back into the position you were in previously will expose them, and make it much easier to find your way to the door through the fog of manipulation.

The escape route from the nice guy fascism of liberal narrative managers operates in much the same way.

“I call Obama’s particular brand of establishment sycophancy Nice Guy Fascism. It’s just like regular fascism, enabling the brutal dominion of a few depraved and bloodthirsty tyrants, except you get to look like a nice guy while you’re participating in it.” https://t.co/TLwfYl1izK

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) April 11, 2019

For ages the Democratic Party and its allies have been actively manipulating leftwardly-inclined Americans away from issues which might inconvenience the powerful–issues like economic justice, anti-imperialism, slashing the military budget, ending government surveillance and police militarization, and actually getting money out of politics. Instead they’ve been encouraged to only care about issues which establishment power structures don’t care about–issues like abortion, misogyny, LGBT rights, gun control, and racism.

The powerful do not care if you have an abortion. They do not care how many bullets your gun can hold, they do not care if two guys get married or what gender pronouns you use, and they do not care if everyone is a racist or if no one is. They care about maintaining and expanding their ability to exert control over other people. If they can use prejudice or the threat of revoking rights to advance those agendas then they will certainly use them, but beyond that, they do not care.

For this reason, many who see the abusive nature of the oligarchic empire have come to look upon these issues a bit disdainfully, seeing social justice issues as a power-serving distraction from the actual issues they don’t want us pushing for like dismantling the war machine, ending plutocracy and making sure everyone has what they need. This is a major part of why, when racism suddenly became the number one hot topic in the news for days on end amid protests against police brutality, many anti-establishment types viewed it with suspicion.

But what actually seems to be happening here is a lot more interesting than some impotent and irrelevant distraction. Because people aren’t just out protesting racism, they’re calling for the complete dismantling of the entire police state, which is an essential part of the glue holding the US-centralized empire in place.

Read More @ CaitlinJohnstone.com