One Thing The Mainstream Media Doesn’t Want
If you haven’t heard, in the last few days the Dilbert comic strip was dropped by US media over the creator's racist tirade. Here’s more reporting:
This isn’t the first time Dilbert creator Scott Adams has showed his racism… but our culture and institutions seem to put up with a certain amount of it. This was a case of high-profile, flagrant, blatant, audacious racism. In-your-face racism.
The good news is that American media decided that their audiences, their subscribers, and their advertisers don’t want a blatant, in-your-face racist as one of their cartoon artists. Good for them, and good for us.
Even more good news about this is that it’s evidence that the majority of Americans and American institutions don’t want blatant racists in our day-to-day media.
With that, it’s a clear indication that we could do a heck of a lot more to pressure American businesses and media to do a better job pushing back against racism and hate. They know it doesn’t sit well with the majority of Americans.
It also indicates that US media are vulnerable to pressure to get them to do more coverage and calling out of the rising hate and intolerance in this country, and to do less whitewashing of demagogues like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The hate is not okay, and we can do more to advocate for the moral high road in the US. We can push media and businesses to do more and to do better. And they’ll likely be receptive.
Our work here at Shift the Country is to be able to energize the majority of voters… and also to help that majority better drive the narrative to help reach and influence more voters. We intend to help people leverage connections, social networks, and existing organizations, too, and to bring businesses on board through partnerships or pressure. We can shift the direction of so many things in this country; with a concerted, coordinated effort and some basic strategy. Here’s our 5 Thing approach for changing our collective trajectory:
Thing 3: Involve Businesses Through Partnerships & Pressure.
Thing 5: Drive the Narrative, Create a Buzz, & Spread It Everywhere.
We’re rescheduling Zoom events to get this shift going; we’ll re-announce shortly. If you’re interested in getting involved… subscribe to this Substack, share it around with groups and organizations, talk about our work with others, and donate if you’re in a position to.
We’re just getting started, and we’re dreaming big. We need that. We need to go big and think big and dream big.
Why The Big Dreams Matter
What Scott Adams actually did with his recent videos is more insidious than “just” being a racist. Some of the related things to what’s happened with him are insidious, too.
For a deeper dive on all that, check out this Seth Abramson post. It ends with this bit of sunshine (I’m being facetious): “As tempting as it may be to see what Scott Adams did as a one-off scandal… this whole incident is in fact yet another data-point in a trendline that points toward mass civil unrest in America somewhere down the line this decade.”
Analysis from experts in homeland security, terrorism, and domestic violent extremism also predict an extended period of insurrection, unrest, and instability that could last a decade.
Abramson adds, “When Adams speaks of Whites ‘getting the hell away from Blacks,’ he’s talking about the same thing that [Marjorie Taylor] Greene and [Tucker] Carlson are. Just so, Elon Musk’s myriad schemes to turn Twitter into a massive megaphone for insurrectionists and white supremacists while simultaneously launching vile, race-based attacks on American media and the Democratic Party is a core component of the MAGA movement toward racial segregation and insurrection.”
We need to do more than just push back against racial segregation, insurrection, instability, violence, and hate.
We also need to champion a whole different future — a more egalitarian, equitable, and inclusive one. A more sustainable one. A more solution-oriented one. A future where the most powerful nation-state in the world truly does become the world’s first multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religion democracy that actually functions as a democracy is supposed to… and not as the minoritarian hellscape state we’re headed toward if the MAGA Republicans get their way.
We need the American majority to start winning the US Senate and the Electoral College in bigger ways. We need to win enough votes to topple the minoritarian structures holding us back, like the Senate filibuster. We need to reach voters in rural areas where Democrats and their allies have not recently succeeded. We need to do it in new and different ways… and part of that can be in offering a future that resonates. A future where we all have a better chance to thrive and flourish. A future where we invest in Americans and American communities instead of starving the places we live while they atrophy and while the wealth gap grows.
We can do it — all of that. It will help if we set out to. Big dreams matter. They will be critical as things intensify.
Stick with us. We’re fixing to do big things.
Onward.