STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Elite Strategy 101: Stoking the Culture War, Reinventing the Enemy
By Ben Bartee - June 29, 2026

Originally published via Armageddon Prose:

Comedian Tim Dillon recently expressed bafflement at the strategy of shoving Pride™ propaganda down every orifice of the body politic, fervently employed by the tranny activist corps with the purported aim of improving public relations for the alphabet people:

“It makes more people angry. That’s why gay marriage has lost 11 points in support. More people are annoyed… They’re like, why is my bank gay? When did my bank come out as gay?… What are we doing? This doesn’t make anybody’s life better. It is just virtue-signaling horse-shit that ends up doing the exact opposite of what they want. They think it increases acceptance. It decreases it. Because you’re shoving a worldview down someone’s throat.”

What Tim Dillon, who is otherwise savvy, apparently doesn’t appreciate is that consistently generating resistance to the machinations of the social engineers, rather than an inadvertent byproduct, is actually the entire point of the exercise.

The tranny lobbyists love the defiance from the Basket of Deplorables, as Hillary Clinton infamously described the segment of the populace opposed to her neoliberal identity politics dogma, because it generates more fodder that they then use to generate donations to combat the transphobia they themselves created.

The power structure at large, of which the Social Justice™ faction is an integral arm, loves the antagonism for different, yet related, reasons.

Related: U.S. Corporate Profit Margins Surge to All-Time Apex

It was with great interest that I watched Dr. Ron “Audit the Fed” Paul surge out of nowhere, with no institutional backing, in the 2007-08 GOP presidential primary season.

(The establishment GOP, of course, as retribution for distributing common sense to the rabble that they might use at some point to liberate themselves from their largely invisible fiscal prison constructed surreptitiously over a hundred years, marginalized and ostracized Dr. Paul on behalf of their donors, the true stakeholders in the party. Transparency in central banking?! That’s wingnut stuff!)

On the left, similarly, I watched from afar with interest in 2011 when the Occupy Wall Street protests began. ( I was living in the Orient when they kicked off, a fresh college graduate with a useless degree in liberal arts and a dearth of options in the U.S. economy that the bankers had wrecked in the 2008 collapse.)

Before that era, in the stagnation of the post-9/11 War on Terrorism days, the casino Ponzi scheme collapsed, and the people who did it got away scot-free, a mass protest movement specifically targeting the banking sector would have seemed implausible.

Via Carolina Journal:

“What better way to insulate society’s true power centers from criticism by the masses than to divide the masses themselves, pitting them against each other based on how they look?

Remember the “99 percenters” of Occupy Wall Street fame (or infamy)?

While their “solutions” were decidedly socialist, their instincts were strong. Their outrage stemmed largely from the massive bank bailouts orchestrated in 2008, which saw billions of dollars go to help “save” major banking and insurance corporations. Their rallying cry was to unite the “99 percent” of us who were continuing to struggle under the most significant economic crisis since the Great Depression, while the big banks received a decidedly soft landing courtesy of their big government brethren.

The 99 percenters were getting uncomfortably close to uniting people against the true ruling elite: big government in cahoots with big banks, the Federal Reserve, and big corporations. The movement also provided a uniting rallying cry of working- and middle-class households of all races and demographics, directing their angst against the nation’s most influential centers of power.

What to do for the ruling elite?

Divide and conquer…

The trends are undeniable. Shortly after the 2011 rise of the 99 percenter movement, major corporate media outlets in near unison drastically increased articles discussing “racism” and “systemic racism.” One would think this dramatic transition rather odd to occur in the second and third year of the administration of the first black president in America…

Perhaps this was just a coincidence, but the results have been unmistakable — and dangerous.

The woke crowd is conditioning people to accept the absurd notion that a white plumber has more in common with a white billionaire CEO than his black or Hispanic construction worker neighbor, simply because of the way he looks — or that the black construction worker has more in common with Maxine Waters than his white plumber neighbor for the same reason.

Divided people are far easier for the elites to control.”

The last line there delivers the précis — the same reason Europe is currently inundated with Third World migrants with no allegiance to the country or the native population, why the Irish Gardai are busy recruiting Pakistani cops on Pakistani television in Urdu.

Intentionally stoked popular division has always been, arguably, the state’s most potent weapon against its own constituents.

Related: German Minister Announces Pre-Crime Surveillance, Prosecution of ‘Far-Right Extremists’

—————————————–

[If you appreciate Armageddon Prose, please consider a $5/month or $50/year Substack subscription or a one-time digital “coffee” donation. For alternative means of patronage, email benbartee@protonmail.com.]

——————————————

Is it any coincidence that, immediately after Occupy Wall Street kicked off, outflanking him from the left, Mr. “Hope and Change” Barack Obama — who had run and won largely on that exact species of popular outrage over the economic collapse and subsequent bank bailouts— after opposing federal gay marriage for years, suddenly announced his support for it in May 2012?

(Per Wikileaks email hacks, it’s worth noting, Obama’s entire cabinet following his 2008 win was literally handpicked by his donor, CitiBank. “Hope and Change” was, of course, a lie from the start — but a galvanizing lie that Obama shrewdly exploited.)

Then, when the gay marriage thing didn’t really ignite the culture war they hoped it might, in order to redirect loosely defined “progressive” energy into the culture and away from an economic reckoning, the progressive social engineering machine took it to the next level with transgenderism beginning around 2014 as well as a spate of “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” hate crime hoaxes?

The whole timeline could be a big coincidence — or it could be the artifact of a slowly engineered culture war designed to distract and balkanize the population.

The invention of new public enemies, of course, continues on a rolling ad hoc basis.

In addition to transphobics, white supremacists, anti-vaxxer extremists, etc., the power structure recently, as I covered at the time at Armageddon Prose, per leaked documents out of Department of Homeland Security (DHS),* debuted a new category of public enemy: “anti-technology extremists” who oppose the mass data center bonanza, to serve as the nervous system of the budding panopticon Beast state.

(*The DHS is a department, it should never be forgotten, the power structure only managed to birth opportunistically in the wake of post-9/11 trauma. Now, like FISA, it’s taken for granted as a permanent tool in the government’s arsenal, the utility or morality or constitutionality of which never to be revisited.)

Nothing the corporate state does is primarily about solving problems afflicting the people under its jurisdiction, whom it holds in utter contempt; if improving their lives were its impetus, there wouldn’t be a million homeless fentanyl addicts on American streets.

Rather, the continual manufacturing of novel crises and classes of enemies of state is always about one of two things — or, more often, both at the same time:

· Increasing the scope and capabilities of the national security state

· Ratcheting up the culture war, which serves as a convenient distraction from the top-down economic rape of the middle and working classes (the only viable class war in 2026 being the one the elite wage against the serfs, not the other way around as envisioned by Marx)

In the service of answering Dillon’s original rhetorical question posed at the top: that’s why major league baseball (and every other institution under the thumb of the cultural elite) is gay.

Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback), is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

Follow AP on X.

Subscribe (for free) to Armageddon Prose and its dystopian sister, Armageddon Safari.

Support AP’s independent journalism with a one-off, hassle-free “digital coffee” tip or Patreon.

Bitcoin public address: bc1qvq4hgnx3eu09e0m2kk5uanxnm8ljfmpefwhawv



Related Posts:

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
loading