I nominate this NYT opinion piece for shittiest take of 2024!

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Thompson “grew up in a working-class family in Jewell, Iowa,” a tiny farming community north of Des Moines, Amy Julia Harris and Ernesto Londoño report. “His mother was a beautician, according to family friends, and his father worked at a facility to store grain.” Thompson’s childhood was spent “going row by row through the fields to kill weeds with a knife, or working manual labor at turkey and hog farms.”

is true… then he’s a class traitor; not a hero. he made his money fucking over the working class. that’s not heroic.

you really think someone would do that? just go on a once-respected publication and tell lies?

“Just”… ? no. There’s a certain vetting process that makes sure they tell the right lies.

Not sure if you didn’t get it, but that’s a reference to an Arthur meme.

I’m aware of the arthur reference, but it’s really important to realize these aren’t off-the-cuff lies.

This is a planned, coordinated effort that has been going on since before I was even alive; and the ~~journalists~~propagandists have been very carefully selected- and have indeed worked very hard to get the job of fucking over americans.

There are two jobs where you can go on national TV, lie and not get fired. President and weather man.

Fox News personality.

Plot twist: the Fox News weatherman tells the truth

Press secretary, too.

Also, weathermen aren’t necessarily lying. lying requires an intent to deceive, and most times, weathermen don’t mean to deceive, they’re just factually wrong. (FWIW, predicting the weather more than a few days in advance is a crap shoot.)

Press secretare is just a modern herald or crier, they are the voice of the king.

As for the weatherman bit, your right, but thats also the joke…

the precipitous fall of print media over the past couple decades is something that would one day be written about in the history books if they weren’t also full of shit.

Decentralized media like fedi is the only hope of the working class.

Owners either own or control everything else government, fake news, TV, Hollywood, publishing, corporate socials.

Wikipedia will be deposed in time, they are already mawing at the foundation

Thank you for your service…

More people need to understand how media whores for the regime

But they’re not lying. It’s pretty reasonable to believe both that his parents were working class, and that him becoming a class traitor on such a level does make him a hero in capitalist eyes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

it is, though.

The implication is that Brian Thompson should be/is a hero to working class people.

he’s not.

he’s an asshole who made millions fucking over people just trying to get medical care. many of whom have died as a result of his fucking them over, and that is especially true of those who actually work for a living- which he has not in a very long time.

i don’t think it’s lying, necessarily. i suspect that it’s embellishing, and it’s inarguably providing an incomplete, intentionally flattering picture.

Keep in mind it’s an opinion piece, not official reporting

The irony being here that a ‘working class hero’ to Bret is someone who is no longer working class

Especially if they fuck over the working class.

he made his money fucking over the working class. that’s not heroic

I mean, of course it isn’t, but nobody told the NYT or their opinion writers who are currently tripping over each other trying to normalize Trump, Thompson, and other monsters…

This is one of the problems with treating class as an inherent identity, not a person’s relation to the means of production. A person that begins as a direct wage laborer is working class, but if they ascend the ladder they become closer and closer to carrying out the functions of the owner class (i.e. becoming upper management) they lose proletarian character and gain bourgeois character. So the UHC CEO may have started out working class but obviously he became a bourgeois monster.

There’s a similar pitfall, which is the uncritical moralization of the working class. The working class has a world historical role to play and is the class oppressed by the bourgeoisie, but it can easily have reactionary elements that should not be embraced, esoeciskky not as “working class values”. The working class exists in the society shaped by the bourgeoisie, with marginalizations baked in by the bourgeoisie that can become self-perpetuating (e.g. racism), so we must not simply accept whstever the majority opinion of the working class is, let alone some random guy that ended up facilitating death and pain for profit.

Y’all really need modernize the delivery lol

Solid msg tho

Bootlickers are the biggest obstacle to basic reforms happening.

Education of the working class should be the priority and that’s exactly what divisive politcs is doing.

Luigi surely did a thing… People at least in US across left/right divide are talking and noticing how media and government is behaving.

Beautiful

They love these stories. They reinforce their delusions of libertarianism and that anyone who is truly able will be found and given their rightful position.

Yeah, I’m going to need some citations for the claims of those people.

absolutely.

Like. This sounds like the kind of shit Musk used to spew everywhich way.

Yup. If any part of that bio is true, then that’s even more unforgivable. It means that unlike someone who was born into wealth and had asshole-ishness thrust upon them, he deliberately chose to be an asshole.

Corporate offices are filled with bootlickers who are ready to join the club. They waste their entire life for a chance to be Brian Thompson the parasite.

This is what success looks like to them, they will do anything for it crime, corruption, toxic work enviroment… It is unpleasant to be around them.

Careers is a cancer of the working class. It ruins solidarity

Then he went on to get a job making it more difficult for everyone in his tiny farming community north of Des Moines to get health care.

Weird how they forgot that part.

TIL betraying your fellow man makes you a hero. /s

When I went to IA State, I used to drive through Jewell on the way to see this girl I was dating. The only notable thing about the town was the fact that it harbored a puppy mill.

Yeah, it’s super smart to make a class hero out of a prep school valedictorian and Ivy League grad, grandson of a wealthy real estate developer - definitely a class traitor himself but in a Good Way - and hey, he did suffer from back pain while doing his tech job remotely from Waikiki. So his struggle was real. Power to the people!

Bourgeois class traitors should be celebrated.

Yeah I know, the old “It’s different when WE do it” routine. Same old same old.

Yes, because betraying the bourgeoisie is good for workers, whereas betraying the workers is bad for workers. Duh?

Rich people got a union and that’s beautiful…

Peasants got a union that’s bad, mmmkay

Spoiled rich kid with back pain kills insurance CEO, some industry-wide practices abruptly change.

Public: “Yay, justice at last! Spoiled Rick Kid is a god!!!”

Insurance practices slowly go back to the way they were. New CEO is just as bad.

Public: “The system betrayed us again!”

Duh?

And now the public knows that killing a CEO had a direct impact. Regardless of the perpetrator, that has an effect on the public imagination!

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