Burt Trimble

Meh.

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@rudy_betrayed @redbaronpizza Yr being a bitch about this.

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@Hero_OfThe_Day Married man btw

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

What happened with that viral Red Baron Pizza worker is not a feel-good story, it's a feel-bad story. Everything about it says horrible things about where our society is headed.

Some obnoxious prick films a guy working his fingers to the bone for a "prank" hoping to get social media clicks, and the worker flips out at him because his shitty, abusive job had stretched him a hair's breadth from snapping. The video goes viral because people sympathize with a father shouting at a creepy live-streamer about how his shift was supposed to end an hour ago and he needs to get up at five in the morning to do it all again so his family doesn't get evicted from the home he's struggling to pay for, and then a fundraiser is launched which winds up giving the man half a million dollars.

Sounds like a happy ending, until you look at it. None of the other Red Baron workers are getting fundraisers to help them make ends meet; they're all toiling and suffering along with everyone else in similar socioeconomic positions, just as the man in the video would have been if he hadn't gone viral. Turns out the guy who set up the fundraiser for the Red Baron employee was himself a homeless veteran of the US military, who received his own far less successful fundraiser when this revelation came out. When you zoom out, this is just a story about how incredibly bleak life is for ordinary people in the heart of the US empire.

And yet capitalism proponents have seized on this story as an example of the system working perfectly while portraying it as a victory in their weird culture war theater. Conservative media platforms like The Daily Wire, The New York Post and Barstool Sports have framed the worker as a people's champion standing up to an entitled coastal liberal while working hard for his employer as Judeo-Christian God intended. Red Baron posted on social media that they are part of their employee's "fan club" and that he is their "employee of the month", causing conservative figures like Laura Loomer, Benny Johnson, Kevin Sorbo and Tim Burchett to swoon with approval.

They want you focusing on this one particular instance where it all worked out fine so that you don't think about the exponentially greater number of instances in which it doesn't. Billionaire corporations are exploiting workers around the world for appallingly meager wages, causing a combined amount of suffering too vast for the human mind to comprehend. People resonated with that worker pouring his heart out into that click slut's Meta glasses because so many of us have been there and know what it's like to be stretched to the breaking point just trying to feed your kids.

The capitalist class squeezes the life out of workers, and then they manipulate working people's thoughts at mass scale so they don't understand what's happening to them. They tell them their suffering is because of immigrants, or welfare recipients, or an amorphous cabal of "elites" who always conveniently belong exclusively to the opposite political party. They feed them media convincing them that the system is working fine and that if they can't hack it it's because something is wrong with them. They offer them the occasional "feel-good" viral story about someone who got lucky, like feudal serfs listening to fairy tales imagining that they too might one day marry a prince or discover that they are a member of the royal family who was lost at birth.

They pour all this energy into convincing workers to accept the status quo because they are at all times acutely aware that as soon as the workers stop accepting the status quo, it's over for them. The most under-discussed political reality in the world is that there are a whole lot more people suffering under the status quo than there are people profiting from it, and that the sufferers are fully capable of overturning the status quo by force whenever they decide to.

Our entire society is built around the need to manipulate our attention away from this political reality. All our mainstream culture. All our news media. All our politics. All our education systems. It's all designed to direct our gaze away from the reality that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and that they need us infinitely more than we need them.

They don't want us to look at this reality. They don't want us thinking about it.

But we really, really should.

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@andywhite_17 You could go on a caloric deficit and do some cardio.

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@Perla_Carrillo6 Too bad she sucks at winning at it.

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@RyannMcEnany Tampa is worse.

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@foo_4_thought I agree. Hanging them is a better idea.

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@ScoutWithBryan Yeah. You’re alone.

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@LADodgersMuse Milwaukee has a fraction of the population of LA.

But it’s nice to see you’re still seething over getting trounced.

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@huntryerson @Sherronesmoore Then you’re pretty retarded.

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@Sherronesmoore Republicans owned by the small hats < Muslim brotherhood

Also, your story never happened.

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@Ko_tr4eva I despise LeBron and I believe his career was manufactured.

HOWEVER….

I got his back on this one. Fuck the nationalist anthem.

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@laurenboebert Your son is a pedo and you are a lesbian.

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@Honestly_Jake Still salty that your stacked team got stomped 😂

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@IconicChriss You homosexuals live off of hypotheticals

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@suzukiplsstay Lol. Yr a Shitcago fan

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@elonmusk What’s this… “democracy?” you speak of?

Go back to Africa.

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@SarcasmStardust He hasn’t seen his little worm in decades

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@HorrorGorl The Samson Option

[Burt Trimble @BigBurtTrimble]

@legendz_prod Dray clawing at Edeys eyes like a bitch