How the WTO Gave Us Occupy and the Tea Party

0:00Can we zoom out for just a minute here and go back to the time before the internet completely scrambled our collective borderline Neanderthal brains, because I'm quite positive that this is something that every single one of us is struggling with on a daily basis, whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not. And I think you know exactly what I'm talking about if you've made it this far into the podcast. The internet has almost completely destroyed our ability to see each other clearly, which is tragic because it was supposed to bring us together. We get all that. Social media has inflated our egos to the point where we've fallen in love with the sound of our own voices and opinions, and I know that's rich coming from an opinionated asshole like myself, but that doesn't make it any less true.

0:42And if it makes me a hypocrite to enunciate the hypocrisies of our time to earn a living, then so be it. Problem is that our voices and opinions around the water cooler of America have now been weaponized by every major corporation on the planet to maximize their ability to digitally brainwash our attention spans to the point where we will agree, repeat, and parrot any random talking point they want us to recite verbatim. Do you ever catch yourself trying to repeat an opinion you heard on a podcast just the day before as if it was your own? No, I guess it's just me that does that, right? Every single talking mouth that you see blathering on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram or one of the other 5 ,000 apps that I can't keep track of anymore is doing nothing but repeating the same regurgitated infotainment from one microphone and camera to the next.

1:31And that is precisely the membrane that I'd like to puncture right now. Here, I got a nail. Got a nail right here. I'm going to pop it. Boom. We're like a dog chasing its own tail. And there's no end to the cycle. We've intentionally been placed inside of an intellectual hamster wheel, a psychological contraption that we call the internet. It takes our outrage and packages it and then aggressively sells it back to us. So we become more outraged It becomes a closed loop of insanity. If you don't like the dog chasing its tail, then it's more like a snake that eats its own tail. Yeah, I think we forget to realize how new this technology is and how drastically it's compromising our integrity and livelihood and happiness.

2:14What it's capable of doing to our minds and our souls when we're exposed to it year after year and decade after decade now. What's it done to our egos and our sense of self-importance? What's it done to our friendships and our families? I mean, social media can be great if you use it like your grandmother does, for cute pictures and staying in touch with each other. And beyond that, it's a vanity machine that amplifies the worst of human behavior. I'm an 80s kid myself, but by 1994, we were already online. Dial-up, chat rooms, message boards, AOL, you've got mail. We were kids talking to strangers around the world in those message boards.

2:48There were no feeds and no algorithms yet. You had to go looking for a fight. Then you argued and you logged off and then you went about your life. Fast forward five years, by 1999-ish, the internet still wasn't the manipulative behavior-shaping algorithm machine that it would eventually become. There were no engagement incentives quietly herding people into their ideological camps. It was chat rooms and message boards and email chains and half-finished websites held together by duct tape. And for the first time, regular folks realized that they could coordinate without permission or institutions.

3:21That early, messy internet helped people compare notes sideways instead of being talked down to from above. And that energy spilled out of the screen and into the real world. Different people showed up angry for different reasons, but they were circling the same problem. Because power had gone global overnight, and accountability conveniently went missing. For a brief minute there, it wasn't a battle between left versus right. It was the people versus a system that was too big and too far away, and completely insulated from any sort of consequences. is. That's when people's attention turned towards the World Trade Organization.

3:53I mean, decisions that reshaped entire communities and economies were being made in rooms most people would never enter by people they would never vote for under rules that nobody agreed to. When capital went global and labor stayed local, workers lost their leverage, jobs left, and wages flatlined. When people demanded answers, they were told the same thing every time. It's global, it's complicated, it's out of your hands. That was the moment the fuse was lit. just before it happened to be snuffed out. The anger didn't disappear. It was scattered to the winds on the morning of September 11th, 2001.

4:27A shock so large that it basically shifted everything sideways. I would argue that that moment set us on a path toward the toxic political culture that we live in today. To be clear, I am not saying that Osama bin Laden was trying to derail American unity around globalism or economic accountability. That wasn't his project. The division that followed wasn't the goal. It was just the fallout. Just a byproduct of a violent agenda that shattered trust and redirected attention and left the country psychologically exposed in ways that nobody really understood at the time. Because after September 11th, fear replaced trust as the organizing principle of American life.

5:02We built a security state that demands obedience, a media ecosystem that thrives on catastrophe, and politicians that understood that it's easier to control the population when they're scared as opposed to informed. The war on terror turned into mass surveillance of the population, which turned into people being suspicious of their government even more than they already were. And those suspicions developed into identity politics on both sides of the aisle. And over time, disagreement became disloyalty somehow. Your neighbors somehow became a threat because they don't have the same political yard signs you do.

5:34Politics became the only place that fear could be converted into religion. And this tribal warfare that we live inside of today didn't just develop out of thin air. It was cultivated profitably over time. And when the blowback of the people resurfaced against this globalist agenda, years later, it came back split into two parts. Occupy Wall Street showed up to call out the banks, corruption, and a system rigged for insiders, while the Tea Party erupted over bailouts, centralized power, and a government that always conveniently seemed to rescue the people at the top, no matter who was in charge.

6:08Different language, different style, for sure. But it was the same gut level realization that the system answers to itself, and the regular people are the last ones in the room. Both movements were hijacked and co-opted and inevitably collapsed from within. And today, there's very little, if any, signs of them left intact meaningfully. I don't know exactly where we go from here with this information, but I think it's important that we remember it happened. At least it almost happened. And I'm actually working on something really big at Newsweek along these lines that's going to knock me offline for the next couple days, maybe a week or two.

6:42And while I can't really say too much more about it than that, I will be back bigger and badder than ever in the very near future. So until we can do it again, it's Newsweek Radio. I'm Jesse Edwards. Catch you next time. Bye. And we say bye-bye! Newsweek Radio is a member of the Trust Project. Ha ha!