Karla Marx, Fox News, and the Woke Brigade

Watch as a mother is co-opted by conservative media for becoming class conscious while "leftists" respond with accusations of racism.

An Alabama mother names Jessica McCabe “went viral” (haven’t used those words in a while) on TikTok after sharing her frustrations with the state of the American economy, ultimately depriving her children of “The American Dream” that she was able to achieve.

As expected, her rational point has been taken less than charitably by political people online, giving us yet another demonstration of the media’s powerful division machine.

Karla Marx

To summarize McCabe’s TikTok, she believed that hard work would allow her grown children, aged 25 and 28, to secure a good life, just as it did for her. She acknowledged that every generation faced challenges but distinguished between the struggles of her time and what she sees as the insurmountable challenges facing her children.

During her youth, she could afford to live on less than $10 an hour, but now even on a six-figure salary, it can be difficult to find an apartment to rent (studios in decent shape going for $2k+ in her area). Her son, a college graduate, hasn't been able to move out despite saving “every penny” he has earned for 10 months due to high rent costs. She's perplexed at the high rent prices and feels that the economic classes are polarizing into the ultra-wealthy and everyone else who is struggling.

The very end is what particularly matters to me, though:

So I don't even think that there's even classes anymore. There used to be upper class, middle class, lower class. It's literally turning into the ultra-wealthy and then everybody else is just poor.

- Jessica McCabe

So, while musing on the death of “The American Dream,” McCabe snaps herself out of liberal class conceptualization. She sees that the “upper, middle, lower” way of seeing things just doesn’t apply “anymore” and has noted that there are only two actual classes. She doesn’t quite map ownership onto it, but this is a person ranting into their phone in her car after becoming emotional about her children’s predicaments. I think it’s pretty forgivable that she “only” achieved proto-class consciousness.

When we begin to see things through the lens McCabe is, though, we stop seeing all the competitive ankle-biting that is today’s current politics. This mother’s understanding has risen above even people calling themselves “Marxist” on social media, and people are responding to what she has to say.

Fox News

This video received more than 11 million views and counting on TikTok, and has also been racking up millions more on other platforms. An average person rarely gets to say something leading toward class consciousness somewhere it actually gets heard.

So, Fox News had to “claim” her, inviting her on-air Tuesday, for several reasons.

Firstly, this video is legitimately extremely popular. It did not get featured in any articles or other new media content aggregation outlets (like Buzzfeed); I use the word “viral” because it organically spread on TikTok, a Chinese-owned (though independently operated) platform that regularly gets called a place for “leftist propaganda” and a popular target of conservatives and Fox News(who are not fans of how well communism is working out for China). In fact, Fox News is more well-known for being sympathetic toward “Libs of TikTok,” which sees the platform as “a haven of blue-haired weirdos,” so their use of viral TikTok content for their point is notable.

If leftists had laid some claim for what McCabe is saying, it would be a big problem for the right-populism brand that has been carefully cultivated in recent years – the conservative populist argument would instead be in the hands of its “enemies.” The proto-class consciousness of populism (the people vs. the elite) has only been recently properly wrestled away from the left. Bernie Sanders represented the last vestige of compromise, and we all know Donald Trump won.

But that’s only the problem of The Brand™ – one team wanting to maintain the advantage in a game.

The more critical reason for Fox News grabbing ahold of McCabe is that if talking about class in a more direct, dialectical framing becomes “good,” rather than “left” or “right,” the ruling class is going to start having some much bigger problems.

Whether one considers Fox News “good” or “evil,” one can not deny that it is partisan. It runs on one end of the liberal political spectrum, and no one who supports or detracts from it would argue. Thus, whatever they talk about will be mapped onto the liberal political spectrum – conservatives will be sympathetic, and leftists will argue with them.

The issue is thus only seen through that lens. As of this writing, 45% of registered voters are independents – not staunch dogmatists for either wing of capitalism. How people are doing economically isn’t allowed to be a “normal people” issue, even though (regardless of race, gender, identity, etc.) ordinary people are the ones most affected.

If everyday people are turned off by partisan anger while hardcore partisan whales hyperconsume content about how their side is correct, we have an ultimately divided and disinterested populace growing more disenfranchised by the year and a booming content industry.

The Woke Brigade

The backlash McCabe was expecting (and, to an extent, experienced before being featured on Fox News) was more about Gen X feeling that Millennials and Gen Z weren’t working hard enough.

Almost as if to prove my book, Woke Ouroboros, right yet again, The Left was happy to oblige in their side of the partisan media deal, taking to social to paint McCabe as an evil racist for daring to say a word about white people experiencing hardship, with some people genuinely implying she (and other “privileged” white people who might dare talk about being… not rich) deserve to die.

This first post is particularly confounding; it doesn’t invalidate anything McCabe says but decides that her next move will be racism. This person, for no reason whatsoever, alleges McCabe would never want to solve the problems she is highlighting “because it would help black people.”

“The Left” loves repeatedly associating any concern with economics with conservativism, and people who participate in this fall on their own sword to avoid addressing these issues, just as the post alleges McCabe would.

Isn't it interesting how when one “side” of the liberal political spectrum addresses the challenges faced by working people, it can cause opposition from the other side? This opposition becomes so deep-rooted that even when they recognize the same issues, addressing them seems counterintuitive because it might benefit their perceived “rivals!” Sadly, this divisive mindset is present on both sides, as seen here.

One would hope that the universal hardships of working people could evoke empathy, but as McCabe's experience illuminates, “left” reactions were skewed towards the messenger's identity and not the message itself. McCabe being white should not be a contentious point in this discussion; these are not issues even vaguely exclusive to white people.

In that respect, it should be painfully obvious how well the liberal political spectrum effectively makes economic concerns untouchable to everyday people: who the fuck wants to deal with any of this shit?

Conclusion

Too often, a message is overshadowed by people’s biases, identity, and political allegiances. At the heart of McCabe's outburst is an earnest plea about the difficulties of achieving “The American Dream” in today's economic landscape. Her concerns resonate with countless Americans who similarly feel that the dream is drifting further out of reach.

Yet, instead of uniting in addressing these shared hardships, contemporary ideology divides the populace along predictable lines, getting entangled in the trappings of identity and partisan loyalties. The result? A lost opportunity for genuine dialogue and collective action. By viewing McCabe's narrative through a polarized lens, we stray from the essential message: the increasing challenges faced by working people – white, black, whatever – across America.

Whether left or right, the media plays a significant role in shaping these perceptions. Their selective amplification or negation of certain voices based on partisan interests hinders constructive conversations. Ideally, McCabe's narrative could have been a bridge, a point of mutual agreement, a rallying cry for change. But she, like countless other voices, got drowned in the noise.

We are presented with more evidence of a need to escape the liberal political spectrum.