Opinion: Scent in the wind – crisis on the horizon

By The Truth Reporter:

Have you ever been out in the garden and one of the neighbours is having a barbecue? You get a faint whiff of sizzling meat and all those taste buds start to work overtime.  Of course the ability to detect and locate scents is largely irrelevant for us today but in our ancient history, it was a matter of survival. 

In a similar way, it is possible to detect hints and traces in the media which point to more serious issues. Of course in today’s media soup of mainstream gibberish, extremist fakery and hateful propaganda you need your nose pretty finely tuned to detect anything of importance. 

I’ve picked up a scent recently, it is very faint but I think it’s there and I’m pretty sure it is coming in our direction. If you’re aware of what is going on right now you’ll know that there is a sinister and growing undercurrent of identarian politics in this country but it hasn’t really become part of everyday life as yet. In the USA the conflict is becoming more overt and more dangerous every day and as a nation, we need to be aware of the danger of allowing such issues to take hold here.

If you’ve lived in America you’ll know that the fast-food industry is ubiquitous, it’s everywhere and there are outlets focused on every socio-economic and cultural group. If you want a burger, it’s far more nuanced than McDonald’s or Burger King, you’ve got Whataburger, Jack-In-The-Box, Wendy’s, Five Guys… and on and on..

Inevitably some chains cater for the tastes of specific cultural groupings, Popeye’s is an outlet that specialises in southern style products and to generalise, breaded chicken and seafood. They have had something of a revolution recently with their chicken sandwich which they spent a great deal of money tuning to the exact taste their consumers demand – in fact they combined the thick breadcrumbs, succulent chicken and condiments together so well the effect is pretty hard to resist, imagine a KFC fillet burger on steroids with twice as much mayonnaise… hungry yet?

Who could have thought that designing a sandwich would spark a race row?  Well it’s happening in the USA and as I mentioned earlier, it could happen here. 

When we think of identity politics we think of David Lammy and we instantly dismiss him as a fool, as would any rational person but just for a moment look at what happens when these ideas are allowed to filter into the mainstream of political thought.  Just look at these headlines…

‘Fights break out after Popeye’s run out of chicken sandwiches’

‘Popeyes chicken sandwich lines are not an excuse to replay racial stereotypes’

‘Why the popeye’s chicken sandwich craze quickly morphed into black shaming’

There are more, you only need to Google it.

So what is happening here? Well, it seems that America has reached a toxic stalemate between consumerism and woke politics. On one level it seems that Popeye’s has come up with a product that is so tasty and appealing to certain market sectors that people are prepared to fight hand to hand to get them. This has then caused comments about the behaviour of these groups which have then been cited as evidence of resurgent racism in the USA.

Do you see now why this is so worrying?  Any and all issues are being weaponised in today’s toxic political debate, if we can find racism in the formulation of batter for a chicken breast then we can find racism ANYWHERE – and if you can manufacture an argument from nothing then you have a licence to extract concessions and favours from people without any reasonable justification.

Who wants to live in a society like this? Certainly not me…  the thing is these things creep up on us very slowly and are barely perceptible unless you’re really, really looking hard.

Keep your noses well-tuned – don’t fall for the fake smell of identity politics.