The key to the metaphor is the aggressive shaking of the jar.
This is what the media does so well.
People are normally myopic about their problems, and aren’t usually looking for the big picture, but 99.999% of the time can keep their head even when things are going badly. But if you can convince people that all these social and political forces and groups are an existential threat, you’ve got people ready for war.
Very true.
The government, having discovered an entirely new spectrum of power it can exert over the population from the CV-19 episode, is busying itself coming up with all manner of new restrictions. It is constructing a cage and looking around for any kind of stick laying around it can poke thru the bars of the cage to harass and intimidate.
I think the Leftists in the media, in politics, in Academia, and even in the permanent bureaucracy, are mostly useful idiots.
There are unseen Marxist strategists behind-the-scenes constantly generating these divisive narratives, skillfully weaponizing them, and identifying the most useful idiots through which to deliver them.
The goal is the destruction of our self-governing republic. Liberty and Self-governance are the natural enemies of tyranny - and Marxism is just an instruction book for would by tyrants.
Marxism shows the would be tyrant…
First, how to create divisions in order to deceive a free and self-governing society into perceiving itself as having failed in many ways.
Next, how to use those perceived failures as “proof” that freedom and self-governance just don’t work - that people are too selfish to self-govern.
Next, how to offer Totalitarianism as a better alternative (usually by some nicer sounding name, such as Progressivism, or Social Democracy).