STOP LOOKING WHERE THEY POINT

A message for the morons

Man, Arabs are the fucking worst. Muslims too... and the Jews... the fucking Jews... Oh... and the Christians... Black people, let’s not forget them... and gay folk... and bi folks... and Trans people... yeah... and disabled people... and ugh... the poor people... they’re the worst too... don’t forget about them... and the fucking immigrants... terrible... and don’t even get me started about indigenous people... ewww.

How the fuck do you keep it straight? Is it just a mental list? Or do you have a notepad somewhere with all the folks you dislike? A list of people whom you’ve decided to blame for everything that’s gone wrong in your life? Is there a Signal group or a “Dumb Motherfuckers” group chat where you share this shit? Or is it a weekly newsletter? Is there a shared Google spreadsheet? Do you have to update it manually, or does it auto-populate when Tucker or Fuentes or Rogan adds someone new to the list?

Because I’ve got to say that from where I stand... here on the outside looking in, it seems fucking exhausting. Like a full-time job... scratch that... more than full-time... like a first-year-investment-banker-hours kind of job. It must be so much work keeping tabs on who to be afraid of this week, especially since the list keeps growing... which, I mean, let’s not bullshit each other... the growing list is pointing to one of two things, either the world is getting more and more dangerous every day or your hateful xenophobia is genuinely five-star, ten-out-of-ten, no notes, Olympic-level paranoia, and I say that with something approaching awe because I can barely keep track of my chore list while you’re out here maintaining a real-time database of everyone who is ruining civilization and your life by simply existing.

Every day, you take your marching orders from the dumbest people in media and politics and religion, and every day you learn... Shocker! The problem isn’t you... it isn’t them... It’s those other people... You know the ones... and every day they keep adding people to the list. And no one ever comes off the list... no one ever graduates to acceptability or earns their way into your good graces. The list only ever grows... the blackness spreading... the hatred encompassing more and more of the big, scary world...

You seem to have a lot of enemies, friend. It’s a staggering number of groups and people who are all out to ruin your specific life. And I hesitate to offer this insight, but maybe let’s explore, as a thought-experiment of sorts... for the sheer arithmetical novelty of the idea, that if your list of enemies includes basically everyone who isn’t exactly like you, that the problem might not be the list?

Yesterday, two teens in camo walked up to the Islamic Center of San Diego with guns and a suicide note about racial pride and a gas can with a Nazi SS symbol on it and killed three people outside the largest mosque in the county. A week before ‘Eid. With kids in the building just going to school. A security guard, a father of eight, died protecting the building.

A couple of months ago, a man drove a truck into Temple Israel in Michigan and opened fire on people.

In December, two men killed fifteen people at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney.

In September, an ex-Marine drove into a Mormon church in Michigan and set it on fire during services.

In August, a man opened fire at an all-school Mass at a Catholic church in Minneapolis.

I could go on and on and on and on for days and never run out of examples.

And here’s the thing about the folks doing this shit... they ain’t fucking masterminds. These aren’t brilliant strategists. These are not the crème de la crème. They are not architects of anything. They are the product. They are the output. They are what you get at the end of a supply chain that starts with a man with a microphone... a woman in front of a camera... or a man behind the screen... people who have all, in one way or another, figured out, years ago, that fear is the most profitable commodity on earth and have spent the intervening decades strip mining it for all it is worth.

Those teens in San Diego did not wake up one morning and independently develop a theory of racial pride and white supremacy. They were taught it. They were fed it. They were brined in it, day after day, post after post, podcast after podcast, algorithm after algorithm, until the hatred felt like common sense and the guns felt like a solution and the mosque felt like a legitimate target and the people inside it felt like something no longer human.

And the people who taught them that... they’ll never be in court. They’ll be on television... or behind an online paywall... or on a podcast... and they’ll express something that looks kind of like concern but omit the fact that their rhetoric built the tragedy. They’ll offer their cheap-ass ‘thoughts and prayers’ litanies and say shit like “lone wolf” or “deeply troubled” or “mental health crisis.” They will say absolutely anything except the thing that is true. They will say anything except “Yeah... I did this.”

That’s the fucking trick. The magic trick. And it’s as old as fucking time itself, and it’s foolproof. Quite literally so... every fool always falls for it. 100% success rate.

The people who taught them that are selling you hatred. And it’s not because they actually hate the people they’re pointing at... they don’t actually give a flying fuck about Arabs or Jews or Muslims or immigrants or trans kids or Black people or any of the other targets on the rotating scapegoat carousel. They aren’t afraid of any of them or worried about any of them. Not really. They are insulated by their money and their position. The only thing they care about is you. Not personally. They don’t give a shit about you either... not like that. You’re the product. You’re the ‘mark.’ Your fear is the revenue stream, the ‘engagement metric.’ Your vote is the payoff.

It’s a simple trick, really. It works like this: the really powerful and power-adjacent people (i.e., not drag queens at the Library, or Imams at a mosque, or a trans kid just trying to survive Middle school)... the kind of people who own media companies and fund political campaigns and write tax policy and play golf with senators and have Supreme Court Justices in their phone on speed-dial... those motherfuckers... they need you not to notice what THEY are doing.

They need you not to notice that wages haven’t risen in forty years while productivity has doubled and prices have quadrupled and they have pocketed the difference.

They need you not to notice the healthcare that you can’t afford because they lobbied to kill the public option and they lobbied to protect the pharmaceutical monopolies and they lobbied to make sure you pay four hundred dollars for insulin that costs eight dollars to manufacture so that their quarterly fucking earnings call sounds impressive to their investors who will never have to choose between medicine and the rent.

They need you not to notice the schools they are defunding and the teachers they are driving out and the classrooms that don’t have textbooks while the Pentagon budget sails through without a single fucking amendment every year with both sides voting for it.

They need you not to notice the unions that they spent fifty years busting so that the only people at the negotiating table are the people who own the table and the chairs and the building the table is in and the parking lot outside and the politicians who run the town and the state and the country.

They need you not to notice the pensions they looted and the retirement funds they gambled with and the bailouts they collected when the gamble failed and the jail time that they will never serve because the people who write the laws they break are the people who need their money.

They need you not to notice that they shipped your job overseas to save eleven cents on per unit production costs and yeah that’s not a lot but multiply brother and now it’s real money and it’s not our fault the factory closed...

They need you not to notice that they poisoned your water and your air and your soil and then spent 200 million dollars a year lobbying to make sure nobody will ever hold them accountable and sold you the bullshit that Climate Change is a hoax invented by the Chinese because the alternative, which is that the people who are killing the planet are the same people who are funding your politicians, is a thought too large and too SCARY and too fucking obvious to be allowed to stand.

They need you not to notice that the democracy you think you live in has been hollowed out from inside and that your vote has been gerrymandered into irrelevance and your representation has been auctioned off to the highest bidder and your Supreme Court has been bought and paid for and your agencies have been staffed with people they are supposed to regulate and your public lands have been sold and your public services have been privatized and your trust has been shattered...

They need you not to notice that none of this... not one fucking bit of it was done by the Muslim family down the street or the Jewish guy at your office or the gay couple next door or the immigrant who mows your lawn.

They need you not to notice that all of this... every fucking bit of it was done by men and women who socialize together and use ‘summer’ and ‘winter’ as verbs and sit on each other’s boards and attend each other’s wedding and send their children to the same schools and who would not recognize you as human if you were standing in front of them in a t-shirt that said “HUMAN” because you are not a person to them, you are a line item... you are the P in their P&L... you are a unit of labor... you are a vote to be captured... a consumer to be monetized... and the only value you have to their economy is the amount of fear they can extract from you to convert into political power and advertising revenue.

So they point. Look! Over there! The Muslim! The Jew! The immigrant! The gay kid! The Black family! The Latin family! Them! THEM! THEM! They are the reason your life is hard. They are why your town is dying. They are why you can’t afford college and your insulin costs so much and your factory closed and your church is empty and your country doesn’t feel like your country anymore. IT’S THEIR FAULT!

And you look. Of course you do. So much easier. So much less complicated. Them... the other. It’s all their fault. And while you look at where they are pointing with their left hand... their right hand is in your pocket. Where it has been the entire time.

Because. You. Are. The. Mark.

You are the underclass. You are the one being robbed. Not by the people you have been told to be afraid of. Not by the people you have been told to hate. Nope. You are being robbed by the people who told you to be afraid and hate. The people who need you to be afraid and hate... because that’s more useful to them than people who organize and demand and look around to understand exactly who has their knee on their motherfucking necks.

The teens in San Diego are not the disease. They are the symptom. The disease is profitable. It has shareholders and ad revenue and a primetime slot and a congressional caucus and a few Justices and a book deal and movie coming out. It has a business model.

And three people at a mosque in San Diego are dead because the model works.

A father of eight who put his body between the gunmen and the children is dead because the model works.

Fifteen people at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach are dead because the model works.

Four people at a Mormon church in Michigan are dead because the model works.

And every single one of those people was someone’s parent or child or friend or cousin. They were praying or teaching or studying or walking to class or celebrating a holiday or guarding a door. They were doing the most ordinary things that human beings do.

And they are all dead because the people behind microphones needed your attention and your rage and your money and your engagement and your vote and the cheapest way to get all that is to point at a stranger and say ‘enemy’ and wait for a teen in camo to take the message literally.

The model works because you let it work. Because the trick is simple and the trick is old and the trick is tried and the trick is true and the trick is the same trick that every demagogue has run since the first frightened man in the first village pointed at a stranger and said “HIM... he is why the crop failed” and the village believed him because believing is easier than looking at the sky and realizing that the drought was no man’s fault and that the work of surviving it could only be done together.

Every single person on your list has one thing in common. All of them. Every Arab and every Latin person and every Jew and every Black person and every immigrant and every trans kid and every veteran and every poor family trying to stretch a paycheck. They all have one thing in common. They are all trying to get through the day. Just like you. That’s it. Trying to get the kids to school and keep the lights on and maybe not think about the fucking news for five minutes today.

They are not thinking about you. They are not plotting your downfall. They are not making your miserable life any worse than it already is. They have no idea who you are. They do not care about you. They are trying, like you, to survive.

So maybe... just fucking maybe... try to remember that it is always way easier to hate than it is to think... it is always easier to blame than to build... but it is never more useful... it is never more effective.

And maybe... just fucking maybe... the next time someone points at the other... to tell you where to look... maybe don’t look at the pointing hand... Look at who is doing the pointing and then look down and see whose hand is in your pocket.