A message to my friends on the other side of the fire.
I get it. I really do.
I know what you’re thinking. To admit, even for a second, that you might be on the wrong side of this whole goddamn circus… it’s not a political disagreement. It’s a death sentence. Your entire moral, political, and personal identity, the whole beautiful, fragile, and completely bullshit house of cards you’ve built for yourself, it would all come crashing down. And that’s a terrifying thought.
But it has to happen.
And I know it’s going to be tough. But I’m here. We’re here. We’re not the monsters they told you we were. We don’t want to kill you. We don’t want to shame you. We just want to live in a world that makes a little bit of goddamn sense again. We just want everyone to be able to breathe.
I know, I know. You think that being anything other than what you are now makes you immoral, makes you… evil. That’s the beautiful, ugly, and completely effective lie they sold you. It’s like getting out of a long, abusive relationship. It’s confusing. You’ve been living in someone else’s reality for so long, a reality designed to keep you small, and scared, and quiet, that you’ve forgotten what the real world even smells like.
But I’m asking you, just for a minute, to step outside. To take a breath. A real one. Breathe the air of the truth.
And what you’ll find, over here on our side of the fire, is that we’re a hell of a lot nicer, a hell of a lot more decent, than they told you we were.
Over here, we’re not going to excommunicate you for getting someone’s pronouns wrong. We’re not going to get you fired for telling a bad joke. Over here, you don’t have to live in constant, quiet terror of saying the wrong thing, of thinking the wrong thought. We’re the side that still believes in the beautiful, messy, and completely necessary business of working ideas out, of talking, of arguing, of being gloriously, beautifully, and completely wrong.
And most of all, if you can show us the facts, the real, hard, ugly numbers, we’ll change our goddamn minds. Because we believe in the truth, not the goddamn scripture. Our reality is built on a foundation of observable facts, not a fragile, shifting, and completely insane ideology.
You’re on their team now. And you have to look at the whole goddamn roster. The ones who burn cities and call it “social justice.” The ones who want to defund the police while the murder rate is going through the roof. The ones who will look at a white woman getting stabbed in the neck by a black man and pretend it didn’t happen, because it doesn’t fit the narrative. The ones who will shoot an unarmed conservative kid and then find a way to blame the kid for being in the way of the bullet.
That’s your team. That’s the club you’re in. And your silence is your membership fee.
I’m asking you to quit the club.
It’s going to hurt. It’s going to be lonely. It’s going to feel like you’re dying.
But it’s the only way to be born again.
Come on over to our side of the fire. It’s a mess over here, I’ll admit. It’s loud, it’s ugly, and sometimes the drinks are cheap.
But it’s honest.
And in a world that’s choking on its own pretty, comfortable, and completely soul-crushing lies, a little bit of ugly truth is the only goddamn thing that’s worth a damn.
