There’s that old song, the one from a time when we were still allowed to have a little bit of truth in our music. “There’s something happening here,” the man sings, “what it is ain’t exactly clear. There’s a man with a gun over there, telling me I got to beware.”
I think about that song a lot these days. Because there is something happening here. And it is exactly clear, if you just have the goddamn guts to open your eyes. There’s a man with a gun over there, alright. But he’s not a soldier. He’s a man in a clean, expensive suit, with a pretty smile and a microphone, and the gun he’s holding is the truth. And he’s not just pointing it; he’s trying to execute it, right in the middle of the goddamn street, for the whole world to see.
And the rest of them, the whole beautiful, ugly, and completely corrupt machine, they’re just standing around, watching, telling you it’s not really happening.
You listen to their talking points, the same tired, empty, and completely bullshit lines, repeated over and over again, from a hundred different mouths, until they start to sound like the truth. There’s no substance, no thought, just a script. And the good, decent, and completely brainwashed people, they take that script home with them, and they repeat it to their friends, their family, their kids. “This is normal,” they say, as the whole goddamn house is burning down around them.
You can see it in the quiet, ugly hostility of their press conferences. You can hear it in the difference between the quiet, respectable lies of NPR and the loud, angry truths of Fox News. And let’s be clear: Fox News is one goddamn rowboat in a whole armada of battleships. The legacy media, the networks, the newspapers, the whole goddamn show, they’re all singing from the same hymn sheet. They’re all priests in the same new, ugly, and completely joyless church.
And what is the gospel they’re preaching?
It’s a gospel of lies.
You were told that Hillary Clinton had a ninety-eight percent chance of winning the 2016 election. A beautiful, statistical, and completely manufactured lie, designed to keep you at home, to make you think the fight was already over.
You were told that a global pandemic, a sickness that shut down the entire world, came from a bat in a wet market. And if you dared to suggest that maybe, just maybe, it came from a goddamn lab that was playing with fire, you were a conspiracy theorist. A heretic.
You were told that Hunter Biden’s laptop, a treasure trove of corruption, perversion, and pure, uncut, beautiful, ugly truth, was “Russian disinformation.” Fifty of your own country’s top intelligence officials, the men who are supposed to protect you, they signed their names to that lie, just to get their man into the White House.
You were told that Joe Biden, a man who can’t find his way off a stage, who shakes hands with thin air, who has conversations with dead people, is “cognitively fine.” And you’re supposed to just sit there and nod, and pretend that the emperor isn’t just naked, but drooling on himself.
You were told, for three goddamn years, that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the election. A beautiful, intricate, and completely fabricated lie that tore the country in half and accomplished nothing.
You were told that Trump built cages at the border and was keeping children in them. A beautiful, ugly, and completely dishonest piece of propaganda that forgot to mention that the cages were built by their own sainted Obama.
You were told that Trump called white supremacists “very fine people.” A lie so blatant, so easily disproven by a simple transcript, that it’s a goddamn work of art in its own cynical beauty.
You were told that Joe Biden had no knowledge of his son’s business dealings, even as the evidence piled up to the goddamn sky.
You were told that January 6th, a protest by a bunch of unarmed, pissed-off, and completely disorganized Americans, was an “insurrection,” a greater threat to the republic than the Civil War. All while the cities burned for a whole summer in the name of “social justice.”
You were told that Trump called our fallen soldiers “suckers and losers,” a story sourced to a handful of anonymous cowards that was designed for one purpose: to wound a man who loves the military.
You were told that a Plexiglass shield, a piece of cheap cloth over your mouth, and a six-foot space on the floor was a magical force field that could stop a virus. You were told that healthy children and pregnant mothers should be injected with an experimental vaccine, and if you dared to ask a question, you were a threat to public health.
You were told that an El Salvadorian national, an alleged gang member, a wife beater, and a human trafficker, was just a “good old dad from Maryland.”
And I’m just wondering, my friend. I’m sitting here, in the dark, with a bottle of something strong, and I’m wondering… at what point are you going to start to question what you’re being told?
That’s a very good question, isn’t it?
Why do they do it? Why the lies? Why the constant, grinding, and completely relentless campaign of psychological warfare against half the goddamn country?
It’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because they think you are.
It’s about control. It’s about building a reality, a beautiful, comfortable, and completely soul-crushing cage, and then convincing you that it’s the whole goddamn world. It’s a protection racket for the soul. They create the chaos, the fear, the division, and then they sell you the solution, which is always, always, more of them. More government, more control, more of their quiet, respectable, and completely passionless brand of tyranny.
They’re not interested in the truth. The truth is a messy, ugly, and beautiful thing, and it doesn’t fit neatly into their talking points. The truth is that the world is a complicated, dangerous, and magnificent place, and it can’t be fixed with a goddamn committee meeting or a new set of pronouns.
And you, my friend, you’re standing on their side of the fire. You’re a good man. A smart man. But you’re on the team that’s burning the whole goddamn house down. And you’re just standing there, with a quiet, polite, and completely bullshit look of concern on your face, pretending you don’t smell the smoke.
And that’s the part that keeps me up at night.
It’s not the liars on the television. It’s the good men who listen to them. It’s the quiet, decent, and completely respectable people who have traded their own goddamn minds for the comfort of belonging to a tribe.
And I’m just sitting here, watching you, a good man, a smart man, swallow this poison, and I have to wonder, what the hell happened to you?
You don’t have to be a part of this. You don’t have to drink the Kool-Aid. You don’t have to be another brick in the wall of their beautiful, rotten, and completely insane new church.
You just have to have the courage to ask one simple question. The one they’re all terrified of.
”What if you’re wrong?”
