The Bullshit Brigade
They know what side they're on, why don't you?
Ever get the feeling you’re being bullshitted? To live in the United States in 2025 is to be constantly inundated with a torrent of bullshit created by artists of the craft to assure you that you actually love making the same wages as you did 20 years ago, you aren’t struggling, you adore your private health insurance, and that this is the best you can hope for. Partisans go on TV and rant about the opposing political party and convince you that if your neighbors would just vote the opposite way life would be Good Again, maybe even Great. You’re told not to notice that there’s more and more month than money. Politicians give you grand speeches about how the other side is a threat to freedom, democracy, your way of life. If it works, you start to see the country along red vs blue lines. If it works, you think your enemies live two doors over and not on Wall Street or in DC.
While you obsess about the tens of millions of people who didn’t vote like you, the pundits and politicians whose job it is to convince you that they’re on your side take off the mask, put on their nicest suits, and go to ten thousand dollar a table galas with their theoretical enemies. They raise their glasses of Dom and toast another day where you’ve been utterly bamboozled by their bullshit. After all, these are the people who understand the true dividing lines in their country, and they aren’t red vs blue.
Occasionally, whether due to a an unearned feeling of safety and comfort, or due to pure stupidity, the mask starts to slip. A private fundraiser invitation goes public, a fist bump with the other side gets filmed, a group chat gets leaked, and the truth of the thing comes into sharper focus. The people who are telling you that the other side is the problem never really believed it themselves. Those are their friends, their colleagues, their fishing buddies. They all belong to the same club, as George Carlin once said, and you ain’t in it. While you busy yourself with worrying about the next election they’re working together on the next big con. To be sure, there is some ideological disunity amongst this cohort, but those disagreements are all subordinate to their class interests, and can be tossed aside at any moment.
These folks have committed their entire life’s work making sure you don’t discover this simple truth: that their continued existence relies on you never realizing what they really are. Once you start to notice that they aren’t actually enemies, the world begins to make a little more sense.
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Suddenly Nancy Pelosi’s call for a “strong republican party”, Matt Yglesias saying that we need to “expand the tent” to include people like billionaire Trump supporter Marc Andreessen, Democrats getting hoodwinked over and over by Republican machinations, all come into view as the logical preservation of their class. It becomes almost trivial to predict their next moves, because they will always do whatever preserves their status against anything and anyone who could diminish it.
Take the recent Semafor article that revealed the existence of a group chat that, on the surface, appeared to include a wide array of ideological diversity. The big names in this chat included popularism proponent, race science enthusiast, and Democratic operative David Shor, billionaire Kamala Harris surrogate Marc Cuban, Trump advisor and neofeudalist Marc Andreessen, economist and former Clinton advisor Larry Summers, Trump fan and megadonor David Sacks, far right commentator Ben Shapiro, “former” neo-nazi Richard Hanania, and more. While this cohort seem to have disparate ideological goals, according to Hanania they are all completely aligned on one thing: “defeating the left”. The primary animating purpose for the ruling class is the defeat of any and all leftward momentum, any possible hope of redistribution or economic equality. They are far less concerned with rising autocracy, with a deteriorating climate, with the threat of nuclear war, than they are the mere possibility that any of their ill-gotten spoils could possibly be reclaimed. In short, they know that they are at war, it’s only us who don’t seem to realize it.
To this end, the ruling class is highly organized and coordinated, not sharply delineated along party lines, but working in tandem to shape your reality towards their ends. According to former group chat member Thomas Chatterton Williams, “It’s the same thing happening on both sides, and I’ve been amazed at how much this is coordinating our reality. If you weren’t in the business at all, you’d think everyone was arriving at conclusions independently — and [they’re] not. It’s a small group of people who talk to each other and overlap between politics and journalism and a few industries.” or as another group chatter put it “we will always be on the same side against communists and lefty journalists (but I repeat myself)”.
The first step in fighting back is realizing who your enemies are in the first place. Billions get spent every year to obscure this fact and keep you fighting your neighbor instead. While the MAGA mechanic down the road might be a racist prick, he isn’t the thing standing between you and a dignified life. It is and has always been the Guys in the Group Chat. It’s the journalists, the politicians, the pundits who play at opposition to one another while coordinating behind your back. It’s the slew of Vox writers telling you BlackRock buying your neighborhood is fine, actually and honestly, who needs more than one staircase in a high rise? It’s the “Abundists” who try to convince you that you have to sacrifice the welfare state (and the right to breathe clean air) if you want more housing. Those who know that if we move into neofascism or neofeudalism they’ll mostly be ok, it’ll only be the workers who really suffer. Those who seem to come out on top no matter who the president is. Those who spend billions of dollars on propaganda to try to convince you to get caught up in distractions and to cast your eyes to your left and right so they never shift upwards towards the people robbing you blind.
Once you see everything through the lens of class, once the blinders come off, you notice that so much of our system relies on beating you over the head with relentless bullshit to distract and misdirect you in the hopes that you won’t notice that the team you think you’re playing for is only an elaborate front for the real con. There’s nothing that these bloodsucking parasites fear more than for us to recognize our very own class membership and turn our attention towards the true villains that are never satiated in their lust for an ever-expanding piece of the pie.
While we hurtle towards oblivion in the world they have created for us, while we get buried under ten thousand metric tons of bullshit, the only way out is for us to realize that the false divisions they’ve manufactured for us serve one purpose: to keep us from uniting against them. The longer we let the Matt Yglesias Fan Club work one over on us, the worse off we will be. While their tent may be big enough to hold fascists and liberals (but I repeat myself), ours must be relentless in excluding the ruling class, their minions, their mouthpieces, their ideas. The bad faith charlatans can’t be defeated through high-minded debate. They don’t even believe half the shit they say anyway. It all serves a singleminded goal, and that is to preserve their positions and the structure of inequality that makes this system thrive. The only way to truly defeat them is through class struggle.
Make no mistake, we are at war. We’ve always been at war. The Bullshit Brigade knows this and their goal is to make sure you don’t. We can’t hope to win unless we know where to aim.
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Once you come to develop your own sense of class consciousness, it becomes as clear as day that the "left vs. right" obfuscation serves as a primary distraction from the ruling class to keep the workers divided. We had that one fleeting moment after Brian Thompson was put in the dirt where it seemed like most people out there were on a similar page of class understanding, acknowledgement and recognition. The potential for the American working class is absolutely there - we just need proper organization, infrastructure, and leadership. Class consciousness also serves as a gateway into understanding everything you're expertly articulating in this piece. There's a tent out there alright, but it was never intended to include all of us - only those the ruling class deems worth saving. I love your invocation of George Carlin as well because another of his famous quotes also feels relevant here:
"You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities, they're on the same boards of directors, they're in the same country clubs, they have like interests, they don't need to call a meeting, they know what's good for them and they're getting it."
The ruling class is laughing their asses off while they sew perpetual division amongst the workers and watch us tear each other apart. It's a big game to them, and they're going to always keep playing until you pry their cold, dead hands from the levers of power. War was declared right from the start and the depraved and belligerent members of The Bullshit Brigade wont ever relinquish their power out of the goodness of their hearts, or even for the betterment of society and humanity as a whole. The time has come to stop looking left and right because the ruling class manufactured enemies. All we have to do is look up, and we'll always be able to see who the really enemies are.
“What presents itself to us as bourgeois legality is nothing but the violence of the ruling class, a violence raised to an obligatory norm from the outset.” - Rosa Luxemburg
Thanks for another great read as always Scarlet!
I'm from AZ and watched Gallego for years now... He is a snake who, like many others, was only "progressive" when it was considered professionally advantageous. Now as we drift further and further right as a society, when we need "progressive" voices most, he's locking himself in as a full blown right wing democrat, and making all the standard concessions to corporate and business interests. Fuck that guy.