Instability Is the Policy

Let’s get something straight: the United States doesn’t stumble into chaos overseas, it administers it.

For decades, Washington has treated instability in the Middle East not as a failure of policy but as a carefully maintained asset. A stable, independent region would trade on its own terms, control its own oil, and stop buying American weapons.

That would be disastrous for Wall Street, for the Pentagon, and for the whole corporate-imperial apparatus that feeds off permanent crisis.

From the Carter Doctrine onward, U.S. law and doctrine have made domination of the Persian Gulf a “vital interest.” That means any government that tries to chart an independent path - nationalize resources, ally with non-Western powers, or simply stay out of Washington’s orbit - can expect sanctions, subversion, or invasion.

Iran 1953, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria 2012 to today: these weren’t mistakes. They were operations. Each one destroyed a functioning state and replaced it with rubble, warlords, and foreign dependency. And that’s the point.

The arms merchants get rich, the dollar stays glued to global energy markets, and the American public is told it’s all to keep them “safe.” The real safety being protected is the safety of U.S. capital.

Enter ISIS and Al-Qaeda, the perfect villains. They perform the same function the Soviet Union once did: a permanent excuse for military budgets, foreign bases, and endless war.

These groups almost never attack Israel, but their mere existence keeps the region on a boil and the money flowing.

They are the necessary demons in a morality play that sells occupation as security and empire as benevolence.

If Washington didn’t need them, the media would treat them for what they are, relatively minor insurgent movements bred by occupation and economic ruin, not civilization’s sworn enemy. But that story would force us to admit who created those conditions in the first place. So instead, the networks roll the same footage, the politicians mouth the same slogans, and the fear machine hums along.

When people finally ask, “Why are we still over there?” the answer is simple and ugly: money and racism.

The phrase “radical Islam” is one of the cleverest propaganda tricks of the last half-century. It turns political resistance into religious pathology. It says nothing about imperial occupation, CIA coups, or IMF austerity, it just whispers, “They hate us for our freedom.

When politicians tell us “they hate our way of life,” they’re not talking about the nine-to-five job, the Starbucks run, or the two kids and a dog. What’s really meant is the way of life that sends troops across oceans, drains other people’s oil fields, and topples governments that refuse to obey.

It’s not our freedom they resent, it’s our imperial footprint.

And let’s be honest: this “way of life” is hard-fought, but we don’t do the fighting. The burden is carried by the people of the nations we exploit: the workers digging our minerals, the farmers displaced by our trade policies, the civilians buried under our “precision” bombs.

Their suffering is the down payment on our comfort.

So when leaders say “they hate our way of life,” they’re right about one thing: people do hate a system that steals their future, poisons their soil, and calls it freedom. What they hate isn’t democracy, it’s the violence behind it.

Look closer and you’ll see that groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda follow the same pattern as every other desperate, violent reaction to foreign domination.

They are anti-colonial extremists, not theological aberrations. Religion is the banner; empire is the battlefield. Labeling them “radical Islam” erases that reality. It lets Western power claim moral innocence while treating Muslim identity itself as suspect.

No one calls Latin American guerrillas “radical Christianity.” No one describes European fascists as “radical Catholics.” The term exists only to racialize and de-politicize Muslim resistance, to keep the public frightened and obedient.

Fear = profit, so to dehumanize people is good for business.

If we stripped away the propaganda and looked at the record, we’d see continuity, not exception. Every empire has faced uprisings. Every uprising is called barbarism by those who rule. And every time, the language of civilization is used to mask the machinery of profit.

To confront extremism honestly, we have to confront the system that breeds it. That means abandoning the slur “radical Islam” and naming the real radicalism of our time, the radicalism of empire, the belief that no nation, no people, and no faith has the right to stand outside the reach of the West's power.

And while politicians in Washington and Ottawa posture about “condemning violence,” they sign the arms deals, fund the bombings, and applaud the sanctions that starve children.

They condemn violence only when it isn’t theirs.

Today, let's remember that In 1919, international powers began deciding the fate of Palestine without its people’s participation, laying the groundwork for later conflict.

Palestinians were never asked to consent to giving up their land. Under the British Mandate (1920–1948), Britain and later the United Nations made decisions about partition without consulting the local Arab majority.

The 1937 Peel Commission first proposed dividing Palestine, which Arab leaders rejected, and the 1947 UN Partition Plan (Resolution 181) allocated 55% of the land to a proposed Jewish state even though Jews made up about one-third of the population.

Palestinian and Arab representatives rejected the plan as unjust and imposed without their consent, leading to the 1948 war and the creation of Israel without Palestinian approval.

Awareness Is How It Ends - How Netanyahu’s need for enemies became a system of domination, and why exposing genocide is the only way to stop it

The aim here is to cut through the propaganda so that we can see the truth behind what's happening in Gaza.

Benjamin Netanyahu has spent his career mastering a simple political craft: rule through fear, and manufacture the enemies needed to sustain it. His genius is not in diplomacy or statecraft but in the orchestration of panic. He needs a permanent crisis to remain indispensable. What changes over time is not the source of impending danger, but the targets of his hostility.

In the 1990s, that target was Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin sought peace with the Palestinians through the Oslo Accords. Netanyahu, then leading the opposition, worked to make that peace appear as treason. His rallies featured chants of “Death to Rabin” and images of the prime minister in Nazi uniform. He stood above those crowds without condemnation. The message was unmistakable: those who speak of reconciliation are traitors to the nation. When Rabin was assassinated, Netanyahu disclaimed responsibility, but the culture of demonization that surrounded the murder was the atmosphere he had built. We now know this phenomenon as stochastic terrorism, the use of incitement that makes violence statistically predictable even if not directly ordered. And the predictability of that violence means there is culpability.

Today, the names have changed but the rhetoric has not. Protesters demanding democratic reform are called anarchists. Judges defending the law are accused of mounting a coup. Journalists are “terror sympathizers.” Human rights organizations are “foreign agents.” Palestinians are “human animals.” This is not a politics of disagreement; it is a politics of moral extermination. The function is always the same: transform opposition into existential threat.

The key to understanding Netanyahu’s narrative about Palestinians is not about any intrinsic violent behavior on their part. That notion is fabricated.

The real key is arithmetic.

Inside Israel’s borders live about 9.9 million people, roughly 7.1 million Jewish and 2.8 million not.

Add to that the 3.2 million Palestinians in the West Bank and the 2.1 million in Gaza, and the total population between the river and the sea comes to about 15.2 million.

Half are Jewish, half Palestinian.

If all were granted equal citizenship, there would be no Jewish majority. Israel would still exist, but not as an ethnically defined state. It would become a democracy of equals, something its current structure cannot accommodate. That is the true existential threat: not violence, not rockets, but equality itself.

To sustain this imbalance, Palestinians must be depicted as inherently violent, irrational, and undeserving of rights. Their resistance, whether armed or peaceful, is reframed as proof of their inhumanity. The more human they appear, the greater the danger to the narrative that justifies their subjugation.

This pattern extends beyond the conflict itself. It is the same pattern Netanyahu has used against Rabin, against the courts, against journalists and protesters. Each opponent must be cast as not merely wrong but evil, not merely misguided but destructive to the nation’s survival. By making every disagreement a matter of life and death, Netanyahu ensures that the public will tolerate any measure of repression in the name of defense.

This is the oldest technique of authoritarian politics: turn power into protection and dissent into betrayal. Israel’s tragedy is that the mechanisms once used to silence a political rival are now used to perpetuate a system of permanent domination. Netanyahu does not fear Palestinian violence.

He fears Palestinian equality, because equality would expose the illusion that his leadership, and the structure that sustains it, are necessary for survival.

The real threat to Netanyahu is not his enemies. It is the possibility that Israelis and Palestinians alike might someday stop believing in the enemies he invents. Once that happens, the logic of siege and self-defense collapses. When the public no longer buys the narrative, the whole apparatus of fear begins to unravel.

That is also the point at which a politics of permanent domination mutates into a politics of mass destruction. When a leader depends on a permanent enemy to justify his own power, the loss of that enemy’s credibility creates a crisis. The simplest way out of that crisis is to escalate, to intensify violence so that the enemy looks irredeemable again. That is why so many genocides are preceded by years of incitement and “security measures.” What begins as demonization becomes mass killing not because of spontaneous rage, but because the political system needs the spectacle of an inhuman foe to survive.

That is why exposing genocide, naming it, documenting it, showing the motive and the plan, is not just moral witness but strategic action.

It denies perpetrators the ability to present mass killing as “necessary,” it alienates allies, it accelerates sanctions, and it drives wedges inside the regime itself.

We can already see the red flags in the mainstream press. The coverage is framed by questions that sound objective but are designed to mislead. We are asked, “Does Israel have the right to defend itself?” while thousands of civilians and children are being killed, as though the scale and method of that killing are secondary details. Or we are asked, “Does Israel have the right to exist?” A question that is both irrelevant and manipulative, because it conflates a state ideology with an entire people and traps the listener in a false binary.

Most viewers cannot distinguish between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and the media exploits that confusion to silence criticism.

Meanwhile, Palestinians are reduced to a single word: Hamas. Their history, suffering, and humanity are erased. Every dead child is called a militant, every bombed neighborhood a stronghold. It is the same dehumanizing shorthand that always accompanies genocide, the narrative armor that lets an audience watch atrocities and still think of them as defense.

But that narrative is fragile. It requires enormous effort to maintain, with daily repetition, censorship, and the constant invocation of victimhood by the powerful. One wonders how it has held for so long. Yet it cannot endure much longer. Every image, every testimony, every act of witness erodes it.

And this is where Netanyahu’s political survival meets the logic of genocide. His power depends on the same narrative machinery that justifies mass killing. He cannot exist without enemies, and he cannot maintain control without convincing his public that annihilation is defense. The war is not only against Palestinians; it is a war to preserve a political order that would collapse under equality and awareness. As the world begins to see the reality, the fear that sustains him weakens.

The very worst thing for Netanyahu and for the genocide itself is awareness. Genocide cannot survive exposure. It depends on confusion, on silence, and on the false moral balance that turns murder into policy. Those who profit from the continuation of war through oil, arms, or political relevance are not going to stop because they have a change of heart. They are sociopathic actors who treat suffering as opportunity.

But they can be stripped of what they need most: the illusion of justification.

Awareness does this. It pulls away the mask of necessity and reveals cruelty as strategy. It makes it impossible to claim ignorance or neutrality. When enough people see clearly, the machinery of destruction begins to lose its power. That is how genocides end. Not when the perpetrators are persuaded, but when their lies no longer work.

Live, confrontational videos pierce the filters of corporate media and bypass the careful choreography of official narratives. They show what the press is too timid or too compromised to show: the destruction of homes, the killing of families, the faces of the dead. This is why journalists in Gaza have been systematically targeted and killed, and why those who survive risk their lives to continue documenting. It is also why governments have passed anti-BDS laws in open violation of the First Amendment, punishing people not for violence but for the refusal to be complicit. The purpose is to silence the witnesses and criminalize the act of telling the truth. The camera, the protest, and the boycott are treated as weapons because they expose what propaganda tries to hide.

The genocide must stop. It will stop when the world refuses to look away and refuses to believe the story that made it possible. Awareness is how it ends.

The Alberta government’s proposal for a new export pipeline is not about helping ordinary Canadians. It is about helping oil companies charge higher prices.

Right now, our domestic oil market is isolated, which keeps fuel prices lower for Canadians. This pipeline would allow Big Oil to sell more crude at international rates, and Canadians would pay the difference at the pump.

At the same time, the environmental burden falls on communities that see no benefit.

There are no public-interest or environmental advisors involved in the decision-making, only oil companies.

This is not energy security. It is a wealth transfer from the working class to corporate shareholders.

When GDP goes up, it does not mean life gets better for most Canadians. In fact, it often gets worse.

"The Alberta government said Wednesday it plans to submit an application for a new oil pipeline to northwestern British Columbia.

The proposal is to be filed to the new federal Major Projects Office, which aims to speed along developments deemed in the national interest. A submission is expected in the spring of next year.

“This project application is about more than a pipeline; it’s about unlocking Canada’s full economic potential,” said Premier Danielle Smith in a news release.

The province plans to develop the project with the backing of an advisory group that includes three major Canadian crude pipeline operators: Enbridge Inc., Trans Mountain Corp. and South Bow Corp."

This is a red flag:

“We’re at a point where, based upon our numbers, things cannot continue as they are, and I think everybody knows that,” Parliamentary Budget Officer Jason Jacques said, adding his report contextualizes the anxiety some Canadians are feeling about the economy right now.

The problem is, the deficit we are heading for is because we are giving handouts to the rich instead of taxing them like we were promised.

If Mark Carney had stuck to his promises and taxed the wealthy, Canada could look very different today. He could have funded middle class tax cuts and social programs without increasing the deficit. He could have created more and better jobs by investing in green infrastructure and public housing. He could have reduced inequality by shifting the tax burden upward and closing loopholes. He could have avoided austerity for the working class by cutting wasteful spending, like bloated military budgets and oil industry handouts, and reinvesting in healthcare, education, and affordable housing.

That is the Canada Carney promised. But 120 days into his term, he has done the exact opposite.

Carney did not just fail to tax the wealthy. He gave them a gift. His first major move was cancelling the capital gains tax increase, a policy that would have made the richest Canadians pay more on their stock profits and luxury assets. Instead, he let them keep their millions while claiming it was about helping small businesses. Then, to fund his middle class tax cuts, he borrowed money, money the wealthy will now collect interest on through government bonds. You get a crumb. They get the whole cake.

Carney promised to invest in Canadians, but his government is pouring billions into military spending to meet NATO’s 2 percent GDP target, a move that mostly benefits defense contractors and shareholders, not working families.

Meanwhile, he cancelled the EV mandate, a direct handout to the fossil fuel industry that ensures Big Oil keeps raking in profits while the rest of us choke on smog and high gas prices.

Carney talks about fiscal responsibility and a narrow path to sustainability, but his version of responsibility means cuts to the services you rely on, healthcare, education, housing, while investment means handouts to corporations, defense contractors, and the fossil fuel industry. He is not asking the wealthy to sacrifice. He is asking you to tighten your belt while they loosen theirs.

So why is Carney governing like this? The answer is simple. He is not working for you. He is working for them.

Carney and his team claim that cutting taxes for the rich and corporations will stimulate the economy and create jobs. But we have seen this movie before. Trickle down economics does not work.

The wealthy do not invest their tax cuts in jobs. They hoard the money, buy back stocks, or park it in offshore accounts. Meanwhile, the rest of us get fewer services, higher costs, and a lecture about shared sacrifice.

Carney’s policies, military spending, fossil fuel subsidies, capital gains breaks, are not accidents. They are deliberate choices that benefit the powerful, defense contractors, oil executives, and the financial elite. These are the people who fund campaigns, lobby governments, and shape the rules.

Carney is not breaking his promises to you. He is keeping his promises to them.

The government claims we cannot afford to tax the wealthy or cut military spending. They say we need to stay competitive, attract investment, and avoid scaring off the rich. But let us be clear. This is fearmongering. Countries with higher taxes on the wealthy, like Norway and Denmark, have stronger economies, better services, and less inequality than we do.

The real fear is not that the rich will leave. It is that they will stop donating to political campaigns if they do not get their way.

The way this is framed in the press release ("the anxiety some Canadians are feeling about the economy right now") is designed to make consumers feel responsible for the coming austerity, even though it is not their fault.

The word for that is gaslighting.

It shifts the blame to regular Canadians for a crisis created by policies that favor the wealthy, and it prepares the public to accept cuts to the services they rely on while the rich continue to benefit. This is not an accident. It is a strategy to protect the powerful at the expense of everyone else.

Addendum:

I just did a quick calculation. Carney is working hard for Canadians. Well, some of them. The top 1.5 per cent wealthiest Canadians - about 400000 people - will get about $60000.00 per year direct in tax savings, stock dividends, and interest income from Carney's policies today.

The other 98.5 per cent will get a $840.00 tax break.

Austerity needs to start with the top 1.5 per cent.

The alternative might resemble the French revolution.

Addendum:

If Carney didn't give those handouts to the wealthy, the deficit would drop from $68.5B to $32.5B and the Debt-to-GDP ratio falls to ~41–41.5% which is closer to the pre-pandemic level in the article.

You know what else we could do with $36B?

Universal pharmacare (~$15 billion/year).

Affordable housing (~$10 billion/year).

Green energy transition (~$10 billion/year)

Addendum:

About six weeks after this, Ottawa says it’s looking to hire a permanent parliamentary budget officer, someone with “tact and discretion”.

When a news site tells us, “While tariffs and their effects on the economy are largely out of our control, consumers can prepare for tariff-driven cost increases by monitoring changes and applying simple budgeting strategies,” we should see the red flag.

Tariffs are not natural disasters, and they are not outside our control. They are political decisions, and they can be challenged.

To frame them as inevitable and reduce our role to better budgeting is propaganda meant to distract, demobilize, and disenfranchise.

The real response is not to assume this problem is an individual responsibility but to recognize tariffs as deliberate choices that benefit corporations while ordinary people are told to bear the costs. In other words, what’s needed is not better personal budgeting, but collective action.

So when we are told that “adding a small buffer to your budget, substituting products, or timing purchases around scheduled tariff changes can keep you from burning a hole in your wallet,” this is not neutral advice. It is selling resignation.

Worse, it suppresses organization by channeling frustration away from solidarity and toward quiet self-management.

The real task is not to quietly absorb the blow, but to demand accountability and resist the normalization of policies that serve profits at the expense of people. News outlets should do their job: depict the issue as it truly is, not bait and switch to appear helpful.

The truth is outrageous. By reframing outrage into resignation, they are serving the interests of corporations and the wealthy.

Don’t let it work.

Conditional recognition of Palestine is paternalistic and hollow. It just entrenches delays and external control.

Unconditional recognition of Palestine would have carried deep symbolic and moral weight.

It would signal to Palestinians and the international community that statehood is not something to be earned through negotiations but a fundamental right grounded in international law and the principle of self-determination.

Such recognition would affirm solidarity with a people who have long faced displacement and occupation, elevating their claims to sovereignty without filtering them through external economic and political needs passing as security or governance conditions. Unconditional recognition would represent a bold moral stance that prioritizes justice and legitimacy over political expediency.

But Canada's electeds are neither bold nor moral.

Addendum:

• "I cannot help but be sympathetc to the isaelis....a lot of them have been killed by hamas"

 I understand. I have sympathy for both sides. But I have a hundred times more sympathy for the victim than the oppressor. Here are the facts:

Palestinians have not lived with the same freedoms that Israelis take for granted. Their right to assemble is heavily restricted, their political movements are fragmented, and genuine representation is denied under the weight of occupation and military control.

The rise of Hamas itself cannot be understood outside this context: it was fostered and even financially supported by Netanyahu’s government as a way to weaken Palestinian unity and undercut the Palestinian Authority. To describe Hamas only as a terrorist organization ignores this history. It is the product of decades of disenfranchisement, manipulation, and desperation, rather than a simple matter of ideology.

October 7th was not the beginning of a terrorist plan. It was a continuation of the same dynamic Palestinians have faced since 1948: displacement, military occupation, and the denial of basic rights. To frame that date as the origin of violence erases the decades of structural violence imposed on Palestinians, which has shaped every aspect of their daily existence. Seen in this broader historical arc, October 7th was not an isolated eruption, but part of a long struggle over land, freedom, and survival. Call it resistance or self-defense.

When facing a colonizer, “terrorism” is better understood as resistance against an occupying power that has systematically dispossessed them. While violence against civilians is tragic, it does not occur in a vacuum. It arises from generations of military rule, blockades, settlement expansion, and settler violence that the international community has largely failed to stop. This is the same history as Vietnam against France and the U.S., Haiti against France, Mexico against Spain, Egypt against Britain, India against Britain, and so on.

When Israel responds with overwhelming force, the asymmetry of power becomes clear: Palestinians have no state army, no protection under international law, and no equal means to defend themselves.

The imbalance in deaths tells the story more starkly than any rhetoric. Since 1948, Palestinian casualties have vastly outnumbered those of Israelis, and entire communities have been uprooted or erased in the process. To speak of Israeli suffering without acknowledging Palestinian suffering is to look at only one side of the conflict. Any honest account must recognize that Palestinians have lived under occupation and siege for generations, denied equality and the chance at self-determination, and that their resistance, however one chooses to label it, is inseparable from this lived reality.

The Jewish people have indeed suffered enormously throughout history. They have been displaced, persecuted, and killed in countless cycles of violence. But take a closer look and you will see that this history is different from the picture painted today. In all of history until 1948, it was not Muslims who were the mortal enemy of Jews, but Europeans.

Before 1948, Jewish communities living outside their ancestral homeland generally fared much like other religious minorities in foreign lands, sometimes better, sometimes worse, depending on the place and period. Like Muslims, Christians, or others living under empires or outside majority populations, their treatment varied: they could face restrictions and outbreaks of violence, but they also often built thriving communities, participating in trade, scholarship, and civic life when conditions allowed.

In Europe, Jews endured centuries of expulsions, pogroms, and systemic exclusion, culminating in the most entrenched patterns of religious marginalization of the era. At the same time, Jews in Muslim-majority societies lived under a subordinate legal framework and sometimes faced localized violence, but they maintained continuous communities and relative security.

The deepest and most sustained persecution of Jews before 1948 came from Europe, not from Muslim lands.

In 1948, the land of Palestine was partitioned to create the State of Israel, a process led by Britain and the United Nations without the consent or meaningful consultation of the indigenous Palestinian population. Britain, exercising imperial authority through its Mandate, administered the territory as colonial powers often did, treating it as land to be divided and assigned rather than as the homeland of a people with rights to self-determination.

Since 1948, Palestinians have experienced ongoing displacement and violence as the State of Israel expanded beyond the borders set in the UN partition plan, occupying additional Palestinian land through war and settlement. Many Palestinians who remained inside Israel became citizens, but they have often faced systemic discrimination, land confiscation, and political marginalization compared with Jewish Israelis.

In the West Bank, Gaza, and surrounding areas, waves of conflict, occupation, and settlement have deepened Palestinian dispossession, with settler violence against Palestinian communities becoming a persistent feature of daily life. Over the decades, the number of Palestinian deaths has far exceeded those of Israelis, reflecting the disproportionate impact of the conflict on the indigenous population.

From 1948 to October 6, 2023:

Palestinians killed by Israeli forces: about 18,000–30,000+

Israelis killed by Palestinians: about 1,500–2,000

Since October 7, 2023:

Palestinians killed by Israeli forces: about 60,000–65,000

Israelis killed by Palestinians: about 1,100–1,200 (killed in the October 7 attacks and subsequent conflict)

So, if you were faced with the same overwhelming violent oppression and no ability to "vote yourself to freedom" what other option is there? What would you do?

I learned about stochastic terrorism yesterday.

I was yesterday old.

But I also learned another word yesterday and wrote about it. That word is heterodox, which is another word for douche. (Hence I call them the Hetero Movement).

It took me a whole day to learn more about stochastic terrorism. I maybe would have written about that yesterday if it wasn't for the Heteros.

Anyway,

I used to think divisive rhetoric was just uncomfortable noise. Annoying to hear, corrosive in conversation, but basically more hot air in an already overheated culture war. Then I learned about stochastic terrorism, and I realized this kind of talk is not only harmful, it is predictable.

Stochastic terrorism is a term that comes out of critical terrorism studies. A 2024 paper by James Angove in Critical Studies on Terrorism explains it clearly: when public figures demonize or dehumanize groups, they create an environment where violence against those groups is statistically predictable, even if you cannot say which individual will act or when. The lone wolf is unpredictable, but the violence is guaranteed.

This means the harm caused by certain kinds of rhetoric is not hypothetical.

It is measurable.

It is not simply that listeners get their feelings hurt, or that the culture feels coarser. It is that the language itself sets in motion a cycle where someone, somewhere, will lash out violently.

The pattern is visible and repeatable.

There is a repugnant gut feeling humans get when something makes them feel unsafe. Not the sting of immediate harm, but the spectre of the world shifting darker. It is not about anything they did as individuals. It is their identity, their community, that suddenly feels unsafe. Sometimes it comes from words in the media. Sometimes it is a loser coworker making a comment nobody should feel okay saying, and they get away with it.

Ever know of someone quitting on the first day, right after lunch?

"They didn't say anything! "Nobody knew why! What a weirdo!"

Now you know.

Think about what that means for our current discourse. When people who label themselves as heterodox thinkers treat systemic critique as excessive, or when Charlie Kirk casts structural reformers as dangerous radicals, they are not just expressing opinions. They are policing the boundaries of conversation in ways that delegitimize dissent.

They are reinforcing a frame where advocates for change are painted as threats. According to Angove’s analysis, that kind of framing reliably produces violent consequences.

There is no innocence left here. You cannot say, “Who could have known that speaking the truth would be harmful?” because now we know. The evidence shows that demonization and dehumanization, even when wrapped in clever language or technically factual statements, make violence predictable. And once something is predictable, choosing to do it anyway is not harmless. It is culpable.

That is why words like “woke” matter so much. The way the term is deployed today is not descriptive, it is demonizing. It paints whole groups of people as dangerous to society.

It strips them of legitimacy and humanity. Every time it is repeated, it feeds the statistical machine Angove describes. It adds to the pile of predictable violence. So yes, every time you call someone “woke,” someone else pays the price. Maybe not directly. Maybe not immediately. But the pattern is clear.

Stochastic terrorism is real. And now that we can name it, there is no more hiding behind the idea that words are just words. Divisive rhetoric does not only shut down conversation. It manufactures violence.

And once we admit that, we can no longer treat this kind of talk as edgy, contrarian, or harmless.

It is not brave. It is not clever. It is predictable harm.

Understanding stochastic terrorism can make debate sharper, not weaker. It helps separate questioning ideas from attacking people. It shows why slurs like “woke” land differently than arguments about policy.

And it leaves us with a simple test: are we debating issues, or are we demonizing groups? It's up to us, not the Heteros ("Heterodox", relax.) to make this happen.

We need to call it out when we see it and demand that the voices calling for radical change are heard instead of this cosmetic - and now clearly harmful - mainstream rhetoric. The managed spectrum where debate is curated so it feels lively, but only over superficial points that won't threaten the systems of power that are the actual problem.

"Gramsci's Hegemony is the process by which ruling groups shape culture and “common sense” so thoroughly that people accept inequality and corruption as natural and inevitable. It is not maintained by force alone but by consent, by shaping desires, expectations, and beliefs."

---

In “White Antiracist Allies in Training: My Social Justice Workshop Troubles (and Yours),” published in Blue Mountain Review in June 2021 (pp. 170–183), the author writes with the conviction that America’s racial divisions can be healed through mutual recognition, common ground, and a spiritual commitment to one another’s well-being. He invokes the dream that if people could simply see each other clearly and affirm each other’s humanity, then the shadows of the color line might dissipate.

It is a hopeful sentiment, resonant with the rhetoric of liberal optimism and evocations of a “beloved community” that have circulated since the civil rights era.

But embedded in this vision is a refusal, or perhaps an inability - I do not know which is scarier - to grapple with the structures that shape racial life in America.

The dream of “just getting along” collapses once one considers how deeply inequality is embedded in law, policy, and economic arrangements. Shared humanity cannot erase housing segregation, employment discrimination, school funding inequities, mass incarceration, or generational wealth gaps. Goodwill does not redistribute resources.

By framing racial problems as interpersonal misunderstandings or failures of empathy, the author narrows his lens to the psychological and the cultural, leaving untouched the systemic scaffolding that ensures inequality persists.

What makes this even more troubling is that the article does not merely overlook systemic injustice. It casts suspicion on the very antiracist movements that confront it.

Antiracist organizations are portrayed as strident, divisive, even counterproductive. The suggestion is that their critiques risk worsening the problem, as though calling out injustice is the real source of discord.

This is a familiar move: to vilify those who demand structural change because their insistence unsettles the comfort of common ground optimism, the dream of beloved community, and, incidentally, the ruling order where the wealthy hold more power than voters in every aspect of society.

Placed alongside Charlie Kirk and his brand, the similarity becomes stark. Kirk insisted that America was fundamentally fair, that anyone could succeed through personal responsibility, and that focusing on systemic racism was divisive. For him and his entourage, any antiracist statement, by definition, tore the nation apart.

His rhetoric was blunt, populist, and profitable. Outrage and denial of systemic injustice generated clicks, filled speaking halls, and drove donations. His denial was a business model.

The author of the Blue Mountain Review article, Adam Gussow, took a different route to a similar conclusion. Where Kirk monetized outrage, Gussow presents himself as the courageous contrarian, casting himself as a heterodox thinker and brave dissenter.

In practice, both undermine antiracist work by reframing it as the problem rather than the solution. Both argued, in different registers, that those who called attention to systemic injustice were the ones tearing society apart.

Yet how ridiculous is that, given the overwhelming evidence? Racial wealth gaps persist across generations. Schools remain segregated and unequally funded. Disparities in healthcare, policing, and incarceration are well documented. To argue that naming these truths is the problem, rather than the structures that produce them, is to invert reality.

It is like blaming the fire alarm for the fire.

The tragedy lies in motivation. For Kirk, the calculus was cynical. His posture was monetized. From a salary of about US $27,000 in 2016, his compensation at his nonprofit organization, Turning Point USA, rose to over US $407,000 by 2021. Over the same span his group’s revenues grew dramatically, and he acquired multiple high-end properties, including a multimillion-dollar estate in Arizona.

For Gussow, it is sadder. He seems to genuinely believe that common ground is enough, that antiracist movements are the obstacle rather than the engine of justice. One denied out of self-interest, the other out of misplaced faith. Both arrive at the same dead end, a refusal to reckon with the structures that must be changed.

Yet denial is only one tactic. Equally destructive are strategies that pretend to address systemic issues but are hollow by design. These partial or superficial efforts create the illusion of reform while ensuring failure.

Consider how diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are sometimes implemented. The principle of DEI is sound, to broaden access, correct imbalances, and ensure marginalized groups are represented and empowered. But when implementation is reduced to transactional incentives, such as tax breaks for hiring a certain number of employees from marginalized groups, the reform is sabotaged from the start. It's another win systemic racism.

Companies comply for financial gain, not justice, and the deeper issues of pay gaps, promotion bias, and workplace culture remain untouched.

Predictably, resentment grows, results disappoint, and soon critics declare DEI itself a failure.

That failure is not proof of the principle’s weakness. It is the product of a system designed to neuter real change.

The red flag is someone who calls out DEI instead of shining a light on the sabotage. Nowhere in the story is there mention of the sabotage.

This pattern is not unique to Kirk or to Gussow. They are simply two examples in a wide field of actors who perpetuate inequality in plain sight. Some did it through common ground optimism that erased structures. Others did it through weaponized accusations of division whenever injustice was named. Still others did it through shallow reforms that were destined to collapse and discredit the cause.

Different as they seem, these strategies converge in their outcome: preserving the status quo while appearing to engage with racial justice.

Example: Media presence is inversely related to how directly someone confronts root causes.

The persistence of such hollow strategies is no accident. So who benefits from these failures?

They serve powerful interests across society:

Politicians and media figures: For figures like Kirk, denying systemic racism was a business. The narrative of division and victimhood culture sold books, filled speaking halls, and drove donations. The outrage itself was monetized.

Corporations and HR departments: Many businesses embraced DEI in its most superficial form, through diversity trainings, photo-op hires, or tax-incentive quotas, because it boosted reputation while avoiding costly restructuring. True equity would have meant raising wages, altering promotion pathways, or addressing bias in management culture, all of which threatened profits. Symbolic reform let them look progressive without ceding real power.

Real estate and banking: Segregated housing patterns and discriminatory lending remain immensely profitable. Programs that gesture toward affordable housing or community reinvestment often fall short by design, maintaining property values and profit margins for developers, landlords, and lenders.

Policing and prisons: Entire industries depend on maintaining racialized patterns of surveillance and incarceration. Reforms framed as community policing or sensitivity training rarely challenge the underlying incentives, such as budgets tied to arrests, private prison contracts, or union protections for misconduct. Token reforms protect these revenue streams while appearing responsive.

Higher education and nonprofits: Universities and NGOs can attract funding by advertising their commitment to diversity and inclusion, yet often stop short of transforming curricula, admissions, or governance structures. The result is a cycle where students and donors are reassured, while inequities in access and outcomes remain intact.

Cultural figures and institutions: Gussow benefits by presenting himself as the courageous truth-teller, the one willing to say the things others are too afraid to say. It is a familiar pose: cast yourself as embattled, as someone risking reputation by voicing an unpopular truth. In practice, it is a license to be an asshole while claiming victimhood.

He dismisses antiracist organizations as divisive, while dressing up his stance as noble contrarianism. Pushback becomes proof of his bravery, insulating him from critique. The irony is that his words do not challenge entrenched systems of racism. They challenge those who seek to dismantle them. His role grants him cultural capital, the glow of rebellion without the cost of real resistance.

The result is a cycle in which failed reforms are not only tolerated but desired. They protect the existing order by showing that something was tried and by allowing critics to argue that comprehensive reform is impossible. The system perpetuates itself in plain sight, through denial, through vilification of antiracism, and through actions designed to fail.

Why are such failures accepted, even celebrated, despite the obvious harm and despite running contrary to people’s own interests? Here Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is indispensable.

Hegemony is the process by which ruling groups shape culture and “common sense” so thoroughly that people accept inequality and corruption as natural and inevitable. It is not maintained by force alone but by consent, by shaping desires, expectations, and beliefs.

Every tactic outlined above, whether Kirk’s monetized outrage or Gussow’s contrarian optimism, functions within this hegemonic framework. And in every case, the key to unraveling it is the question cui bono, who benefits?

Narrative control: Politicians and media benefit when misconduct is reframed as virtue.

Normalization through repetition: Scandals lose power, benefiting those who repeat them until they seem ordinary.

Delegitimizing critique: Leaders benefit when critics are painted as divisive rather than truth-telling.

False choices: Parties and institutions benefit when people settle for “lesser evils.”

Displacement of blame: Systems benefit when poverty or injustice is blamed on individuals rather than policies.

Affective investment: Leaders benefit from loyalty built on hope, patriotism, or identity.

Incentivized ignorance: Employers and institutions benefit when silence is rewarded and dissent punished.

Hegemony itself: Ruling classes benefit when inequality is mistaken for inevitability.

Asking cui bono turns normalization inside out. It shows that acceptance is not passive blindness but the result of an active system of benefits and incentives.

What looks like resignation or naiveté is in fact the outcome of a carefully structured order that ensures the unacceptable feels normal.

I bet you can sense that things aren’t normal. For four decades, U.S. elections haven’t been decided on what’s best for the wellbeing of all citizens, but on money.

The “war on crime” and the “war on drugs” institutionalized racism.

Immigration policies sidelined the demographic and economic benefits of newcomers and instead left them more open to exploitation.

Obamacare was never universal health care, only a patch on a for-profit system.

And the Iraq war was never about safety or peace, just more war spending from taxpayers' pocketbooks to big corporations who supply arms.

Unity and common ground are not wrong in themselves. They are necessary. But without confronting the systems that perpetuate racial injustice, calls for togetherness and half-measures of reform are empty slogans.

Whether spoken with hope from the mountaintop, shouted with certainty from a political rally, or dressed up as corporate diversity programs, they offer comfort without change, a dream of healing that leaves the wound open while those in power continue to profit from keeping it that way.

I first heard the word heterodox today. I was today years old.

At first, I thought it was a fresh concept that might actually make me think. But after a minute, I realized it’s douchey.

We don’t need more words.

Unorthodox works just fine. So what’s the motivation here? Are you just trying to sound smart?

Of course you are. But wait, there’s more.

Heterodox feels like a safe way to rebel. It says, “I’ll borrow ideas from *all* sides, mix and match, and look brave doing it.” But the trick is, it never questions the sides themselves. It plays along with the boundaries.

It enforces that the existing narratives are real and valid. It’s basically dissent that still bows to the referee.

Unorthodox is different. That word doesn’t care about your rules.

It helps to have a deep understanding of the narratives and the frames that hold up mainstream ideas - that’s how you learn to transcend them. But unorthodox says, “Yeah, I know the rules, but I don’t accept them as the limits of what I can say or think.”

It doesn’t toggle between poles, it goes outside the whole setup.

That’s the difference between sounding radical and actually being radical.

Beyond being douchey and performative, the problem with heterodox is that despite granting you the ability to pull ideas "from both sides", it shuts down any conversation that's outside of the box. If you agree to stay inside the lines, certain questions never get asked.

And silence always helps the people in power. That’s the beauty of heterodox: it looks like diversity of thought while quietly keeping the system intact.

And that’s no accident. Since around 2010 or 2015, the word has been all over mainstream politics and economics. Those are domains where power structures rely heavily on what people think.

The word heterodoxy is visible enough to signal edgy independence while also reassuring everyone you’re not going to rock the boat.

Unorthodox thinkers, meanwhile, get pushed to the margins. They’re harder to accept, sometimes ridiculed, often ignored.

That's by design.

In the end, heterodox is the word you use when you want to look edgy but you don't really have any interest in making change.

Say unorthodox instead. If that doesn't feel comfortable to do, then you probably shouldn't pretend that you are pushing any boundaries.

And you're not special.

Once you really think about it, in a deeply polarized realm, heterodox doesn’t mean brave, it just means bipolar.

Okay, you are special. But that's despite your use of that word.