I opened this with Tom Macdonald's latest releaser “The Government”
The oldest political trick on Earth is still working because your nervous system was built for tribes, not for truth….and both parties know it.
Tom MacDonald dropped a song that is not subtle, not polite, and not interested in your team jersey.
The Government.
The line he put on the video is the whole diagnosis:
it’s not the Left or the Right. It’s all of them.
He’s right. He’s been circling this for years….The System, Brainwashed, The Machine…and this one just stopped pretending there is a clean team left to root for.
Honey, that is not “both sides-ism.”
That is pattern recognition with the safety off. And if it pissed you off, good. Sit in it. The discomfort is the first honest thing some of you have felt since you picked a color.
What follows is not a review. It is an autopsy.
The Diagnosis, Not the Anthem
The song is a list of refusals.
He does not trust the water or the food. He does not trust a man in a suit. He does not trust bankers, judges, headlines, screens, teachers selling a script, doctors selling a product, politicians selling a vow they already broke.
He does not care if the mouth doing the talking is Democrat or Republican. He thinks they all want the public managed, distracted, and if necessary, expendable.
You can argue individual lines.
You cannot honestly argue the structure. The structure is older than the Republic and older than the parties you treat like churches.
Politics, as it has actually operated…not as your favorite commentator narrates it…has always been a technology for extracting compliance from large groups of primates who would otherwise notice they are being farmed.
Left and right are costumes. The constant is the extraction.
If that sounds venomous, congratulations.
You still have a pulse.
Divide et Impera Is Not a Metaphor. It Is the Operating System.
Rome did not invent “divide and rule.”
Rome just wrote it down like a user manual. Split the tribes. Fund both. Let them exhaust each other. Keep the grain dole flowing so nobody looks up at the palace.
Machiavelli said a prince should appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious…and be ready to be the opposite when the ledger requires it. He was not writing fan fiction.
He was describing the job.
Robert Michels later named the Iron Law of Oligarchy: every organization, even one born screaming about the people, hardens into a ruling clique that protects itself first. Pareto talked about the circulation of elites…lions and foxes trading places while the mass stays the mass.
Public choice economists, with less poetry and more math, showed that politicians, bureaucrats, and donors are not angels who happen to work in government.
They are agents maximizing power, safety, and rent under constraints. The voter is a cost center with a flag.
This is not a conspiracy in the cartoon sense.
Conspiracies are messy and leak.
Institutions are worse.
Institutions do not need a smoke-filled room when the incentive structure already points every ambitious bastard in the same direction: keep the herd fighting sideways so it never fights up.
Federalist 10 worried about factions.
The Founders were not naïve children. They built checks because they assumed men were not angels. Then parties formed anyway, captured the machinery, and taught each generation that the other color is the existential threat.
That teaching is the product. The product sells.
You think you chose a side. A side chose a use for you.
The Neurology of the Jersey
Your brain did not evolve for 24-hour cable or a phone that never sleeps. It evolved for a band of 150 people, a horizon you could walk, and a predator you could see.
The amygdala does not read policy papers.
It reads threat. Once a face, a slogan, a hat, a pronoun, a flag becomes tagged as not-us, the prefrontal cortex…the part that does slow, expensive, adult thinking…gets shoved out of the driver’s seat.
That is not poetry. That is threat circuitry doing what it was built to do.
Dopamine is not your friend here.
Variable-ratio reinforcement…the same schedule that makes slot machines addictive…is how feeds work.
Outrage, in-group applause, the little hit when your team “owns” someone. You are not informed. You are trained.
Skinner would have wept with professional pride.
Mirror neurons and identity fusion do the rest. You stop evaluating claims. You evaluate who said them. A lie from your tribe feels like loyalty.
A truth from the other tribe feels like betrayal.
That is not stupidity in the insult sense. It is a predictable failure mode of a social brain under industrial-scale stimulation.
Add sleep deprivation, cortisol, processed food, and a news cycle designed to keep you one headline away from panic, and you get a population that can recite talking points and cannot hold a two-step causal chain.
Clinical language for that is not “they’re evil.”
It is impaired executive function under chronic affective load. The machine likes you that way.
Impaired people are governable.
Tom saying he does not trust anything on a screen is not just a vibe. Screens are the delivery system for the hijack.
Photoshop, AI, selective framing, omitted context….your visual cortex treats a sharp image as evidence. It was never built to audit a production studio.
Clinical Notes on a Sick Body Politic
If you walked this country into a forensic interview room and asked what is wrong with the patient, you would not start with “Democrat” or “Republican.”
You would start with identity foreclosure….the premature locking of a self around a political brand before the person has done the work of becoming an adult.
You would note splitting, the borderline-style defense: all good / all bad.
My side is the last firewall of civilization.
Your side is proto-genocide.
That is not analysis. That is a primitive defense against ambiguity, and ambiguity is where reality lives.
You would note projection at industrial scale. Every faction accuses the other of the exact sins it is busy institutionalizing….censorship, lawfare, cults of personality, captive media, moral exemption for “our” violence.
Projection is cheap. Accountability is expensive. Guess which one scales.
You would note learned helplessness in the people who still vote like it is a sacred rite while admitting, in the same breath, that nothing changes for them.
Vote harder. The shock comes on a schedule. The lever still gives a click. That click is the pellet.
And you would note something darker in the class that never seems to lose no matter who is “in power”:
a cluster that looks a hell of a lot like dark-triad selection.
Not every politician is a clinical narcissist, psychopath, or Machiavellian.
Enough of the ones who survive the filter are. Empathy is a tax. Shame is a tax. The people who treat those as optional rise. Then they hire communicators to wrap the extraction in words like compassion, security, equity, freedom, the children.
The children. Always the children. Every regime on Earth has used that sentence. It should make you reach for a receipt, not a tear.
This is not a claim that your neighbor is a monster.
Most people are tired, tribal, and trying to keep a life together. The pathology is upstream. It is in the selection pressure of the game.
Behavioral Psychology 101: How You Were Trained
Operant conditioning is not a theory you debate. It is what your feed already did to you.
Positive reinforcement: likes, shares, “you’re one of the good ones,” donor emails that call you a warrior.
Negative reinforcement: the anxiety drops when you perform the ritual…share the post, hate the correct person, buy the merch.
Punishment: cancellation, HR, family exile, demonetization, the cold silence when you notice your own side is full of shit.
Extinction burst: when the old rewards stop working, people double down before they quit. That is why the last two inches of every culture war feel insane. The pellet machine is jammed and the rats are biting each other.
Classical conditioning pairs the out-group with disgust and fear until a face is enough. You do not need an argument after that. You need a target.
Both machines run this protocol. One uses different nouns. The schedule is the same. That is why Tom’s “I don’t care if they’re Democrat or Republican” lands like a slap.
He is describing the schedule, not the branding.
If you only see the conditioning on the other side, you are not awake. You are a well-trained animal with better copy.
The Pathology of the Class That Never Loses
Here is the part people use to call you a conspiracy lunatic, so let’s be precise and lethal about it.
You do not need a single secret handshake.
You need aligned incentives among people who live in the same zip codes, marry into the same networks, send kids to the same schools, sit on the same boards, and rotate through the same jobs: agency, think tank, bank, contractor, media, foundation, university, campaign.
When the same names show up around surveillance, war, pharma, finance, tech moderation, and “emergency” powers no matter which team won the last costume contest, a sane mind does not say “wow, democracy is vibrant.”
A sane mind says capture.
Hollywood, finance, intelligence-adjacent NGOs, legacy media, and the donor class do not experience left and right the way a guy in Selinsgrove experiences left and right.
They experience risk management.
Your rage is a line item. Your vote is a weather report. Your identity is a marketing segment.
Tom’s shots at screens, suits, doctors-for-hire, and a celebrity caste that lectures you about morality while living like it is exempt….that is not “punching randomly.”
That is pointing at a status system that talks like a church and books like a cartel.
Are there decent people in office? Yes.
They get isolated, bought, broken, or turned into mascots.
The machine metabolizes sincerity. It does not run on it.
If that makes you want to scream that your guy is different: of course you do.
That is the jersey talking.
Take it off and look at the voting record, the spending, the surveillance architecture, the wars, the debt, the revolving door.
Then come back and tell me which color of necktie reversed the direction of the extractive state. I will wait. I will not hold my breath. I like my lips a normal color.
History Does Not Repeat. It Rhymes in Red and Blue.
Athens had factions and demagogues who discovered that a crowd will vote itself gifts until the treasury is a corpse.
Rome had populares and optimates. The names changed. The grain and the games did not.
Medieval kings played nobles against cities.
Early modern states played sect against sect…Catholic, Protestant, whoever was useful this decade. The Treaty of Westphalia did not end the habit.
It professionalized the state that feeds on it.
America’s two-party system is not a law of nature.
It is a Duverger consequence of first-past-the-post plus ballot access plus media cartels plus donor pipelines. Third options get treated like heresy because they threaten the duopoly’s pricing power over your attention.
Reconstruction, the Gilded Age machines, Wilson’s propaganda board, FDR’s alphabet state, the Cold War’s secrecy cult, the post-9/11 security blender, the 2008 bailout caste, the pandemic’s emergency stack…every era produced a story about why this expansion of control was uniquely moral.
The storytellers always lived upstairs.
Bread and circuses updated into SNAP and streaming.
The Colosseum updated into the timeline.
Same psychology. Better resolution.
You want a philosophy citation with your whiskey?
Plato’s cave is not a dorm-room poster. It is a warning about people who would rather fight over shadows than turn around.
Nietzsche saw ressentiment coming a century early: moral language as camouflage for weakness and revenge.
Orwell understood that the point of political language is to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. He did not specify a party because the trick is portable.
The portable trick is this:
give the population a sacred enemy so they never audit the accountant.
What “All of Them” Actually Means
It does not mean every voter on the other side is your enemy. That is the lie that keeps the farm productive.
It means the professional political class, the permanent bureaucracy, the donor-media-academic circuit, and the corporate partners who write the rules they later “obey” are not your parents.
They are not your pastors.
They are not your friends.
They are a labor market for people who are unusually good at wanting power and unusually poor at being ashamed of how they get it.
“All of them” means the left will use your empathy as a battering ram and the right will use your loyalty as a blank check.
Different hymns. Same collection plate.
“All of them” means the culture war is real and useful. Some fights are about actual human things…speech, borders, sex, crime, family, God.
Those fights get metabolized into content so the structural fights…money, war, surveillance, liability, who gets to print and who gets to eat…stay boring enough that you scroll past them.
Boring is the camouflage of serious theft.
Tom’s refusal to trust “anyone with a tongue” is ugly on purpose.
It is the opposite of the pastoral voice that says just vote harder and trust the process. The process is not your friend. The process is a maze designed by people who own the cheese.
Does that mean nihilism?
Only if you are lazy. Seeing the cage is not the same as lying down in it. It is the precondition for not decorating the bars and calling it a home.
Wisdom, If You Can Stand It
A grown political mind holds two facts without melting:
One: Ideas differ.
Some policies wreck cities, some wreck balance sheets, some wreck children, some wreck the currency. You are allowed to prefer one stack of tradeoffs. You are allowed to hate a worldview. You are not required to pretend every dispute is a psyop.
Two: The people who monetize those disputes, who fund both PACs, who never miss a meal when “your team” loses, who discover emergency powers in every weather event, who speak of citizens as populations to be managed….those people are not confused about left and right.
They are fluent in both dialects. Fluency is not friendship.
Clinical humility says: you are biased.
Your memory is a press secretary. Your tribe will forgive its own atrocities and inventory the other side’s with a jeweler’s loupe.
If you cannot admit that about yourself, you are not a dissident. You are a congregant.
Behavioral humility says: change the reinforcement.
Touch grass that does not have a comment section.
Talk to a human without converting them.
Read a primary source.
Follow the money until you get bored, then follow it one hour longer.
Boredom is where the bodies are buried.
Neurological humility says: if a clip makes you feel holy and homicidal in the same thirty seconds, you are not receiving information.
You are receiving a dose.
Put the device down before you confuse a neurotransmitter event with a revelation.
Philosophical humility says: power hates a person who can stand alone without a choir.
That is why every machine on Earth tries to make solitude feel like exile and conformity feel like virtue.
The Sweet Part, Because You Asked for It
I am not telling you to hate your neighbor. I am telling you to stop letting professionals rent your nervous system.
Most people are not the enemy.
They are scared, proud, lonely, overworked, and trying to protect something they love with the only map they were handed.
That includes the ones whose map makes you want to put a fist through a wall.
Bless their stubborn hearts.
Then do not let them, or their handlers, drive.
Love is not the opposite of ferocity.
Love is what makes the ferocity aimed.
If you love a country, a kid, a craft, a God, a patch of dirt that still has seasons…you do not donate that love to a brand that would sell the dirt and keep the slogan.
Tom’s song is a blunt instrument. Good.
Some locks only open with a hammer.
It is not the Left.
It is not the Right.
It is the people who need you to think those are the only two rooms in the building.
There are other rooms.
They are quieter.
They require you to be less entertained and more dangerous…dangerous in the adult way: hard to lie to, hard to herd, hard to buy with a little flag and a lot of cortisol.
Never trust the government is a slogan.
Never outsource your mind to a team is a discipline.
Do the discipline.
Sweetheart, the alternative is to die as a well-branded extra in somebody else’s budget meeting.
And that would be a fucking waste.
