”Oaths are but words, and words but wind.”— Samuel Butler, 1665
I used to be an amateur magician. A bad one.
But one of the first moves I learned was misdirection. Show the left hand, let the right do the trick. Make the audience look where you want. Keep them distracted.
Politicians do the same thing.
Trump’s people want to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. It’s clownish hand waving unable to stand under even passing skepticism: When the next Category 5 hurricane slams into Florida, do we really want America in the headline? Brilliant.
J.D. Vance monkeys his own tricycle. At the Munich Security Conference, he trashed Europe’s free speech laws, told them to shut up about U.S. politics.
It’s all good theater, but the point was chaos. Keep people angry. Keep them scared.
And while we all watch that, Elon Musk guts the federal government. More than 85,000 jobs gone. Education, Veterans Affairs, IRS—slashed.
Musk says it’s about efficiency. It’s about control. Privatize everything. Cut the government until it’s too weak to fight back.
This isn’t new. It has always rested in the conservative playbook to gripe change, to lament progressivism, under whatever label: hippie; Politically Correct, Woke, DEI. It’s all the same:
Change suckes, and you’ll pay for it eternally.
Pain is the point. Race sleeps in the center.
But there’s a way to beat it. Stop watching the weak hand.
Ignore the noise. Watch what they do, not what they say. Observe just how much of the news is simply about what someone has said — not did. It’s the laziest kind of journalism on tap.
The problem, of course, is, in the internet age, what someone said has become the news. A politician rants, an athlete makes a vague comment, a celebrity posts something, and suddenly, the news cycle revolves around it.
Not the actions that actually shape the world. Not the policies being passed in silence. Just words. Which, as Butler says, are but wind.
So watch the subtle hand. It’s the one doing the real work behind the Great American Grift.
