Have you heard the latest? There’s a new thing—a scary thing—and it’s coming for everything you love. Doesn’t matter if it’s immigrants, artificial intelligence, or the fifth booster that turns your blood into Bluetooth—the only requirement is that you panic. Loudly. Publicly. On cue.
The panic script writes itself. First, you declare that the thing in question is hyper-competent: it’s going to take your job, ruin your life, manipulate your children, and reorder civilization itself. Then, almost in the same breath, you declare that it’s also completely incompetent: stupid, broken, lazy, unreliable, and pathetic. And somehow, people believe both.
Take immigrants. They’ve apparently crossed the border to steal your cousin’s roofing job while also refusing to work. They’re mooching off government systems they supposedly don’t know how to access, building criminal empires while also not being able to “speak English good.” They are both lazy freeloaders and hyper-efficient economic predators. It’s remarkable—truly the most ambitious loafers on Earth.
Or look at AI. One minute, it’s the death of art, the end of thinking, and the beginning of humanity’s extinction. The next minute, it’s making cursed cat pictures, writing cringe poetry, and confusing bananas for bowling balls. It’s going to replace your lawyer and also can’t pass a middle-school history test. It is both an evil god and a confused toddler. How convenient.
Then there’s the vaccine circus. A government conspiracy, a toxic injection, a microchip mind-control device that also—somehow—doesn’t work. People will swear it’s a deadly serum designed to kill you and a useless medicine that does nothing. They’re so committed to the performance that logic becomes optional. Fear becomes identity. Anger becomes communion.
And that’s the engine. These aren’t arguments. They’re projections—inner anxiety wearing the costume of certainty. What people fear isn’t immigrants or AI or medicine. What they fear is change. Irrelevance. The unknown. They fear waking up and not recognizing the world—or worse, not recognizing themselves. So instead of facing that fear inward, they throw it outward. They invent a “them.” Whoever “them” needs to be this week.
So the contradictions don’t matter. The job-stealing lazy people. The slop-producing superintelligence. The useless hyper-lethal medicine. None of it has to make sense, because fear doesn’t run on logic—it runs on fuel. Anger. Loss. Confusion. Shame. And the people selling that fuel know exactly how to pump it with both hands: one shaking in rage, the other reaching for your wallet.
Watching it all unfold is maddening, because it’s not just untrue—it’s dumb. Hilariously dumb. A circus of cognitive dissonance. A revival tent of false prophecy. A grievance theater where no one ever stops to ask how something can be both omnipotent and incompetent at once. It’s funny—until it isn’t. Until policies are written around fiction. Until real harm is done to real people in service of imaginary monsters.
So what’s left to do but laugh? Not to mock the frightened, but to puncture the performance. Not to ridicule the scared, but to unmask the ridiculous. To remember that contradiction is not truth. That rage is not wisdom. That fear, repeated often enough, starts to look like faith.
And maybe—just maybe—if the laughter rings clearly enough through the tent, someone will set their pitchfork down long enough to notice they’ve been swinging at shadows.