An Essay on Thinking for Yourself Augmented by the Wisdom of Cowboy Will Rogers

I Am Forty Years Old and I Feel Like I Have Lived Through a Thousand Years of Stupidity...

There is a scene in the 1976 film Network where a man on television tells his audience to open their windows and scream "I am mad as hell and I am not going to take this anymore." Thousands of people do it. They scream into the night because they have finally had enough. That scene was fiction fifty years ago. Now it feels like prophecy.

Watch it above and then read the article.

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I do not recognize this country anymore.

I am in my early forties but I feel like I am seventy years old. I have seen things in my life that most of you would not believe if I told you, things that would keep you up at night, things that fundamentally changed how I understand the world and the people in it. And as bad as all of that was, watching my country devolve into warring tribes of screaming idiots is somehow worse. It is worse because it did not have to happen. It is worse because we did it to ourselves. It is worse because I can see exactly what is being done to us and I cannot get enough people to listen.

What is being done to us, you ask? Let me explain.

Divide and Rule: The Two Thousand Year Old Trick That Still Works on You

The Romans had a saying: divide et impera. If you ask most people who think they know a thing or two about history, they will tell you it means “divide and conquer.” They are wrong. It means divide and RULE. There is a difference. Conquering is what you do to an enemy. Ruling is what you do to your own people. The Roman patrician class, the ruling elite for those of you who never took a history course beyond eighth grade, used this method to keep the population under control for centuries. As long as the plebeians were fighting each other, as long as they were divided into factions and tribes and interest groups that hated each other more than they hated the people actually exploiting them, the rulers stayed in power. The rulers stayed rich. The rulers kept taking everything while the common people argued about bread and circuses.

Nothing has changed in two thousand years except the technology they use to control us.

You think I am being dramatic? You think this is ancient history that has nothing to do with you sitting there in your comfortable chair scrolling through your phone? Let me show you exactly what happens when the ruling class perfects this strategy.

The Last Time This Happened, Eighty Million People Died

If you want to see where this road leads, study what happened in Germany in the 1930s. The Weimar Republic was a mess. The economy was in shambles. People were angry and scared and looking for someone to blame. And into that chaos stepped a group called the Thule Society, occultist elites who decided they were going to reshape Germany according to their vision. They funded a small political party called the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, which would later become the Nazi Party. But that was only half of the operation. They did not just build one side. They made sure both sides were at each other’s throats. Communists versus nationalists. Workers versus business owners. Jews versus Christians. Everyone had an enemy. Everyone had someone to blame. Everyone was so busy fighting their neighbor that nobody noticed the puppet masters pulling the strings.

Then they introduced the charismatic demagogue. The man who would unite one side, crush the other, strip everyone of their rights, and drag the entire world into a war that killed eighty million people.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Look at America right now. Really look at it. The Democrats and Republicans hate each other with a passion that borders on religious fervor. Each side is absolutely convinced that the other side is not just wrong but evil, that they are literally trying to destroy the country, that they must be stopped at all costs. And yet somehow, no matter which party wins, the rich keep getting richer. The wars keep getting funded. The surveillance state keeps expanding. The rights keep eroding. The banks get bailed out while ordinary people lose their homes. Nothing that actually matters to the ruling class ever changes, no matter how many elections we have or how much the two parties scream at each other on television.

Ask yourself: who benefits from this division? Who benefits when you hate your neighbor so much that you cannot even have a conversation with them about politics? Who benefits when every issue, no matter how complex, gets reduced to red team versus blue team? Who benefits when Americans are so busy fighting each other that they do not notice their pockets being picked and their futures being sold?

It is not the Democrats. It is not the Republicans. It is the people above both parties, the ones who fund both sides, the ones who own the media outlets that tell you what to think, the ones who have been running this game for longer than any of us have been alive.

I watch the Democrats push policies that seem designed to infuriate conservatives. I watch Republicans push policies that seem designed to infuriate liberals. And I cannot shake the feeling that both sides are being played, that somewhere there is a room full of very wealthy people laughing at all of us as we tear each other apart over issues that they manufactured specifically to keep us divided. The culture wars are not organic. The outrage is not accidental. Every week there is a new controversy perfectly calibrated to make one side apoplectic and the other side defensive, and we all take the bait every single time like fish who never learn that the worm has a hook in it.

United we stand, divided we fall. You have heard that phrase your whole life. But have you ever really thought about what it means? It means that the only way to destroy America is to turn Americans against each other. Foreign armies cannot conquer us. Our geography and our military make invasion essentially impossible. But if you can get us to hate each other, if you can split us into tribes that see each other as enemies rather than countrymen, you do not need to invade. You just wait for us to destroy ourselves from within.

We are more divided right now than at any point since the Civil War. We have people openly talking about secession. We have people cheering when their political opponents die. We have families that do not speak to each other anymore because of yard signs. We have reached a point where a significant portion of the population would rather see the country burn than see the other side win.

This is not an accident. This was done to us. And it was done to us by people who studied history, who knew exactly what happened in Weimar Germany, and who are using the same playbook because it works.

So who are these people? Who has the power and the money and the motivation to orchestrate something this massive?

You Have No Idea What Real Wealth Looks Like

Let me tell you about the real ruling class, because most of you have no idea what actual wealth looks like. I am not talking about the upper middle class guy in your neighborhood with the half million dollar house and the new Mercedes. That guy is not rich. That guy is one medical emergency away from bankruptcy just like the rest of us. I am talking about the kind of people who have so much money they could build your entire neighborhood out of solid gold and still be considered wealthy.

I am talking about old money. Generational wealth. The kind of fortunes that can trace their lineage all the way back to ancient Rome, to Babylon, to the Mongol khans, to every empire that ever existed. The ruling class has always been the ruling class because the ruling class has always been the richest people on the planet, and they have spent thousands of years perfecting the art of keeping the rest of us fighting each other instead of looking up at them.

But there was a time when we almost broke free.

People Died So You Could Have Rights and You Are Ready to Give Them Away

About a hundred and fifty years ago, something changed. Kings started losing their crowns. The rich suddenly had to deal with angry working class people who were pissed off enough to riot in the streets, destroy factories, assassinate leaders knowing full well they would die in front of a firing squad for doing it. These people fought and bled and died so that you could have the pathetic scraps of rights you still cling to today. They were beaten by police. They were shot by private militias hired by the wealthy. They were imprisoned and tortured and erased from history books so that you would never learn their names or understand what they sacrificed. And here we are, a century and a half later, watching a whole lot of Americans line up to throw all of that away so they can put a crown on some new king’s head and bend the knee and worship at the altar of sycophantic stupidity.

And the worst part? If you try to point any of this out, both sides will attack you.

I Get Called a Leftist on Monday and a Nazi on Tuesday

I publish an article one day and get a hundred comments calling me a leftist libtard. I publish something different the next day and get a hundred comments calling me a MAGA moron. I am neither. I am neither because I use my brain on a per-situation basis. I look at evidence. I consider motives. I ask who benefits when I am told to believe something. I do not watch television news because I think anyone who spends hours a day letting propaganda get pumped directly into their skull by the same six billionaires who own ninety percent of all websites, radio stations, television networks, and movie studios gave up on thinking a long time ago. Those people are not informed. They are hypnotized. They are in a constant trance state where they absorb whatever talking points their chosen propaganda channel feeds them and then vomit those talking points into comment sections without ever stopping to ask themselves: what if I am being manipulated? What if I do not have all the facts? What possible motivation would the people in power have to lie to me about this?

You want proof that both sides are brainwashed? Here is the most disturbing example I can think of.

Both of Your Heroes Have Been Accused of Sex With Children

I have watched two presidents in the last decade get accused of having sex with teenage girls, and somehow both sides are absolutely convinced that their guy is the good guy and the other guy is the pedophile. One of them has a daughter who wrote in her diary that he used to force her to shower with him when she was a child. His son’s laptop was full of receipts for prostitutes paid for with what appears to be taxpayer money. And millions of people still worship him as a defender of democracy. The other one has his name appear hundreds of times in documents connected to a man who ran an international child sex trafficking operation. There are flight logs. There are photographs. There are depositions. And millions of people still worship him as a savior sent by God. When something looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, chances are it is not a canary. But some of you people will bend over backwards to explain why your duck is actually a noble eagle while the other side’s duck is a monster.

Something is deeply wrong in America and I have been trying to point it out for years now, hoping I could break through the programming, hoping I could shake some of you awake. But only about twenty percent of you ever seem to get it. The rest just scroll from one dopamine hit to the next, website after website, video after video, like heroin addicts getting high on digital dope. You do not think. You do not read. You do not consider the possibility that the other side might have a point about something. You just react. You just vomit up the same tribal talking points you were programmed to vomit, and then you feel good about yourself because you owned the libs or you dunked on the MAGAts or whatever childish framework you use to avoid the terrifying reality that you have been manipulated into hating your neighbors by people who are robbing all of you blind.

Which brings me to the hard truth nobody wants to hear.

Half of America Has Chosen to Be Stupid. Do Not Be One of Them.

I am going to say something that will offend a lot of you: half of America is stupid. Not because they lack intelligence. Most people are capable of critical thought if they bother to try. They are stupid because they have chosen not to think. It is easier to parrot what other people tell you to say than it is to form your own opinions based on evidence and reason. It is easier to pick a team and cheer for that team no matter what they do than it is to evaluate each situation on its own merits. It is easier to scroll and react and move on to the next outrage than it is to sit with uncomfortable information and let it change your mind about something you previously believed.

Now, before you get too angry at me, let me explain why I understand how this happened.

You Are a Slave and They Did Not Even Have to Put Chains on You

And I get it. I understand why people do this. Most of you have already had most of your time eaten up being slaves to the ruling class. They do not call you slaves, of course. That would be too obvious. They call you employees and taxpayers and consumers. They let you pick which master you work for and they give you a paycheck instead of food and shelter, and they have convinced you that this makes you free. But just because you are not being whipped in a cotton field does not mean you are not a slave. You trade your hours for money that immediately gets taken from you by landlords and insurance companies and banks and tax collectors, all of whom are ultimately owned by the same tiny group of people who have been running this show since before your great-great-grandparents were born. You are left with just enough time and energy to consume the entertainment they produce for you, entertainment designed to keep you distracted and divided and docile.

And while you are distracted, while you are divided, while you are docile, they are preparing for something much worse.

The Missiles Are Real and They Are Pointed at You

Right now, the sitting president is almost certainly gearing up for a world war. China. Russia. Maybe both at once. And it is going to be bad. I mean end-of-the-world bad. I am talking about robot soldiers and AI-designed weapons that most people cannot even conceptualize and yes, nuclear weapons. I know some of you have convinced yourselves that nuclear weapons are somehow fake, that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were staged, that the thousands of nuclear tests conducted over the past eighty years were all elaborate hoaxes. You are idiots. Go talk to the survivors in Japan who watched their skin melt off. Go talk to the people in Arizona and Nevada who used to drive out to the desert in the 1950s to watch mushroom clouds rise into the sky like it was a fireworks show and then spent the rest of their shortened lives dying of cancer. Go talk to anyone with an advanced degree in nuclear physics. Or just drive to your nearest nuclear power plant and sit there and look at it. Those reactors run on the same science that nuclear bombs use. The same chain reactions that generate electricity can be weaponized to vaporize cities. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is basic physics that we figured out almost a century ago.

The world is closer to nuclear war right now than it has been since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and most of you are too busy arguing about pronouns and immigration and whatever other distraction the algorithm fed you this morning to notice or care. The ruling class is fine with this. They have bunkers. They have islands. They have escape plans. When the missiles start flying, they will be safe underground with stockpiles of food and water and medicine while the rest of us burn. They do not need you to survive. They just need you to keep working and consuming and fighting each other until the moment they do not need you anymore.

So what are you going to do about it? Because clicking the angry emoji is not going to cut it.

Clicking Like Buttons Is Not Activism

You need to start using your brains again. You need to start protecting your rights again. You need to start protesting again in real life instead of sitting on a computer clicking like buttons and share buttons and thinking “there, I did my part.” Clicking is not activism. Sharing is not resistance. The civil rights movement in the 1960s did not win by going viral on social media. They won by marching in the streets. They won by sitting at lunch counters and refusing to move. They won by filling up jails until the system could not hold them all. They won by getting beaten and firehosed on national television until the conscience of the nation could no longer ignore what was being done to them. They bled for the rights that you take for granted, rights that are being stripped away right now while you scroll through TikTok.

I know what some of you are thinking. Easy for you to say. What have you sacrificed?

I Gave Up Everything to Sound This Alarm

I quit a good job to do this. I blew my entire life savings on a YouTube channel that failed, and then I started over on Substack, and now I sit here barely able to pay my bills because I believed this work was more important than making money. I believed that if I could just reach enough people, if I could just explain what was happening clearly enough, something would change. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I made the worst decision of my life. Maybe I should have just kept my head down and collected a paycheck and let the world burn without me trying to stop it.

But I did not. And I am still here. And I am still trying.

And now I need to ask something of you.

You Are the One Who Has to Save the World

You, the person reading this right now, you are the one who has to save the world. Not me. Not some politician. Not some billionaire who is going to swoop in and fix everything. You. You are the person who needs to understand that things got this bad because we let them get this bad. You are the person who needs to start telling others not to buy into the tribal bullshit. You are the person who needs to model what it looks like to think critically and evaluate evidence and change your mind when the facts demand it. You are the person who needs to wake up and then wake up everyone around you.

I am the alarm clock. I have been ringing for years. And I am tired. I am so goddamn tired of screaming into the void while people call me a leftist and a rightist and a conspiracy theorist and a shill and every other label they use to avoid engaging with what I am actually saying.

But I am not going to stop. Because if I stop, if people like me stop, then there is no one left to ring the alarm. There is no one left to point out that the emperor has no clothes. There is no one left to remind you that you are a human being with a brain and a conscience and the capacity for independent thought.

Wake up, America. Turn off the television. Close the social media apps. Go outside and talk to your neighbors, the ones you have been trained to hate, and find out that they are just as scared and confused and manipulated as you are. Find common ground. Build something real. Remember that the only reason the ruling class stays in power is because we let them divide us.

And remember who you are.

We Are Americans, Not Tribes of Psychotic Idiots

We are AMERICANS. Not Democrats. Not Republicans. Not liberals or conservatives or libertarians or socialists. Not white or black or brown. Not native or immigrant. Americans. That word used to mean something. It used to mean that no matter where you came from or what you believed, you were part of something bigger than yourself, part of an experiment in self-governance that the whole world was watching. It meant that you had more in common with your neighbor than you had dividing you, and that when it really mattered, you would stand together against anyone who threatened your shared home.

We have forgotten that. We have let them make us forget. We have let them convince us that the guy down the street with the wrong yard sign is a bigger threat than the billionaires who own both candidates. We have let them turn us into tribes of psychotic idiots screaming at each other while they rob us blind and prepare for a war that will kill millions.

United we stand. Divided we fall. That is not just a slogan. That is the literal strategy being used against you every single day, and it is working, and it will keep working until enough of us decide that we would rather be Americans than be right about which tribe we belong to.

The clock is ticking. The missiles are being polished. The robots are being built. The bunkers are being stocked.

What the Hell are you going to do about it?

I know that was a lot to take in and some of you are probably furious with me right now. No hard feelings — here is the funniest thing Will Rogers ever said to lighten the mood.

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I need to tell you something before you go.

The Wise Wolf lost forty paid subscribers this week. We also lost nearly five hundred free subscribers. All because I questioned the actions of a certain politician that a lot of my readers worship like a god.

Forty people who paid to read my work for years. Years of supporting independent journalism. Years of trusting me to tell the truth even when it was uncomfortable. And they cancelled over ONE article. One piece where I dared to question something their guy did.

I want you to think about that. If you have been paying someone for years and they say ONE THING you disagree with and you immediately cancel, is it because you genuinely think they are wrong? Or is it because what they said made too much sense and it scared you? That is tribalism in action. That is what happens when someone’s brain has been conditioned to reject anything that causes cognitive dissonance. That is what staring at 24/7 streams of news and websites and YouTube videos does to a person. It turns your brain into mush so you cannot think critically anymore. You just accept whatever the television tells you. You just parrot whatever your favorite content creator says without ever wondering if that content creator is a CIA psychological operation designed to keep you docile and distracted.

You can tell me I am wrong but I know I am right because I have friends in intelligence and they have all told me the same damn thing: we control the internet so we can control the idiots. That is how this works. Like it or not, the people in power are smart. They know how to subtly manipulate you into doing what they want. And right now what they want is for you to fight your neighbor instead of paying attention to what they are doing behind the curtain.

The Wise Wolf has no corporate sponsors. No political donors. No advertisers. We are not owned by the left or the right because both sides are owned by the same people. We survive entirely on reader support from people who still believe that truth matters more than tribe.

If this article made you think, share it. If it pissed you off, good. You should be pissed off. We all should be.

Do not be a fool. Think for yourself.