At some point, we have to come to terms with the fact that a whole swath of the American public has literally no consistent set of values or beliefs. The absurdity of it all is that they’re also the same ones who are so desperate to shove their beliefs down the throats of everyone around them.

They’re the crowd that spent much of 2020 shouting “Back The Blue” and “Blue Lives Matter!” That is, until the police stood in the way of them storming the Capitol Building or arrested them when they were acting as agitators at a protest. A Right-Wing Influencer gets arrested, and suddenly, the police are corrupt and acting on behalf of “Radical Marxists.” They’re the people who said–with straight faces–that no one has anything to worry about if they just comply with existing laws and the people charged with enforcing them, but then treated a woman killed while breaking into the Capitol as if she was a martyr. They also conveniently had a litany of excuses for all the times it was clearly evident that someone did comply before they were killed, since it didn’t fit their narrative.

They’re the same people who insisted, “All Lives Matter,” as long as those lives don’t belong to people whose political ideologies diverge from theirs. If you’re Black, Indigenous, Central/South American, LGBTQ+, Liberal, or Leftist, your lives only matter if you keep your thoughts to yourselves and comply with their restrictive and toxic worldview.

These people will share every poorly Photoshopped piece of nonsense they can find, to disparage or discredit a victim–while hauling out the torches and pitchforks every time someone quoted Charlie Kirk with well-documented statements he’d made. They’ll condemn anyone who wasn’t saddened by that death, while reveling in the deaths of anyone killed by ICE or Border Patrol, blaming the victims for what happened.

They’re the evangelical Christian antichrists, distorting the Bible until Jesus is as cruel and mindless as they are…while simultaneously insisting on the utter infallibility of the same book.

The fact is…you can’t trust these people. No one can. They can’t even trust one another, because they’ll turn on each other at a moment’s notice.

They’re just liars.

It’s all they are. It’s all they do. And it’s why what they believe changes as rapidly as they shed skin cells. They have no beliefs. They have no values. They have no standards. All they know how to do is keep shifting goalposts around in a frenzied attempt to get one over on someone else. They have no concept of nuance or context. What they have is a desperate need to feel like they’re winning, even as they shoot themselves in the foot repeatedly.

They will perform whatever feats of mental gymnastics they need to, to uphold that delusional certainty that they are winning.

They’re all losers, though.

A pack of losers and liars; grifters who aren’t even really in on the grift, because they’re being conned and scammed along with the rest of us. The difference is that they’re just too stupid to see it.

That’s what we all need to accept. They’re all either stupid or evil…or both.

Either way, it’s worth it just to see what they have to say and reply with, “You don’t actually believe any of that (or you won’t by next week), so why should anyone else?”

As another deadly shooting at the hands of Department of Homeland Security agents takes place in Minneapolis, it still somehow amazes me that there’s still any debate over the incident on January 7, 2026, when Renee Nicole Good was murdered. It shouldn’t surprise me, but I can’t help but hold on to just a kernel of faith in humanity, despite there being little to no cause for that faith.

People on the Right conveniently disregard 18 U.S. Code 111, which states that anyone using a deadly or dangerous weapon while resisting arrest shall be fined and/or imprisoned not more than 20 years. Unless they’re on the receiving end, of course.

That’s a far stretch from summary execution.

And, of course, the narrative predicated on Good using her vehicle as a deadly weapon (which she was not) was transparently fictional from the jump. Nevermind the mental gymnastics required to pretend the ICE agent was not actively violating the DHS “Use of Force” policy that says agents “…should always avoid intentionally and unreasonably placing themselves in positions in which they have no alternative to using deadly force.”

People can make believe it wasn’t murder all they want–and they will–but it was murder perpetrated by a state actor. Anyone insisting otherwise is grifting…or stupid.

The same people who are so adamant regarding the Right To Bear Arms are the first to state that a man deserved to be shot by Federal Agents simply because he had a firearm on his person. It’s just another example of the complete and total lack of coherent or consistent beliefs among these people.

It’s time to shed the optimistic, rose-colored perception of humanity as being capable of overcoming gullibility. I wish there were evidence supporting the assertion that we could trust the people around us to have any capacity to see through manipulation, gaslighting, and grifting.

Greed, Grief, and Desperation make people altogether too susceptible to manipulation by even transparently ridiculous cons, performed by transparently idiotic conmen and women.

There’s a well-known story about how Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini crossed paths in the 1920s. It happened because the previously rational and reasonable Doyle was driven to believe increasingly outlandish spiritual claims following the tragic losses he and his family suffered during the First World War. Houdini hoped to remedy this by performing a magic trick involving automatic writing, but Doyle stubbornly maintained his belief in the paranormal nature of the experience, even after Houdini walked him through how he had performed the trick. No amount of proof or evidence could shake Doyle’s belief that what he’d witnessed was anything but supernatural–even when it was supplied by the man behind the experience itself.

Imagine how much Houdini could have taken the man for, had he just leaned into Doyle’s erroneous, preconceived notions. That is precisely what grifters have been doing for as long as there have been people on the receiving end of their manipulation.

Even without Greed, Grief, and Desperation involved, it’s hard for people to admit they were taken advantage of, even if they’re capable of seeing the truth of it.

No one wants to admit they were fooled. It makes them feel foolish.

Unfortunately, too many people can’t seem to see that it would still be better to admit the truth and correct course than to continue acting like a fool. And so that is what they do. They insist on behaving foolishly.

It’s impossible to turn on the television or open social media timelines without seeing obvious grifters at work, so confident that they’re not even putting in much effort to make their lies plausible or even halfway coherent. There’s a reason they’re so confident, too, and it’s because they believe they are that much smarter than everyone else, or because they’re victims as well–unable to admit they were made a fool.

What the world needs now is a wake-up call and a willingness to admit when we’re wrong. We need fewer fools.