Manufactured Outrage Keeps Us Divided and Conquered

Manufactured rage is a tool — and it’s working exactly as designed.

If you want to loot a country, the first thing you need to do is keep its people fighting each other.

While billionaires were quietly buying up the courts, deregulating industries, and capturing public institutions, the public was fed a steady diet of manufactured outrage. Books. Bathrooms. Flags. Holidays. Headlines designed to provoke rage but never to change anything that mattered.

It wasn’t an accident. It was a strategy.

If people are screaming at each other about drag queens or gas stoves or pronouns, they aren’t asking why their wages have been frozen for forty years.
If people are furious about statues or school libraries, they aren’t noticing that billionaires just bought another Supreme Court seat.
If people are convinced that their neighbors are their enemies, they won’t see who’s actually emptying their pockets.

Culture war is a weapon.
Let that sink in…
It’s a distraction.
It’s a way of fracturing solidarity, of preventing the one thing that could actually threaten oligarchic power: collective action.

Divide the workers. Distract the voters. Drain the outrage into endless, unsolvable battles that leave people too exhausted to fight where it matters.

And the deeper the rage runs, the easier it is to convince people that democracy itself is the problem — that elections are a joke, that nothing can change, that violence is the only answer left.

The culture wars were never about solving real problems. They were engineered to keep us at each other’s throats while the architects of collapse built a new world above our heads.

While the headlines screamed about bathrooms and book bans, billionaires rewrote the tax code.
While the public fought over flags and slogans, corporations captured regulatory agencies.
While the news cycled through outrage after outrage, political operatives methodically redrew district lines, suppressed votes, and packed courts.

We were trained to treat every cultural flashpoint like an existential battle, while the real existential battles — for wages, healthcare, housing, democracy itself — were stripped of urgency, buried under a flood of noise.

This is how power hides in plain sight.
It wears the mask of outrage, the mask of culture, the mask of endless grievance.
It teaches us to hate each other so thoroughly that we forget to look up.

The last thing the billionaire class can afford — the thing they fear most — is a population that knows who really stole their future.

Outrage alone wasn’t enough to finish the job.
Once the public was divided and distracted, the real machinery of control was ready to move into place — not with guns, but with gavels.

The Quiet Siege of the Legal System and the Fight to Defend It →