To MAGA, to the left, and to everyone in between,
In May of 2016, two crowds of Americans stood on opposite sides of Travis Street in Houston, screaming at each other outside an Islamic center. One crowd came to stop the Islamification of Texas. The other came to defend their neighbors. Both protests were organized by the same office in St. Petersburg, Russia. The organizers never left their desks. They did not need to. We showed up for them.
This letter is for both sides of that street. For MAGA. For the left. For everyone who stayed home. Nobody reading it is my enemy. Not the man in the red hat. Not the woman with the yard full of signs. Nobody.
That is not softness. That is the whole argument. Stay with me.
To MAGA
Your love of country is not theoretical. It is the flag on the porch and the folded one in the closet. It is the pew your family wore smooth, the shop where you know every machine by its sound, the casserole that shows up after the funeral without being asked. And your grievance is not imaginary, whatever you have been told about yourselves. You watched institutions that demanded your trust get the biggest calls of a generation wrong and pay nothing: a war sold on evidence that was not there, a crash where the banks got saved and the block did not, factories that left with a shrug and a severance, an addiction epidemic that arrived with a sales rep and a lie. You said something was breaking out here. You were called backward for saying it.
You were not backward. You were early.
And the list of what you say you want: work that carries a family, a border that means something, towns your kids do not have to leave, institutions that respect you back. There is nothing hateful on that list. It is what most people in most of history have wanted. It is a deeply American thing to demand.
To the left
You love this country too. Differently, and no less. Yours is the love that takes the founding words literally and asks why they have not arrived for everyone yet. Your lineage is abolition and suffrage, the weekend and the eight-hour day, civil rights, clean water, the ramp into the school, the teacher buying supplies out of their own pocket. Every one of those causes was called radical right up until it became obvious. You keep insisting the promise is not finished until it reaches the person it was never written to include. You are right. That too is a deeply American thing to demand.
Caring about strangers is not weakness. It never was.
What you’ve each been sold
Now the part that costs something to read. It cuts both ways. It is meant to.
MAGA: a machine learned to make money off your love of country by converting it into fear of your countrymen. You know the texts. EMERGENCY. All caps. Eleven at night. You may not know about the pre-checked boxes that turned one donation into a weekly withdrawal until retirees’ accounts ran dry. That happened. The people who built it understood what it did. And some of the loudest voices telling you the 2020 election was stolen were telling each other the opposite in private. We know because their own messages came out in court, and their network paid three-quarters of a billion dollars rather than put those messages in front of a jury. Sit with that. They were not afraid of lying to you. They were afraid of losing you. Your attention is the crop.
Then look at the delivery. The swamp is still the swamp. The tax bill they sold you at the rally was written so the corporate cut was permanent and yours came with an expiration date. The healthcare plan stayed two weeks away for four years. Main Street looks the way Main Street looked. You keep being handed a culture war because a culture war is cheaper than a factory.
Left: your machine burns the same fuel under different branding. Every election is the last election in American history. Every email is begging. Doom is the subscription model, because the feed learned that despair holds you almost as long as rage holds them. You are shown the worst one percent of the other side every day, on purpose, and it works. Researchers call it the perception gap: the more partisan media you consume, the more wrong you are about what the other half believes. Your picture of them was drawn by someone paid by the minute of your disgust.
And your delivery problem is real too. Look at the cities where your side holds every lever. Ask why the rent is highest there, why the housing never gets built, why the sidewalks fill with the people your signs say you welcome. Ask how institutions can fly every flag of justice and still not produce the things justice is made of: homes, wages, safety, schools. Too much of your politics became a language to speak instead of a thing to build. The people you say you are fighting for noticed. Some of them changed their votes. Calling them fools did not bring them back.
What you want, and what the machine needs
Poll the MAGA rank and file: secure the border, yes. Also hands off Social Security. Drug prices a person can say out loud. Monopolies broken up. Work that does not require a degree and a U-Haul. Poll the left’s rank and file: healthcare that survives a layoff, rent that leaves room for groceries, wages that rise, a planet that stays livable, dignity for the people the country keeps finding reasons to skip. Most of that, on both lists, polls like a landslide.
Now watch what the machinery between you and those goals is built to do. Consultants get paid win or lose. Scared pays better. Platforms get paid by the minute of your anger. A fundraising list is worth more frightened than informed. Safe districts mean most politicians fear only their own primary, so a small furious sliver of the electorate decides who everyone else is allowed to vote for in November. And the fight always raises more than the win. The win ends the fundraising.
On both sides, the voters are the good-faith party in the room. The machine’s whole job is converting what you want into what it needs. It needs you angry, scared, and certain your neighbor is the reason.
No enemies does not mean no mirrors
MAGA: your movement calls fellow Americans enemies as a habit now. Traitor. Vermin. Not a real American. You know what those words are for. Cruelty became how loyalty gets proven. Doubt gets tried as treason. A generation’s real grievance has been aimed at election workers and school librarians, people with lanyards and minivans, and almost never at anyone who has held the money. And you have accepted a rule that says the count was rigged wherever your side lost, while the same count, the same night, on the same machines was honest wherever it won. Somewhere under the hat, you know that is not right.
Left: your movement learned contempt as a second language and teaches it as intelligence. Half the country dismissed in a word. Deplorable. Irredeemable. The smirk that goes with it. Purity became a sport that mostly eats your own. The rules of acceptable speech move mid-conversation, and confusion gets read as malice. Disagreement got renamed harm, and harm became the reason you never have to persuade anyone again, only condemn them. And when the working people you claim to champion tell you plainly what they want, you file it as a messaging problem. Somewhere under the yard signs, you know that is not right either.
The two machines are one machine
Pull back far enough and the red machine and the blue machine share a business model. Neither needs your side to win. They need you to keep watching. The rage is the product.
Foreign services do not create the divide. They fertilize it. So does every platform, every list, every show that gets paid in your attention. Remember Travis Street: the organizers did not pick a side. They rented both.
And under it all, we got lonely. The unions, churches, lodges, and leagues, the places Americans were teammates first and voters second, thinned out. Politics moved into the empty room. When your politics becomes your whole identity, compromise feels like dying. It is not dying. It is the job description of a free people.
The entire economy of contempt depends on you never learning one fact. You already agree. Enormous majorities of you, red and blue together. Get big money out of politics. Term limits. Lower drug prices. Hands off Social Security. Background checks. A border both secure and humane. Break up the monopolies. Researchers who brief representative samples of both parties and let them argue it out keep finding the same thing: more than two hundred policy positions with majority support on both sides. The overlap is a landslide with no candidate, because consensus does not fundraise and agreement does not trend. Your common ground is the largest unrepresented constituency in the United States.
To the rest of you
If you belong to neither camp, the independents, the worn out, the ones who stopped answering the phone: you are not apathetic. You are unclaimed, and there are more of you than there are of either of them. The machine has priced in your absence. Your absence is a subsidy.
What you can do, starting tonight
Audit the fear. Unsubscribe from everything that pays its bills by keeping you scared of Americans. Emails, texts, channels, feeds. If a message’s main effect is making you hate someone you have never met, it is not information. It is revenue.
Grade your own side in nouns. Roads. Prices. Homes. Clinics. Paychecks. Not vibes, not insults landed, not how mad you made the other side. The most patriotic sentence available to you this year is: my side did not deliver, and I am saying so out loud.
Vote in the primary. That is the room where the extremism gets manufactured. In 2020, ten percent of eligible voters cast the primary ballots that decided more than eighty percent of the seats in Congress. Two hours on a spring morning buys more sanity than a thousand Novembers of complaint.
Protect the referee. Accept the counts you lose. Demand your own side concede when it loses. The peaceful transfer of power is the family heirloom. Nearly everything else is furniture.
Rejoin something with faces. A crew, a congregation, a league, a shift at the food bank. Anything that meets in person, where politics has to sit next to a casserole. You cannot hate a man you have sandbagged a river with. The algorithm knows that. It prefers you home.
Retire the enemy words. Traitor. Vermin. Deplorable. Fascist as punctuation. Everywhere neighbors have killed neighbors, the words came first. They are not analysis. They are permission slips.
To America
Both of these prides are real, and the country needs both. One of you carries the pride of the built thing: the kept promise, the paid debt, the folded flag. The other carries the pride of the unfinished thing: the promise extended, the door reopened, the union made more perfect. Normandy pride and Selma pride are the same pride reporting to different work sites.
The founders did not design a country where the argument ends. They designed a country where the argument does not have to become a war. A ballot instead of a battlefield. A courtroom instead of a siege. The argument is not the country failing. The argument is the machinery of the country, running. You were never meant to agree. You were meant to stay at the table.
You have been told, in bulk and for money, that the person across the table is your enemy. They are not. They are your co-signer. The loudest tenth of their side is not their side. You know that is true of yours.
The people who profit from your contempt are counting on you never to finish a letter like this.
You just did. Now make it travel.
Send this to one person on the other side. Not your group chat. Not your side, where agreeing costs nothing. The brother you stopped calling. The coworker you stopped eating lunch with. The neighbor whose signs you hate. Send it with one line: I read this and thought of us.
Rage travels because it is paid to. This travels only if someone carries it. A letter passed between two people who were supposed to stay enemies is the one thing the machine cannot price.
One person. Across the street. Tonight.
— An American who is pissed off
Sources and scope
This letter relies on court records, congressional investigation reporting, and public polling, linked below at the claim level. It names no politician and accuses no reader. The examples were chosen because each is documented, not because either side owns the pattern. The pattern is the machinery, and the machinery is bipartisan.
