Taking a break from viral pandemics, we’re going to instead touch upon a pandemic that is unique to America: the pandemic of gun violence, which as we all know, is caused solely by exposing children to violent videogames. This is why I am lobbying Congress to pass a bill forcing Rockstar Games to delay the release of the long-awaited Grand Theft Auto 6 until it is fully reworked so that you can only kill & torture enemies of American freedom: random fishermen, schoolgirls, taxi drivers, and other nefarious enemies undermining our glorious democracy. We don’t want our youth being indoctrinated into the woke subterfuge of questioning white men in positions of authority! Jack Thompson for President 2028!
America’s Cultural Violence Fetish
In all seriousness, America’s culture of gun fetishization is a stain of obscenity upon our nation, and we are suffering the consequences of it. For example, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001, many Americans donned yellow ribbons to “support our troops,” as in *all* of the troops who were fighting in Afghanistan. Over the years, that seamlessly transitioned into a fetishization of “The 1%,” just as American culture worships the wealthy and corrupt: The elite “Tier-1 operator,” “high speed low drag slingin’ bodies,” and the general “tactical” aesthetic. Many love to “cosplay” as members of Delta Force (Army), Seal Team 6 (Navy), MARSOC (Marines), Blackwater (PMC), etc. The fact that I know all of this has inspired me to subscribe to a smartphone social extraction app:
The civilian gun ownership market is now fixated on marketing this tactical aesthetic, to a point of absurdity. It’s not uncommon to see people spending $1500 on an AR-15 and then another $3000 on attachments before even bothering to learn the basic fundamentals of gun safety and marksmanship. Most horrifyingly, there have been numerous attempts to butcher the service rifle of the Soviet Union in World War 2, the bolt-action Mosin Nagant, to make it “tactical.” Gun perverts do a lot of stupid stuff and have to learn reality the hard way:
Mass media has fixated on this “tactical” aesthetic as well. Television and film is rife with programming about elite “operators” who regularly commit war cri...I mean, don’t play by the rules of those wimpy weenie limp-dicked Washington bureaucrats! To name a handful off the top of my head: The Unit, Zero Dark Thirty, that Benghazi flick with Chris Pratt, etc. Most notably, 12 Strong with Chris Hemsworth chooses to omit the reality that American special forces provided cash and arms to Afghani drug smugglers who sexually abused little boys as a status symbol. That might just have put a damper on all the ooh-rah chest pumping jingoism. Decades later, we handed Afghanistan back to the Taliban with a mountain of American-manufactured military hardware and vehicles that you, the taxpayer, footed the bill for.
Videogames are rife with this as well, with the first-person-shooter genre almost entirely focused on catering to this aesthetic. In the recent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, not to be confused with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the player participates in an interactive lynching set during a hypothetical conflict with North Korea while failing to mention how America previously slaughtered millions of their people, bombing entire villages with napalm; an adhesive flammable substance that sticks to your skin as it burns you alive. There’s also no mention of how we employed war criminals from the Imperial Japanese bioweapons division, Unit 731, to contaminate civilian homes with smallpox. While it’s easy to make all sorts of criticisms and caricatures of North Korea, perhaps we’d be better off taking a hard look in the mirror at ourselves and the horrors we’ve inflicted before throwing stones:
Americans are drowning in a culture of firearm fetishization that sees much of the world as soulless non-player-characters to be casually mowed down by men in tactical gear with state-of-the-art weapons. The relatable working class action heroes of the 1980s, such as waitress Sarah Connor (The Terminator) or space trucker Ripley (Alien), are a thing of the past. We are taught that a relentless torrent of senseless violence is the only solution to the world’s problems. So no wonder that shooting one another is how we resolve our conflicts!
Which brings us to Malcolm Gladwell, an alleged intellectual.
The Faux Intellectual Tobacco Huckster
In 1990, a humble tobacco lobbyist published a devastating warning: If anti-smoking campaigns succeed, the American economy is going to crash as pensions and Social Security are drained dry. If fewer Americans die of cancer and other causes linked to smoking, they’ll live longer, and that will create an undue burden on the economy! This vocal display of moral depravity did not see Malcolm violently shouted out of the public sphere in shame for his deathmaking.
Instead, with shallow dreck such as The Tipping Point and Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell seamlessly pivoted into the role of the public intellectual: a master understander of how everything in the world works. This incredibly lucrative publishing career allowed Gladwell to wash away the stain of being an advocate for one of the most horrific and nefarious industries with a mountain of blood on its hands. You have to really dig through the archives of the Internet, most notably an Exiled Online article by Yasha Levine, to get an honest apprasial of Gladwell and who he really is:
“Gladwell analyzed various studies into teen smoking and came to the simple conclusion that kids pick up the habit simply because they want to emulate cool people, totally ignoring the countless millions of dollars big tobacco spent (and probably still does) specifically targeting kids.” -Yasha Levine, The Exiled
Malcolm Gladwell is sadly back with a new book, where he has decided that he has conceived of a… final solution to America’s crisis of gun violence, something that nobody, and I certainly mean absolutely no one, has ever thought about prior to 2026. Just as political scientists (still not a real science!) Stephen Macedo & Frances Lee bragged about refusing to consult actual doctors and scientists to write a revisionist fanfiction, Gladwell has courageously anointed his unqualified the ultimate judge of how to deal with American gun violence. Before I tell you what this tobacco lobbyist’s master plan is, let’s give you some context from a little hole in the wall some of you mighta heard of… it’s called… Reality.
As I’ve written before, a 2020 report found that police departments across America are rife with white supremacists hooked on a steady stream of racist social media propaganda. After exploiting the murder of Heather Heyer by white supremacists to launch his campaign, Joe “shoot them in the leg” Biden diverted hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of pandemic relief funding to buy military toys (including assault rifles) and surveillance tools for these same police departments rife with white supremacists. “Fund them, fund them, fund them,” he said.
A “Final Solution” to Gun Violence
Malcolm Gladwell has dedicated an entire book in which he argues that Biden simply didn’t go far enough. Even in the midst of ICE committing a domestic terror campaign against the American public, Gladwell has surmised from atop a detached place of wealth and comfort that the final solution to America’s gun violence problem is...
...even more armed police on America’s streets.
No, really. Through an extended sprint of butchering data, misreading research studies, and prioritizing his comfort as a wealthy liberal white man, Gladwell thinks that what America really needs is a massive expansion of disgruntled and highly propagandized white supremacists stomping the pavement, just waiting for the opportune moment to brutalize anyone at the slightest offense. Yes, Gladwell is advocating for an American Gestapo. Weren’t we warned about this?
There’s no consideration for how the laws are unequally enforced in America. Let’s take the opioid epidemic that has wreaked havoc on America, for example. Had the criminals responsible been Black men in streetwear instead of white guys in expensive suits, there would be calls for public hangings for the devastation they’d wrought. Is Gladwell calling for cops to shoot murderous pharmaceutical and health insurance executives in the head? No, of course not.
The Anguish of the Wonk
Let’s say that Gladwell gets his way, and then some. Now you can’t go thirty seconds without seeing cops in tactical gear on every street corner, there’s armed drones hovering over every street, and an “artifical intelligence” dispatch is regularly deploying armed units to terrorize non-white kids for the crime of....holding a bag of chips. Gun violence doesn’t vanish, and instead, we are treated to another horrific series of tragic viral videos in which unarmed Americans are publicly executed by Gladwell’s beloved turbo-armed thugs.
Do you think multi-millionaire faux-intellectual Gladwell would dare to admit error? Do you think he’d demand to have his book redacted from sale? Why would he? Malcolm’s already made his money. He will just casually move on to the next issue he can capitalize on with his willfully ignorant “insights.”
As America’s misadventures in the Middle East has taught us, when you dump a mountain of guns and bombs in a certain part of the world, violence inevitably erupts. This is basic, basic cause-and-effect. Gladwell, in all his genius, is arguing that more guns on American streets will somehow result in the opposite of this. Here’s a question for Malcolm:
What’s it like making a career out of being paid to be this stupid?
Learning is for Chumps
Instead of using his platform to elevate the actual people doing the hard work to study gun violence and develop real, working policy to combat gun violence, Malcolm Gladwell casually decided that he magically knew better. Oddly enough, I am reminded of a quote by the Chief Warrant Officer of Babylon 5, Michael Garibaldi:
“They all think they know the rules better than you do. Your job is to show them they don’t. But you can’t just jam a PPG rifle in their nasal cilia and say, ‘Yo, bud, can’t drop that bubblegum there.’ You’ve got to know how to treat them right. Or make them THINK you’re treating them right, even when you ain’t. This is called DI-PLO-MA-CY. Count the syllables. If the law of averages is with me, some of you greenies can probably even pronounce it. But here’s the rub: now you’ve got to practice it.” -Michael Garibaldi, Babylon 5 Security Manual
Gladwell’s latest book is an oversized admission that he needs to be dragged by the ear back to remedial education and learn about some basic concepts, such as LIST-EN-ING and READ-ING. Had Malcolm mastered those courses in grade school, perhaps he wouldn’t have written an entire screed arguing for a fascist dystopian hellscape. Instead, he chose to obsess over getting to hear the sound of his own voice.
Between the data crimes and the arrogant ignorance, Gladwell’s latest book is yet another textbook example of how to *not* critically engage with the challenges we face in the world. This is precisely the very sort of “Good German” that Trump and MAGA needs to carry out the current regime of domestic terror. Perhaps this liberal genius should “reach across the aisle” and go “cooter mogging” with dead-eyed OnlyFans racist Savanna Cannon if he really wants to break some sales records?
Personally, I’d like to live in a nation where we challenge one another to become smarter, not dumber. I bet that most of you would too.
