News of the World - A battle cry for the Harvard oppressed approaching the end of their eight and half hour hunger strike.
Oppressor vs. Oppressed: The Fentanyl of Vanity.
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The Oppressor vs. Oppressed framework has become the Swiss Army knife of modern grievance culture—a multifaceted tool for simplifying complexity and alleviating the existential ache that we all face before we pass away. Nuance, after all, is hard.
Peeling back layers of motivation, history, and context is the intellectual equivalent of open-heart surgery with a spoon. Who has the time or patience for that? Where’s the dopamine hit? Where’s the glittering moment of epistemic triumph when you declare, “Behold! I have uncovered the truth?
It never comes.
Finding an oppressor, though—that’s glorious.
Self-righteousness is the weed high of moral vanity: pungent, immediate, and available without prescription. And it comes with a companion animal—the ever-faithful scapegoat.
No matter how brutally it’s kicked, how unfairly it’s blamed, it never leaves. It simply trudges on, absorbing every blow, every projection, every grotesque oversimplification. It’s the Stockholm dog that never bites.
But what is oppression? Let’s not get bogged down in political theory. Oppression might be as simple as not getting what you want or being outnumbered in an argument. It’s a tug-rope you can pull to haul yourself back into the warm bath of grievance.
And those cloaked in the noble garb of “the oppressed” rarely admit to vengeance. No, no—it’s always righteous. “We were mistreated. We’ve had enough. My parents missed my birthday, and I had to mow the lawn every Saturday. I only got the iPhone 14.”
Oh—sorry. Those were the grievances of the Harvard protesters after their legendary eight-and-a-half-hour hunger strike.
The prisons are full of the oppressed—just ask them. Jihadists, warlords, terror cells: PLO, ISIS, LRA, Haqqani, Jemaah Islamiya—they are, by their admission, simply the bruised fists of God. The oppressed in arms. Outnumbered, outgunned, but spiritually entitled. Are their numbers smaller than their foes? Undoubtedly. Are their desires pure? Assuredly. Are they oppressed? Always.
This is the magic of O v. O. It creates a binary moral cosmology where one’s place on the victimhood index determines virtue.
It’s a simple taxonomy of pain. Unless, of course, it’s gender—we can’t have binaries there. Imagine the logistical nightmare of deciding who’s the real victim in a legal battle between a wealthy trans male landlord and a poor, white Appalachian woman facing eviction. It’s untenable. Better to fudge the math.
So we create a hierarchy, a point system, a kind of Intersectional Fantasy League, where oppression is cumulative—except when it isn’t. A Black woman born in poverty? +2. A trans lawyer removing tampon dispensers from the men’s room? -2. The math gets messy. So we fudge it again, assign the highest rank to whoever’s screaming loudest, and pretend the rest don’t exist.
Because complexity is exhausting.
O v. O is efficient. Why dialogue when you can shout? Why investigate when you can indict? It’s easier to park the Subaru, unload the placards, and shriek at a synagogue than it is to think. Thought is hard. Screaming is cardio.
But the real genius of O v. O is that it erases agency. Push it hard enough, and no one is ever responsible for anything. It is the fentanyl of vanity, both for the “oppressed” and for their handlers—the professional mourners of modern justice. Those in charge of narrating oppression must keep the dial turned to eleven. Let in even a shaft of light—hope, effort, self-reflection—and the illusion begins to shatter.
For the oppressed, the payoff is freedom from responsibility. But sometimes, inconveniently, they get a little weepy, moaning that they can’t change anything. Don’t worry. Ignore it. A bit of gasoline huffing or spiritual self-harm will set them right again. When you see them lying in the gutter crying, just know: those are tears of joy.
Now, yes, occasionally a few radicals drift off-message. They begin to suspect that perhaps the world doesn’t owe them a utopia. They begin to question the sacred narrative of the victim. This is dangerous. It denies them the joy of destruction, the thrill of moral certainty, the ecstasy of hierarchical grievance, the narcotic stupor of learned helplessness.
It even risks the most dreaded outcome of all: hope.
As Alfred reminded Bruce Wayne, some people just want to watch the world burn. And O v. O hands them the matches, the gasoline, and the moral license. They burn and forget to rebuild. But once in a while, someone blinks—someone stops dancing around the fire and starts asking, “What comes next?”
That, dear reader, is heresy.
Here is the scapegoat—poor fellow.
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