Fact Check Me: Outrage Is Not a Personality

People love calling out hypocrisy. Especially when it’s easy.

A celebrity talks about stolen land.

“Well, they own property on stolen land too.”

Yeah. So do you. So do I. That’s not a contradiction — that’s the point.

Acknowledging that land was taken violently isn’t a demand for personal purity or mass self-exile. It’s a statement of historical fact. A starting place. You don’t fix the wrongs of the past by pretending they never happened, and you don’t build a shared future by erasing how we got here.

We all belong on this land now. That doesn’t require amnesia.

The same lazy logic shows up when people rage at advocates who criticize policing and then dare to have personal security.

“Defund the police” was never about abolishing safety. It was about reallocating resources, improving training, accountability, and outcomes. And private security — better trained, better paid, more narrowly tasked, and accountable — doesn’t undermine that argument. It proves it.

If anything, it sets the example everyone deserves.

But instead of grappling with that, people reach for gotchas. Because engaging with substance is harder than pointing at a house, a bodyguard, or a bank account.

The resentment deepens when an advocate succeeds.

A political commentator starts making videos in her kitchen. People listen. She builds an audience. She makes money. Suddenly she’s a “grifter.”

Funny how making money only becomes immoral when someone you don’t like does it.

If wealth disqualifies a voice, then you’ve disqualified almost everyone you’ve ever voted for. And if ambition is a sin, then politics itself is indefensible. The truth is simpler: people hate when someone speaks without permission — and worse, when people listen.

So they tear them down. And here’s the tragedy: they tear down people who are advocating for them.

Instead of engaging the ideas, they invent purity tests: You own property? Hypocrite.

You have security? Hypocrite.

You made money? Sellout.

Those tests aren’t about ethics. They’re about permission to disengage.

And while that’s happening, the same people turn around and follow figures who act like overseers — who profit from obedience, resentment, and silence. These figures don’t need truth. They need repetition. Say something long enough and it becomes reality for anyone who hasn’t been taught how to think critically.

“Stay in your lane.”

“Shut up and sing.”

“Dribble the ball.”

It’s not advice. It’s a command. Power saying your value is conditional on silence.

And when celebrities speak anyway — knowing they could lose fans, money, safety — that’s not narcissism. That’s risk. Conviction in a culture that rewards conformity.

Instead of recognizing that, people melt down.

They burn their shoes.

They shoot their beer.

They destroy things they already paid for.

That’s not protest. That’s a tantrum with props.

If you don’t like a company, you stop buying from them. Quietly. Effectively. Like an adult. Boycotts work precisely because they’re boring. Rage just feeds the thing you claim to hate.

And rage is expensive.

It takes energy to stay angry all the time. To carry outrage like a backpack everywhere you go. Is that really the personality you want? To be defined by what you hate?

Anger has a place. It’s a signal. But there’s a difference between fighting because you despise something and fighting because you love something enough to protect it.

One burns you out.

The other sustains you.

Nowhere is this clearer than when people scream about capitalism being challenged — right up until capitalism does exactly what capitalism does. Expands markets. Finds new customers. Chases profit.

Suddenly it’s a moral crisis because a group you don’t like is drinking the beer you like.

What — you think a trans person drinking a Bud Light is going to turn you gay?

That’s not economics. That’s insecurity.

You don’t get to defend the free market until it stops centering you. Capitalism doesn’t care about your identity. It never has. If that bothers you, the issue isn’t trans people — it’s the system you’ve been cheering for.

And that leads to the final question, the uncomfortable one:

If your identity is tied to the products you buy or the media you consume — do you have an identity at all?

A real identity survives disagreement. It doesn’t collapse when a brand changes its marketing or a show adds a character you don’t like. It isn’t outsourced to corporations, algorithms, or outrage cycles.

Taste is not character. Consumption is not conviction.

If disagreement feels like an attack, if change feels like theft, if someone else existing feels like a threat — that’s not strength. That’s dependence.

Outrage is easy. Identity is hard.

And growing up often starts the moment you realize you were never being attacked — your preferences just weren’t being centered anymore.

That’s not a crisis.

That’s reality checking you.

Fact check me.