Enemy Maintenance

“For me to be right, you must always be wrong no matter what” seems to be the mechanics behind a lot of sociopolitical turmoil these days, and it is often utilized by people who intentionally twist positions, most that their opponents never held, simply are not true, consist of terms that have been redefined to fit, situations that have been recontextualized, or they just never happened so they can be “right.”

It happened to me this week when a person attacked me for things I never said, I never did, I never believed, nor have I ever espoused—and no matter how much direct, objective, and in some cases, publicly known, evidence I presented, he just would not accept any of it. His entire package of grievances was a neatly tied up box of manipulated rhetoric, things taken out of context, false memories and mythmaking that was completely and totally false.

His attacks included armies of straw men built from Manichean “reasoning” and it is extremely dangerous. We are witnessing authorities ignoring law (immigration laws, for example), releasing or being extremely soft on criminals, allowing (and in some cases, encouraging) criminal activities (like the massive fraud we are seeing across America), standing with objectively bad people who are enemies of America (hating Israel while supporting Iran and the Hamas Caucus), and creating, supporting and protecting bad policies and programs.

He was super pissed about the Tennessee redistricting effort that culminated in the kicking of the horrible District 9 US Rep, Democrat Steve Cohen, to the curb (the contradiction of a majority black district being represented by a pasty white dude is completely lost on them). Without a drop of reason applied, he argued that eliminating a district expressly created based on race was in fact, a racist act. As I noted a week or so ago, creating “majority minority” districts only help the Democrat Party because there is zero evidence it helps the people of the district.

Spoiler alert: none of this is based on logic, reason or principles—it’s all about owning the conservative opposition. It is about showing regular Americans and religious people how America has always been bad and the goodness and charity of her people is really just racist and evil.

Because can’t win that debate, so they just act in ways contrary to what their opposition would, with the goal of fomenting discord and chaos. It’s also a form of hostage taking, keeping society in chaos until a ransom is paid. That is what the “protests” about ICE and enforcement of immigration law was all about, the left choosing to ignore law that has been followed for half a century, not because they love their Tren de Araguan “neighbors” and human trafficking “Maryland Dads”, but because they hate President Trump.

After thinking it through my own conversations with these folks and seeing elements of several logical fallacies in the process, I went in search of what to call it and didn’t really find any one thing that fit—so I’ll just bundle them all together and call it “enemy maintenance.”

In highly polarized political and cultural environments, many people no longer define themselves primarily by what they believe, but by what they oppose. Their identity becomes dependent upon the existence of an enemy. Once that happens, nuance becomes dangerous because it softens the contrast. Agreement becomes betrayal because it threatens tribal cohesion. Accuracy itself becomes secondary to utility — not whether something is true, but whether it helps maintain the narrative and preserve the moral divide between “us” and “them.”

And honesty, it is not just about winning the argument, it becomes so personal that it is about existence. Many of these folks are so wrapped up in being wrong that it has become their reason for existing. As much as people like Elon Musk are driven by challenge and success, these people are driven by failure narratives that they redefine as winning. They live simply to argue and without the energy gained by simply opposing, they have no other identity, their entire existence is based on telling the world, and themselves, how bad I am, and the louder the better.

That is why modern sociopolitical conflict so often involves twisting positions beyond recognition, reframing historical events, redefining words to fit ideological needs, and leveling accusations detached from evidence or context. Opponents are no longer portrayed as merely mistaken, but as immoral, irrational, dangerous, or fundamentally illegitimate. If a movement’s legitimacy depends upon permanent moral contrast, then the opposition cannot simply be different; it must be continually reconstructed as evil. The broader mechanism could be described as ideological othering through narrative manipulation.

None of it is true.

That’s why I settled on the term “enemy maintenance.”