If you were to design a laboratory experiment to test the absolute lower limits of human intelligence, you couldn’t build a better petri dish than Minneapolis on a Saturday. Once again, I found myself scrolling through the reports of the weekend’s festivities, forcing my brain to process the same tired script that this country has been reenacting for years. The cast changes slightly—this time featuring the right-wing 'activist' Jake Lang—but the plot remains excruciatingly, painfully derivative. It is the 'Fast and Furious' franchise of political discourse: loud, devoid of logic, and seemingly destined to continue until the heat death of the universe.

Let’s dissect this latest episode of American theater. Jake Lang decided to hold a 'pro-ICE' rally. In Minneapolis. Let’s pause and appreciate the sheer, unadulterated cynicism of that decision. This wasn’t a policy summit. This wasn’t an attempt to win hearts and minds. This was a man walking into a bear cage slathered in honey and salmon, screaming that he hates bears, and then acting surprised when the claws came out. Lang’s gathering was reportedly 'small.' Of course it was small. Nobody with a job, a mortgage, or a functioning frontal lobe spends their Saturday afternoon standing on a sidewalk cheering for a federal law enforcement agency. The only people who show up to a pro-ICE rally are grifters looking for B-roll footage for their victim-complex documentaries and people who have been banned from their local bowling alleys for yelling at the pins.

But the Right’s performative trolling is only half the equation. A troll, by definition, requires a reaction to exist. Without a bridge to guard, the troll is just a homeless weirdo living in a damp ditch. Enter the counter-protesters. Like clockwork, or perhaps like Pavlov’s most disappointing dogs, the opposition materialized within minutes. They saw the bait dangling on the hook—a tiny, pathetic gathering of right-wing agitators—and instead of swimming past it with a dignified smirk, they swallowed it whole. They rushed in, ensuring that what would have been a forgotten gathering of misfits became a 'clash,' a 'violent confrontation,' and, most importantly, a headline.

I look at this dynamic and I don’t see ideological warfare. I see a symbiotic relationship. These two groups, supposedly mortal enemies, are actually lovers locked in a toxic embrace. They need each other. Desperately. Without the counter-protesters, Jake Lang is just a man yelling at clouds. Without Jake Lang, the counter-protesters are just people dressed in black with nowhere to direct their nebulous angst. They complete one another. They provide each other with purpose, with content for their social media feeds, and with the intoxicating rush of adrenaline that comes from punching a stranger over a disagreement about government bureaucracy.

The reports say the confrontation turned violent 'within minutes.' naturally. Dialogue is dead; nuance is a corpse rotting in the corner that everyone is politely ignoring. Why talk when you can shove? Why debate when you can participate in a street brawl that solves absolutely nothing but allows everyone involved to go home and feel like a soldier in a war that exists entirely in their own heads? The Right gets to cry about 'leftist mobs' and fundraise off the footage. The Left gets to pat themselves on the back for 'shutting down fascism' by beating up a handful of nobodies. It is a perfect, closed loop of idiocy where everyone wins the prize of self-righteousness, and the rest of us lose the will to live.

What is truly exhausting is the predictability of the geography. Minneapolis has become the designated playpen for this nonsense. It is a city 'on edge,' we are told. But is it really on edge, or is it just bored? Is it a powder keg, or is it just a stage where we allow the most maladjusted members of our society to cosplay as revolutionaries? Watching this unfold from a distance, I don’t feel anger anymore. I don’t feel fear. I feel a profound, bone-deep boredom. I am bored of the provocateurs who mistake obnoxiousness for patriotism. I am bored of the reactionaries who mistake street violence for justice. And I am certainly bored of pretending that any of this matters.

This wasn’t a clash of ideas. It wasn’t a battle for the soul of the nation. It was two groups of bored, angry people meeting up to validate each other's delusions of grandeur. It is the modern American mating ritual: the provocateur preens, the reactor charges, and together they birth a news cycle that makes us all just a little bit stupider. If this is the best political discourse we can muster, perhaps we should just hand the keys over to the cockroaches and be done with it. At least they have the decency to scurry away when you turn the lights on.