The Screen: How Partisan Theater Keeps the Power Brokers Scoring
A Treatise on the Manufactured Division of the American Public
I. The Play
Do we have any basketball fans in the house?
Just in case you're reading this and never got into b-ball, I'll quickly define the term "screen." When MJ wants to take the ball to the hoop, Scotty follows a route that intercepts Isaiah using his body as a blockade — or screen. While Scotty and Isaiah fuss with each other, MJ gets to score.
Simple play. Textbook basketball. And the most elegant political metaphor you'll encounter this decade.
My hope is that this rudimentary allegory helps to explain how most of us are Scotty and Isaiah, fussing with each other, while MJ gets what he wants. While we are fussing in the streets and on the ground, the power brokers get what they want. They make legislation while we fuss. The Blues make AB5, the Reds make Ag-Gag Laws. Both are evil, but they use Partisanship to get Scotty and Isaiah to fuss, while they get to be MJ and take the ball to the hole they want.
They'd like you to think their motives are noble and therefore the "ends justify the means." This just isn't so. Were their motives noble, they would not need to employ subterfuge.
That last line bears repeating, because it is the skeleton key to this entire treatise: Were their motives noble, they would not need to employ subterfuge.
Sit with that. Roll it around your mind. Let it settle into the marrow before we proceed, because everything that follows is an elaboration on that single, devastating truth.
II. The Geometry of Distraction
Here's what makes the screen such a perfect allegory: it is not incidental to the play. It is the-play. MJ doesn't score in spite of the chaos between Scotty and Isaiah — he scores because of it. The fussing is not a side effect; it is a precondition. The screen is drawn up on the whiteboard before the whistle blows. It's designed. It's rehearsed. It's intentional.
And so it goes in the halls of power.
When you watch cable news — any channel, pick your poison — and you see two pundits screaming past each other about some culture war flashpoint, you are watching a screen being set. When your uncle and your cousin can't get through Thanksgiving dinner without somebody flipping the table over pronouns or prayer in schools, you are watching a screen being set. When your coworker in the next cubicle thinks you're the enemy because you vote differently, you are living inside a screen.
The screen is not the point. The screen is never the point. The screen is the mechanism by which the point is obscured.
So what is the point? The point is the ball going through the hoop. The point is the legislation that gets signed while you're arguing on Facebook. The point is the regulatory capture that happens while you're doom-scrolling Twitter. The point is the consolidation of power and capital that proceeds, uninterrupted, behind the curtain of your manufactured outrage.
Let's talk about what that looks like in practice.
III. AB5 — The Blue Screen
California's Assembly Bill 5, for those unfamiliar, was sold to the public as a worker protection law. The pitch was simple, noble-sounding, and delivered with all the moral certainty that the Blues can muster: independent contractors are being exploited, and we're going to reclassify them as employees so they get benefits, protections, and dignity.
Sounds great on the bumper sticker. Sounds like justice. Sounds like the little guy finally getting a fair shake.
Here's what actually happened.
AB5 decimated freelancers. Writers, musicians, interpreters, graphic designers, truck owner-operators, and a constellation of independent professionals who had chosen the freelance life — who valued its flexibility, its autonomy, its fundamental alignment with their creative or entrepreneurial spirit — were told, in effect, that the state knew better than they did how they should work.
The bill didn't protect the vulnerable. It made the self-sufficient vulnerable. It didn't lift people up; it collapsed the scaffolding they'd built for themselves, then handed the wreckage to large employers who were only too happy to absorb a newly captive labor force on their terms. The gig companies, of course, spent $200 million to exempt themselves via Proposition 22. The freelance translator working from her kitchen table? She didn't have $200 million. She had a career she loved, and then she didn't.
But here's the thing that should make your blood run cold: the architects of AB5 knew this would happen. They knew who would be hurt. They knew that the people most impacted would be individual operators, solo entrepreneurs, and small-scale creatives — people with no lobby, no PAC, no war chest. People who don't write legislation. People who are, in this allegory, Scotty and Isaiah.
And while the public debated whether AB5 was a triumph of labor rights or an overreach of government regulation — while Scotty and Isaiah fussed — MJ scored. The institutional beneficiaries consolidated. The power structures that were already entrenched became more entrenched. The people who were supposed to be helped became collateral.
The Blues told you it was noble. But nobility does not require subterfuge. Nobility does not require that you disguise the ball.
IV. Ag-Gag Laws — The Red Screen
Now let's walk across the aisle, because this is not a partisan essay. This is an anti-partisan essay. And the Reds have their own screen game that is every bit as cynical, every bit as calculated, and every bit as corrosive to the public interest.
Ag-Gag laws — shorthand for a collection of state-level statutes primarily championed by Republican legislatures — criminalize the act of documenting conditions inside agricultural facilities. In plain English: if someone goes undercover at a factory farm and films animals standing in their own waste, confined in cages so small they can't turn around, pumped full of antibiotics and living in conditions that would make a horror filmmaker squeamish, that person can be prosecuted. Not the facility. The person with the camera.
Read that again. The person who documents the cruelty is the criminal. Not the person who perpetrates it.
The justification, as always, is dressed in the language of virtue. "We're protecting farmers." "We're protecting private property." "We're protecting biosecurity." "We're protecting the food supply."
From what? From the public seeing what's in it?
If your operation is so righteous that it needs legal fortification against the mere act of being photographed, what does that tell you about the operation? If the "ends" of agricultural efficiency are so noble, why do the "means" require making transparency a felony?
Ag-Gag laws exist for one reason: to protect the profit margins of industrial agriculture by ensuring that the public never sees the true cost of cheap meat. They are not about farmers. The family farmer with 40 head of cattle has nothing to fear from a camera. Ag-Gag laws protect the concentrated animal feeding operations — the CAFOs — the corporate behemoths that process tens of thousands of animals per facility, that lobby relentlessly, and that depend on public ignorance as a business model.
And while the public argues about whether vegans are annoying, whether PETA goes too far, whether animal rights activists are "radical" — while Scotty and Isaiah fuss — MJ drives the lane. Another Ag-Gag law passes. Another state makes it harder for you to know what's in your food, how it got there, and what suffered to produce it.
The Reds told you it was noble. But nobility does not hide behind legal barricades. Nobility does not make the truth illegal.
V. The Symmetry of the Swindle
Here is where most political commentary fails, and where most people lose the thread: they see the screen on one side and think the other side is playing straight.
Blue partisans see Ag-Gag laws and say, "See? The Reds are corrupt. They're in bed with corporate agriculture." And they're right. But then they go home and defend AB5 because their team drew it up, and surely their team's motives are pure. Meanwhile, Red partisans see AB5 and say, "See? The Blues are authoritarian. They want to regulate your life." And they're right. But then they go home and defend Ag-Gag because their team drew it up, and surely their team is protecting honest, hardworking Americans.
Both sides are right about the other side. Both sides are blind about their own. And this selective blindness — this asymmetric skepticism — is not a bug in the system. It is the system. It is the screen.
The power brokers on both sides of the aisle understand something that most of us refuse to accept: the partisan framework itself is the instrument of control. It is not a lens through which you see reality clearly; it is a filter that ensures you only see the half of the corruption that isn't wearing your team's jersey.
Think about it structurally. What do AB5 and Ag-Gag laws have in common? Strip away the window dressing, and both of them:
Consolidate power in the hands of large institutional actors at the expense of individuals. Restrict the freedom of ordinary people — to work as they choose, to document what they see. Were authored and championed by politicians beholden to concentrated interests rather than distributed constituencies. Were sold to the public using the language of protection and virtue. Required subterfuge — misdirection, emotional manipulation, deliberate obfuscation of consequences — to achieve passage.
The surface content is different. The underlying architecture is identical. The Blues screen for corporate labor consolidation. The Reds screen for corporate agricultural impunity. Different jerseys, same play.
And we keep falling for it because we are so deeply, so profoundly invested in the fiction that our team is the good one. That our MJ is scoring for the right reasons.
VI. The Subterfuge Principle
Let me return to the skeleton key: Were their motives noble, they would not need to employ subterfuge.
This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a diagnostic tool. It is the single most reliable method available to any citizen for evaluating the legitimacy of any piece of legislation, any political campaign, any institutional initiative.
Ask yourself: is subterfuge present?
Is the true effect of the policy being obscured? Are emotional triggers being used to bypass rational evaluation? Are critics being demonized rather than addressed? Is the beneficiary class being disguised? Are complex consequences being reduced to simple slogans? Is the urgency artificial?
If the answer to any of these is yes, you are being screened. Full stop. You are Scotty or Isaiah, and someone is driving to the hoop while you fuss.
Noble motives do not require concealment. A genuinely good law can be explained in plain language, and its consequences can be described honestly, and it will still garner support because people are not, contrary to what the power brokers believe, stupid. People can recognize a good policy. People can weigh tradeoffs. People can handle nuance.
The reason subterfuge is employed is not because the public is too dumb to understand the policy. It is because the public is smart enough to reject it if they saw it clearly. The subterfuge is not a concession to complexity. It is an admission of illegitimacy.
Every time a politician says, "It's complicated," what they frequently mean is, "If I explained this simply, you wouldn't let me do it." Every time a pundit says, "You don't understand the nuance," what they frequently mean is, "The nuance is where we hid the grift."
VII. The Machinery of the Fuss
Understanding that the screen exists is step one. Understanding how it is manufactured is step two. Because the fuss between Scotty and Isaiah doesn't happen organically. It is engineered with extraordinary precision, funded lavishly, and maintained with industrial-grade infrastructure.
Let's name the machinery.
Media Polarization. This is the most visible component of the screen. The 24-hour news cycle is not designed to inform you. It is designed to activate you. Activation means emotional engagement. Emotional engagement means choosing a side. Choosing a side means adopting a package of positions that were bundled for you by people whose interests do not align with yours. Once you've adopted the package, you will defend it against the people who adopted the other package, and you will do so with the passion of someone who believes they arrived at these positions independently. You didn't. They were sold to you, and the purchase price was your attention.
Social Media Amplification. If cable news is the engine, social media is the accelerant. The algorithms that govern your feed do not care about truth, nuance, or civic health. They care about engagement. And engagement is maximized by conflict. Every time you share a post dunking on the other side, you are running the play. Every time you argue in the comments, you are setting the screen. Every time you feel that dopamine hit of righteous indignation, you are being used — not by the person you're arguing with, but by the system that profits from the argument itself.
Identity Capture. This is perhaps the most insidious mechanism. At some point in the last few decades, political affiliation stopped being a matter of policy preference and became a matter of identity. You don't just agree with the Blues or the Reds — you are Blue or Red. This means that an attack on your party's position feels like an attack on you. Criticism of a policy feels like a personal insult. And persuasion becomes virtually impossible, because people will endure almost any logical contradiction before they will endure an identity crisis.
The power brokers understand this. They cultivate it. They spend billions ensuring that your political affiliation is woven so tightly into your sense of self that you cannot separate the two without feeling like you're losing something fundamental. Because once your identity is captured, you will do their screening for free. You will set the pick on Isaiah without being asked. You will fuss on command.
Controlled Opposition and the Illusion of Choice. Here's the darkest part of the machinery: the two "sides" are not opponents. They are collaborators in a system that requires the appearance of opposition to function. The Blues need the Reds. The Reds need the Blues. Without the other team, there is no screen to set, no fuss to manufacture, no distraction behind which to operate.
This does not mean every individual politician is cynically performing. Many true believers exist on both sides — people who genuinely think they're fighting the good fight. But the true believers are the most effective screeners precisely because they are sincere. Scotty doesn't need to know he's setting a screen for MJ. He just needs to believe he's fighting Isaiah for a good reason.
VIII. The Spectators
There is one more role in this allegory that we haven't discussed: the spectators. The people in the stands. The 20,000 fans who paid $200 a seat to watch the game.
In our political metaphor, the spectators are the broader public — the millions who are not actively fussing, who are not Scotty or Isaiah, but who are watching the game and rooting for one side. And here's the thing about spectators: they think they're participating. They wear the jersey. They paint their faces. They scream until they're hoarse. They feel, viscerally, that their energy matters, that they are part of something, that the outcome of the game is their outcome.
But the spectators don't touch the ball. They don't make the plays. They don't write the contracts. They don't share in the revenue. They pay for the privilege of emotional investment in an outcome that was never theirs to influence, and they go home in the jersey of a team that will never know their name.
When you vote every four years and then spend the intervening 1,461 days arguing about politics on the internet, you are a spectator. You are emotionally invested. You are financially contributing. You are energetically depleted. And you are not materially affecting the outcome.
This is not an argument against voting. Vote. By all means, vote. But understand what voting is and what it isn't. Voting is a single data point in a system designed to dilute your influence. It is not the totality of your civic power. It is not even the most potent expression of it. The most potent expression of your civic power is what you do on the other 1,460 days — and the power brokers have engineered an entire entertainment complex designed to ensure that what you do on those days is fuss.
IX. The Escape
So how do you stop being screened? How do you stop being Scotty, stop being Isaiah, stop being the spectator in the $200 seat?
The first step is the hardest, and it is this: abandon your team.
I don't mean stop voting. I don't mean disengage from civic life. I mean abandon the emotional allegiance that makes you defend your side's AB5 while attacking the other side's Ag-Gag, or vice versa. Abandon the identity capture. Refuse the jersey.
This will feel like loss. It is designed to feel like loss. The machinery of partisanship has been engineered to make departure feel like betrayal, like exile, like losing your tribe. And in a society that is increasingly atomized and lonely, the threat of tribal exile is potent. The parties know this. They leverage it.
But what you lose in tribal belonging, you gain in clarity. And clarity is the one thing the power brokers cannot afford for you to have.
Once you have clarity, apply the Subterfuge Principle relentlessly. Every piece of legislation, regardless of which team authored it: Is subterfuge present? Is the true beneficiary being disguised? Is emotional manipulation being deployed? If yes, reject it. Not because the other team told you to. Not because your team told you to accept it. Because you evaluated it, independently, using the only diagnostic that matters.
The second step is to redirect your energy. Every hour you spend arguing with the other team's Scotty or Isaiah is an hour you are not spending building something outside the system entirely. Every dollar you spend on the spectacle is a dollar you are not spending on your community, your neighbors, your local institutions — the structures that are small enough for your voice to actually carry weight.
The power brokers want you playing their game, on their court, by their rules. They want you in the arena. Because in the arena, you are a participant in their system, and their system is designed so that the only people who score are the ones who drew up the play.
The radical act — the genuinely punk act — is to leave the arena. To stop fussing. To build something they don't control, on ground they don't own, by rules they didn't write.
X. The Last Screen
There is one final screen I need to name, and it is the most difficult to see because it is the screen that protects all the other screens:
The belief that this essay is about basketball.
It was never about basketball. Basketball is beautiful. Basketball is honest. In basketball, the screen is a legal play, the rules are transparent, and everyone in the arena understands what's happening. The game is played in the open.
Politics is not. The screen in politics is not a legal play; it is a confidence game. The rules are not transparent; they are deliberately obscured. And the people in the arena — the Scottys, the Isaiahs, the spectators — do not understand what's happening. That is the entire point.
The last screen is the one that tells you this is all just the way it is. That politics has always been dirty. That both sides have always played games. That corruption is baked in and there's nothing you can do. That the best you can hope for is to pick the less-evil team and cheer hard.
That screen exists to prevent you from ever arriving at the conclusion that the game itself is the problem. That the court was built to benefit the owners, not the players and certainly not the fans. That the fussing is not a failure of the system — it is the system performing exactly as designed.
Were their motives noble, they would not need to employ subterfuge.
Were the game fair, they would not need the screen.
Stop fussing. Start seeing.
F. Tronboll III
Share