By The Intrepid in Nosideism — 11 Feb 2026

On the Shoulders of Ogres

The article didn’t arrive dramatically. It appeared the way most things do now: as a link in a feed, shared by a sociology professor I follow on Bluesky. A long-form piece from The Atlantic about Ammon Bundy—once a symbol of armed resistance to federal authority—now “alone,” estranged from the movement he helped galvanize because he refuses to endorse the current wave of ICE violence.

There was nothing unusual about the act of sharing. No commentary beyond a sentence or two. No attempt to provoke. Just the ordinary circulation of something deemed worth reading.

That ordinariness is important. Nothing in the moment felt extreme, or even especially political. This is how meaning moves now: not through manifestos or declarations, but through mild acts of recommendation. Here’s an interesting thing. This seems relevant. You might want to see this.

Reading the article privately left room for ambivalence. Bundy’s story is not one that invites easy sympathy, but neither does it allow easy dismissal. A man led armed occupations of federal land; a man also now recoils from state violence when it’s aimed at people he didn’t expect to be the target. The article’s frame is clear enough—Bundy as evidence of how far the right has shifted toward authoritarian nationalism—but the human material resists total resolution.

Sharing collapses that distance.

Once the link moves from reading to distribution, it stops being a space for unsettled thought and becomes an object doing work. The article doesn’t just describe Bundy’s isolation; it performs a lesson with it. And the act of sharing—no matter how neutral it feels—participates in that performance.

That was the first friction point. Not is the article right? but what is it doing, and what am I doing by passing it along?

The question isn’t accusatory. It doesn’t assume bad faith on the part of the magazine, the professor, or the reader. It’s simply a recognition that in mediated systems, stories don’t travel inertly. They arrive with handles.

And if they’re being carried, someone is gripping them.

II. Bundy as Diagnostic, Bundy as Raw Material

The Atlantic’s framing is coherent and largely persuasive. Bundy hasn’t meaningfully changed. His theology is intact. His hostility to government authority remains. What has changed is the movement around him. The right no longer needs anti-state absolutists if they won’t bless state violence when it’s aimed correctly. Even its former folk heroes become disposable once they insist on principles that interfere with enforcement.

Read this way, Bundy functions as a fixed coordinate—a stable reference point that makes ideological drift visible. Hold him still and the landscape moves.

There’s nothing dishonest about this use. It’s a legitimate journalistic move. But it’s not the first time Bundy has been made to do work for others.

He was used before.

At Bunkerville and Malheur, Bundy functioned as spectacle and legitimacy—proof that armed resistance could be framed as moral duty rather than criminal insurgency. The movement didn’t just gather around him; it coalesced through him. A man died at Malheur. That fact matters, and it doesn’t soften with time.

Now Bundy is doing a different kind of labor. He’s no longer a rallying point; he’s a diagnostic specimen. His confusion, his isolation, his halting attempts to explain why his principles no longer find purchase—all of it is converted into evidence of a broader transformation.

Different audience. Different extraction. Same underlying logic.

This isn’t an argument for sympathy. Bundy doesn’t get to be rehabilitated by the machinery that now processes him. But it’s also not an argument for the satisfaction of judgment. If he’s too easy to condemn, the mirror never turns.

The unsettling thing about Bundy isn’t that he’s uniquely monstrous. It’s that nothing about him requires exceptional psychology. He didn’t need to be especially cunning, or cruel, or visionary to end up where he did. He needed only to be present, confident, and insufficiently resistant to the momentum that gathered around him.

That ordinariness is what makes the story hard to set down comfortably.

III. Getting on the Horse

It’s tempting, at this point, to explain Bundy by reaching for ambition. He wanted to be important. He wanted attention. He wanted power. Those stories are convenient because they turn harm into pathology. If only bad people do bad things, the rest of us are mostly safe.

But ambition isn’t doing the explanatory work we want it to here.

Most people who end up leading something that later causes harm don’t begin with a desire to lead. They begin with presence. They’re there when something is happening. They have words when others hesitate. They have a framework—religious, ideological, moral—that makes sense of what’s unfolding. And when momentum starts asking for direction, they don’t refuse.

This is the moment that gets misremembered later as destiny or hubris. At the time, it rarely feels like either. It feels like duty. Or necessity. Or simply not wanting to be the person who stayed silent when something important was happening.

The metaphor that suggests itself is a horse standing nearby, reins loose. No trumpet fanfare. No announcement that this ride will end badly. Just an opening. Someone has to ride. Someone has to lead. If you’re already there, already speaking, already confident, the step up doesn’t feel dramatic. It feels continuous with who you already are.

From the outside, this looks like ambition. From the inside, it can feel like failure to refuse.

That distinction matters because it relocates the ethical error. The problem isn’t that someone wanted the spotlight. It’s that they didn’t apply friction at the moment when momentum first asked them to steer.

Once you’re riding, everything after that feels louder and more consequential. But the leverage was earlier, when refusal would have been small, boring, and socially awkward—when stepping back wouldn’t have looked like courage or betrayal, just absence.

This is uncomfortable because it suggests that the line between participant and leader isn’t crossed by desire, but by acquiescence. And acquiescence is something ordinary people do all the time.

IV. Individuals Matter. Waves Matter Too.

None of this works if it dissolves individual agency into systems-talk. That’s the failure mode that turns analysis into excuse.

Individuals can and do cause immense harm. Their choices matter. Their actions matter. Their victims are not abstractions.

Timothy McVeigh mattered. His finger mattered. The dead mattered.

And yet it’s also true that McVeigh was riding something. The anti-government militia ecosystem, the circulation of apocalyptic rhetoric, the normalization of fantasies about righteous violence—these existed before him. Without that ambient field of permission and meaning, he’s still violent, but he isn’t history-altering. With it, he becomes a rupture that reshapes law, policing, and public memory.

Both of these statements have to be held at once, even though they pull against each other:

McVeigh was responsible.
McVeigh was recruited by a wave that preceded him and would have found other expressions.

This is where the thesis sharpens, not softens.

In mediated political systems, large-scale harm rarely emerges from singular acts of malice or ambition alone. It emerges when momentum recruits ordinary people who fail to refuse roles that turn presence into direction. Individuals still matter—but what scales is recruitment, not intent.

That’s why focusing exclusively on villains misses the point. It asks who is guilty after the fact, not where leverage existed before things hardened. It treats harm as an eruption rather than an assembly.

The uncomfortable implication is that responsibility doesn’t only live at the moment of catastrophe. It accumulates earlier, through smaller gestures that don’t feel like decisions at all. Showing up. Lending credibility. Staying in the room. Letting your presence do work you didn’t explicitly authorize.

By the time the harm is undeniable, refusal is loud and costly. Earlier, it was quiet—and cheap.

That asymmetry is the core problem this essay is circling.

V. Thresholds, Not Architects

Most ways of talking about political harm are oriented around two questions: who started it? and what happened? We look for architects and we count bodies. Both matter. Neither is sufficient.

What gets missed in between is the threshold—the moment when being present stops being neutral and starts becoming directional.

Thresholds are not dramatic. They don’t announce themselves as turning points. They look like ordinary social situations in which the cost of refusal feels slightly higher than the cost of going along.

A meeting you weren’t sure you should attend, but did.
A march you didn’t fully agree with, but showed up for anyway.
A joke you didn’t like, but didn’t challenge.
A post you shared because it seemed important, even though you hadn’t decided what you thought yet.

None of these feel like decisions with moral weight. That’s why they work. Thresholds hide inside plausibility.

What changes at a threshold isn’t your belief. It’s your function. Your presence begins to do work for something larger than your intention. It adds legitimacy, mass, confidence, or momentum. You haven’t endorsed anything explicitly, but you’ve helped it cohere.

This is why thresholds are so hard to see from the inside. They don’t feel like acts of will. They feel like continuity. Like staying consistent with the person you were five minutes ago.

By the time you’re being asked to do something you clearly object to, the threshold is already behind you. You’re no longer deciding whether to participate; you’re deciding whether to defect.

Most harm doesn’t require people to cross moral lines they recognize as such. It requires them to drift across thresholds they never thought to name.

VI. Grease-Stained Hands

The language we usually reach for here is “dirty hands.” It’s evocative, but it misleads.

Dirty hands imply guilt and cleansing. They suggest a moment of transgression followed by confession, absolution, or hardening. They fit stories about leaders making tragic choices under impossible constraints.

But most participation in harmful systems doesn’t feel like that. It feels like work.

Grease-stained hands are a better image. Grease doesn’t mean you broke something. It means you touched it. You adjusted it. You kept it running. The stain isn’t dramatic, and it doesn’t wash off easily—not because you’re guilty, but because you’ve been in contact with machinery.

This distinction matters because it prevents a flattening move: we’re all equally complicit. That’s comforting in its own way, but it’s false.

How you’re involved matters.

There’s a difference between:

designing a system,
operating it,
participating in it,
and merely being adjacent to it.

Bundy isn’t grease-stained in the same way an article-sharer is. A man died at Malheur. That doesn’t get redistributed evenly across the network. But neither does it require mythologizing him into a singular monster. His hands are bloody because he helped build and legitimize a machine that made blood a foreseeable output.

Most people are not in that position. Their hands are greasy because they live inside systems they didn’t design and can’t fully opt out of. That doesn’t make them innocent. It does mean the ethical question isn’t how do I get clean? but what am I keeping running?

Grease is lubricant. It allows motion. Sometimes the most honest contribution isn’t withdrawal or confession, but friction—introducing drag where smoothness would be easier.

VII. Early, Unglamorous Refusals

Refusal is often imagined as a dramatic act: the resignation letter, the public break, the statement that begins I can no longer in good conscience… These moments matter, but they arrive late. By the time refusal is legible, the machine is already loud.

The refusals that matter most are earlier and quieter.

They look like not going to the meeting.
Not lending your credibility to the panel.
Not sharing the post you haven’t decided about yet.
Not laughing when something is said that needs laughter to survive.

These refusals don’t feel virtuous. They feel awkward. Petty. Slightly paranoid. They often look like overreaction in hindsight—nothing would have happened if I’d gone.

That’s exactly why they’re effective.

Early refusals don’t scale. They don’t circulate. No one thanks you for them. They don’t produce identity or narrative. You don’t get to tell a story about them later, because from the outside, nothing happened.

But leverage lives there.

Once a system needs you—your presence, your voice, your legitimacy—refusal becomes costly and visible. Earlier, it was just absence. Just a gap where something didn’t quite cohere.

No one writes articles about the person who didn’t go to Malheur. No one profiles the people who felt the pull of momentum and quietly declined to be present. Those non-events don’t metabolize into content.

They do, however, change what’s possible.

VIII. On the Shoulders of Ogres

We stand on the shoulders of ogres—and the stench from up here makes it hard to forget what’s affording the view.

That sentence doesn’t ask for agreement. It just names a condition.

The height is real. We can see further from here. We benefit from structures built by people who did harm, tolerated harm, or made harm thinkable. None of that disappears because we disapprove of it, or because we can narrate its history with sophistication. The smell is the point: it prevents the view from being mistaken for innocence.

This isn’t an argument for jumping down. That’s another fantasy—the idea that withdrawal restores purity. Nor is it an argument for celebration. The ogres don’t become giants because they built something useful.

It’s an argument for staying aware of where the height comes from, and for being alert when the next set of shoulders is offered.

Because they always are.

They show up as opportunities, platforms, moments of momentum that feel like alignment rather than danger. They come with reasons attached. They rarely announce what they’ll make possible later.

The only warning you get is a faint sense that saying yes would be easier than saying no.

IX. No Exit, No Alibi

There is no outside to mediated political systems. There is no position of purity from which to speak. Awareness doesn’t grant innocence, and analysis doesn’t cancel participation.

What awareness can do is sharpen your sensitivity to thresholds.

It can help you notice when presence is about to become direction.
When staying in the room will do work you haven’t agreed to.
When refusal is still small enough to feel unnecessary.

Those are the moments that don’t feel important. That’s why they matter.

Large-scale harm isn’t assembled from villains alone. It’s assembled from ordinary non-refusals—people who didn’t mean to steer, but didn’t step away when the reins were offered. By the time the machine is loud, refusal is heroic. Earlier, it was just awkward.

This essay doesn’t offer a method for staying clean. It offers no redemption arc, no instruction manual, no checklist for virtue. It can’t. That would turn it into another form of machinery.

What it offers instead is a question you can carry quietly:

What would happen if I didn’t show up to this?

Not as a gesture.
Not as a statement.
Just as an early, unglamorous refusal.

Nothing might happen. That’s the point.

Sometimes the most consequential act is the one that leaves no evidence it ever occurred—except that something didn’t quite gather, didn’t quite harden, didn’t quite become inevitable.

You don’t get clean hands.
You don’t get an alibi.

You get a chance—earlier than you’d like, quieter than you’d expect—to decide whether your presence will help something move, or whether this is one of the rare moments where letting the horse pass is enough.

I. The Article, the Share, the Machine