Us and Them: A Field Dispatch from the Quintessential Quintennial Riot”

There used to be lines.

Not the blurred, bendy, bi-curious kind we draw today, but actual moral chalk—clear, decisive, and visible unless you were channeling Ray Charles not to see it.

We called it us and them.

It was never just tribalism. It was epistemology—a big-ass word that means how we know what’s real, as opposed to how they feel about what isn’t. (…