Everyone Has a Plan
Abbie Chatfield posted a joke about political assassination and called it dark humour. Her boyfriend just got stopped at the US border. Australia is full of this type. The mechanism has a name.
Abbie Chatfield posted a joke about political assassination and called it dark humour. Her boyfriend just got stopped at the US border. Australia is full of this type. The mechanism has a name.
Mike Tyson said it best. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
Abbie Chatfield had a plan. Post the edgy content. Build the audience. Use the platform to punch at anyone who does not share the worldview. Call it speaking truth to power. Call it dark humour. Call it whatever keeps the algorithm fed and the followers engaged.
She had a plan right up until the US border officer had one too.
Her boyfriend, musician Keli Holiday, got stopped at the border during a tour. Detained. Denied re-entry. New York shows cancelled. And Chatfield, a year after posting a video that suggested incels should pick up guns if they want female attention, posted a grovelling public apology and called the original video distasteful.
Distasteful. That is the word she landed on. Not dangerous. Not wrong. Distasteful. Like she had served a wine that did not pair with the entree.
The apology did not arrive when she posted it. It did not arrive when people flagged it. It arrived when the personal cost did. That is not a conscience. That is a calculator.
The video was not subtle. Chatfield joked about Luigi Mangione, the man who shot and killed the UnitedHealthcare CEO in New York. She suggested that if incels wanted attention like Mangione was getting, they should start a revolution. The implication, clear enough that the US authorities apparently noticed it, was that political violence gets you female attention. Good luck. Go for it.
She said she never named Trump. That is technically accurate and completely beside the point. A video that frames political assassination as a viable path to female validation does not need to name a target to be a problem. The idea is the problem. The casual comfort with the idea is the problem.
She posted that and went about her day. Yoga. Matcha. Save the planet. Be kind.
That gap, between what the content says and how the person who made it sees themselves, is the thing worth naming.
There is a type in Australia. Not a rare type. A common one. Concentrated in the eastern suburbs and the inner west of Sydney. Paddington. Newtown. Bondi. You find them across Melbourne too, in Fitzroy and Brunswick and Northcote.
I drive rideshare in Sydney. I have a sample size most commentators do not have. I pick up this type on Friday nights and Sunday mornings and I have been watching the pattern for years.
The type presents as soft. Spiritually aware. Environmentally conscious. They do the yoga. They cleanse the crystals. They drink the matcha and carry the reusable cup and talk about energy and consciousness and the importance of holding space for difficult emotions.
And underneath the aesthetic, they are some of the most entitled, most aggressive people in the room. They punch hard and often. They shame publicly. They cancel without hesitation. They use platforms and group dynamics and social pressure as weapons and call it activism.
The spiritual aesthetic is the disguise. It signals empathy and higher consciousness to the world. It makes the violence underneath invisible. Not just to observers. To themselves.
They genuinely do not see it. They have so thoroughly convinced themselves that they are the good people that actual calls for political violence read as comedy. Dark humour. Just a bit of fun. The incels cannot take a joke.
Getting something from this? The List sends the next essay first, free, Sunday mornings.
Here is the mechanism that makes this type so difficult to deal with.
They punch. Then when the punch lands consequences, the victim costume goes on faster than the apology video uploads.
Chatfield spent years building a platform on being provocative. On saying the things that get the audience gasping. On punching at conservative men, at tradies who vote the wrong way, at anyone who does not perform the correct politics. That is the content. That is the brand.
The moment the US border created a real consequence, she became a victim of misinterpretation. Of unfair media. Of a system that did not understand her intent.
This is not unique to Chatfield. This is the defining move of the type. The aggression is always reframed as courage. The consequence is always reframed as injustice. And the person who points out the flip is immediately added to the list of people punching at them.
You can punch as hard as you like, as often as you like, at whoever you like. As long as you never get punched back. The moment you do, the game resets and you are the victim.
I know this type from closer than a rideshare window.
Natalie did the yoga. The crystals. Adamant about recycling. Talked about energy and consciousness and the importance of authentic connection. From the outside she was exactly what the eastern suburbs produces at volume. Soft. Aware. Evolved.
What she was in practice was a woman who could engineer a conflict, light the match, step back into the spiritual aesthetic, and watch from a safe distance while it burned.
Victor was her cuckold. He knew about the other men. He allowed it. He participated in the arrangement and built a philosophy around it so he could look at himself in the mirror and see a man ahead of his time rather than a man who had handed over the most fundamental part of his dignity piece by piece until there was nothing left that was his own.
That is the thing about a man who has surrendered himself that completely. He has no independent will anymore. He does not act. He gets sent. When Natalie pointed him at a target, he moved. Not because he decided to. Because that is what the arrangement produces over years. A man with no spine of his own who mistakes being directed for being strong.
Victor spent two years in silence. Then one night, with Marco in from overseas and Rhys and Owen in the background and the right depth of alcohol in the room, he found his nerve. Fourteen calls. Racial impressions. The borrowed courage of a committee assembled for the occasion.
Two years of silence. Then an army.
That is not a man who found his courage. That is a man who rented it for the night from people who had nothing to lose and a flight home the next morning.
And he brought Rhys and Owen. He could not protect his own dignity. He could not keep his sons out of the wreckage of what he had become. They were in the background of fourteen calls made by a man who needed an army because he had spent years building a life around being less than himself and calling it evolution.
Natalie, the architect of the whole situation, was nowhere near the fire. She was cleansing her crystals and holding space for difficult emotions while someone else carried the consequences of what she had engineered.
The coward gets the army. The warrior stands alone. And Australia calls the warrior the problem.
This is the part nobody talks about.
Rhys and Owen were in the background that night. Children do not miss what adults think they miss. They were present for the lesson. What did they learn?
They learned that you wait until you have numbers before you move. That courage is not something you build alone. It is something you borrow from a committee on a Saturday night. That the person who stands alone in front of you is the threat, not the example.
They watched their father need an overseas friend and the right amount of alcohol to find a voice he should have been building for years.
And the children of the Natalie type are watching their mother perform softness for the world while learning that the performance is the point. That you can say anything, engineer anything, do anything, as long as the aesthetic holds. That when consequences arrive you reframe, apologise just enough, and wait for the cycle to reset.
The entitlement does not generate itself fresh each generation. It gets passed down. Through what children watch. Through what gets rewarded and what gets punished in the home. Through the model of what a strong person looks like when the world pushes back.
Chatfield's audience is being assembled right now in the eastern suburbs and the inner west. Children who are watching a parent use a platform to punch without consequence. Who are learning that the apology is just another content format. Who are growing up inside the spiritual aesthetic without ever being shown what is underneath it.
In ten years they will have their own platforms. Their own audiences. Their own dark humour that lands somewhere real.
And they will be genuinely surprised when the border officer does not see the joke.
Australia produces this type in volume because Australia has not been honest enough about what the type costs.
The rideshare window gives you a view of it that the political class and the media class do not get. The eastern suburbs dinner party circuit produces consensus. It produces the feeling that the aesthetic is the majority. That everyone thinks this way. That the people who do not are the outliers.
They are not the outliers. They are a concentrated pocket of people who have never been seriously told no by anything with real consequences. Who have confused the absence of consequence for the presence of correctness.
Chatfield is not the problem. She is the symptom. The problem is a culture that rewards the performance of virtue while ignoring what the performance conceals. That lets the bully-victim flip run unchallenged. That calls the person who names the mechanism the aggressor.
Tyson's line is not about boxing. It is about reality. About the gap between the plan you carry and the world that does not organise itself around your feelings.
Everyone has a plan.
The border officer does not care about your podcast.
The consequences do not read the room the way your audience does.
And the children watching are learning everything.
Rico Holt · ricoholt.com
If the dark joke met the border, tip the desk that named the mechanism. Essays stay free.
Leave a tip · A$5Get the next essay and the book launch price first.
Privacy: your email gets used for one thing, sending you Rico Holt essays and book news. It's stored with Netlify, our form host. Never sold, never shared. Want off? Reply to any email and you're gone.