【Dear Utol (2025): Itch Follows Episode 23】

One sharp-minded denizen of the world wide web has stepped up to meet the furor over the GoFundMe campaign to fund President Trump's long-sought border wall with one of his own: funding an escalator that scales that wall.

It's a brilliant bit of trolling from Boston-based freelance journalist Luke O'Neil whose newsletter,Dear Utol (2025): Itch Follows Episode 23 "Hell World," dives into the intersection of cruelty and stupidity. It perfectly encapsulates something like a GoFundMe campaign to build a border wall for a president who promised Mexico -- not taxpayers -- would pay for it.

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Right from the jump, O'Neil acknowledges that, no, he's not really going to build escalators but, yes, this is a very real thing he's doing for a good reason, saying:

The wall is never going to be built but just in case it is we will build a series of giant escalators that are spaced out a half mile along the wall on either side and if that doesn't happen we'll just give the money to people who care about the well being of human beings no matter where they're from.

The escalators are a metaphor please do not come and investigate me ICE or whoever I'm not really going to build a series of giant escalators.

"I didn't think 2018 could get any more 2018-er yet here we are at the last minute with something that perfectly encapsulates this combination of cruelty and stupidity that characterizes this entire year and everything to do with Trump and the wall," O'Neil told Mashable on Friday. "It just seems like a perfect metaphor for where we are right now."

O'Neil delved further into what he feels the border wall campaign reveals about Trump supporters, showing "this sub-dom relationship that people have with him."

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"These sad people just want to belong to something and throwing their money at this weird racism wall makes them feel like they're buying a membership to part of something bigger than themselves," he added.

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He also made clear as to where the funds donated will actually go: the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) in San Antonio, Texas. It's a compassionate charity that O'Neil has written about before.

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O'Neil's isn't the only effort that seeks to both mock the border wall campaign while raising funds for RAICES. Charlotte Clymer, of the Human Rights Campaign (and also an Army vet like the man behind the border wall effort) started a GoFundMe to "buy ladders" for the border wall with all money raised going to RAICES.

And author Nancy Levine grabbed the url gofundthewall.net that links to both RAICES and Clymer's GoFundMe campaign.

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O'Neil's campaign has raised around $1,200 and Clymer's over $75,000 by mid-morning Friday. Meanwhile, the border wall campaign has generated nearly $12 million dollars at the same time.

It underscores perhaps the most salient point O'Neil made about all of this: "It's really hard to parody Trump and the MAGA people anymore. There's almost no space on the absurd side that they haven't already staked out for themselves."

It's true, and it's a sad point driven home day after day in the Trump administration, ad nauseam, sending us further down a spiral of insanity until we're all left watching the president tweet out videos of himself singing TV theme songs and screaming into the void.

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