We Are Everywhere - Television Tropes & Idioms

Hi. You're going to call off your rigorous investigation. You're going to publicly state that there is no underground group. Or we are going to take your balls. Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. [pause] Do not fuck with us.

— Tyler Durden, Fight Club

When a fascist or otherwise extreme political group is investigated and busted, a member, often the leader, brags how the group is everywhere. The group member will further claim that their movement is growing, and will rule supreme someday, leaving the heroes concerned that there will be more trouble in the future.

Currently often associated with right-wing militia movements, which became a trope of their own following the militia scare in the media after the Oklahoma City bombing.

Note also that the exact same claim may be made by the heroes when they are the resistance to a despotic regime. Naturally, the message is inverted this way.

Contrast Red Scare and Yellow Peril. The Syndicate is very fond of this line, as is The Conspiracy. People involved with the Masquerade generally don't brag about it, but might make an exception if they're dying anyway.

Examples

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Anime and Manga

Guyver. The Zoanoids are everywhere.
Agito: "You probably thought Chronos was simply a secret organization, but we are very public. Classmates, politicians, ambassadors. It is an international community all linked through the clandestine operations of the Chronos Corporation. A simple matter like the attack on the school is easily covered with key positions in the media, and the police are controlled by us. We're everywhere. We're everyone. The Earth is now within our grasp... a possession of Chronos."
Grappler Baki, possibly inspired by Fight Club, pulls a similar stunt after a guy in a fighting club got killed. The waiter, the police, the owner of the amusement park, all of them are part of the club.
Reasonably early on in 20th Century Boys, Kenji learns that the cult lead by mysterious Big Bad Friend has members in high places, making his fight against them harder.
Quite early in Suzumiya Haruhi, Yuki and Ryoko tells Kyon that her fellow interfaces have long infiltrated the school, and that quite a few of them are like R yo ko. Later, Koizumi tells Kyon that other members from the Organization are everywhere, and are in high places, like the president of the Absurdly Powerful Student Council.
Showed rather than said, but The Dollars in Durarara definitely count. One of the Crowning Moments of Awesome comes when Mikado Ryugame is in a tense stand-off with Namie Yagiri. When she threatens him, and basically claims to be powerful enough to squash him like a bug, he replies that if she won't listen to reason, he'll have to rely on numbers. He pushes a button on his cellphone, and suddenly the cell phones of everybody in the vicinity start going off. The look of horror on the faces of Namie and her bodyguards is priceless as the formerly faceless masses are all revealed to be members of the enigmatic Dollars, including several important characters.

Comicbooks

A version appears in Batman, Inc when Bruce Wayne explains that criminals will never have to wonder where Batman is... because Batman is everywhere. This as a group of Bat-bots foil an attack by some criminals on the locale where he's making the announcement to a reporter. (He knew the attack was coming).

Film

Fight Club provides the page quote. Especially noteworthy because it's delivered to the man charged with taking the underground movement down at his own reception.
The Night Slasher's speech at the end of Cobra follows this trope to the letter, but it's more of a crazed final rant than a accurate estimate of his actual following.
Quantum Of Solace has this exchange:
Bond: Are you going to tell us who you work for?
Mr. White: The first thing you should know about us is that we have people everywhere. [Turns to M's bodyguard] Am I right? [The bodyguard opens fire on M and Bond]
- M later lampshades it:
M: When someone says "We've got people everywhere", you expect it to be hyperbole! Lots of people say that. Florists use that expression. It doesn't mean that they've got somebody working for them inside the bloody room!
In the trailers at least, the Big Bad of Eagle Eye claimed this. It turns out it's both true and false. The Big Bad is a supercomputer that really is everywhere, at least everywhere with a networked computer. The "We" part isn't technically true; it has assumed itself to be "We the people" from the Constitution. It does more or less have people everywhere though, since it threatens anybody it wants to into doing exactly what it says to do.
At the end of Infiltrator, a neo-Nazi attempts to assassinate Oliver Platt's character, Yaron Svoray, boasts to Svoray that "I am one of millions." Svoray has a great response though: "So am I."

Literature

The Scholastic book series Animorphs featured this trope as its very premise, with the main characters fighting an invasion of alien mind-controllers.
- And interestingly, the main characters also convinced their enemies that this was the case with them as well (their powers were ideal for infiltration, sabotage and subterfuge).
  - A Major world leader was even mentioned to be one of these "controllers". It's not revealed who, but it was either the President of the U.S.A., leader of China, President of Russia, and a handful of other large powers. It is later revealed that the President of the U.S. at least was not a controller.
In the first Night World book, Secret Vampire:
James to Phillip: "The Night people. We're all around you, Phil. Anybody you know could be one—including the mayor. So keep your mouth shut."
This is the title of a 2003 collection of essays about the global justice movement (better known, including by many of the participants as the "anti-globalization" movement). The title is occasionally referenced by the people in the book, who often lampshade the irony of calling your movement "anti-globalization" and having "We Are Everywhere" as your motto.

Live-Action TV

In the MacGyver episode "The Ten Percent Solution", MacGyver uncovers a massive Neo-Nazi conspiracy that has infiltrated a sizeable portion of America.
On Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, there is often a variant where a pedophile reminds Our Hero that pedophiles are everywhere, particularly on the internet. The episodes "Chat Room" and "Pandora" used this technique.
Law & Order episode Charm City, a white supremacist convicted of planting a poison gas bomb on a subway car angrily hisses that "My country is growing, yours is shrinking!" as the credits roll.
- In another Law and Order, an ADA actually uses this ploy against a defendant who was paranoid about a Happyology-istic cult.
- A child molester tried this as well.
- Law & Order: UK features a Neo-Nazi suspected of killing a Jewish man with a letter bomb make a speech like this to which DS Ronnie Brooks gives a truly great response:
Let us know when you're coming and we'll bung on a cup of tea for you.
Trope subverted on the CSI: Miami episode "Pirated" where the white supremacist militia leader threatens how his movement is everywhere and growing. The detectives, particularly Delko, respond that they are investigating every connection he has and expect a wave of arrests of his cronies in short order, which we see happening in a flurry of images as the police swoop in to bust the terrorists. The militia leader is left stunned to hear that his organization is being smashed so quickly.
A variation in the same vein as this trope occurred on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the season three finale "The Adversary" where a defeated changeling who has been sneaking around the ship trying to sabotage it tells Odo that the Changelings are Everywhere. Subverted in a later episode, where a Changeling informs Captain Sisko that there are only four Changelings operating on Earth, and that they find the Federation's fear of being infiltrated more effective than actually doing it.
- Before that, a semi-early 2-episode-arc of TNG featured a paranoid captain warning Picard of "strange happenings" with Starfleet Command. It turned out to be caused by a race of mind-controlling parasites that had already infiltrated every level of SFC's upper echelons, and was spreading out through the most prominant captains to be able to spread even further. Picard and Riker end up blasting what looks like a queen, spend the last five minutes of the show wondering how bad things have become... and then the entire situation is never brought up again.
In Babylon 5, when Garibaldi interrogates The Mole who shot him in the back, he is met with arrogant self-assurance: "There's a new order coming back home, Garibaldi. You can either be part of it, or you can be stepped on. A winner or a loser. I'm with the side that's gonna win." The prisoner's confidence is borne out when friends in high places arrange his disappearance on his way back to Earth for trial.
- The very scene which leads to him getting shot in the back while trying to arrest a terrorist is a veiled We Are Everywhere moment.
- The slogan "We're everywhere... for your convenience" in the PsiCorps commercial carries a definite overtone of this.
Trying to keep this from happening — and then dealing with it when it does get out of hand — drove most of the plot for the unfortunately short-lived science fiction series Threshold, where the aliens sought to conquer Earth by mutating us into them.
In Torchwood: Miracle Day, the shadowy Ancient Conspiracy apparently behind the Miracle claim to be "everywhere and always".
- Considering they constantly thwart the heroes' plans, usually with suicide bombers, it shows that their reach is worldwide. Hell, one of their people is working directly for a senior CIA official and kills him with a bomb when he's onto her. What's amazing is that they've managed to grow from three groups of street thugs to this in under a century.
Doctor Who has the Silence, who appear to embody the trope, even if they don't outright lay claim to it.
The Following has Carroll's cult (the titular following), which is made up of completely ordinary people from all walks of life, meaning anyone could be part of it. A captured cult member gives a speech about it (including paraphrasing the trope name) in episode 8 before taking a Cyanide Pill sown into his thumb.
- Hardy and Mike are largely unimpressed with his We Are Everywhere speech, pointing out he's paraphrasing Ted Bundy (see below). Quite badly too.

Music

The anti globalization song well we are everywhere

Professional Wrestling

The federation Ring of Honor used this trope as part of its "Project 161" storyline, in a fashion fairly similar to the Fight Club example. Posts on the official ROH messageboard, the occasional hack, interruptions in DVDs with the 161 logo as well as the lowering of the harness to hang Jay Briscoe at the Age of the Fall's debut leads one to believe that messageboard members, a computer programmer, someone who worked on the DVDs in the final stage and someone dealing with the running of the show were all involved.
- Not to mention the NWO in WCW. At their height of popularity, one of the "good guys" from WCW was turning heel and joining the NWO on a weekly basis. They took over the company, and anyone not in the NWO or fighting against the NWO rarely got any TV time. They took this trope so far that it actually helped destroy the company in real life.

Tabletop Games

In Warhammer 40000, the Inquisition (who are humanity's Designated Heroes) and the Alpha Legion (for whom it's a long story), both tend to make this claim, and they're more than likely telling the truth. The Deceiver and its agents would also have grounds to say this truthfully, if they deigned to talk to anyone at all outside of their cover identities.
- And thanks to the warp Demons are literally everywhere.
- Also, although they can't really make claim of it, Tyranids use Genestealers to infest the population of a target world, slowly infiltrating important positions. They literately have people everywhere.
Likewise with devotees of the assorted horrors in Cthulhu Tech.

Videogames

Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The vampire mooks like to taunt Buffy about how she is one, they are many. It's possible to stake them mid-rant for the humour.
"We are formless. We are the very discipline Americans invoke so often." — Patriot Colonel, Metal Gear Solid 2.
Mass Effect has Cerberus, the shadowy pro-human organisation with apparently bottomless funds and influence at every level of the Alliance. Rogue operatives tend not to live long, especially if they get picked up by the Alliance.
- The Shadow Broker, too, judging from the data available on the consoles.
In Deus Ex:
Icarus: I am right behind you, Mr. Denton. Soon, I will be ahead of you, beside you - I will be a part of everything in your world.
In Prototype 2, Alex makes such a claim.
Pokemon Black And White, Ghestis gets Clay to release the captured Team Plasma members by effectively warning him of this.

Western Animation

In one episode of The Simpsons, Homer is watching a movie in which a biker, when arrested, says "You can put me away, but you'll never defeat the Cobras!" Homer later says this exact line to Chief Wiggum, despite the fact that his gang has a different name.
In Sev Trek: Pus in Boots (an Australian spoof of Star Trek: The Next Generation) the evil alien grows from a zit on Commander Piker's face. After it's defeated Councillor Troi says she picked up a final telepathic message from the alien: We. Are. Everywhere. The show then concludes on a turbolift full of expendable ensigns with zits.
The Every where Man drops the trope name in his self titled episode of The Batman. At the same time as all his copies all over the building.
Done in one episode of Kid Vs Kat where an evil alien hamster warns Kat before making his getaway that his kind are everywhere.
Over in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, the shape-shifting Skrulls are working on taking over Earth. By the time of "Infiltration," everything is starting to come to a head.
Hawkeye: Who else? Who else is a Skrull?
Skrull: We are everywhere. You will see.

Real Life

This is unfortunately, a Truth in Television, as we can see with this newspaper.
A real-life (well, as real as the internet community can be considered) example is Anonymous, their mantra being: "We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us." Anonymous's influence has most recently been seen in their protest attacks against the Church of Scientology.
- Anonymous has actually used that quote from Fight Club in some of their copypasta. Well, the bits about "we cook your food etc. DO NOT FUCK WITH US", anyway.
- Scientology actually falls under this as well. The members have a tendency to take jobs that would allow them to spy on any enemies of the cult. One notable example being the IRS.
- In late July 2010, the Tea Party tried to use Anonymous' slogan for their own ends. Anonymous responded...rather sharply.
Russian partisan girl Zoya Kocmodemianskaya, caught by Nazis and cruelly tortured before execution, said from under the gallows:
There are millions of Russians. You cannot hang all of us.
Ted Bundy apparently once stated, "We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere! And there will be more of your children dead tomorrow!"
This is a popular saying among anarchists, as put to music by David Rovics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8j8BmgeYLA