The real world is a cold and unforgiving place, it usually is, but is especially right now.
And then you have all the stuff (broadly gestures to the world) going on right now. The new administration has stopped Medicaid (hopefully temporarily), food prices are going up because of the bird flu, we have fires in California, snow in the swamps where alligators are turning to ice cubes, airline disasters likely caused by an understaffed air safety team, governmental chaos, where we have officials (including the president) trying to spin DEI as the culprit.
If feels like we're in the throes of the death of an empire. At the very least, the throes of some cover band mashing REM's "End of the World" and Billy's Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" into a ham-fisted commentary likely sponsored by Pepsi.
The media and tech companies are making it so much worse with the way they are handling stories in order to get the most clicks.
For instance, you ask anyone on the street if they feel safer this year than they did five years ago and you're going to hear over and over again that they don't, despite all the data we have available to us saying this is the safest you've been in 30 years.
Anxiety and Fear are very easy ways to get engagement. Fox News, Twitter, Facebook, MSNBC... you name it, they have all been pushing headlines and stories that make people addicted. They want to keep you coming back, refreshing to see if the numbers went up or down, and whether they should be more afraid. When you don't have any stories to push fear, it's very easy to make people fear people that aren't like them. This is why you constantly get stories about how illegal immigrants are here to take your jobs and murder you.
You're less likely to have a crime committed by an illegal immigrant than by a US born citizen. Illegal immigrants are unlikely to take a job you wanted. Yet, Trump, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity are all out there telling you that MS-13 is coming to murder you and kidnap your daughters.
Remember a few months back when the media started covering the Haitian immigrants eating dogs in Ohio? Yeah, that was fake too. Some social media influencer started the lie, others hopped on the train, and next thing you know you have Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk spreading this BS.
Unless your dream as a kid was to pluck chickens and package them for Tyson, you should be looking upward at the CEO, board of directors, and stock holders for why you lost your job. They made the decisions and likely made more money because of it.
But if you spend any time on the internet, you would think that illegal immigrants are gunning for your job and gunning for your family in the same breath.
Then there's the whole, "We want to outlaw Trans people because criminals might use that as a way to go into a woman's bathroom or ruin women's sports." Even though you're much more likely to be raped by a priest, preacher, politician, or uncle, this talking point is still being pushed.
Trans people make up less than .6% of our population, but Jack Posobiec would have you think we were nearing a 30% threshold and growing if you got your news from Twitter.
And don't get me started on how little these pundits care about women's sports. If they cared about women's sports, the sports would be better funded and Flavor Flav wouldn't have to come to the rescue.
The algorithms are programmed that engagement is everything. Get people coming back. Get people interacting. Fear and anger will get that.
Once your threshold of fear levels out, you want more. There's brain chemicals in our cave man brains that start craving it after a while. So the algorithm starts feeding you more outlandish fear. Want proof? Pick a random episode of Tucker Carlson from 10 years ago vs today. 10 years ago, Obama's tan suit was the topic. Today, it's a militant Antifa agenda.
It's not that society has gotten worse, it's that they know their bread and butter would get bored and move onto more extreme people like Alex Jones if they don't keep that fear treadmill going uphill.
And that treadmill will eventually show you flat earth videos if you spend enough time on YouTube.
That treadmill will start showing you vaccine conspiracies (all from disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield) on Tik Tok. (And weirdly enough, usually the people in these videos just happen to have some supplement with their name on it to sell you to cure the thing the vaccine prevents.)
And my god, Twitter was bad before it was X, but the Great Replacement Theory (There's a globalist push to replace white people with mixed race people) is pushed to the top of your feed constantly.
And I could spend three blogs talking about how far right talking points are pushed via the most popular podcasts, but if you're really interested, check out this Bloomberg article. People like Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and Jake Paul love to be the "we're just asking questions" people, but they normalize tyrants like accused sex traffic-er Andrew Tate and vaccine denier and brain worm haver, RFK Jr. They platform dangerous people like Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes all in the name of views.
Here's my biggest fear. We're starting to see an entire generation of young men, feeling isolated, depressed, and feeling forgotten as more and more "manly" jobs disappear, turning to the Manosphere to fill the void. Manosphere influencers constantly attack leftists, transgendered people, gay people, women as the reason why "YOU are no longer in control of the world." They push violent tendencies, hate, and yes... keep that fear treadmill going so they can sell their Beast Burgers or whatever dumbass YouTube stuff they are selling.
Yes, I'm incredibly scared for my trans' friends and family. I'm incredibly scared for my friends' parents who are first generation Mexican immigrants. I'm scared for my left political friends.
But I'm really afraid for and of these lonely, radicalized young men who are going to see their lives get much worse in the next four years, who will no longer have "Trump is our savior" keeping them in line with optimism. When these people realize Trump is a grifter. Trump doesn't care about them, Trump only cares about himself, they are going to want to take out their anger and frustrations on others.
We already have to deal with a certain level of mass violence in America. My work was the site of a mass shooting several years ago. We all know a nearby school where a shooting has happened. There will be more violence and it will likely be directed at the wrong people.
I mention this because the media and tech companies want to distract us from real issues. We're too busy fighting each other in the comments about culture war BS, that we don't look up at those that are actually making our lives worse. It's not Democrats, Republicans, immigrants, any various flavors of religion, gender, sex. It's haves vs have-nots and it's always been that way.
Amazon and Meta will continue to push anti-union agendas. Elon Musk will continue to push conspiracy theories that go after his perceived enemies. And Donald Trump will never take responsibility for his mistakes, always putting it on some other group.
There's a saying, "An American billionaire and a Chinese billionaire have more in common than you do with the American billionaire." They've formed a united front as the haves. They've bought the government, the media, and the utilities. They convince you to vote against your best interest.
It's hard to not think about the French Revolution. The fall of Rome. See the parallels to today.
I just hope if it comes to revolution, the people with the guns know to point upward instead of downward. Right now, I'm not so sure.
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