This will be a US-centric post, fair warning if you don’t want to hear about more of that.

I’ve been more on twitter and reddit (I know, god…) recently in the week of the election and its results, and my main takeaways are:

• Liberals keep going mask off fascist in one way or another

• It seems like there’s a concerted effort across social media posting and news articles to spin the democratic party loss as anything but the democratic party’s fault, which often involves blaming one minority group or another; excuse to be racist? mask coming off? or just cynical use of them to shift blame? I don’t know, but the end result is racism either way. There’s also a fair amount of “voters are ‘stupid’, etc.” that portrays them as well informed and conscious voters who know what they want and are asking for it, but simultaneously don’t understand what they’re asking for and deserved to be punished for it when it comes back to bite them (???).

• Liberal still act like clever retorts on twitter is opposition when their (alleged) mortal enemies are on track to take an enormous amount of power

And the last one, which is why I’m posting it more casually here:

I probably need to just step away from those kind of ‘mass’ places for a while and confine my engagement with online politics to here. I know vibes aren’t evidence, but the mood of things feels like people are ready to drive themselves into a frenzy, whether the situation is actually dire or not. The best way I can think to explain it is that it’s like a bunch of people are needing a real political framework for the first time in their lives and all they have is “voters stupid”, “fascism when people do stupid/mean stuff with power”, so they’re just running around in circles.

It’s exhausting and there are moments it seemed like I made a point here and there that maybe made some difference, but I don’t know how much of that is just preaching to the choir and it’s a lot of energy to spend for very little discernible payoff. It feels like an energy trap in a way. You step into a sea of reactionary and generally panicked thought and will shout yourself hoarse trying to make a point.