What are we to make of the flood of posts screaming “I didn’t vote for this” aka leopards eating faces posts that we see everywhere? I mean really, fundamentally, what are we going to do about the people whose businesses are now closing because they can’t get drop-shipping or machine parts from Germany for their small business? For a day or two after Trump makes his next idiotic policy pronouncement, the internet is awash in these types of posts. Some idiotic gen-xer or boomer goes viral on r/LeopardsAteMyFace and we all have a good laugh. So I’m asking, how do we integrate these people back into society, I mean really?

Is anyone thinking deeper about what any of this means? How are we supposed to have a society when people believe foreign countries pay tariffs as they themselves are paying those tariffs? That’s a level of cognitive dissonance science has no instruments to measure. Not even the metric system can save us this time.

Internet comments on these types of posts are like water, they quickly find their own level. Meme phrases such as ‘Play stupid games, win stupid prizes’ rise and then fade away like a firework on the fourth of July. These phrases rotate in and out so quickly it’s hard to catalog all of them. Memes that have even an ounce of cleverness are soon trodden to death by commenters looking for engagement on whatever wave is riding high that day. Despite all that, internet commenters generally seem to land on two themes that I generally agree with.

1: The number one metric for whether you support Trump is how fucking racist you are. Because I’m here to tell you that shit will supercede literally everything. You’ll pay higher gas and grocery prices all fucking day long if you get to come home and rage to Fox News, Charlie Kirk, or even Nick Fuentes for a couple hours about brown people, then go to work in the morning and do it all over again every single day.

2: The second one is more complex: “I hope you get what you voted for.” What you are seeing now is a natural backlash to the ‘owning of the libs’ that memed Trump into office in the first place. For the regressives to come to any type of epiphany whatsoever, we are all going to have to feel a massive amount of pain. Trump is president for 3.5 more years, bro. There are more of us, statistically speaking, but not enough of us to avoid me having to write all this. Or not enough people who could be bothered to vote.

Here’s why you’re seeing these posts right now. Conservatives only care about something when it affects them. You ever wonder why that is? I mean it’s one thing to point it out over and over again as people do, but does anyone ever, you know, think deeper about it? Or do we only think social-media-deep anymore? The answer is easy: Conservatives live in a curated reality. They’re often indoctrinated religiously or politically from birth. When you’re brought up to respect your pastor and your dad at all costs, well let’s just say it’s quite easy to see why so many pastors get arrested for sexual assault. When you’re brought up not to question what you’re told, it’s gonna hit super hard when you get pregnant, have a complication and need to terminate it and can’t. Because you voted for politicians who took away the right. And they duped you into voting for it by telling you there would be exemptions for the ‘life of the mother’. Has there been even one example of these exemptions? They didn’t tell you that doctors wouldn’t ever perform them for fear of being arrested later. Real world consequences are hitting you for the first time. You are facing objective reality for the first time in your life and it doesn’t vibe. Like at all. Because you’re selfish. Now you’re whining on social media for an exemption because consequences are also selfish; they don’t ask for permission. Selfishness is a fundamental conservative trait. No conservative ever thinks about the greater good, selfishness is one of the most core tenets of the ideology.

I’ve got terrible news. There’s no way to win, not really. The information space is so polluted that simply putting valid information into the machine is an exercise in futility. Right wing media won the battle and we lost. Before we even acknowledged the battle it was over. We never even made an effort because most people never understood what was happening. In 2017 I posted that one of our biggest issues was a rising wave of christo-fascism and got downvoted.

Do you disagree? Trump won a second time, so I’m not sure how you could. So what are we gonna do about it? I have more bad news for you: There is no political answer to the current problem without violence. They said that violence is never the answer but every time I open a history book I see it’s pretty much the only answer. Violence is the authority that all other authority is derived from. Fascism has never been defeated without violence. It remains to be seen how bad fascism in America will get. The people still hold power but Americans are stupid, fat, and lazy so not likely to ever come together on a scale large enough to solve this problem.

The idea of America is dead. The America that existed for hundreds of years, that you and I grew up in is gone. We’re never getting that world back. In America, we used to chase dreams. Now we chase engagement. We used to read books, now we read phones. We used to solve big problems. Now when someone says the ocean is blue we ask what’s their source. I truly don’t know what to do, I don’t know if anything will ever be enough. I hate to leave this problem unsolved, but I’m just one person, and fascists are out here leveraging economies of scale.

Goliath couldn’t be more well-defined, what remains to be seen is, who is our David?