I mean like Charlie Kirk, Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, etc. It’s so blatant to me that their existence is about wasting people’s time. They’re pure sophists. They probably believe in everything they claim, or more probably, they have a flimsier understanding of truth/reality than we do and can believe contradictory things.
But none of that matters. They exist to waste your time. They’re keys being jangled by fracking billionaires and possibly also the state department.
Yes I know the Sartre quote about antisemites and all but this is worse than that. It doesn’t even matter that Shabibo or Dan Bongos knows they’re playing a game, because reality doesn’t matter to them. Fascists believe base level reality is pointless to explore, because there’s a deeper core reality that affirms their every belief, even if that belief changes day to day or isn’t internally consistent. They’re not materialists, they’re fixated on simply being correct and powerful and whatever dirty, stupid reality contradicts them doesn’t matter. They’re never going to care about scientific documentation about trans people, or studies about healthcare costs, or homelessness rates, or anything else, because it doesn’t matter what they care about. They believe in a truer, super-reality above our own that makes them always correct no matter what happens. But again, that doesn’t matter.
They exist to waste your time and mine. I know they’re not going to truly go away and that I’m wasting my own time by even posting about this but jesus christ can these people just go away. They’re an annoying swarming static noise of pure nothingness that for some reason everyone has to pay attention to. People I’d otherwise respect or listen to have to talk about them. Movie reviewers who otherwise might focus on interesting indie films might have to talk about whatever stupid slop Matt Walsh puts out.
Why does anyone talk to Charlie Kirk anyway? He’s the worst offender to me because no one knows who the fuck he is. Where did he even come from? This guy simply appeared as if he were already famous for something. Just farted into existence and people started pretending he was valuable enough to have on talk shows and colleges and fuck who the fuck is this guy and why do I have to know about his stupid face
yeah I know, touch grass touch grass, I’m trying, but even just going out and about, talking to random people or meeting up with coworkers for tea or something these fascist media bozos have a way of infecting casual conversation, or like showing up in the corner of my eye on one of the TVs at a Chili’s
Lenin had the right idea when he put a bunch of reactionary public intellectuals on a leaky tug boat and exiled their stupid asses. Please wake up, kind Vladimir Illych. 
Yeah they’re awful people. We live in a harrowing time of hyper-reality and they excel in it. This is their swamp.
We live in the dumbest timeline and these clowns are what floated to the top. Sucks to be them, in a way. This is the kind of world that “works” for them. A world that is quantifiably dying and full of peril for everyone that isn’t them. Bozos, every last one of em.
They’re such clowns. You’re right. Their jobs are predicated by having no soul whatsoever. They’re empty, dead eyed autonomous decoys who dance around and annoy people. They posture themselves as leading political figures and yet half their time is spent complaining about gay characters in cartoons and the other half is about how it’s actually ok when poor people die.
They’re nothing. They feel no shame or common humanity. The only thing they feel is some sick satisfaction when their bourgeois masters slip another million into their stupid little companies. Wait a minute
Are TPUSA and the daily wire just tax evasion or money laundering or something, with the added benefit of having an annoying clown go argue with college students
Are TPUSA and the daily wire just tax evasion or money laundering or something
You’d hope at least one of them is smart enough to be pulling those kind of strings to get extra dough before the inevitable collapse. Their whole existence would be useless if the won the world they profess to want. They can only exist inside this dying world like a parasite.
This also extends to c/slop and c/gossip.
All ragebait is an attempt at wasting your time and making you miserable. They are sucking up your mental bandwidth.
Ya gotta just learn to let people say stuff. It sucks but it doesn’t have to make you mad and you don’t have to engage with it or think about it at all. Just hit report, block that person, and/or move on. Giving it any thought at all is just feeding the troll.
Just because you saw it does not in fact mean that everyone else has to see it too. It’s just spreading bad vibes for no reason.
Some of us have been calling this kind of thing out. But yall piggies like to wallow in shit.
I’ve been dreaming of a movement to just not give these people the attention they’re seeking for a long time now.
As the ancient scribes said, “don’t feed the troll”. But no one listened, and now I am forced to know who Ben Shapiro is.
It’s up to the mods, and kind of a site culture thing. People just want to dunk, theyre tired from work etc, all the standard arguments. Don’t expect a lot from the site that enshrined badposting and fakenews.
I don’t really mean the site, I don’t care if people here talk about whatever fascist dork of the week. I can go outside. It’s when these reactionaries leak into my everyday life that I start to feel sick. I hate seeing and hearing about them on like a podcast about book reviews, or whatever. It’s exhausting to live in a world where they get constant attention
It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I’ve banged on this drum, the site freaks out over even the tiniest changes to the toxic slop treats. It should come as no surprise that most of the sitewide struggle sessions in the past few years have been over this specific site culture problem.
You want to eliminate dunking of any kind or just towards MAGA?
Yup
I don’t argue with people much anymore
I’m not going to change their minds, they’re not going to change mine
I state my position, provide sources and disengage
Unless I’m playing Helldivers and someone starts using slurs, then I give them the ol’
and 
Honestly I’d prefer if reactionaries just drop the whole debate thing and say slurs instead. It saves so much time and headache. It’s so much easier when they come clean about how garbage they are instead of dancing around respectability and rhetoric.
That would end the self-delusion these people have that they think they’re superior to everyone else. They think their way of thinking is “normal” and “common sense” and that we’re just a bunch of lazy morons.
I wish their ideology would die off. IDK how China manages to keep their Conservatives from causing problems.
Bit idea: Chinese conservative that wants to go back to the good old days of Mao Zedong getting rid of landlords
It’s annoying that the podcasts talk about them so much. TrueAnon and co waste way too much time bringing up their fellow professional blabberers.
Ya I see a lot content creators I enjoy spend too much time doing debunking. Honestly I appreciate the effort, and maybe it’s good for libs on the fence, but personally I can’t consume it.
D
ebunking is cheap and easy content for a pod of casters to produce during the decades when weeks happen. As the weeks where decades happen are relatively scarce they need to save their energy for the long, lean periods of light news weeks.It really is. It just feels like a default episode for a lot of creators.
Many commentators like the illustrious Mr. Chapo were terminally online twitter assholes who spun their follower counts into podcasts, they weigh the importance of shit on twitter way more than it should because it was the website that made them rich
I’m wasting my own time by even posting about this
Fwiw, I found your post insightful
I’m at this point with reactionaries in general. Nearly everything they say is complete bullshit, they’ll never apply any sort of science or even logic to their ideas, and never for a second will there be any reflection on their past bad ideas. For many of them, social issues are just a means to an end, like only pay lip service to women’s rights when it’s attacking trans ppl.
Instead of trying to parse what they’re saying is true or false, I just ignore them.
I’ll still have left friends be shocked that guy friend with a lot of chud values did or say something awful. I get you love your friend, but gosh it wasn’t surprising.
A leaky boat with not enough food, an engine that will crap out mid-ocean and nothing but meat cleavers in the tool roomDidn’t shartpeero get humiliated multiple times to the point of irrelevancy after 2020?
never recovered from the “wet ass p-word” remix
I feel you. I used to post a lot of awful stuff when it seemed like others at least pretended to care about shutting that shit down, but it’s completely out of control
This is the internet without any meaningful regulation whatsoever I fear
(I’m not very articulate and I’m just doing stream of consciousness so I apologize if this seems incredibly cliched or unhinged) I feel this every time I log on and use a major social media platform. The spectacle exists to waste our time and abstract and obfuscate baseline reality. ‘Online is not real life’ but they got so much of the west to buy into it by pushing journalists throughout the 2010s to embrace Twitter. My friend was given quotas by her editor for how many times she should tweet per day. It was done with eye rolling condescension at the beginning but she quickly bought in. Culture war shit does the same thing. You can make a difference online; change some minds. (I feel like this spectacle of ideological clashing was where right wing personalities flipped and won the youth… it has the same energy we all had back when Jack Thompson was the most hated person on the internet; we had a battle and we were righteous in being trolls). Doxxing extends its tendrils into the real world. People getting jobs because of their online presence. All of this makes you feel as though online has a real gravity and importance to it. But online is not real life, it’s a mediated space. It trains people to exorcise their frustrations via online simulated activism in the form of posting. It’s like watching Schindlers List and feeling like you’re good because you recognize the moral in the movie… and then never actually fighting for any justice in real life… except the simulation online convinces you even more that you ARE fighting for justice. It trains people to use anodyne language like unalive. Importantly, online is a totally flat reality. Death and logging off look exactly the same to online, it’s just an account that no longer posts. So posting is proof of life. Money controls online more than it can ever control real life so money has an enhanced control over everyone there. And almost every platform quantifies ‘engagement’ as a spectacle for all to see, so we consciously or subconsciously train ourselves to get those numbers up. We maximize our activity for what will get upvotes and retweets and turn everyone into audience and performer. (This feels particularly prevalent on the large platforms. You’re tweeting for the imagined millions of people you don’t know. On smaller discords and places like hexbear we at least know eachother and have more of a peer relationship.)
Everyone wants to log off and ditch the smartphone, so they must all feel this too. I don’t know what solutions exist once we log off, but it does seem like leaving the major platforms is the only way to avoid having all our revolutionary energy siphoned off, and the only way to build the actual relationships that we will need to affect anything. End of rant.
Yep, that’s why I never cared about them or content about them and still don’t.
I think there is still some value in knowing what the CHUD talking heads are saying, just so it’s easier to talk to a “normie” who has fallen for some bullshit and counter it. Some of this stuff they say is so wild and nonsensical that trying to educate someone who is worth talking to can end up being a waste of time because they’ve been drowning in pig shit and you don’t have the tools to pull them out.
the thing about cultural hegemony is that you don’t need to seek out the narratives being promoted by the ruling class, because they are constantly oozing from every outlet and orifice. you could purposely ignore Kirk and Shapiro for a year and I bet you could make a list of bullet points after that year which basically sums up their talking points for any given week.
the message is inescapable. you don’t need to give them your attention in order to think of counter arguments to austerity, anti-immigration, hierarchy, or other reactionary frames.
by paying attention to them and reacting to their narratives, you are letting them set the terms of discourse you expect to find in the world. when, realistically, the people earnestly listening to that garbage aren’t reachable in the way that people who are casual consumers of mass media are. reachable people worth talking to about issues and building something are not particularly interested in what the latest talking points to repeat or rebutt are according to capitalist platforms selling their entertainment products. often, what is on their mind is, not-coincidentally, is different than the latest topic of distraction being purposely hyped by the machine’s puppets.
That’s the sort of thing I was more thinking about, that we should be aware of what they are saying, but we don’t need to actively seek them out. While we shouldn’t let them set the terms of discourse, they will try, and they will provide people with quick, easy to digest thought terminating cliches that we do need to be aware of and call out.
I’ve found that a lot of “apolitical” people will fall for the same shit over and over again as long as it is repackaged correctly, they don’t do the same analysis of information that we do, and it can be hard to figure out from a casual conversation what they are even talking about. It’s much easier to “debunk” shit to a normie if you know it comes from Shapiro or something, because then you can just say “Oh, that thing, yeah, that weirdo who loves wearing adult nappies loves saying that shit. It’s nonsense.” and it’ll reach them much more easily than a careful takedown of the idea.
