In other news, the flossy haired criminal swine has been inaugurated. I switched to situation-normal-all-effed-up mode a few days after the election, and haven’t been worrying too much. Not because he’s not going to do horrible things, but because he’s already stolen enough of my life thinking about him. Not everyone is in a privileged enough position to be able to be that detached— white, male, cisgender, straight, US citizen, (lower) middle classish. Old enough that there’s a limited amount of damage they can do to me in what’s left of my life.
Get off of social media
Get out, get away from it. It’s all being algorithmically tweaked to suck you in with negativity and exhaust your emotions at least. Twitter/“X” is an absolute cesspool of that, and I abandoned it right after the election, quite happily. TicToc is shaping up to be a major source of disinformation and emotional drain. Most musicians I know, and family, are on Facebook, and that’s the only reason to use it, a little light socializing, demonstration of your acitivities. And a few special people like Mike Clark and Hal Galper.
Bluesky is the one apparent exception to the algorithmic games and weaponized troll infestation— as such, it’s not as “engaging”, WHICH IS GOOD. That feeling of unaroused detatchment you’re experiencing? That’s non-addiction, that’s you having the freedom to do it for a minute when you feel like it, and then do something else.
Beware of rage farming
To the extent that you’re on social media, keep the eternal rage bait at arm’s length. Even people you agree with— to an extent are in the service of this fascistic social media project, by keeping you agitated and glued to your phone, and emotionally exhausted. Follow real journalists, not the accounts just playing videos of the president being horrible.
What they do
If you haven’t noticed, virtually 100% of the belief system of this incoming reactionary cabal is to “trigger the libs”, which they mostly do by saying awful things, asserting their inevitable triumph, promising to wreak terrible vengeance when they finally become actual dictators. Your attention and negative reaction is the whole reason they do it. I mean, they believe it, but they really want your attention.
Any time you find yourself obsessing over what is wrong with them, you are participating in their media mission. That’s with anyone— 99% of social media personalities exist for that reason, to make you obsess wondering wtf is wrong with them. Bail out, do not participate in that.
Don’t worry about it until they do it
No doubt, that tangerine pig is going to try to do some terrible things, but you can’t be worrying about it in advance. You’ve noticed that he says a lot of things he never does. And he and his minions have proven to be quite incompetent at actually doing things, so much of it won’t happen, or happen in any durable way.
His real purpose
That dying orange sh*t-gibbon’s only purposes in life are to a) get richer, b) get attention, c) get praise, d) get vengeance on his enemies. That’s it. That is it. He does not care about any of the issues he incoherently slurred about in his campaign. He’s already screwing the crypto people who supported him on the belief that they would finally get to loot the United States Treasury, for example.
What I hope
I’m banking on his crazy-making and incompetence. Have you noticed that he betrays and f*cks over everyone he does business with? Often in record time. There is no way this relationship with ketamine boy survives. He looks bad when confronted with real crises, and proves totally unequipped to deal with them— he actually sees them as opportunities for blackmail— but that’s not a good reason to hope for bad things to happen.
And, because he is a chaotic individual, almost as interested in keeping his loyalists insane as he is his enemies, there is also a faint chance he decides cooperate with Democrats to do something good. I’m not holding my breath, but there’s a greater than 0 chance of it.
Also, with federal law enforcement soon to be mainly a political wing of the ****p administration, and the major news media reaching for new levels of servile whitewashing his crimes, the entire movement will be emboldened to believe they are above the law, and will commit a lot of crimes, some of which they’ll actually be prosecuted for.
Do your work
Like I said somewhere in my new book, the more involved you are in real life doing real stuff, real music, the less the internet media blow pipe of upsetting things, which exists to hurt you, can hurt you. Do that, let’s do that.