A Real Note.

Discussion surrounding the current climate, including references to fascism and gun violence. 

I am posting with the understanding that this is counterintuitive to my belief that our society is reaching a critical mass of opinions across the board, and the widespread mindset is that if you have an opinion, it needs to be heard by the masses. IE, you’re one podcast episode away from greatness. This is in no way the intention I had for this blog. I don’t think anyone is going to read this anyway, and I have surrounded myself with people who I believe agree with me on most things, so I am creating nothing more than an echo chamber of my own community. I digress. It is this ideology that we must be heard that brought Charlie Kirk to the forefront. It is this ideology that has led to the influx of influencers in our society, which is approaching that “critical mass.” We are reaching a point where we, as a society, are so self-centered that we believe the goal should be building an internet platform of people who care solely about us and what we have to say.

There are many places where this tends to be problematic, one major example being the fitness industry. Many influencers tend to have their intro include “these are my big muscles and if you do this exactly like I do you will look exactly like I do,” which has been a rhetoric since the dawn of sweatbands and shakeweights but, with some extra thought and research, we can deduce this isn’t true because of the number of variables that go into body building and musical growth and health. For example, testosterone is a huge factor in muscle growth, where the average man has between 400-900 ng/dL testosterone levels (cis or not if on HRT), but lifters who use steroids can have levels up to 1100 ng/dL which further pushes into this narrative of unattainable social media bodies that we are constantly trying to achieve, when simply without external intervention, is not possible. All of this is to say that people have this thought process that the way they have gone through life is so ideal that everyone else needs to know about it, and you should listen. But why should you listen? Have we just looked at the results and said, “Yeah, no, that makes sense.” Have we forgotten Ethos, Pathos, and Logos? Have we forgotten RAVEN?? (Reputation, Ability to observe, Vested interest, Expertise, Neutrality or bias). I believe that people should have to put in the interest to be educated before they educate others. Maybe that is a hot take or a biased viewpoint because I appreciate education. And I want to be clear in that this comes from an appreciation for education, not as a crutch for elevating those with the means for higher education as a superior group of people.

One group of people on a surface level is not better than another based on the level of education completed. It would be hypocritical of me to say that people only provide value based on their education, when many people who choose not to/cannot go to college fill roles in society that are still vital to our functioning. Someone who goes to trade school out of high school, for example, may become a mechanic instead of going to university, and with an incredibly automotive-centered society, that role of upkeep in that industry is vital. I chose to go into a major outside of the norm to fill a role in life that I deem important, and to not offer others that same understanding would be wrong, based on my moral compass. However, it isn’t about the piece of paper that makes us fill a certain place in society. High school and college are so much more than that. At its best, school teaches us skills in specific contexts that can be cross-applied to many other scenarios. This is usually the answer to the question of “when are we going to use this in the real world?” Mostly in reference to algebraic formulas. This can also be applied to many other subjects, especially in high school. They weren’t just teaching us how to read; they were teaching us critical thinking in literature, they were teaching us problem-solving, and so much more. I will stand by this until I die, that the curtains are never just blue. Details that are put into stories are chosen with care and precision. The author chose a detail to provide to the reader. But these details can go beyond what we consider classic literature (clit for short), and were intended to be applied to situations outside of the book at hand. As humans, we are were good at recognizing patterns and coming to conclusions based on those patterns. When we come across scenarios in our lives, the idea is that we trace back our lived experiences and apply them to those scenarios. We are running away from this thought process, and we are running away from those skills and abilities. We are not exercising these skills enough in our everyday lives. We read Fahrenheit 451 and watched the process of book burning as a form of media censorship, but we didn’t bat an eye when states are banning books in libraries because it’s not the same? Watching the real world right now is genuinely a frightening experience. I began watching a show recently called The Man in the High Castle. The premise is basically that we lost World War II, and the world is living under the Axis power, and the United States is living under Nazi rule in 1962. Some of the world-building and character interactions draw chilling parallels.

Mr. Hitler. He’s got his left hand in his pocket. Do you know why? …He’s got Parkinson’s. His hands shake like shit. How much longer do you think he’s got?

The Man in the High Castle

We are living in an age where we are shifting towards a specific kind of content that falls away from storytelling and world creation that we grew up with. The content we are consuming as a larger society is only information that merely mimics a specific shade of real life. We have been warned about the dangers of the portrayal of life on social media since we had access to it in our pockets. I grew up around young girls being told how they shouldn’t believe what they see on social media because we knew it would lead to debilitating self-deprecation and self-worth issues. But we didn’t listen to the warnings. Either that or we weren’t set up in a way that made it easy by any means to listen to the people around us over the void of social media projections. How are we asking teenagers who are at a pivotal moment in their lives developmentally to block out the noise they see online all the time and to listen to the reason around them, when we know for a fact that these kids are vulnerable to manipulation, whether they know it or not?

The content and media we consume nowadays, by and large, are simply just a life we wish we lived, rather than allowing ourselves to indulge in media that is so far removed from what we see daily that we know can’t recognize fascism when it is screaming at us right in front of our eyes. It is allowing us as a whole to be propagandized in our own houses, and we don’t even know when we see it.

Charlie Kirk built a platform, an organization, and a movement off of a demographic of people in a pivotal time in their lives. I had a conversation with a middle school band director I know, and we talked about how, while we are music teachers, we are teaching young humans first. We are teaching kids how to function in a society. Charlie Kirk was hailed as a political figure because he gave his thoughts on policy and funded politically motivated organizations that were built on the premise of how his faith interacts with society. He said on record that when he dies, he wants to be remembered for how he was a faith-driven man and that he dared to stand up for his faith. Charlie Kirk did not have a college degree in political science. He did not have a degree in theology. He did not have any religious designation. He was a champion to those who looked down on higher education and saw it as leftist brainwashing because he didn’t have anything besides strongly formed opinions to bring to the table, and he was the face of a movement. It is no coincidence that while he was a community college dropout, his popularity was gained by touring around college campuses across America. He gained his popularity the same way the MAGA cult was formed, by preying on a vulnerable population of people in an environment where whatever he says can be taken as fact because no one wants to question otherwise, and we haven’t been taught to question otherwise. As we go forward in life, we are expected to come up with larger conclusions with less and less information. In a video essay that is circulating online, deemed an “apolitical statement,” however, we connect back to the recent violence against Charlie Kirk, where we are watching the literacy crisis in America become the center of the division surrounding the incident.

“The literacy crisis is hitting all four corners of this country because we are never getting a real manifesto again. Haven’t seen one in a minute. It used to be way less stupid to figure out why someone did something, right? They used to tie it up in a bow for us. They used to leave us a little packet, a stapled ‘Hey! This is exactly why! Yep :] No, this is exactly why I did it! Yep! No room for interpretation [or] debate, no, this is why I did it.’ Now we are just pulling motive from Discord server chats, 4chan threads, social media accounts, and corny memes we’re sharing. Now, because of the literacy crisis, we have the dumbest people from your high school hopping online to “”debate”” what a very obvious white nationalist statement made in a Discord server may or may not mean. ‘What does this mean? What does this mean, you guys?’ What do you think it means, Jerry? What could it mean?”

(Reb for Rebrand from TikTok, but I saw this on an Instagram reel reposted from TikTok).

By using my critical thinking skills, I am deducing that this was posted in response to the fact that the motives behind the gunman at UVU are ambiguous at best, with the only information we have on him being short statements from his family, but that didn’t necessarily address the incident as a whole, and engravings on his shell casings that were found. I am not going to pull out my magnifying glass and try to decipher what all of those engravings mean, but the discourse I have been seeing online is genuinely ridiculous. Coming to a comment section with one opinion that just feels like it’s a complete 180o from whatever the initial thought process was, then for someone to reply saying “actually no, it’s this _______” with no other reasoning, and then for everyone just to say “where are your sources, you’re just someone on the internet contesting my viewpoint.” When that’s exactly what got us into this mess in the first place. For general examples, the ways that marginalized communities are vilified by the administration with off-the-cuff comments about the number of crimes committed by these communities, the way that vaccines are bad for us, or any number of bits of information that get chugged through the information warfare machine of retweets, podcast subjects, and then on Fox News.

And nearly two weeks later, the conversation surrounding any affiliations with the gunman has fizzled out, the conversations now surrounding Starbucks tea drinks and the incoming rapture. It wouldn’t surprise me if this was a way of distraction from the file release that the government is sitting on. We were told how they would do it, in another example of how media consumption influences our worldview.

She's engaged. Make everything about that. What kind of dress is she gonna wear? - floggings. What's the cake gonna look like? - executions. Whose gonna be there? - fear.

Hunger Games: Catching Fire

At risk of sounding like my tinfoil hat is going to fall over my eyes while I am writing, like I alluded to earlier, I am a firm believer that the curtains are always more than just blue. Looking beyond the information that is right in front of us is vital to being able to function independently in the world. The right may think that they are looking beyond with their ideas that the media is out to get them and feed them false information, but their skepticism is misplaced when you look at the fact that their ideas are coming from whoever they are idealizing at the time, but they don’t look into information beyond. They don’t ask why.

For example, there is a video that circulates every so often about asking why drag queens only seem to read to children and not the elderly or the homeless. While this might be true, the thinking process doesn’t extend beyond this. When we examine why this fact might be true, we could deduce the fact that kids are only learning to read, or, with the direction we are going, can’t read. My grandmother loves to read and prefers to engage with drag queens over drag bingo. Or homeless people. I am sure someone who is experiencing homelessness would prefer support beyond just reading and something that might help them get on their feet.

I digress. We are fighting a losing battle, and it starts with the demonization of public education under the guise of leftist indoctrination. Charlie Kirk built his following on a very specific presentation of his faith in ways that are very specific followings of the bible that is now being combined with Christian nationalism.

During the Columbine massacre, there was a young woman named Cassie Bernall who was one of the victims. Her name gained popularity when there was an idea circulating that she was approached by one of the gunmen who asked if she believed in god. She replied yes and was subsequently murdered. This created a narrative in evangelical circles that kids should now expect to be killed and martyred for their faith. This specific telling of events ended up being false, but the trauma that extended to later generations was already done. With the unclear motive behind the killing of Charlie Kirk, we are on a similar path, combined with the fact that students are now expected to lay down their lives by simply going to school. While the incident at UVU was a highly viewed targeted killing, it was also a school shooting, on the same day as the shooting at Evergreen High School in Colorado.

It was revealed that the perpetrator of this shooting, Desmond Holly, was “radicalized by an extremist network,” according to authorities, and while it hasn’t been disclosed which one it was, authorities are raising red flags about consuming extremist content online because all it takes is one fringe idea presented to a vulnerable population, combined with the normalization of hatred and violence, leads to the tragedies that we are witnessing every single day. There are minimal laws that are actually in favor of children’s safety online. While COPPA intends to protect the privacy of children online and CIPA aims to provide safe internet access in schools and libraries, when we are allowing young people to freely roam the internet and access content that perpetuates these ideologies, we are setting ourselves up for failure. When we are teaching our kids to worship the internet and to ignore schooling, we are creating a monstrous generation of kids who fail to identify threatening content around them and who disparage education in the classroom in the name of idolizing parasocial relationships with online personalities.

Beyond political affiliation, there is a scenario where the gunman watched what happened with Luigi Mangione and the “fanbase” that ensued after, and thought he would live the same life. Beyond radicalization, when we televise and publicize the support of committing violence, those who cannot recognize nuance and use context to make informed decisions in their best interest. The combination of a decline in critical thinking and rapid radicalization of ideas is creating a dangerous storm that vulnerable people are going to continue martyring themselves for a cause they don’t understand, and is distracting us all from the real enemy at the top.

As a last personal note on something that I have had the hindrance to think about for a long time:

I have accepted the profession I am choosing to go into because it is something that I believe in for the betterment of our society, and with that, I would jump between a threat and a child without a second thought. But it is heartbreaking that it’s come to this.