I’m a bit ashamed to admit it, but I sometimes find myself browsing Reddit. It can’t be helped as internet forums have largely shut down. Reddit was designed to kill them and replace them. Reddit isn’t monolithically horrible. Whenever the discussion revolves around something that doesn’t directly or indirectly relate to politics, it can be quite informative. The problem with Reddit is that it’s a hive minded collective of leftists that’s full of astroturf and manipulated people. The Federalist recently discovered proof that the Kamala Harris campaign targeted Reddit to the tune of 2,551 posts. People have long noticed, like Twitter prior to Musk’s purchase, that Reddit is littered with bots. Whether it’s a scripted program or a lobotomized individual who faithfully retransmits received messages, it’s true. Dead Internet Theory wins again.
It should come as no surprise that, following the election, the howls of the unwashed plebbitors reached peak levels. “How could this have happened? Nobody I know in real life could vote for Cheeto Hitler! All of the posting here indicated Trump was doomed!” I have to give them credit for the fact that few of them contest the validity of the election and the sentiment of the populace. They are simply baffled that they have so fundamentally misunderstood the notions of the people they’re surrounded by.
Listen up, lost redditor. It’s because you live in an echo chamber. You have carefully cultivated safe spaces, of which Reddit is one, where you never have to confront an opposing opinion. I can reliably guarantee you that anybody you interact with in your normal life and never mentions politics was sympathetic to the Trump platform. This never would have occurred to you. Silence isn’t violence to you. It’s consent.
It’s common knowledge for normal people that people on the Right not only understand leftist positions, but can argue them more effectively than leftists can. It’s not reciprocal. All leftist constructs of a “conservative” are caricatures. Redditors ask why Hollywood has such a tough time convincingly writing villains nowadays with exceptions like the Riddler from The Batman. Because the villains are conservative and the people writing them simply can’t fathom their point of view.
If you are a redditor and reading this, you need to come to terms with the fact that your view of reality came up short on election night. Yes, a lot of dumb people voted for Trump. But a lot of people smarter than you did as well. You could say that it’s because they’re misinformed or evil, but you were clearly misinformed, and writing them off as evil leads you back to where you started. I do believe there are evil people who believe and do evil things. But you’re in the tenuous position of having to maintain that every single generation of humans who lived before the current year were hopelessly and irredeemably evil. Your grandmother who gave you peppermint candy and had some politically incorrect things to say about gays and minorities? Evil incarnate.
That’s not a great way to live, if just for the reason that this gilded age of iPhones and civil liberties came from a tradition of “evil” people. You could argue that it’s been an endless linear march towards progress, but I don’t think you could shake the fact that life’s gotten measurably more miserable despite the “progress” in the past decades. Women have more rights than they’ve ever had, but now they’re continually “under threat.” They’re also not happier. As of 2011, 1/4 of them were on medication for mental health issues. The problem hasn’t gotten better. If things were continually improving, people wouldn’t be so miserable.
The truth of the matter is that you’ve been lied to. You’re upset right now because reality isn’t shaping up to your expectations. But who shaped those expectations? Who made you a pawn? You don’t have many original thoughts, if you stop to consider it. You’re full of talking points, but who gave those to you? I’ll be frank with you in a manner they won’t: a lot of them know the truth. They know the statistics on crime, the dire implications of the destruction of the family, and about the corruption in our political and bureaucratic system. You probably know about the corruption and are fine with it so long as it achieves the desired results.
But the results, so far, have not been beneficial. I could say what everybody says to a redditor. “Go touch grass.” But I don’t think you’ve had a genuinely sympathetic voice in your life for a while. I’m not here to hand you a script to regurgitate to other people. I’m not here to listen to you regurgitate a script you got from other people. I’m here to point out that somewhere on the road of your life, you decided to start doing things other people wanted you to do without considering the consequences it would have for you or others, or if you even wanted to do them in the first place. Maybe you wanted to be liked. Maybe you lacked purpose. Maybe you were bored.
Take an inventory of all of the things you believe most firmly. We already started with the first one: “Trump cannot and will not win the 2024 election.” That turned out to be false, and the people who were hyping you up were wrong and many of them had bad intentions. Go down the list. Think critically about all of the items. Some will be true. You probably care about the environment. Me too. Nobody on the Right actually wants to pave over the national forests and turn them into Walmarts. That’s just another one of the caricatures they made up. I’m not giving you talking points. I’m giving you an invitation to think and take a personal inventory of all of the things you unquestionably accept. I hope it helps.
