anyone else feel like all those analysis/video essays from 2014-2020 that deal with politics in media and philosophy and political debunking (think hbomberguy, shaun, skip intro, jack saint, big joel etc) feel so. idk. depressing now?
like they all try so hard to analyze this media and these events and these political movements, and they often have like. a LOT of effort put in. graphs, elaborate data, etc, and when i watched them then, it was like an antidote to all the far right bullshit that was spewed all over the place often by ppl laughing at it. highly entertaining and funny and also interesting and informative and a gateway for you to research more and think, and a lot of them help me develop my views on like. far right looneys from "they're just assholes" to "the large ones are motivated by capital, economics, and grifting, and the lower-class ones are reeling from economic shifts and tie cultural memory with economic memory (eg. I can't buy a house now, therefore the gays are what's wrong with the world since they showed up then.)" and these videos kind of have this hopeful tinge to them. like they all end with stuff like "well, if we build communities and organize labor and talk to these people, (and produce enough content to combat the far-right stream of disinfo) then maybe, maybe we can win. it will take a massive amount of change but we can do it, on a small scale first then a larger one." and then like none of that happened.
like the antidote was made and it was wonderful and it didnt matter for anyone except those healthy anyway. n like none of it happened. there wasnt mass community organizing (i tried but like. i was one teen), the ppl who were far right didnt stop being far right, and we like. went backwards. like there was a vid about how modern family or whatev normalized gay ppl and now its like we're going back. like far right assholes are in power n culturally important, the last election had right-wing talking points as the fulcrum of every discussion and trump WON by way way more than last time and most ppl i know either shifted right or were radicalized left but hopeless abt it. u see all these vids and they're like "well, heres a way we could fix this, here's the data to back this up, etc etc etc" or "here's how this media perpetuates negative beliefs about police" or whatever and then we didnt fix it and the media didnt change or still exists. all the hope they seem to have feels so fcking hollow when we are in the future they talk about and know everything still sucks.
