I'm not sure the word has any meaning anymore beyond, "Political opponent I dislike or just random person in general I dislike."
It's like "alt-right". Remember that one? People learned a new vocabulary term, and suddenly it was everywhere. Everyone who so much as annoyed the Twitter-dwellers were suddenly deemed "alt-right". I swear my cats were alt-right. Only alt-right creatures would mess with my rugs like that.
That disappeared as quickly as it appeared, and has almost entirely been replaced by fascist.
It's always strange to me how these vocabulary words get handed down from social media, and then suddenly they're just everywhere. Doesn't matter if they apply - they will be made to fit to apply as clumsily and ahistorically as possible.
All it really does is signal to me, "I don't really read books and get most of my information from what other people are saying on the internet."
Which is kind of the problem. As much as I enjoy the back-of-the-cereal-box understanding of fascism and history, it's very cringe. It's like advertising, "I've never read a history book in my life!"
Musk isn't a fascist. He's an egotistical contrarian who enjoys trolling people for validation with the added spice of a decent sycophantic following. He doesn't think far in advance when he runs his mouth. It's what slaps at someone in the moment. Mussolini he ain't. He literally bought Twitter to pettily fuck with people on Twitter. He is 100% succeeding in that part. (The making money part much less so). All the outrage and articles and endless attention is by his design, and people are happily walking into the shit hole he dug for them. He wanted this and he's getting it because the media and social media addicts simply cannot help themselves.
I'm enjoying the hell out of it. But no one is looking intelligent in any of it. All it's doing is proving that Twitter was the trash fire long suspected and a problem in our media culture. People literally can't look away as Musk pisses away billions to troll people.
And this is how people have spent a month where *checks* we had a major election while passing 8 billion people and a continuing war in Ukraine. And no, people often can't walk and chew gum at the same time. Media oxygen is a finite resource. People at large can only pay attention to so much at once.
And too many looked out at the world and went, "I'm gonna talk about Twitter a lot. Like, a lot."
Americans always live up to their own stereotypes. I will give us that.
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