this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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Yeah, my sister.
She lives in an "upper middle class" yuppie suburb where we grew up, but I moved away years ago.
She gives me updates on what it's like, and she describes it like it's mad max now. She says there are bands of roving weirdos, and there are now no-go zones that the police have declared lawless.
I ask my brother what she's on about, and he has no idea. I went to visit recently and it seemed same as it ever was lol
Conservative media really do be melting brains
Actively rewriting people's realities as they're experiencing it. A family member of mine recently went up to Seattle and described it in post-apocalyptic terms too. Said there's open warfare in the streets and people shooting heroin in broad daylight. Said he saw no less than a dozen burning buildings on an average day. I went on youtube later that day to watch some recent videos of people around Seattle and it seemed like any other American urban area. Seemed kind of nice actually.
One of my cousins did a roadtrip back in like 2017 and claimed he got stopped by "antifa checkpoints" several times throughout Colorado lmao. Just utter derangement, telling exaggerated campfire stories that wouldn't be believed in middle school
I don't even know what to call this. White people wanting to feel like they're on the bad end of the stick? Hallucinations? A strong desire to do racist pogroms on false pretenses of riots?
I have to imagine it's some kind of coping strategy for precarity. People in the suburbs are scared to death of losing what they have and having to live among the lower classes. So they project these fears as poor violent minorities coming to take what they have as opposed to the accurate view of economic decline that's actually pushing them to live among the lower class
anxiety about class precarity is as old as the ascendance of the bourgeoisie. a hereditary nobility always had their place simply by birth---even if they became cash-poor, but a burgher losing their wealth forfeits their social standing. early bourgeois-ruled places like Venice actually recreated that hereditary security with a hereditary citizenship that was frozen and required legislative approval to admit new persons/families
no no it was true antifa did used to stop travellers and force them to take free weed and propagate weed legalization back then, i still have my orders from antifa headquarters, framed.
People do be doing heroin in broad daylight but otherwise that's all nonsense
What in the entire fuck? Was he just making shit up or did he really believe that? Like the cops from Kansas or whatever glass-flat shitholes abut on Colorado are notorious for robbing people with colorado plates, but antifas?
I think people like my cousins are in a constant competition with other paranoid conservatives to tell the best spooky campfire story.
For whether or not he actually believes it, it seems like a lot of their beliefs exist in a liminal position between legitimate belief and making shit up. They make stuff up until they believe it. It's like Qanon. Whether or not they believe in the tiny, granular details doesn't matter because they believe in the general vibe of the thing. Antifa checkpoints exist to my cousin because they sound like they're supposed to be a thing, not because he actually experienced them
I mean it does suck in Seattle, but that's because everything's fucking expensive, there's no bathrooms, has a shitty nightlife, feels weirdly hostile to pedestrians, and is fucking expensive. Like even Sacramento felt like it was a better city even though it's roughly similar in experience to me just more hot and worse tap water.
Maybe I should just say it sucks living down in the lower 48 and I'm happy enough up where I'm at.
She means the country club is lowering fees and the cops aren’t arresting the boat salesman who scammed her