When a fire starts to burn.

A thought on L.A. and social media consumption

Hi folks. Chuy here. Five weeks into the new life with hard-mode unlocked aka with newborn and toddler. No lie things have been at once extremely, existentially difficult and serene. I exist in a fugue state, wandering from sleepless nights filled with red-faced crying (how does such a tiny thing hit such decibels!?) to crack-of-dawn feedings before the rest of the world wakes up. Where looking into the eyes of my second-born makes that world recede into the edges of importance.

Seriously though find a cuter baby! I’ll wait.

But nothing can quite pull one out of that insularity like the encroaching footsteps of fascism outside your door. Hell can we even still say that those footsteps are encroaching? They’ve arrived and are now kicking at the entrance, splintering the frame with the same steel-toed boots they used on our neighbors necks. Let’s talk how the powers-that-be are using L.A. to execute their plans, and our country, in the process.

Now before we get much into it. Let’s look at the language we’re using. I’m not talking about riots. Or unrest. Or unruliness. Which, if your algorithms are like mine you heard and saw plenty of photos in the last week with those headlines and imagery. Of cars on fire and gas-masked individuals. If your feed was like mine you would have thought that L.A. was literally burning to the ground in a cacophony of anger and violence. But as with most things on the internet we have to think about what is getting filtered and distorted. What is getting amplified or diminished. We have to discern through the noise, things like slimy politicians re-tweeting five year old video as if it was happening now. We have to think about how this fascist dictator and his lapdogs are salivating at the fact that their wheels of discord are successfully turning. As we wring our hands remember that this is all going according to plan.

No- seriously, this is in the Project 2025 guidelines, of which our country is speed-running into oblivion. Guess Matt Walsh wasn’t joking when he said that Project 2025 was the plan all along huh?

Even though…and I shit you not, Walsh attempted to backpedal from the tweet in a video by saying that he “included the Lol.”

But anyways, back to the scorched earth that was our timelines this past week. My heart was in my stomach when I scrolled passed image after image of fire and strife. L.A. must be a war-zone right!? Then I saw this:

@z00mieLA today has been peaceful, organized, even joyful. Don’t believe what the media is saying, this isn’t LA’s first rodeo. We know how to protest respectfully. We know how to make our voices heard 🫶

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Then I remembered that we are being conditioned to see the world in extremes. And not only that, but that world is manipulated and filtered through second-third-and fourth-hand accounts. It’s like the most shittiest game of telephone, one where in the middle of it some asshole is changing every phrase to be the stupidest edge-lord shit you can imagine. (Omg Elon is that you!?)

I stopped doom-scrolling and did what I should have done from the start…go to the sources. To the actual people, there on the ground. Regular readers of this column will be familiar with my appreciation of F.D. the Signifier and his YouTube channel. It’s no coincidence that he had a similar thought and interviewed someone on the ground in L.A. over the course of the last few days. Both that account and the TikTok from before share a very similar sentiment. The vast majority of the assemblies happening in L.A. were peaceful. Yes there is no denying that there was strife but a lot of it came about when armed forces came to escalate the situation. One can’t help but feel that sending those forces was a desperate attempt to find that photo op. Find the burning car and Mexican flag. Plaster it on our walls and on Fox News. Turn on the gas of the stove and fill the kitchen…looking for the opportunity to light the match and blow our country apart. Let’s make sure that we are doing our part on amplifying the platforms of those actually there…because soon enough it will be our turn to bear witness.

That’s all for now. Believe me I could go on but for the briefest of moments I choose to recede back into the warmth of my family. To cherish and to strengthen. To prepare for the next turn of this administrations totalitarian screw. Stay safe.

-C