What the hell happened to this country since the MySpace days?!

I really don't get it. I'm not even talking acceptance, I'm talking tolerance for other human beings and the way they lived their lives.

Back in 2005, true, things were less than ideal. You had George W. Bush, the Iraq War which everyone hated, the nosey-ass PATRIOT Act, an online environment that quickly became the most toxic cesspool one could possibly imagine (if you can imagine it being worse than today), gay marriage wasn't yet legal in the US.

And yet you had a whole generation of emo/scene kids with dyed hair and piercings who rallied around their favorite bands, did crazy adventurous sh*t, put up their middle fingers and said "literally get f*cked if you don't like our amazing gender-bending, cross-dressing, boy crazy asses. We love who we love, kiss who we wanna kiss, f*ck who we wanna f*ck."

Predictably, parents and the media went a little Satanic Panic because they seem to do that whenever kids express their emotions (god forbid).

But from what I recall, it was a hell of a lot easier to find your tribe. People weren't obsessed with politics like they are today, because distrust in the government was at an all-time high, and there were a lot of things that were thankfully background noise. You didn't have to worry as much about your rights being questioned or taken away, and if people didn't accept you, f*ck 'em and move on. Maybe this was helped by us not being online 24/7 back then, I don't know, because the cyberbullying in my generation was thankfully limited to after-school PC access (even if it was comparatively a billion times more dehumanizing).

But you know, whatever, you could be Zen.

Nowadays, everything's gone to absolute shyte.

You have pathetic reactionaries like Matt Walsh asking "what is a woman", men like Jordan Peterson (who had come off a years-long benzo addiction, I might add) ranting about "compelled speech", and Ben Shapiro rattling off sentences faster than Eddie Kaspbrak about abortion and trans people and whatever reality looks like to him (miserable, I guess).  

Plus all the disaffected incel Red Piller men who follow them and are somehow convinced nonbinary and trans people will destroy their very masculinity. How fragile can you be to think your own manhood (or womanhood, since TERFism is still alive and well) is determined by someone else identifying as they wish?

Amazing the amount of whining a simple mask or pronoun can elicit from these crybabies.

Funniest thing about it all is that they can hate "liberals" or "the left" all they want, but without them, I'm convinced no one at the Daily Wire would even have a career, considering 95% of Matt Walsh's content is cringing about some type of liberal thing.

But such are the times now, thanks to the American public being stupid enough to allow someone like Donald Trump to be president. Hell, there was a time I actually had a lingering shred of respect for the Republican party. Now it's all about "owning the libs", even if it means cutting their own hands off in the process.

And the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade,

God, I miss the days when trolls couldn't monetize themselves and got forced into the dustbin of internet history where they belonged. The resurgence of brutal trolling online in recent years is troubling (though more irritating than scary), and the fact it's bleeding into reality is only evidence that the digital world and the real world are further merging.

THAT part of being online all the time is what's scary and bothersome to me--more people are doing despicable and even violent things in reality because of what they watch or read on the internet (like the QAnon believer who shot up a pizza place a few years back), and it's slowly affecting their ability to distinguish between real threats and imagined ones.

But back to my point, I've never seen conservatives whine so much about things that don't affect them. Someone else identifying as they wish is the end of the world, really? Grow up lol.