Breadlines are brat. Are you cuckoo for Coconut? Are you brat? Does the joy of a kind-hearted wine aunt running for president, or her folksy grandpa running mate who once read to a class of kindergartners for a photo op, make you “happy”? Early last week, this was the cheerful internet glop America was drowning in when famed, welfare-queening European bureaucrat Thierry Breton threatened Elon Musk, an American businessman, for interviewing Donald Trump, an American president, on X, an American social media platform. Explicitly, Breton threatened to destroy X with crippling fines for disseminating “misinformation,” but implicitly, via clever reference to the rise of despotism in the UK — an odd topic to raise for a man with no jurisdiction over the region — the threat was something darker. Such hostility from a union of our most important global allies should have been a major controversy. In response, however, our government said nothing. In part, this is likely because our sitting president appears to have dementia. Does he even know this happened? Probably not. But there’s also been a deeper change in the way we all communicate, which has blinded us to almost anything of meaning.

The last important event that really penetrated our frivolous discourse was the near assassination of Donald Trump. That lived in the news for about a week before the coconut eclipse, and we’ve been vibing ever since. How did Kamala become our nominee? Does she even have a platform? Don’t be a “substance demander,” I was told the other day. It was an incredible piece of dystopian language. It was also honest. It was also correct. You can cry about it all you want, but we no longer talk about reality in concrete terms, and concrete language is certainly no way to win an election.

It’s 2024, we vibe or we die.

There’s always the question of how much the internet matters. The meme’ing, and the meme’ing about the meme’ing, and the think pieces about the meme’ing about the meme’ing — sure, I’m always ready to quote McLuhan. Our primary medium of communication has fundamentally changed, so we should expect our world to change accordingly. But are we all just too online? How much does “coconut season” really matter? Well, in the case of this election, the polls and the betting markets tracked to a vibe, which was absolutely set by the memes. Notably, money also followed. Record breaking amounts of money.

Now, a good meme is something I understand. But throwing millions at a presidential candidate because a pop star called her “brat”? Nobody is actually that stupid.

Right?

Earlier this month, curiosity got the best of me, and I logged into the VCs for Kamala fundraiser, which certainly sparked a little “joy” in my life. According to the organization’s creator, this “movement” (Californians voting for Democrats) was “historic.” What began as an angry tweet became an open letter: if Donald Trump won another term in office, the letter argued, the technology industry could literally “collapse.” At the time, amidst a flurry of enthusiastic reporting, many rich investors publicly endorsed the language. This was an act of “bravery,” said the organizer of support for a Democrat in Silicon Valley.

Okay. I’m surprised this needs to be said, but the position that it’s in some way socially dangerous to vote for Kamala Harris in the Bay Area is, in the first place, untethered from reality. As Pirate Wires has reported, the Valley is still, by the dollar, overwhelmingly Democrat. But the overall mood of the VCs for Kamala Zoom that “broke the internet,” or at least my newsfeed for a couple hours, was nonetheless excited, with participants fully committed to a cause as essentially fictitious as their own persecution. Kamala, at the time of the event, had not so much as suggested a single policy. Hell, she hadn’t even sat for an interview — not even with the effusive TIME, which nonetheless produced a hagiographic piece of propaganda in her honor. Indeed, by mid-August, Lil’ Coconut’s race for the White House was entirely comprised of other people talking. It was only natural, then, that none of our “brave” venture capitalists for Kamala seemed to agree on what, exactly, they were supporting.

One of the speakers cried. Another suggested if Kamala didn’t win, there would be fewer female entrepreneurs. This was an apparent reference to some impending DEI policy, which I would oppose if it actually existed. It doesn’t. Or, it doesn’t yet. Every position discussed was totally invented, a fascinating sight to behold. Hundreds of VCs had simply followed a floating coconut, like their North Star, to a fundraiser. There, one at a time, they each politely discussed a made-up version of the woman for whom they were ready to vote.

“We don’t need to do due diligence,” said Ron Conway. “This candidate is absolutely qualified.”

It was a shocking admission: he honestly didn’t care what this woman was intending to do with our country. Ron’s comments seemed to be a nod to recent controversy surrounding what has been, by any honest measure, the most vapid run for president in any of our lives; at the time of my writing, there are still zero policy positions on Kamala’s website (the application form in her careers section does however offer 9 options for your preferred pronouns, including hu/hu and fae/faer). Not even the New York Times could muster a denial of this aversion to substance, though they did manage a defense.

To Ron’s little bit of credit, it does seem his girl has finally come around. By Friday, roughly a month into her historic, “joy”-fueled race for office, Kamala’s campaign announced their economic agenda. Long story short, it’s communism.

Has Ron, a venture capitalist who is presumably (his LPs hope) literate on matters of the economy, walked back his support for price controls on groceries, which have led to famine in every command economy in human history? What about cash subsidies for real estate, which can only logically lead to more expensive housing? What about Thanos snapping medical debt for millions of Americans out of existence? Of course not. Because Ron doesn’t believe Kamala will actually do any of these things. After all, it wasn’t as if we had zero clues as to what the woman believed, or would say she believed, before this week.

Remember, Kamala (pronouns she/her) already ran for president. Sure, she received fewer votes than Marianne Williamson managed to “law of attract” from behind her crystal ball, but just a few years ago she shared her positions: banning fracking, confiscating guns, the elimination of private medical insurance, free sex change operations for prisoners, a closer look at reparations (cash gifts awarded by race), seizing patents, defunding the police, and amnesty for every illegal immigrant in the country. Before last week, we also knew a lot about her running mate that didn’t, and still doesn’t, seem to matter.

Good ol’ grandpa Tim fought for free school lunches, which Minnesotans seem to love — and who doesn’t! But he was also a big pro-riot guy back in that “mostly peaceful” summer of 2020. His wife opened the windows, she said, so she could smell the burning tires. But for me the one that really sings is Walz appears, as the Biden administration has proven, to oppose free speech.

“There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech,” he said last year, “and especially around our democracy.”

At this point, I don’t know if I should even bother? But this is not how free speech works. In America, there are no such limitations on our right to speak. That Tim Walz believes otherwise should have been explosive when he was selected to run with Kamala, and Kamala should have been forced to answer for it. We should all still be discussing it. Where have all of our free-speech crusaders gone? Ah yes, poring over the question of whether or not Kamala actually enjoys Doritos.

But while we’ve all been vibing, I do unfortunately have to note the world has changed. Quickly. In fact, I’m starting to think substantive political change may actually be inversely correlated with substantive discussion. Truly, it seems the dumber our conversations become, the more rapidly the world reshapes. My read here is not even partisan.

I didn’t think Roe v. Wade would be overturned. I didn’t think war would come to Europe. I didn’t think a major presidential candidate would circumvent a primary. I didn’t think a sitting president could ever be senile, and keep his job. I didn’t think the DOJ would try to jail a presidential candidate. For all my pointing out of our fundamentally changing world, due to our fundamentally new method of communication, even I somehow failed to grasp the world is, actually, changing.

In London, where insulting language is explicitly considered violence, and “armchair rioting” is now a piece of language used with no apparent sense of irony, normie boomers are being arrested for their normie Facebook posts. Sure, we fought a revolution not to care about these people, but British police officials are also calling for the extradition of Americans who “dangerously” post on social media. The UK’s Guardian published an op-ed by Bruce Daisley, a former executive at Twitter, that argued Elon Musk should be arrested, by the British government, for a tweet. Would Kamala acquiesce to such a demand? I don’t think so, but, as I just acknowledged, I’ve been misjudging the degree to which our country has changed for years, and the Democrats? That’s no longer a free-speech party.

In 2010, Hillary Clinton said “Censorship should not be in any way accepted by any company from anywhere. And in America, American companies need to make a principled stand.” If Trump said that in 2024, Joy-Ann Reid would add it to her list of fascist dog whistles.

Mainstream left opinion now supports hate speech legislation, and anything targeting “misinformation.” In fact, we just saw another great example of the new left’s casual tendencies toward authoritarianism last week, at the White House.

“I think that misinformation on Twitter is not just a campaign issue,” said the Washington Post’s Cleve Wootson, “it’s an America issue. What role does the White House, or the President, have in stopping that?”

To her credit, the Press Secretary didn’t say “lock up Elon.” She just seemed sort of confused. For all of her administration’s agitating for the abolition of speech — a whole ass vibe, let me tell you — it seems not even Democrats in power have fully internalized the degree to which Americans have listened.

Last week, Liz Truss, former Prime Minister of the UK, thanked Elon for defending speech. Consider how bizarre this is: the former leader of one of the greatest nations in human history thanking a foreign entrepreneur for guaranteeing her right to share an opinion.

We are down to exactly one man with a significant degree of power publicly defending not only the concept of free expression, but our very ability to speak. Elon is doing that, as we saw during his interview with Trump last week, with a technology that almost feels primitive: there was our former president, huddled over his little receiver, speaking. And there was America, huddled over our little radio with our family, listening. Almost every major media company in the country was outraged that the conversation happened, and specifically that it happened on X — the one channel we have left. And there is now a war, on every single continent, to dismantle that channel.

Are you feeling brat?

I don’t even know how it’s possible to break through all of this memetic warfare, living as we now are inside a world of memes. Maybe the few sane people left just need to meme harder, and post through it. Who cares about the specifics of cuckoo for coconut communism? Don’t be the idiot asking what will happen when we force a grocery store to sell their goods at a loss (me). Focus on the Venezuelan brat lines. We are in the post-substance era, after all. It doesn’t matter that actual authoritarianism now appears to be in play. All that matters is if Paul Graham feels happy while you’re posting. So make him happy.

Or don’t, and I’ll see you in the gulags. Because America is staring down the barrel of a death by vibes.

— SOLANA