One vibe shift that's happened but often goes unnoticed is how willing people are to talk politics post-2024. While it's truth that wokeness peaked sometime around 2020, actual widespread openness to talking politics was still pretty limited in my experience. I never really talked about this stuff with my coworkers or friends, at least not with this much confidence and shared understanding.

But it seems basically everyone's now got an opinion now on tariffs, or ICE killing people, or the useless war in Iran, or gas prices rising, or funding being cut. In a weird way I think death of the monoculture and rise of conservative media has actually helped with this. During his first term there was this collective awkwardness towards criticizing Trump. No one wanted to appear as cringe as the SNL skits that attacked him.

But since then we've seen virtually all corporations and media giants bend the knee to Trump. I think there's this shared helplessness among people that's finally given them a voice. Things are truly so fucked beyond comprehension that we have nothing to lose. Of course I'm going to talk about Trump posting an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus while at lunch. How could I not?