WorstPossibleNewsAnon

Neotoddler solutions to unprecedented hate

Censorship works. I finally cracked why I’ve not seen a single orange square on Facebook commemorating the Bibas family. This content is of course all over far-right X and on a few Instagram accounts, so I wondered if everyone who hadn’t left the more enlightened platform for Bluesky was respectfully ignoring the story. And then I realized, considering everyone cares so much about children, they might have posted about it but some independent fact-checkers who survived Zuckerberg’s purge blocked them.

This small victory against misinformation should not however allow us to let up on our rage cycles. My self-diagnoses include nocturnal narcolepsy and diurnal insomnia, so I am nothing without my anxiety. There aren’t enough pharmaceuticals in the world to get me over the fascist speech JD Vance recently made in Munich—or the spiteful mockery that followed the 60 Minutes segment on why insults in Deutschland must remain verboten.

The latter evoked the bile Heinrich Heine spewed in 1828 when he wrote, “The German censors ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ idiots ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___.” To use the BBC’s preferred translations, Heine was an Israeli force against whom the righteous needed to engage in jihad resistance. He is remembered for saying, “Where they have burned books, they will end up burning men,” but maybe if the Prussians had more successfully banned unacceptable books like his, it wouldn’t have been necessary to justice the colonialists later.

Harmful content causes harm, and as usual I have been braving a lot of it to save globalism. This week I even had to double up on my sessions with my neurodivergent mental health coach. PS If you’re looking for someone who’s tailored so specifically to you that they can’t proof a file before printing, grab a QR code below. They’re going fast.

Typos for Palestine!

Anyway, the reason I had to double up was because I clicked play on the absolute Mein Kampf of all podcast episodes. It’s about how smart people supposedly sometimes believe stupid things. Um, excuse me, I have multiple humanities degrees and would never fall for any idea that doesn’t get my community maximum clicks. Memes that reduce terrestrial chaos to punchy meta-narratives help improve my sense of belonging, whereas it is an act of oppression for the speakers on Beyond Gender to expect me to listen to them for more than three minutes. So I skipped the nonsense about how we partly evolved to self-delude and jumped to the latest hate I knew I needed to jihad against: anti-neotoddlerism.

You have to skip to 1hr and 4min to hear Stella O’Malley feign professional curiosity before Gurwinder Bhogal defines neotoddlerism as “the belief that you can create utopia by acting like a three-year-old”. Instead of throwing soup cans, blocking traffic, ripping down hostage posters, or releasing cockroaches into a conference hall of cis gays and girl-dick-exclusionary lesbians, we should apparently be forming “good arguments” and “strong leadership”. Like I said, straight out of the Nazi playbook.

I refuse to let anyone tell me it’s unconstructive to behave like a neotoddler or that I should practice greater skepticism and restraint in my doom-scrolling. I am incapable of not screaming when I see posts about how married women are gonna have to change their names on their birth certificates—and store them in a safe—in order to vote. My un-self-regulated fury is not a matter of choice when Joy Reid loses her spot on MSNBC or vigilantes object to doing whatever it takes to stop blasphemy against the Qu’ran. My playpen has become an emotional terror site. So if you don’t affirm every post I share about Elon, consider it a promise not a threat that I will blare Jasmine Crocket in your ears louder than a Jennifer Hudson car alarm.

Just when I thought my storming and stressing couldn’t get any worse, some kind of unconscious demon confronted me with a list of questions he had adapted from a Twelve-Step program. Like wow. Everyone knows the Steps are rooted in white supremacy, insisting as they do that we each have character defects and should stop blaming others for our problems.

The violent centrist looking at me in the mirror said he was concerned. He wondered if it might help to think of what I am going through as an addiction to what he called the Worst Possible News. If I could answer “Yes” to four or more of the questions, I might be in trouble. I share a smattering not to legitimize them but to help others to identify the likely Trump supporter behind the caring persona who asks:

· Have you ever tried to stop scrolling for a week but only lasted a couple of days?

· Do you wish people would stop challenging your views?

· Have you ever switched platforms to get a better high?

· Do you have to open social media the minute you wake up?

· Has your catastrophizing caused problems in your relationships?

· Have you missed days of work or school because of your reaction to the news?

· Do you have “blackouts” where you can’t remember what you posted and later had to delete comments or block others?

Only I can decide whether I want to give WorstPossibleNewsAnon a try. What I don’t get about it, and I’m just being rigorously honest, is what could possibly be gained by victim-blaming myself by admitting my life has become unmanageable. When all the systems of the world are stacked against me, why would I ever make a list of my resentments and ask “What’s my role in it?” My Machapunga tribe was literally genocided by assimilation over twelve generations ago and I still get emails from paint companies on “How to pick the perfect white”. Yet somehow I’m supposed to make amends to those I accused of shedding white tears?

I am perfectly 100% not powerless over my reaction to these unprecedented times. Apocalyptic hopelessness is critical to liberation. The only principles I’m going to practice in all my affairs are going to be alarmism, finger-pointing, and fighting the patriarchy. I will continue to take other people’s inventories and, when they beg to differ on net zero, force them to promptly admit they’re climate change deniers. I will seek, through temper tantrums and spray-painting red triangles onto public property, to improve my conscious contact with Greta Thunberg. Most of all I will dump all my negative feelings onto people who say they love me but are so far gone they think Jacobin is a dubious name for a publication.

History repeats itself but is heading towards the glorious demise of Western civilization. The past only exists so we can project the present onto it rather than understand it on anything other than absolute terms. So censor all philosophy, poetry, and theology prior to The 1619 Project. Let neotoddlerism usher in the Age of Pure Hubris. Because I. Believe. In the universe. My truth is more valid than your truth.

And in case you were wondering, my mental health coach confirmed what I already knew: I definitely don’t have a problem.