Being upset about “Everything That’s Going On" or other exceedingly vague grievances is a variant of its newer cousin “Let’s Go Brandon,” and is the terminology currently being widely used by conservatives to signal that they are conservatives and that they are very mad about what’s happening in this country. Saying you're worried about “everything that’s going on,” is like offering up a line on a Mad Libs sheet, a cipher standing in for whatever you want to say but don’t want to say. Everything That’s Going On might mean reckless government spending, vaccine mandates, government takeover, a rigged election, “critical race theory,” “socialism,” trans people being allowed to use the bathroom of the gender they identify with, having to wear a mask, or generally being asked to acknowledge that slavery happened, was bad, and has continued to shape the power dynamics of this country. Everything That's Going On is a way to center yourself and your family as being directly aggrieved by what are either minor inconveniences, policies designed to make others' lives more tolerable, or completely imaginary things altogether.
By saying you are worried about Everything That’s Going On, you are allowing the receiver of that information to fill in the blanks with whatever they want. --- on social media, and wherever else it’s used, people are rarely asked to elaborate about what, specifically, they are talking about. One person might say they are mad about “everything that’s going on” (having to get a vaccine to keep their job) and the person they’re saying it to might interpret that as “everything that’s going on” (white people are being replaced by immigrants in a white genocide).
Use of the phrase is a two-way relationship involving a tacit agreement: The person using it avoids specificity, and their interlocutor politely doesn’t interrogate what they actually mean. Thus people with relatively minor grievances about, say, marginal tax rates are able to align with people who stormed the Capitol because they thought Biden stole the election.
Everything That’s Going On is also an excuse to act irrationally, because while the actual complaints are kept vague, what is not is the premise that your very way of life is being attacked by autocratic liberals.
The most popular version of this—and the current going theory about why Democrats got their asses handed to them in the Virginia governor's race—is the idea that something is going on in our schools and is motivating Republicans to vote on the new issue of education. The "something" in this case is "critical race theory," "socialism," mask mandates, and other poorly defined terms that generally relate to quite literally any attempt to teach children accurate things about America's history of slavery and racism.
Once you start listening for Everything That’s Going On, you will hear it and variations of it everywhere. There’s the guy in Virginia who said “critical race theory” is the most important issue in the governor’s race there but, when asked, had no idea what it is. There are the people who say “Let’s Go Brandon” instead of “Fuck Joe Biden” to signal that they saw a viral YouTube video and hate libs. There’s the conservative TikTok star coffee company CEO named Jake Dials who speaks in riddles using a Bane voice and is Just Asking Questions about how “something isn’t right” and people should open their eyes to a new, conspiracy-laden reality.
Here is what is happening: The same things that have been unrelentingly happening for decades with little action from a political system designed to entrench current power structures. Climate change and environmental destruction, record levels of income inequality and a global pandemic that has exacerbated it, corporate agglomeration and political capture, a broken healthcare system, the militarization of the police, systemic racism. None of this was new under Trump, and not much of it has changed under Biden.
And yet, to many people, Everything That's Going On is that their kid will be taught they should be nice to Black people, asked to read Toni Morrison, or asked to take a vaccine that has widely been shown to be safe to confer protection against a deadly pandemic for themselves and others. They are right that things are happening; they just seem somehow to have missed what they are.
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