On Despair Signaling

Instead of virtue signaling or vice signaling, some people signal smug hopelessness, with a side order of "I told you so."

Photo by Darren Halstead on Unsplash

Not to totally lib out, but I’m not very happy with ol’ Mango Mussolini McTinyHands Cheeto Peen these days (am I doing it right?) Arguably I’ve never been happy with him, aside from when he had the cameo on the Wendy Williams show, or when he had that queeny feud with Rosie O’Donnell in 2006 (yes, I was following Trump drama when I was a teenager—how else do you think I perfected my impression of him?) But yeah. Trump as a politician? Not a fan.

Lately, I’ve seen him say and do a lot of stuff that has me a little anxious. It’s not like I thought he was harmless in 2016 either, but Trump 2.0 is very clearly more insidious. I can’t say I was ever a big fan of Jimmy Kimmel, but I am very disturbed by Trump pushing the FCC to shut him down, and further pressuring other networks to cancel the shows of late-night comedians who make jokes about him (although after I wrote that sentence, Kimmel’s show was reinstated—another point for Team Nothing Ever Happens.) I’m perturbed by Trump saying that if speech is too negative about him, it should be silenced. I’m spooked by a sitting Senator saying that her thinking had evolved past unconditionally supporting the First Amendment. And this is just the free speech stuff—I think we can all agree (well, us libs, that is) that Trump has done other unsavory things in the past nine months.

If you don’t like what you’re seeing in the news, it’s a natural reaction to be angry, sad, or fearful. It’s also reasonable to express those opinions online or in-person. I basically only want to consume content that is either interesting or funny, so I can’t say I look forward to seeing somber political posts, but I acknowledge they have their place.

However, for a long time now, I’ve been trying to figure out a term for a particular type of online (and sometimes IRL) behavior I absolutely can’t stand. I’ve finally settled on “despair signaling.” One of my Twitter followers also suggested “quirk chungus doomerism,” which has a very nice ring to it. Put simply, despair signaling is the performance of maximum hopelessness (especially regarding anything political, although any current event will do) as a way of signaling that you’re in on a massive (horrible) secret that the rest of the idiot populace has yet to figure out. To the despair signaler, things are, or will be, so much worse than anyone but they (the almighty Oracle) could ever have predicted. Smugness is absolutely required. Sometimes, they’re just reminding everyone that they called it. The earlier back, the better. They must insist, over and over again, that nothing Trump has done could ever have surprised them because they knew all of this was going to happen as far back as Clinton’s first term, and only they have been paying enough attention to know how bad things are about to get. Just you wait.

Despair signaling generally involves the following: