Hey, I appreciate your response! I totally understand that people want to have their feelings confirmed in such a space, but that’s also why I am critical in it. In this sort of environment the discussion is almost as much emotion and feeling as it is the words actually used. A sort of slang can develop where we can understand what each other means without the words we use being truly accurate. The problem with that is that this environment is also an echo chamber, we put meaning onto things that we want it to mean because it also confirms our beliefs.

This leads to situations where it’s impossible to differentiate between radical statements and reasonable statements. A good example is the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” When both extremists and normies use the saying it becomes hard to differentiate them. Another example is the Gadsden flag, on it’s own there is nothing wrong with the flag with a deep historical heritage, but when the far right started using it as a symbol any rational centrist or leftist immediately stopped using it for fear of association. Back in school I had a friend who had the flag hanging on their wall, but around 2012 they specifically stated that they had taken it down because it had been co-opted by the far right.