Don’t Fall For the Narrative

Social media and the news isn’t real

Ayodeji Awosika
8 min readJun 11, 2020

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I called it.

In late 2019 I recorded a YouTube video predicting how 2020 would pan out. I didn’t foresee the coronavirus or the protests over the murder of George Floyd, of course, but I knew exactly where the sentiment was headed and more or less knew what would happen.

The culture has been on a downward spiral for a while. With each passing year, ideas like personal responsibility, optimism, and even basic secular humanistic values have continued to diminish. I predicted that the negativity would reach an all-time high in 2020.

Why? Because it’s an election year. As someone who has studied persuasion and marketing for years, I know there’s one tool more powerful than all others when it comes to getting people to do what you want — fear.

If you can make someone afraid, exacerbate their frustrations, and make yourself out to be the solution, you can get someone to pretty much do anything you want them to do. And that’s exactly what you see going on right now.

Now, our overlords didn’t cook up a virus or cause some piece of shit cop to murder an innocent man, but the law of numbers dictates that they’d find something to latch onto and ride all the way to November.

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