I have a distinct memory. I’m twelve years old, seventh grade. The first whispers of summer. We’re in my aunt’s white SUV, and she’s blasting the air conditioning to combat the Los Angeles heat.

She pulls over at a gas station. It’s 2005, and for the first time ever, we see a $3/gallon gas price.

My aunt mumbles under her breath, “This is bullsh*t.”

She thinks I don’t hear her, but I admire her cursing all the same.

2005 will eventually be known as the year emo music goes mainstream — Fall Out Boy, Paramore, and Panic all dropping seminal albums — and I’m at the height of puberty, depressed, angsty out of my goddamn mind, and ready for the cultural moment. When I say “angsty out of my goddamn mind,” I mean it. I’m writing exactly the kind of bad Myspace poetry you might imagine. I’m constantly wondering why people (mostly girls) don’t like me. I want to dye my hair green — something I won’t manage for another few years, to my lasting anguish.

All of which is to say: what happens next hits differently than it might have otherwise.

My aunt fills up the tank and gets back in the car. We buckle our seat belts.

“You know,” I start. “It’s all a collusion between the United States government and corporations. They don’t actually need to hike the gas prices. They’ll use whatever excuse they can to get as much profit as they can.”

In retrospect, my core thesis might have been accidentally correct. But as I continue on a thirty-minute rant that somehow name-drops Bill Gates, the CIA, the FBI, and — for reasons I absolutely cannot reconstruct — Mark Zuckerberg, something becomes clear to me. One: I have an above-average ability to free-associate and verbally blather on and on and on. Two: yapping total bullsh*t, completely untethered from any grounding or truth — and particularly because it is completely untethered from any grounding or truth — feels incredible. The emo clouds of my brain dissipate. I feel powerful.

My aunt is smirking at me in the rearview mirror the whole time. I’ve chosen to believe it was an “aww, what a cute idiot preteen” smile.

I have absolutely no evidence for this.

***

Most people understand — by instinct or by growing up — that ideally, you shouldn’t speak bullsh*t all the time whenever you want.

Yet we live in alienating times. There is serious reason to believe that the President of the United States may be a child r*pist — and that both he and the government generate layers of bullsh*t whenever that realization gets too close to the surface. We live in a political moment where the President can publicly threaten g*nocide and then, hours later, treat the whole thing as negotiable. A few days ago, he posted, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” Then the threat was put on pause.

So when the President speaks bullsh*t constantly — alienating the public in the most intimate, horrifying ways (child r*pe) and the most macro, catastrophic ones (g*nocide) — the moment poses a real question: If the people running the country can say whatever bullsh*t they want, why shouldn’t we? Why, exactly, is speaking bullsh*t all the time whenever we want bad?

***

Part of the answer is that in 2005 there were still recognizable boundaries to transgress.

That’s not a moral argument for 2005 being better, per se. It means the lines were clearer. Polite society still had a more coherent idea of what counted as too emotional, too crass, too racialized, too vulgar, too much. You could still feel, in a fairly ordinary way, the difference between public decorum and the thing violating it.

That is part of why emo hit the way it did. In 2005, Fall Out Boy’s “From Under the Cork Tree,” Paramore’s “All We Know Is Falling,” and Panic! at the Disco’s “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out” arrived into a culture where young men were still supposed to keep a certain amount of emotional legibility under wraps. The whole appeal was not just catchy songs or cool hair. It was theatrical overfeeling. It was boys being wounded in public and making an aesthetic out of it. That felt transgressive precisely because the norm it was pushing against was still real.

The same was true in cruder forms. When “Lonely Island” broke out in late 2005, the joke was not merely that “Jizz In My Pants” was silly. The joke was that the song was gleefully stupid in a culture that still had enough leftover dignity for stupidity to feel like an event. You were, in fact, not supposed to say “jizz in my pants” with full pop-song commitment and NBC production value. Crossing that line reaffirmed the line. The transgression produced meaning because the structure it was violating was real.

I encourage you to revisit mid-2000s pop culture. Whatever edge the television show Family Guy once had now feels tame. Comedian Russell Peters’s racial humor is now not only unfunny but completely illegible. Janet Jackson’s nipple slip, The Howard Stern Show, Jackass, Borat, Kim Kardashian’s sex tape — all illegible now, not simply because cultural attitudes change, but because something deeper has disappeared.

In the 2000s, transgression depended on the existence of a structure sturdy enough to be transgressed. Stepping over the lines re-codified those lines. But the cultural forces that have made Trump possible have hollowed out that structure. What once felt edgy now feels “whatever” not because it was never transgressive, but because Trump has so thoroughly degraded the stage on which transgression used to mean anything.

That, I think, is part of why we shouldn’t speak bullsh*t all the time whenever we want. Meaning is not something speech generates by itself. It depends on an underlying structure. Bullsh*t corrodes those conditions. And once they erode far enough, everything starts to feel equally meaningless: irony, obscenity, horror, extremes. Doesn’t it feel, more and more, like that is where we are now?

***

Today, the only real way to resist is a fierce commitment to sincerity, openness, vulnerability, and the truth.

That sounds soft. I mean it in a harder sense. Not niceness, or confession for its own sake. I mean refusing to help reproduce a world where nothing has to mean anything, where no one has to stand by what they say, where every horror can be absorbed into unreality.

Trumpism erodes the conditions that make meaning possible. The old norm violations of 2000s-neoliberalism left the underlying order intact — often that was the point, the thrill depending on a structure stable enough to absorb the hit. Trumpism is different. In this atmosphere, speaking bullsh*t all the time whenever you want isn’t rebellion but collaboration.

In that sense, Trump has created an opening. He’s made the symbolic hollowness of our culture impossible to ignore. The old structure has fallen. Much of what passed for public meaning now feels dead or spent. Fine. But whatever comes next will not be built from more irony, more posturing, or more free-floating bullsh*t. It will have to be built from the ground up with language that tries, however imperfectly, to tell the truth.

That is the deeper reason not to speak bullsh*t all the time whenever you want. Bullsh*t feels good. I know that from experience. It can make you feel clever, powerful, insulated, and alive. But at scale, it leaves us dead — and unable to rebuild anything worth having.