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No reason to sugarcoat it, the last week has been pretty rough. We all knew that the arrival of Trump 2.0 was going to be an unpleasant experience, but I don’t think anyone was particularly prepared for the tsunami of bullshit that rained down on us like some kind of doomscrolling version of the eruption at Pompeii. We’re all frozen in our own kind of rictus, watching in stricken horror as headlines like “Trump blames plane crashes on women” and “Secretary Breakfast Beers threatens war with country that doesn’t exist” flash at an unbelievable pace before our eyes. And it’s easy to feel helpless - seemingly every possible powerful person, business, and institution is bending the knee to our elderly wet emperor, and the people who are supposed to be opposing this new nightmarish reality - the elected “opposition party” - appear to mostly be going limp, like they are trying to survive a great fall. And much like with the parachute-less jumper, they aren’t even a little bit prepared. They aren’t ever going to be prepared. They are the wrong guys - and they’re going to get us all pancaked.

The Posting Skills Are At All Time Lows

One thing that has been brought into sharp relief with the past election is that more than ever, posting is upstream of reality. It didn’t matter that the Haitian immigrants weren’t eating cats and ducks, it didn’t matter that the customers at Trump’s McDonald’s were plants, nothing in our past conception of objective reality mattered. The right-wing controlled the narrative online for the most part, and for the most part that’s what our conversation revolved around offline too. The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, etc have never been more irrelevant - and are likely to get even less so as they lose their press room spots to outlets like OAN, Breitbart, and Sex Predator Monthly. They may be cringe, they may be weird as shit, but the right undeniably has the upper hand in the social world right now, and is well-placed to hold onto that spot for the foreseeable future (hello future CEO of TikTok and Marco Rubio booster Larry Ellison).

What’s genuinely unfortunate is that the supposed counterbalance to these forces - the Democrat party, mostly suck at posting. A lot of this can be attributed to their hilariously advanced age - Pelosi and Schumer have a collective 179 years between the two of them - and that’s certainly a component. But the party seems genuinely allergic to anyone who is not rigidly in lockstep with “the program”, and that makes for a really shitty poster. Cory Booker - a “please elect Democrats” button that was cursed by an evil wizard to live life as an eternally 48 year old man - is not that old by congressional standards, and he is one of the worst posters alive. Naturally, the Democrats made him the head of the party’s social outreach. AOC is one of the few elected Dems who actually has a natural talent for posting, so of course she is shunted off to her own business - denied leadership roles and paraded out during campaign season to futilely pander for youth votes. From Chris Murphy to Adam Schiff, the most visible Dem leaders mostly post like groveling little babies, decrying how unfair Trump is being or bafflingly trying to outflank him to the right on issues like immigration or the military. These guys are getting absolutely bulldozed online, and they aren’t going to get any better. As we’ve seen with Elon Musk - you cannot learn how to be a good poster. More than musical ability or academic talent, it is an innate skill that cannot be learned through repetition or instruction. The greats can get better, but the never-had’s will always be lacking. The Democrats have no juice online, and with this team on the field, they never will.

Fucking DO Something

Throughout the last campaign season, we were told endlessly that Donald Trump represented an unprecedented fascist threat to our country. And as we have seen over the past two weeks, he certainly does! So I can imagine it’s pretty confusing to most left-of-center Americans to see the main response to this onslaught of reactionary and illegal shit to be “we need to keep our heads down and talk about inflation” or “we can work together to reduce government waste”. Are you fucking kidding me? I am long past expecting anything else from these people, but it’s somehow still a little but unbelievable to watch how truly ineffectual and cowed these guys are. You told us this dude is Hitler, and now you want to work together on his programs? You want to “avoid distractions”? Man, fuck you.

There are so, so many tools that Democrats have at their disposal to fight against Trump’s insane agenda. They could be holding press conferences with the elderly people who are losing their meals on wheels. They could be flooding the feed with stories of soldiers who are losing their mental healthcare. They could be flying to Somalia to bring aid to the orphans who are about to lose access to federal support. They could be holding endless filibusters where they read the phonebook or every Tumblr poetry post since 2009 on the floor of the Senate to stop any more dumbshit Fox News freaks from being confirmed to the cabinet. They could be highlighting how the (actually pretty unpopular) richest man in the world is dragging his ketamine-shriveled nuts all over every institution in the country. They aren’t doing any of this though - and they won’t! Because if they could, they already would have. It’s not their way. The way you work your way up in the Democrat Party is simply by Not Rocking The Boat. The guests at Biden’s farewell party were the most slovenly-bootlicking hacks to ever enter a convention floor, and their posts were just as boring as you might imagine. Jaime Harrison (outgoing DNC chair) is perhaps the worst at his job that anyone has ever been at any job in history - he is a bumbling, incompetent loser who nevertheless raised money from the right people, shook the right hands, and most importantly, held his tongue at the right moments. That is who the Democrats elevate, not someone who rises to the occasion and breaks tradition.

As Maya Angelou Says

I have never pretended to be a big “poetry guy”, but I’m told that one of Maya Angelou’s most famous aphorisms is “when people show you who they are, believe them”. Actually, I was told this quote perhaps dozens of times by Democrat leaders. So when all these leaders, from Schumer to Jeffries to Booker to Pelosi, show us how prepared they are to deal with this new era, let’s believe them. They are not the guys we need right now, and they never will be. First of all - we’re dealing with an “old dog, new tricks” situation. But more than that, we are dealing with a group of people who are either unwilling or unable to do what is necessary, which at the end of day is more than worthless. Not only does it actually do nothing to resist (sorry) Trump in any meaningful way, they bogart their positions from people who might actually be able to make a difference. They have no vision for a future of our nation that can compel people to believe in them, and it shows! If it feels like we are in freefall right now, it’s because we are.

America is barely a democracy anymore, but we are still a society where you can yell and smash and make a scene big enough for people to take notice. The game has changed (immensely), and we can spend our time lamenting the loss of whatever version of politics or news or whatever used to exist, or we can start forging a plan to tackle the new landscape that lays before us. The forces we are up against do not care about the rules elected Democrats care about, and they have made that so goddamn clear a baby could see it. So let’s clear out this collection of born losers and bring in some people with the capabilities to actually move the needle. Let’s bring in some True Posters, some people with an understanding of the new order of things, some leaders with some fucking balls. Otherwise, the only option we are left with is to just go limp and hope for the best.

Pam Bondi

Nomination: Attorney General

When She Will Be Fired: Summer 2026

Why She Will Be Fired: Pam Bondi is like if a witch cursed someone to be the physical embodiment of the state of Florida. She looks like every single lady afflicted with Fox News Madness Face I ever saw in a random photo of Mar-A-Lago. She looks like she was cooked up by mad scientists in the back room of an unlicensed Orlando-area

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A couple of years ago, I ran across an interesting problem - I had watched all the TV shows I wanted to watch. I’d watched them multiple times, in fact. I cast about for new shows to fill the void, but none of them *quite hit* the same. For one, TV series now are usually around 8-10 episodes long, which is over faster than seems possible. You sit down to “binge” a season and somehow you’re done less than two goddamn hours. The new Wicked movie is longer than the entirety of a new season of Frasier, and it’s only the first half of the Wicked musical itself. Eight episodes is just not enough time to build the kind of cadence and wacky one-offs and bottle episodes that a truly great episodic needs to flourish, and so none of them felt quite right. That’s when I started looking elsewhere - not forward to new shows, but backwards - to the past.

My first “old” TV series encounter was Cheers, a show we’ve all heard of but seemingly nobody in my peer group had ever seen (even if the theme song is somehow indelibly imprinted on every Americans brain at birth). Cheers felt like a solid entry point for me - it’s where the character Frasier Crane first appeared, after all. And lo and behold, it was fucking amazing - not in a dated Keystone Cops sort of way, but in a genuine “hell yeah this rocks” way. In the same way Frasier or Seinfeld were amazing. The 1980’s were a long time ago - before I was even born - but somehow it all felt very familiar to me. The structure, the jokes, the relationships, the universality of the whole thing - I found myself slipping into a happy, comfortable routine as I watched my way through the TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY THREE episodes of the original show. I fell in love with the characters, the in-jokes, the quirks and the tropes. The classic 80’s style design of the furniture, the hilariously low prices of the beer, and the situations that result from *no cellphones or internet* made me nostalgic for a time in which I never actually lived. Yes, there was the occasional reference to a then-current athlete or politician that I had never heard of before (John Kerry actually has a guest appearance, being 1000 years old), but for the most part every joke made sense to me - possessing a timelessness to which all great art aspires. And it got me thinking that maybe I should give some other shows from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s a shot. So I did.

I started my rather haphazard search for TV I might love by thinking about the shows from the American canon that you hear referenced all the time (like Cheers). One that came to mind immediately was Columbo - named after the disheveled star character {garbled first name}. The term “Columbo” has come to loosely mean “Mr. Smart Detective” in the American vernacular - I cannot name the amount of times I’ve seen a character in a modern show or movie turn to another and sarcastically utter “okay, Columbo” as they fail to work out a question or riddle. So I started in on the series (which ran from *1968 until 2003*) and was immediately hooked. If you’ve never watched before, Columbo takes a unique approach to the detective episodic. Yes, each installment features a murder that the titular character will solve by the end. But unlike most modern detective shows, we actually see the murder happen in each cold open, and the episode that follows involves the audience trying to figure out how Columbo will solve the mystery (to which they already know the answer). It helps that the lead actor, Peter Falk, might be the most charming man to ever grace the screen, but the format felt so approachable and reliable to me at its very core (especially given how foundational it was for the genre). There are fewer episodes in a season, but they each have an average runtime of about 80 minutes - roughly the same length as Men in Black. It’s campy in places, dark in others, but always extremely fun and delightfully engaging. The older episodes are also a cornucopia of weird 1960s and 1970s design, which is a huge plus in my book (there’s one where the murderer drowns his wife in a mustard-carpeted pyramid bathtub, amongst many other gems). And of course you get a healthy dose of *forehead-slapping revelation* as you realize all the things that 21st century detective series have cribbed from Columbo. It’s one of the best shows of all time, and I now totally get why there is a bronze statue of Columbo and his dog (appropriately named “Dog”) in the middle of Bucharest, Hungary. Columbo is universally amazing.

After Columbo, I branched out. I watched the 1980’s romcom/sitcom/detective show Moonlighting, which launched Bruce Willis into superstardom (and let me just say, I get it. He’s so fucking good. Classic Bruce Dub shit). The series, like many others, descends into less-than-stellar episodes and arcs in the later seasons, but the prime run of Moonlighting is as good as it gets. The dynamic between Willis and Shepherd (a woman I knew mostly as “Shawn’s mom from Psych”) is unmatched, the episodes are at once intense and light, and the side characters introduced throughout the show are also perfectly-of-their-time. Also Bruce Willis has (some) hair! After that I got into Miami Vice, Married With Children, and The Rockford Files. I’m planning to watch MacGuyver soon - a show and character I am exclusively familiar with via Patty and Selma on the Simpsons and the SNL parody “MacGruber”. I can’t wait to see what that one is all about, too.

I guess my main point here is that like with movies, there is *so much out there* in the world of American television history, and it’s kind of a bummer that most of it is being lost from our collective knowledge. This is, in large part, the fault of the streamers - almost all of these shows are fully gone from Netflix or Hulu, and I had to arrange my viewing of Columbo in piecemeal across a variety of platforms (legal and illegal) to make sure I had seen the full catalogue. For many years I lingered under the delusion that “old TV” would be over my head, unpleasantly outdated, or simply not hit the same for a lad like me who was raised on the internet - but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I was so fucking wrong. I was a moron. It’s an oft-used phrase, but classic things are classic for a reason. Classic films like Chinatown, Casino, and The Godfather all still hold strong cultural cache in 2025 - why shouldn’t these classic shows hold the same? Your grandparents and aunts and uncles had *good fucking cause* for referencing these titles constantly. They are true gems of American culture, and they directly inspired the writers of more contemporary classics that are still on the air today (the amount of straight-up thievery that It’s Always Sunny commits with Cheers is almost unbelievable once you see it). When you watch these shows, you feel connected not just to television history, but to our shared cultural history as well. What was life like in 1970’s Los Angeles? What was it like to be a working class barfly in 1980’s Boston? What did their days look like? How did everyone dress? What did they talk about? It’s all simultaneously familiar and fascinating, and most importantly - it’s just incredible goddamn entertainment. Watch old TV.

Marco Rubio

Nomination: Secretary of State

When He Will Be Fired: Spring 2026

Why He Will Be Fired: One thing we know about Rubio is that there is no amount of public humiliation that could cause him to ever bat an eyelash. A lot of really short guys spend their lives with a big chip on their shoulder, but not Marco - he recognizes 6’3” Donald as his better and acts like it. No insult could cause him to even momentarily pause in the generous Trump-tonguing that is his post-2016 life, no extremely public pantsing would ever make him waver even slightly in his dedication - so it’s highly unlikely that his firing will be the result of any sort of internal power struggle or refusal to do Trump’s insane bidding. He will do everything that is asked of him until one day Trump unceremoniously fires him - maybe as a sacrificial lamb for some ridiculous foreign entanglement they’ve gotten us into (battlefield defeat against the Panamanian National Army, perhaps), maybe because he looks silly standing next to all the regular-sized adults in the group, or maybe just because Trump is sick of looking as his somehow-permanently-sweaty face. Maybe he’ll do it just because he thinks it’s funny (he’s right, it would be). Doesn’t really matter *fart noise* he’s outta here!

How He Will Be Fired: Trump Truth Social post (this one’s a total lock, btw)

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[Obama Voice] Let me be clear, [back to normal voice] I think everything Trump is saying about his intentions for the next four years is ghastly. I vehemently oppose mass deportations, I think his plans to crash the economy are uhhhh…unwise, and I certainly think it is dumb as shit to attempt to annex Canada. All of these things (and many more he has proposed) suck immensely - but many of you are acting like you weren’t here last time Trump was president, and it’s giving you a mean case of TDS. Trump is a threat to our country, certainly, but his real talent is sucking all of the air out of the room with his absurd rambling promises and declarations (aka “flooding the zone”) while the senior leadership of the GOP does the really fucked up stuff. Trump’s wild plans rarely (if ever) come to fruition - but Mitch McConnell’s plans…that’s another question. Mitch’s stuff seems to work out a lot, especially when everyone is freaking out about some moronic Trump shit.

During his first term, Trump promised that Mexico would pay for a border wall (they didn’t), that he would purchase Greenland (he didn’t), that America would hold a grand military tank parade down Pennsylvania Avenue (never happened), and that we would declare the moon official US territory (definitely didn’t do that). He talked about invading Venezuela, using “heat rays” on immigrants, building a snake-filled border moat, and nuking hurricanes as they approach the coast of Florida. You are welcome to google any of these but I promise you that he said them all, and that none of them ever got off the ground (even a little bit). Trump is at his core a TV clown, and he knows instinctively just what sort of clown show will keep the audience fully engaged with the performance. But while he’s out there dancing and singing and keeping everyone in hysterics, the rest of the GOP is under the bleachers stealing your wallet and setting the benches on fire. None of the things I mentioned above ever got gained any traction during the first Trump term - but much of the standard GWB-style Republican agenda did. There were massive tax cuts for the wealthy. There was immense deregulation of the most destructive corporate industries. They appointed unapologetically right-wing Supreme Court justices to lifetime terms. They passed military spending increases of hundreds of billions of dollars. There is really no distinguishable difference between Trump’s White House and any of his conservative predecessors - this one just has more dumbshit clown stuff to keep you in your seats.

What’s really crazy to me is that this kind of bait-and-switch approach to politics works not only on Trump’s opposition, but on his base as well. While Trump tells his knuckle-dragging fans that he is going to conduct “the largest mass deportation in history”, the GOP (and Trump) have no real intentions of making that happen. Biden deported more people than Trump did during his first term. Trump has already sided with Silicon Valley on the H1B visa program. He has promised to end foreign wars while drastically increasing defense budgets. He promised a border wall that almost assuredly will never ever fully exist or work. The whole “Make America Healthy Again” stuff he promised the RFK wing will absolutely never, ever happen - that could cut into Big Ag’s profits, after all. Nothing he pledges can ever be taken seriously, even if you are his most ardent supporter. You will never be able to pin him down, never able to put baby in a corner.

In the end, it’s a fool’s errand to focus on Trump more than the GOP itself. Trump is an entertainer at heart, and America loves an entertainer. He is preternaturally talented at gauging the winds of public opinion and anger, and constantly shifting his own purported views to keep in line with those things. You will never be able to denounce him into being unfunny. You will never be able to pin him into a corner about something he said - because he will just claim he was joking, he was just throwing out some early ideas, or that you got your information from fake news. Trump is a singing, dancing distraction - keeping everyone’s attention trained on his hectically-improvised routine while the ghouls in the Republican party do the evil, unpopular things they have always endeavored to do. The next four years will be filled with tons of absurd Trump promises, from annexing Canada to invading Ireland on behalf Israel to Seal Team 6 assassinating Greta Thunberg. They will also be filled with (trifecta-holding) GOP attempts to pass all the most evil conservative policies imaginable. I hope we are able to recognize which of these two are the more dangerous, and apportion our attention accordingly.

Yes, He’s On Cameo

Ahh Cameo, the official home of American Luminaries Who’s Careers Are Going Great. To scroll the homepage feels not unlike strolling down Hollywood’s storied

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A post that particularly stuck with me in the days after the November election was one from Brandon Friedman, a former Obama guy who likes to style himself as independent from the ossified DNC-blob but respects power far too much to actually achieve that:

I think this post, as hilariously naive as it was, serves as a great prism through which we can analyze the post-election moves from the current Dem leadership. What exactly did they do to protect us from the fascism they assured us the Trump GOP was bringing to America? What have they spent the past two months doing? And what does that tell us about the way they will run the party when out of power? This is far from a complete list (so please save us your squawking), but here are some of the most high-profile things our increasingly-senile president and his court advisors have done since November 5th:

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1. Everyone Needs To Relax 20-25%

   With the deck stacked the super shitty way it is, I’m pretty confident that the next year is going to be a pretty unhinged affair through-and-through. A second (and most assuredly more insane) Trump term, a politically-exhausted population, a media environment more and more desperate to get and keep eyeballs at any cost, unpopular and endless wars raging on around the world…the forecast looks grim to say the least. So I think the least we can do is give each other a little bit more grace as we all endure this hellish era together. There are so so many valid enemies that have confidently re-asserted themselves into the posting environment, and it would be self-defeating and unnecessarily painful to descend into some of the pointless bullshit we’ve seen so much of in the past 8 years. The worst people in the world are no longer de-platformed, they’re back and more influential than ever - so why not train our enmity on them? I’m not saying we should fully refrain from roasting idiot BlueWave types or enduring bullshit from third-way-cocksuckers, but I think we can all agree that as a group, we have Started Fights Online for Starting Fights Online’s sake. The world will be shitty enough without all of that, let’s not make it worse. Let’s have some fun online for once.

2. Let’s Post More About Weird Shit We Love

   To make my point here, I’m going to embarrass a poster I both respect and admire: Chris Person (aka @papapishu). I do not personally care one bit about meticulously constructed computers, antique fountain pens, or high-end vintage stereo equipment. I use my macbook or phone for emails and posting, my pens are *whatever pen is nearby when I need one*, and every speaker on earth basically sounds the same to me. But I love - and I mean really, really, love - that Chris cares so deeply about these things, and posts about them frequently. There is something genuinely rad about encountering a poster with a deep, in-depth knowledge of something incredibly niche and even arcane - their passion alone makes the posts compelling, but I come away from their timeline feeling enriched, like I have a unique view of an actually constructive part of society that I didn’t know much about before. That’s fucking awesome, and I hope more people start using posting as an excuse to talk about the things they love as much as they talk about the things they hate. (This is one I personally am going to really work on in 2025).

3. The Follow Ratio Thing Has To Go

   In the few months I’ve been using Bluesky, we’ve seen a lot of encouraging signs from the platform. Outside media (like this newsletter) see incredible traffic when posted to Bluesky’s timeline. The site has its own internal drama and eccentricities (an essential for any healthy posting environment). Overall things look really promising! But one element that definitely needs to go the way of the dinosaurs is the incredibly strange obsession many on Bluesky (especially the Resistance Refugees from Twitter) seem to have with “big accounts” and their follower-to-following ratio.

   If you’re like me, you’ve never once given this ratio a single thought before all the recent drama. I follow accounts when they post stuff I like, and people follow me when I post stuff they like. Thinking about it any deeper than that is a surefire way to develop early onset schizophrenia, and is deeply offputting to any normal-adjacent person you encounter online. First of all - how would any reasonable person enjoy consuming posts when they follow 10,000+ people? I myself would have to follow seventy thousand accounts to achieve the parity these people seem to want from me. Posting is supposed to be fun. Posting is supposed to be a release. Posting isn’t homework. If you are one of the people who cares even a little about this, I beg you to re-evaluate your choices.

   NOTE: Even though Twitter sucks in innumerable ways now, this particular phenomenon seems to have eluded the Twitter user base. Let’s keep it that way even as the site dies a slow and angonizing death.

4. Blocking Is Back

   For years, I was a fierce proponent of the principle that blocking your enemies online gives your enemies content, and you should never give your enemies content. To be honest, I still agree with the general motivations behind that theory - but we’ve all endured years of this shit at this point, and I think its fine to not really want to anymore. I don’t think that online abuse is really the same as real-world abuse, and Tyler The Creator’s wisdom about cyberbullying still reigns supreme, but blocking someone actually works on pretty much every platform except for Twitter, and I don’t think anyone owes it to their Poster’s Reputation to deal with midwit replies from people you wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire. In 2025, save yourself the pain and just block them. I promise you will forget they ever existed by the next morning, and your life will be better for it.

5. Fewer Memes, More Text Posts

   Memes have always had their place, but anyone being honest with themselves will have to admit that they are one of the most lowbrow ways to post. If you don’t believe me, look no further than at America’s Cringiest Poster Elon Musk - this guy LOVES memes. Do you really want to spend your valuable time Being Online making things that this honeybaked-ham-shaped bitch actually enjoys? More importantly, the internet is getting so much dumber. Conspiracy theorists don’t even bother to come up with proper conspiracies anymore. Medieval Peasant Brain is back with a vengeance. Viral posts from Turing-Test-failing bots abound, with every top reply coming from a similarly unconvincing bot account as well. With everything getting so, so stupid, we should endeavor to make things a little less stupid. Well, a better kind of stupid. Think about veteran poster AfraidOfWasps - we should all be working to post a bit more like that dude. Lean into the craft, pontificate wildly, contrive more ridiculous and moronic scenarios - post better, for yourself and for your community.

And with that, I’m logging off for the rest of 2024. I wish you and your families a happy and healthy New Years celebration, and I look forward to posting better in 2025 with the rest of you. Cheers!

For what feels like my entire goddamn life, I have been hearing right wingers from Fox News to whiney online nazis to full-on GOP elected officials decry “identity politics” - casting it first and foremost as exclusively the provenance of the left, and something they stand staunchly against. “The left uses identity politics to pit Americans against each other, creating divisions where there needn’t be any, all in the name of gaining political power” pronounced Tucker Carlson. “The left’s obsession with identity politics destroys the unity of a nation by reducing every individual to their race, gender, or sexuality, rather than seeing them as a whole person“ squealed Ben Shapiro in his hallmark nasally and fearful pitch. These are just a couple quotes from literally tens of thousands that are out there, and if you’ve lived in this country for the past decade, you have probably heard many of them already. So yeah, forgive me if I go a little schadenfreude-mode as the *exact phenomenon these shitheads have been describing* completely splits the online right in half, leaving them scratching and biting each other to decide which race deserves the next open jr. engineering role at grunko.ai or Blumpr. Lol. Lmao, even. I’m enjoying this all immensely - and you should, too.

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Matt Gaetz Found Dead

When the news first broke of Gaetz’s loss of the AG nomination, there were tons of conservatives on Twitter wishcasting that he would resume his position in congress (as he was entitled to, having won his election), or even be appointed to Marco Rubio’s extremely wet and open senate seat by America’s Shortest Governor, Ron Desantis. This was of course, unbelievable cope - Gaetz immediate shrunk from the spotlight and sheepishly announced via his wife’s Instagram that he was going to write a book or something. Any reasonable individual could see this situation for what it was: whatever was in that House Ethics Report scared the absolute tits off of congressional Republicans (and this is a group that had no issue being led by a serial child-fondler for over a decade). The contents of that report were very obviously some Yellow-King-level shit - and now it’s going to be released publicly! So let’s soberly assess the situation for what it is: a rich nepotism case who has been dodging accountability for his entire life is embroiled in spiraling drug-and-sex-crime-fueled behavior, and has just lost his primary reason for keeping this even slightly under control. Drunk driving a car off of an Orlando highway, drowning face-down in a Tampa-area tide-pool, pushed out of a panel van in front of a Tallahassee hospital while overdosing…any of these things are possible. And for the record, I don’t wish death upon anyone - I’m just calling balls and strikes here.

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The murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Johnson was perfectly crafted to be a full-blown internet sensation. A mysterious and handsome Mediterranean assassin, a uniquely loathe-able victim, silencers, meticulously-planned escape routes, and fake ID’s - all set against the hustle and bustle of midtown NYC on a work day. It’s like a fucking movie. So while the government response to the murder is pretty unsettling (spending 10000x more resources on a single crime because the victim was rich and powerful, etc), it’s not surprising to me *at all* that the whole thing gripped (and continues to grip) the public’s collective attention. And given how the health insurance affects almost every single living American in awful and tragic ways, it’s also pretty unsurprising that people had very little sympathy for Mr. Johnson. Well, most people.

As the jokes started rolling in, the usual list of suspects rolled up their sleeves - ready to tsk-tsk anyone willing to honestly admit how they actually felt about this event. Major figures of politicsposting from Ben Shapiro to CNN anchors to sitting GOP reps to former Obama administration guys all linked arms across the aisle to denounce these jokes, and the horrible people who dare to make them. They came at it from different angles sometime, but in the end the message was the same: the violence that we support is categorically different from the violence you support, and you should be deeply ashamed for not sharing their worldview. Ben Shapiro and Yashar Ali may have different politics on a superficial level, but the exact same politics in their hearts: the interests of the powerful are paramount to all others, and they want you to know about it.

The first, and probably most obvious point that these people lean on is that murder is wrong. I (and pretty much everyone else on earth) agree with that! Death is awful and never contained to the victim themselves - the tragedy ripples out and afflicts lasting trauma on family, friends, and coworkers. Murder is terrible for community trust and safety. It locked John Wick into a life of loss and solitude. It made Simba an orphan. It forced Bruce Wayne to become a violent furry. It’s a key pillar of every major world religion’s moral structure. Any small child could tell you that murder is wrong. My point being that “murder is bad” is not a particularly trenchant insight, so it’s notable that every one of the online Luigi-scolds posted some form of this thought as if they were imbued with a groundbreaking moral clarity, one that eludes the unwashed masses who dare to make a Luigi’s Mansion shitpost or just not be sufficiently somber and melancholic when discussing the killing. Ummm guys, murder is bad…

But it didn’t stop there - as people tend to when posting online, the scolds got more niche, more unique, more creative. Conservative voices from LibsOfTikTok to Bill O’Reilly lined up to blame the entire response on the “violent left” (even though the positive sentiment has come from every corner of the political spectrum and Luigi Mangione has classically American indecipherable politics). There were three separate The Root articles blaming the whole situation on white privilege. Jokesters were implored to think of his children, think of his wife, think of his beloved colleagues at the Ministry of Evil. None of these attempts were met with any positive response, nobody was convinced that their jokes were in poor taste, and there has not been a national reckoning about how we are not kind or thoughtful enough to our treasured CEOs. People felt how they felt, and anyone with a genuine interest in changing a society that was near-gleeful to see a man shot down in the street would ask themselves why this was. But that wasn’t what the scolds were aiming to do.

The goal of the scolds has never been to change hearts or minds. It was never about deep concern for a culture that was resorting to violence as a last resort. America has always been a deeply violent place, and these same people never really gave shit about any of that. Ben Shapiro has never once shed a tear for the million people America killed in Iraq. Chris Cuomo doesn’t care about the children of Gaza being crushed under buildings and shot in the head by snipers. Bill O’Reilly does not care about US citizens murdered at Riker’s Island by agents of the state. None of the people excoriating shitposters on Twitter or Bluesky for having the temerity to make a jury nullification joke have ever made a small fraction of that kind of fuss on behalf of the tens of thousands of people murdered by the health insurance industry every year. Because the point has never been that killing or death or murder is wrong - the point is to genuflect towards the rich and powerful, communicating that they are not part of the disgusting poor hordes cracking wise about Brian and Luigi - they’re one of the good ones.

In the end, I doubt little will change in America as a result of Luigi’s actions (except a few executive security companies making more money, I guess). Yes, the events he set in motion very clearly revealed that an overwhelming number of Americans are fed up with the ghouls who lord over our healthcare and siphon off billions for their mansions and yachts and supercars (and the electoral options for changing this system). But America has always been a country where the overwhelming views of the citizens are fairly unimportant if they happen to run counter to the interests of the wealthy. We fight wars the people don’t want to fight. We fund programs people find reprehensible. We build healthcare systems that enrich a few people at the expense of countless innocent lives. The will of the people has never been particularly relevant when it comes to the machinations of the powerful. We are on a fixed path, and the scolds know it just as much as I do. They aren’t trying to change how you feel about Brian Thompson or Luigi Mangione or United Healthcare or jokes or tone or anything at all, really. They just want the masters of the universe to notice them, and smile down upon them.

Elon’s projects over the past decade or so have been marked - almost exclusively - by how far from his promises the final product ends up being. The hyper-futuristic high speed rail system connecting all of California eventually became a small concrete tube that covers a couple blocks of Las Vegas, and instead of concept-style anime trains it’s just some explosion-prone SUVs he couldn’t sell. The Cybertruck arrived years behind schedule, costs 2-3x more than Elon originally claimed, and generally sucks in every possible way a functional truck could suck. Even with “X”, his promises of doing your banking, making a living from posting, and being “the biggest social platform on earth” have of course not happened, even a little bit. He will never set foot on Mars. He is at best a goldfish-brained man who cannot remember what promises he made, and at worst (and most likely) an inveterate liar who loves adulation and money above all else. So it’s fairly unsurprising that the changes he made to X all fit into this mold: half-assed, lazy, designed to save money, and just downright idiotic in general.

I could probably write a hundred thousand word piece about my thoughts on Elon and how his weird little fucked up brain works, but that’s not my main goal here - what I really want to share with you is how his leadership (lol) has left the greatest website in history completely unusable, and how truly odd all the ways it sucks actually are. So let’s get into it.

The “Diverse Viewpoint” Lie

One of the common and oft-repeated “true-isms” from centrists and generally annoying online characters is that having a diverse array of viewpoints is healthy for The Discourse. This may actually have been true at one point in history - I’m sure the Gore Vidal vs William F. Buckley debates were actually pretty stimulating and interesting (if for no other reason than Buckley’s insane and now-extinct Brahmin accent) - but that is not the world we live in now - and certainly not the world of 2024 Twitter. The idea that anyone from the right would engage with your viewpoints with any degree of seriousness or intellectual honesty is absurd - at best you will get someone calling you a libtard, at worst you will get someone named “HitlerGroyper1488” threatening to rape your family. I’m sure this is probably very fun for them, but it’s crazy to think that this is some kind of higher meeting of the minds, or even something that would be worth anyone’s time. I have a woman named “Karen Orlando” (lmao) who replies to every one of my posts about trans bathroom stuff, even if the post has nothing to do with trans people at all. And there are millions of Karen Orlandos on Twitter now, and they know that under Elon, they have run of the place.

The idea that “if we open up the discussion to everyone, the best opinions will win out” is genuinely child-brained stuff. It’s the sort of mindset I would expect from a middle school debate society dweeb, but not anyone who has spent actual time online in any sort of proximity to the American right. It’s the approach you take when nobody actually wants to talk to you, so you have to make them talk to you. And listen, I am not against Arguing On The Internet - actually I am one of it’s biggest proponents…but there’s an old saying - “never wallow with a pig in the mud, because you get dirty and the pig likes it” - that I think is particularly valid here. There is nothing to be gained by existing in the same space as these people, other than to offer them an outlet to screech about trans bathrooms or the Biden Crime Family or whatever their weird hyperfixation is at the time. Saying that debate is “healthy” also presumes that the only reason for posting is to find some sort of political compromise with people who you wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire - and I personally post for FUN. Sometimes it’s to get a point across, but mostly it’s just for shits and giggles! And that is just fine. People post for all different reasons.

The Monetization Problem

This, like many of the changes Musk has made to Twitter, was obviously going to be a trainwreck-level issue to anyone who has a passing knowledge of how the site actually works. Until Elon’s arrival, the only real incentive to post anything was to get a hit of that sweet, sweet dopamine rush that comes from watching the number of hearts on a tweet go up (bbbbrrrrrr). And this was the ideal scenario - it attracted true posting addicts who are only in it for the love of the game, rather than grifters and opportunists. But with the new monetization program, the incentive structure has changed, and now nearly every viral post you see on your feed is just some no-effort slop designed to garner engagement from the lowest-common-denominator types. Old viral videos, race-baiting fight clips, spurious “science” posts from accounts that have zero clue how anything scientific works - these are the new bread and butter for Twitter, and it’s super shitty. Try scrolling through a Twitter video feed for a couple minutes - you will get what I’m talking about. It feels similar to Facebook, but somehow worse, because I never loved Facebook, and I really, really loved Twitter. It’s like watching someone defile the corpse of a loved one, stringing it up like a marionette and making you watch as it arythmically dances around for coins.

The Nazis Are So, So Weird Now

Where to begin here…the most prominent Nazi on Twitter right now is a five foot tall, catboy-dating gay Mexican, and it only gets stranger from there. The psychosexual walls seem to have come down for this group following Trump’s recent election win, and their internal discourse has gotten fucking crazy as a result. With fewer and fewer left-leaning enemies to contend with on the site, their guns have turned on each other - and those guns are so incredibly weird. Everyone they don’t like (mostly other Nazis) is a secret Jewish homosexual (bad), but somehow being a gay pedophile is “based”. Having a wife is gay (bad version), but not having sex with women is decided not gay. In the past week alone, I have encountered a proud meth-using confederate anime nazi chastising other nazis for being “fake methcels”, several adult men loudly fantasizing about raping young boys, and a litany of other Guy Types that I had no idea were things until now. Even after all these years on the internet, I’m still discovering new kinds of freaks - that’s a small silver lining I suppose.

The Nazi Classics are all still in there - Jews control the world, all minorities are bad, etc. But these seem to increasingly take a back seat to absolutely insane and unintelligible group sexual dynamics that I simply cannot get my mind around. More than anything, it seems like a genuinely miserable bunch to find oneself in - as nobody seems to really be having any fun at all. One prominent nazi spent hundreds of dollars on genetic history tests (which are fake btw) to prove to his followers that he was indeed of the very narrow genetic background he thought they might respect - but even that was met with further accusations of Jewishness, gayness, lying, being a Laplander etc. In the end, they are the dog who caught the car. They spent so much time dreaming of a world where they had total cultural dominance over Twitter, and now that they have it, all they seem to be able to do is accuse each other of sucking Jewish dicks and being secretly Indian. Bleak.

The Information Drain

As was reported recently (but anyone who still uses the site has noticed well before that), Twitter now de-emphasizes outside links on the feed, so that users will spend more time on “X” and not on other sites. It’s a classic social media giant move that never, ever works and always ends up making the content immensely shittier. What this effectively means for Twitter users specifically is that you see almost zero articles or news stories in the course of your average scroll-session, and way more "native news content” - which generally takes the form of race-baiting “news” posts from inbred Polish simpletons like the guy who runs “Visegrad24”, hundreds of Israeli “open source intel” hasbara accounts, or 30,000 word posts from famed online-whiner / wife-respecter Bill Ackman. Gone are the days where you hear about a news event first from Twitter, despite the “CEO” Linda’s insistence that “it’s all happening on X!” - it’s just content slop now. Everything is content slop. It also de-incentivizes actual creators from posting their work on the site, as the returns are ever-diminishing. I have nearly six times the follows on Twitter as I do on Bluesky, but more traffic comes in to this newsletter from Bluesky. This was obviously a conscious decision on Elon’s part, and a characteristically idiotic one. I know he’s too socially-unintelligent to understand why this is, but normal people can see it pretty clearly. What was once the best place to stay informed about the world is now the worst, a dying mall where the only stores that are still open sell knockoff products and racist t-shirts.

Everyone Is So, So Much Dumber Now

The most overarching observation I can make about late-2024 Twitter is this: everyone is fucking dumb as shit. Medieval peasant brain is back with a vengeance, and nothing of value is created. I haven’t seen a really good shitpost in I don’t know how long. People are fearmongering about Krampus (???). Jay-Z is drunkposting PR statements about explaining child rape to his children (and promoting it with Twitter Ads!). Discussions about celebrities are, if possible, stupider than anything I’ve ever seen in my life, carried out by people who seem to lack object permanence and maybe some parts of their frontal lobe. Twitter used to be dumb in an awesome way, with celebrities like Shaq posting stuff like “im at knots berry farms n my butts 2 big 2 fit in da seats on ride. ahhhhhh (dats me yellin)”. Now it’s dumb in the worst possible ways, alternating between too evil and too mind-numbingly moronic to even engage with. The celebrities have fled. The content creators have fled. The writers and journalists and authors and artists have fled. Twitter is now the land of the most cringe-inducing and sad parts of our society, all churning out content slop, hasbara, and psychosexual drama as they bow humbly at the feet of their 58 year old epic memeking. Maybe one day he will be forced to sell the thing, but with Trump in office and Elon’s personal net worth fast approaching literally one trillion dollars, I wouldn’t bet on it. The ship is going down, and you can either be on one of the lifeboats or you can be in the band. I know which one I’m choosing.

I think the modern era of film and television really crystalized for me in the Summer of 2022 when Billy Eichner and Judd Apatow were marketing their new gay rom-com “Bros”. Every media hit and online conversation I saw about the movie in the runup to its release went something like this: “this is the first gay romcom in history, and is therefore an important film”. Nevermind that this wasn’t even true (the excellent “Fire Island” came out first) - I don’t think I ever once saw a single clip from Bros itself as part of the campaign. Just endless clips of Judd or Billy sitting in a directors chair somewhere, nodding furtively and assuring us that this was an important film, and we - the moviegoing public - should see it for this reason alone. The movie was a box office flop - earning only 14 million against it’s 22 million dollar production budget. I’m sure it was pretty funny! But I never saw it. Bros was released at the same time as Top Gun 2, which was a box office smash and marketed itself with nothing more than general “fuck yeah awesome shit incoming baby!!!!” messaging. This isn’t to say that Top Gun 2 wasn’t full of military industrial complex stuff fully designed to convince 18 year olds that their future is worth a downpayment on a Hellcat and getting divorced at 21, but I’m just talking about how the movie positioned itself - and that was a pure, uncut “this shit kicks ass” approach. There was a lot to be learned in this moment, I think.

Liberals and progressives aren’t the only ones who are guilty of the kind of overt-value-signaling sort of marketing we saw with Bros - conservative entertainment employs it just as much, if not more so. Conservative comedy specials make sure you know from the key art that this standup comedian (who’s heyday was always the 90’s) is mad as hell about cancel culture. The slate of incredibly boring and self-satisfied films from Matt Walsh and the Daily Wire like “What is a Woman?” make no mystery of what audience they are targeting. The first “original sitcom on X”, The New Norm, is so mono-maniacally dedicated to touching on every single popular online conservative grievance that it seemingly forgets to make any jokes at all. All of this is a long way of saying that our media, all of it, is getting more and more self-segregating along political lines, and that has bled into every level of how they market themselves. I, a generally pinko lefty type, obviously like when my movies have a message that I can support - but it has never been a requirement. Not to mention that it’s hard to use film and television to influence people politically when you market your work with a big flashing neon sign that says “WE ARE TRYING TO CHANGE YOUR POLITICS!” You have to be more subtle. You have to have a Top Gun 2 approach.

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The greatest thing about the “silly detective” genre is that it so naturally lends itself to the episodic format. True Detective has to spend a whole season going after one weird sister-fucking redneck (again, one of the best seasons of television of all time, please do not kill my family), while a single season of Monk will see the defective detective facing off against astronauts, rap executives and shock-jocks on a weekly basis. With as many as twenty-eight episodes a season, these gumshoes need to have a genuine rogues gallery of bad guys - and in these episodics, the best villains are born. Enter: The Magician.

The Magician occupies a strange and unique place in American culture - you can attend a high-end magic show with the greatest magician in the world and walk away from it feeling truly amazed - but the next day you will wake up and go right back to thinking magicians are the goddamn lamest thing on earth - utter disrespect and disdain in your bones. No woman on earth is excited to bring a man home to meet her family and announce that he is a magician. When someone at a bar offers to do a card trick, reasonable people can groan and assume that this person is a “pickup artist” (sex criminal). Magicians are at both a true mainstay of our society and a source of deep cultural shame for us all. Even when watching fun and lighthearted “magician-led” films like Now You See Me, I find myself rooting for the authorities to grab Jesse Eisenberg by his annoying little dick and shotput toss him into Gitmo. Magic is fun! But magicians are the worst.

TV detectives are, by and large, a class unto themselves. You would never, ever, associate someone like Jessica Fletcher or Richard Castle with the stereotypical understanding of a “cop”. ACAB does not apply to the duo from Psych. These are simply fun-loving gumshoes who have a penchant for solving mysteries, after all. What could be more endearing? Columbo would never choke a black suspect to death, he doesn’t even carry a gun! He simply says “I got ya, sir”, and they march off to jail, victims of the detective’s otherworldly charisma.

So now we have the ideal dynamic laid out before us - on one hand, society’s most likable character (the disarmingly charming detective) and on the other, society’s most vile and hated minority (the magician). The magician is instinctively inclined to enact the most convoluted and twee murder plot imaginable - reliably involving stupid fucking disguises and unnecessarily complicated twists. But most importantly, the magician is a clown. This is not an ISIS cell or the Unibomber - this is a cornball in a velveteen suit named “The Great Pasquini” or something. The entire exercise is, by its very nature, farcical and clownish. And "farcical and clownish” is perhaps the most fertile soil for a truly excellent episode of a detective show to grow.

One thing that makes the magician such an detestable foe is their sneering self-satisfaction and self-importance in the face of a detective WE KNOW is going to lock their ass up. When a magician commits a murder, he doesn’t just kill someone, he leaves absurdly obvious clues, signatures, and gimmicks to demonstrate his superior intelligence - a sign of how confident he is that he will get away with his misdeeds. In “Mr. Monk and the Magician”, The Great Torini literally writes out a full confession onto a piece of paper for Monk, only to have the paper erupt into flames the moment it hits his hand. The utter balls on this guy. Do you know who you are up against here? Adrian Monk will fucking end you. You stand zero chance. None. You are the most screwed anyone has ever been. He simply does not miss.

In the end, there are never enough of these things. If you love a kind of TV enough, eventually you will run out of episodes - it doesn’t matter if there are 6 episodes a season (like those perverts over in the UK do) or a full 28, eventually the playlist will come to an end. There are many great installments that pit a silly detective against a loathsome magician, but there can always be more. If you’re reading this, please reach out to your favorite television executive, congressperson, or church leader and let them know that you are a lover of detective vs magician episodes of tv, and you vote. The USA Network needs to be pushed in the right direction. Our nation’s most beloved character actors need to be woo’d. We need a groundswell of support for television that will heal our nation and save our future (watching stupid shows where a detective tries to catch a magician who murdered someone). God bless.

This week’s chump is none other than America’s Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. Reading any piece of media about Rudy from the early 2000’s feels like cracking open the daily newspaper in Bizarro World, because the level of respect and admiration he received from every corner of the media during this time feels genuinely alien to the man we have come to know today. He was a hero, a leader in times of deep trouble for our country’s greatest city - or at least according to the fawning praise everyone was lavishing on him back in the Bush era. I personally suspect that he has always been a huge moron/creep and simply was in the right place at the right time (New York on 9/11), but it’s not really important now. Because now, he is America’s Incontinent Old Clown - and our inaugural Chump of The Week.

What’s truly amazing about Rudy’s steep slide into national chump status is that it was done completely and entirely in service of one man - Donald J. Trump. From the moment Rudy connected with the politician version Trump, he was utterly besotted. He wanted to be near him, to help him, to defiantly tell the media that the president was smart and strong and had never done a crime in his entire beautiful life. And it didn’t matter how many times Trump fucked him over - he would always, ALWAYS, come crawling back like the dumpy little worm he is, begging for a treat and the chance to bask in the president’s reflected glory.

An early Trump supporter in 2016, Rudy was clearly convinced that a cabinet position in the Donald’s first term was his birthright. Which it what made it so funny when he was subsequently passed over for every single position for which he leaked his own name as being in consideration talks. He actively and loudly lobbied for the Secretary of State position, which then went to a retired oil man named Tex who had never met a single diplomat that wasn’t involved in selling him crude oil. He begged for Director of Homeland Security, Attorney General, and even as a simple policy advisor - but was kicked to the curb on each successive attempt. Finally, he was reduced to a role as a kind of palace hanger-on, a mealy-mouthed little hobgoblin who anxiously scampered the halls of the White House, with no real job or reason for being there other than his slobbering loyalty. He would get the occasional media hit (most notably when he tried to whip his crusty little chode out during an interview for the Borat sequel), but always just as a kind of a nebulously-connected individual - just some guy, nobody really important.

Rudy’s true chance to shine (in a chump-ly sense) came during the run-up to, and immediate aftermath of, the 2020 election. Beginning with his campaign to expose the Biden family’s criminal misdeeds in Ukraine (which felt a lot like Donald giving Rudy a “special project” that just so happened to involve him being 5000 miles away), Giuliani spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money traveling back and forth between the continents as he collected evidence of these supposed scandals. What he was doing over there specifically remains a bit of a mystery, but you have to imagine it was a bumbling and cartoonish as his antics on this side of the Atlantic. Smash cut to none of it really mattering, Biden winning the election, and Rudy being left holding the bag for his numerous expenses on this very important endeavor. Lol. Lmao, even. But this is the beginning of a hilarious and amazing trend.

What followed was well over a year of Rudy tripping over his own dick and into various broken glass and diaper filled dumpsters. We all know the highlights - Four Seasons Total Landscaping, The Melting Hair Dye Incident, FartGate - the years of 2020 to 2021 were an unending series of sitcom-level humiliations for Mr. Giuliani, and he was always hungry for more. To add insult to injury, he was absolutely and totally unsuccessful across the board - none of the legal cases he filed had standing, nothing he tried to organize went according to plan, he was laughed out of courtrooms and press conferences around the country for months and months on end with nothing to show for it. If I had been writing a comedy about an election, and turned in a draft where a person did and said the exact things Rudy did and said, I would rightfully be excoriated for creating such an unrealistically buffoonish character.

In the end, Trump left Rudy holding the bag, in every possible sense. He lost his law license. He was successfully sued by the Georgia elections workers he slandered, and had to file for personal bankruptcy after being ordered to pay the two women $146 million dollars (a true “lmao” figure). Trump stiffed him on literally every payment he was owed, from reimbursed expenses to millions in legal fees, and joyfully mocked him in White House circles. He is a laughing stock of nearly every elite institution in which he used to be celebrated. His name no longer conjures the image of him heroically standing atop a pile of rubble in lower Manhattan, and now evokes scenes of his melting hair dye, his wild-eyed and senile yelling, and him lying prone on a hotel bed - ominously unzipping the crotch of his pleated khakis. His legacy and his fortunes in the bottom of a very shit-encrusted toilet, there remains one hope for Rudy - his savior, his liege, Donald Trump, has finally clawed his way back into the White House, with a full GOP control of every branch of government, and can now help his downtrodden servant Rudy from the seat of absolute power.

But he fucking won’t! Lmao. Trump, like the rest of America, sees Giuliani for what he is, a fucking loser and a laughingstock and someone who’s only value is as cannon fodder for the media and the courts. There is no real upside to helping him, and so he won’t! Rudy showed up to the election party for one last ride in beloved classic Mercedes convertible - the one the courts are taking from him to pay his debts, before returning home to an empty Florida condo that he will also eventually have to sell. Trump offered him no position in the cabinet, no chance at redemption, no lifeline for his embattled and downtrodden friend. He cannot practice law anymore, so his only source of income now is simply podcasting. Nothing Trump does to him will dampen the deep, unconditional love Rudy feels for his master, so why would he offer him anything other than crumbs? Why not offer him nothing at all? When the time comes, I’m sure Rudy will eventually find his usefulness again as a human shield (perhaps literally), and until then, he will just keep shivering at the gates to the palace, hoping to be let in from the cold.

And because of this - [game show host voice] Rudy Giuliani you are our official Chump Of The Week!