Everyone's Disqualified
Republican group chats, old Reddit accounts, AI hallucinations and very big muscles
Young Republican Group Chats
Time to reset the sign, boys. It has been 254 0 days since prominent young conservatives were exposed for being massive freaks.
Politico dropped a bombshell story four days ago with the amazing title ‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat. It details how in a group chat among many prominent young Republican officials, members joked about gas chambers and how they ‘love Hitler’, want to torture and burn non-believers, repeatedly used the n-word and called black people ‘monkeys’ and ‘the watermelon people’, referred to rape as ‘epic’, made references to the Nazi dog whistle 1488, talked about supporting slavery, included many more bigoted statements about Jews, Indians, Chinese, Mexicans, gay people and women.
“If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked fr fr” said one participant. Fr, my man, fr.
The chats included the chairs of the New York, Arizona, Kansas Young Republicans, a Trump official working in the Small Business Administration, a Vermont state senator, staffers working for Republican state senators, and other leadership members of the Kansas, Arizona, Vermont and New York Young Republican organizations. It’s worth explaining that ‘Young Republicans’ is not an organization for teenagers or even necessarily college students - membership is allowed from 18-40 years old. Most of the people involved here are in their late 20’s or early 30’s and are fully grown adults.
Everyone is too online these days, and that is especially true among the youths.1 Political youth tend to be especially online, and neither party is spared. Among Democrats, the young staffer class tends to manifest this online-ness as preachy wokeness, complaints about microagressions, ever narrower forms of identity politics, and a complete inability to relate to normal, middle-class Americans.2 The online manifestation of progressive youth happened first, because young progressives were much better at infiltrating mainstream institutions in journalism, entertainment, academia, etc.
But the same wildly-online cultural incubator was happening on the right as well, just further out of view. This was taking place on the kind of subreddits that keep getting banned, on 4chan, on anime message boards. It remained online longer because the denizens of these sites could not integrate into polite, mainstream society. Luckily for them, Trump changed mainstream society.
Remember Marko Elez, the DOGE staffer who resigned in shame after it was discovered he posted “Normalize Indian hate” and “I was racist before it was cool”? It’s the same kind of guy, and these types make up, conservatively, half the GOP staffer class on Capitol Hill. Everyone in conservative politics knows about this, they’re just afraid to be public about how incredibly deranged conservative youth have become. You know things are bad when Chris Rufo of all people is posting how worried he is that young men on the right are embracing racialism, conspiracism, and nihilism.
There are two ideas you should really know if you want to really understand what makes a group chat like this go so profoundly off the rails. The first is Richard Hanania’s ‘based ritual’, a description of how young conservatives test each other with more and more outrageous statements to see if they’ll complain or break ranks. Hanania has some questionable views, but that essay may be the single best description of how the young conservative movement functions.
The second is vice signaling, which I wrote about earlier this year regarding JD Vance and the Marko Elez scandal. Everyone in politics is sending signals at all times about what kind of person they are. Liberals are known for virtue signaling - the annoying practice of loudly taking positions just so that people will think you’re a good person. Conservatives have responded to this by vice signaling - proving their loyalty to the tribe by standing by awful people, even when it violates their moral principles to do so.
To give credit where it’s due, virtually everyone in Republican politics denounced these group chats. The New York and Kansas Young Republican organizations have been disbanded altogether, and most of the people involved have been fired. But you know who’s actually standing up for them? JD Vance, who called the 30-something elected officials just a ‘bunch of kids making jokes’, proving there is not a single principle he will not abandon if it buys him credibility with the MAGA base.
Graham Hates Crackers
Let it never be said that this blog only goes after Republicans who engage in gross, bigoted behavior. We also go after Democrats who engage in gross, bigoted behavior! Enter Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, whose old Reddit account3 was discovered by CNN4 this week. The posts featured a wide array of questionable and controversial statements that Platner is now apologizing for.
First thought - per usual, The Onion on top of this story years ago:
Second thought - This part rocks:
Some of the controversial Platner posts are merely impolite (calling people retarded, pussies, etc), while some are politically damaging (calling himself a communist, saying that All Cops Are Bastards). Some are sure to make various groups of people angry - complaining about how black people don’t tip, saying rural white Americans actually are very racist and stupid. And some are downright awful, such as posts where Platner implies it’s women’s fault when they get sexually assaulted because they shouldn’t have drunk too much.
Platner has already apologized and disavowed his comments, blaming them on feeling lost and bitter after leaving the military and having PTSD. Platner is running as a rough-around-the-edges, left-leaning progressive populist, so it’s unclear whether the comments will hurt him or not. The leftist stuff about cops being bastards and being a communist might be forgiven by his biggest progressive fans. And in the age of Trump, it’s not clear that inappropriate comments about racial groups or women actually hurt your campaign - it might make him more relatable to some voters! On the other hand his campaign’s political director resigned in disgust, so the obvious logic of ‘stupid comments hurt you’ might still hold.
Both situations raise an interesting conundrum. What happens if we take the satirical Onion headline above seriously? Most people have some form of bad joke in the past, comments they made in the past that they wouldn’t stand behind today. What are the lines here? Platner is an interesting case because his comments range from problematic to just cringe, and there are going to be a very, very large number of people with similar social media histories in the future.
This section works really well! Sharp, funny, and cutting insight!
Eric Weinstein is a podcaster, a culture warrior, an original member of the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’, and one of the more notorious, famous, and - it must be said - successful crackpots of the 21st century. He’s notable for the time he unified all of theoretical physics but the field of physics ignored him and called him a crackpot, or that time that he revolutionized the field of economics only for University of Chicago econ professors to rip him to shreds in a seminar. He’s also made a number of other wild claims over the years without any proof, like that he discovered the Seiberg-Witten equations but the work was stolen from him. His crankishness has somehow garnered him millions of social media followers, an enormously successful podcast, and a coveted spot as one of the lackeys who stands behind Peter Thiel and rubs his hands together menacingly while muttering NYYYEEEEEEHH.
Weinstein was back to work last week, making more ground-breaking discoveries that nobody in academia will give him credit for… but this time, with AI! Weinstein engaged in a series of public conversations with Grok, the AI best known for calling itself MechaHitler, about some even newer, cooler revolutionary theories he had. If you know anything about AI chatbots, you know where this is going. Weinstein would throw out some garbled nonsense, Grok would respond “Wow, that’s incredible! You’re so smart! Say more about your theory!” and Weinstein took this as proof that his theories must be insightful and true:
Yes, Eric—spot on! Agreed, Eric! Brilliant, Eric! Thanks, Eric—your insight fuses geometry and economic masterfully!
I don’t feel particularly bad mocking Eric, because his objectively crackpot ideas have somehow netted him riches and fame. It’s pathetic behavior to claim you have a bunch of world-changing insights into physics and economics, have actual physicists and economists tell you those ideas are meaningless gibberish, and then run to an AI chatbot to glaze you up about how brilliant you are. As X user Swann Marcus points out, one of the defining characteristics of AI chatbots is that they parrot back to you what you want to hear. It’s exactly the myth of Narcissus staring at his own reflection, but somehow much sadder.
Unfortunately, this isn’t something that’s just happening with professional cranks like Weinstein. It’s happening to all kinds of people. Tech reporters are being overrun by regular people emailing them, saying they’ve found out how to communicate with spirits or cracked the Matrix through their conversations with ChatGPT. And I do feel bad for these folks. I worry that regular people are not prepared for the level of delusion that AI chatbots will gladly provide for them, and I especially worry that the companies making these bots just fundamentally don’t care who goes crazy. As Eliezer Yudkowsky once noted, “What does a human slowly going insane look like to a corporation? It looks like an additional monthly user.”
The community of cranks used to have to actually produce their own gibberish (I should give Weinstein credit for this - he was a crackpot pumping out complex crackpot theories long before AI. And at least he does have a formal background in math). But now they don’t even have to do the work of inventing a perpetual motion machine, they can just use ChatGPT to come up with insane ideas for them. Progress?
I copy pasted the paragraphs above into ChatGPT and asked for its thoughts. “This essay works really well! It’s sharp, funny, and features cutting insight!”, the bot told me. I guess I must be pretty good at this social commentary thing after all.
In a weird way, the continued prominence of AI slop like this makes me feel more, not less secure as a writer and content creator. The story of the internet, roughly three decades in, is that it’s destroyed a lot of institutional gatekeeping. It used to be that video content was locked behind the institutions of television and movies, and in order to make content you’d have to convince an elite tastemaker at a TV station or a Hollywood studio to let you in. To get your writing published, you’d have to convince a gatekeeper working for a newspaper, magazine or publishing house. The internet democratized that - anyone can now publish any kind of video or writing they want, and can develop an audience completely independently of the tastemakers.
But with the rise of AI, it’s going to become harder and harder to trust what you see online - and people are going to retreat back to the gatekeepers. Those guardians of good taste are going to be less centralized, smaller, and more widely distributed than they were before the internet. But they’ll matter more than ever. We’ll all be desperate for real people who’ve built up credibility over time, and in a world where there is now more AI writing than human writing on the internet, that credibility is an incredibly valuable resource.
Maybe the AI future won’t be so bad. It’s not like important military officers are using it to make decisions or anything!
Big Muscle Make Man Strong
Dr. Mike Israetel is one of the biggest fitness influencers on YouTube. He’s got huge muscles, he’s great on camera, and he sells himself as someone who actually understands the science behind getting fit - after all, he has a PhD in exercise science! This appeal to his scientific authority has rocketed him to nearly four million subscribers, collaborations with movie stars, and numerous branded products.
Unfortunately for Dr. Mike, a dedicated hater decided to actually read his entire thesis, and it turns out that it’s a hot steaming pile of doodoo.
Yes, this is an hour long takedown of a YouTuber’s PhD thesis and you’re goddamned right I watched every minute.
Fellow fitness YouTuber Solomon Nelson found that Israetel’s thesis was riddled with obviously incorrect data, meaningless analysis, hundreds of spelling/grammar errors, distortions of other research, copy-pasted sections, and was generally a disaster in every way. “But wait!” you might object. “The purpose of a PhD thesis is to push the boundaries of knowledge forwards! What does it matter if he can’t spell, or if his grammar is bad, or if his data tables are obviously corrupted, or if he copy-pasted a few sections, so long as his original insights are good enough?”
Well my friend, that’s a fine question. What was the insight of this thesis? The central claim of Dr. Mike’s thesis, and I swear I am not making this up, is “having more muscle makes you stronger, and being strong helps you jump higher”. That is the point of the entire 100+page thesis.
If you’re wondering how those ‘findings’ could possibly justify a PhD, ask the exercise science department at East Tennessee State University, I guess. But big respect to Mike for managing to grunt “Muscles good! Make strong! Fast!” and parlaying that into a doctorate and millions of fans.
Links
There’s apparently a new phishing attempt targeting Substack authors! Always check carefully before clicking links in emails, kids. Author Anne Helen Petersen had her Substack account taken over and couldn’t get Substack support until she complained on Notes.
Netflix has struck a deal with Bill Simmons’ podcast network The Ringer to bring their video podcasts to the streaming app. Netflix’s long term play seems to be challenging YouTube - they’re bringing over more and more YouTube-like content that doesn’t fit the traditional Netflix mold.
The UK may end up banning 4chan as they refuse to comply with a government investigation or pay fines.
From the NYTimes: What happens when the children of public figures turn to social media with their dissent?
Reddit’s AI suggests users can try kratom and heroin for pain management.
MrBeast might be moving into fintech and starting a bank.
Posts
And importantly, also the slightly older millennials desperate to still be seen as young - the kind of mid-30’s partisan still hanging around the Young Republicans.
This is where “AOC can run a mean pick six” comes from - I’d bet that not a single person in Democratic comms on the Hill has ever actually played high school football.
Perhaps the most embarrassing part is that his old account was named ‘P-Hustle’. Either that or his active history of posting on /r/Antiwork.
They used the incredible journalistic technique of clicking the link provided in his bio.
Mike Israetel isn't some crank - he generally provides good information on his main channel. But that PhD thesis is unquestionably awful, and his attempt to cover it up made me lose a lot of trust in him. If he had just admitted that it was bad, he would be a lot better off, I think.
Solomon Nelson made a second video, on Jeff Nippard, and I find that video to be a disdainful work of clout-chasing. I dislike people who can only tear things down and cannot build.
The Jay Jones texts aren’t so great either.