The New Age of Thought Crime
Conservatives raged against woke cancellations. Now they're eagerly doing it themselves.
Welcome to the Weekly Scroll, a recap of the week that was on the social internet. Blame the government for this one being a few days late - firstly because blaming the government is fun and easy, and secondly because I had to do taxes as a small business owner this weekend, which may be cruel and unusual enough punishment to be banned under the Geneva Conventions.
Trump is Creating a New Thought Police
Over the last decade or so, conservatives have made a lot of noise about how the left is anti-free speech. They blame the left for unjust cancellations, for policing language, and for shutting conservative ideas out of powerful institutions like academia, entertainment, media, and more. And you know what? While some of this is overblown, I’m sympathetic to the general idea. We really did have a moment there where folks on the left were trying to cancel people for stuff like making dumplings! The left does have some silly practices going on with their speech! And academia really is unbelievably, overwhelmingly progressive to the point where you might wonder if it’s a conspiracy.
But while the excesses of wokeness were real, the fight against those excesses wasn’t led by free speech warriors who wanted to make sure that nobody got cancelled for mere unpopular opinions, or to make sure all viewpoints got a chance to speak. The fight was led by people who love stepping on free speech - they just want to be the ones doing it.
That’s why you’ve been seeing headlines like Elon Musk's DOGE using AI to snoop on U.S. federal workers. Musk’s team plans to monitor employee communications with the explicit purpose of firing employees who express negative opinions about DOGE, Musk, or Trump.1 It’s also why the Trump administration plans to demand to see the social media accounts of people applying for green cards or citizenship and why they’re now actively monitoring the social media accounts of university students on visas. It’s why they have contracts with AI firms to automate all this data scraping and data analysis.
Some of this is being done in the name of ‘stopping antisemitism’, but the real goal is an expression of power. The Trump administration wants immigrants to know that they’re being watched, and if they say the wrong thing they might be rounded up without a court hearing and deported - maybe to their home country, maybe to a tropical torture gulag in El Salvador. If I was an immigrant, I’d be terrified. Perfectly legal speech expressing a political opinion that Republicans don’t like will get you labelled a ‘terrorist’ or an ‘anti-Semite’ and torn from your life here.
This extends beyond social media snooping. Trump’s anti-DEI efforts haven’t stopped at just ending pronouns-in-you-email stuff. Trump’s administration is banning books at the Naval Academy, taking books from Maya Angelou and books about the Holocaust off the shelves (Mein Kampf is still available to be checked out at the same library. Not a joke). Trump has also personally targeted law firms that have argued against him in court, in moves that are wildly unconstitutional and flagrantly anti-free speech. He’s withholding federal money for universities that have had extensive protests about Israel’s actions in Gaza.
This is already having chilling effects. Law firms that have traditionally done pro-bono work for liberal causes are now shutting down that work for fear that the president will come after them. Other law firms feel the need to bribe Trump, offering him billions in free legal services. Bank analysts are starting to redact their economic reports because they’re afraid that accurately describing the impact of Trump’s economic decisions will lead to retaliation against their firm. Businesses impacted by Trump’s tariffs are declining to sue the administration - not because they can’t win the case, but because they don’t want to anger the president.
We should be clear about what this is. Trump is creating a new Thought Police, an institutional superstructure that enforces what is and isn’t acceptable to say in America. Don’t criticize the president, don’t express ideas that Trump doesn’t like, don’t take legal action against his administration. If you do, be prepared for the full force of the state to persecute you. The administration has been remarkably straightforward about this - when they detained protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, they said that “the allegation here is not that he was breaking the law”. They’re just punishing speech that they don’t like, and many of these policies and tactics are clearly first steps towards even further snooping and even further crackdowns. If they can punish law firms, they can punish any kind of business. If they’re allowed to deport immigrants for speech, they’re going to start going after citizens soon enough.
We’re finding out in real time how few people have any sort of real commitment to free speech. Republicans who under Trump were furious about progressive anti-speech tactics are universally silent about all these steps. Most people think speech restrictions are great as long as they’re the ones that get to determine what’s acceptable and who gets punished for saying or thinking the wrong things.
It’s often unpopular, but standing up for actual free speech is still worth doing. There’s a wide variety of speech that is stupid and awful and should still be legal. It’s not the place of the government to determine who should say what, and Trump’s use of the state to punish people for speech is wrong. As a final reminder - Substack’s Defender program has promised to fund the legal defense of writers in the US who are attacked by the government for their writing.
Minecraft Teens Going Feral
Now that we’re done talking about the future of free speech, time for the second most important story in America: Feral Minecraft Teens.
The Minecraft movie is, in an objective2 sense, not a very good movie. But oh boy is it a popular movie. It stormed to a $163M domestic box office in its opening weekend, which makes it the highest opening video game movie of all time, ahead of even the Super Mario movie which eventually grossed 1.3 billion dollars in 2023. It’s been so successful that the movie’s second weekend haul beat almost every other 2024 film’s opening weekend.3 It’s now grossed over 550M globally and will likely finish with more than double that amount.
Minecraft has been one of the biggest video games in the world for more than a decade now, so it’s no surprise that the movie is doing well. What’s surprising is that it took this long. To my knowledge, this isn’t just the first Minecraft-branded movie IP, it’s the first major studio movie to feature the game in any way whatsoever. The Minecraft film is doing great numbers not because of its artistic qualities, but simply because it acknowledges an enormous group of people who have never been represented on screen before.
And Minecraft fans (mostly teen and pre-teen boys from the looks of it) are taking their shot. Social media is awash in clips of fans erupting into raucous cheering in theaters, screaming along with specific lines and catch phrases. They’re throwing popcorn around. For reasons that I am far too old to explain to you, the ‘chicken jockey’4 scene has turned into 2024’s biggest meme among 14 year old boys. In one instance, someone brought a live chicken into a theater and dramatically revealed it during the chicken jockey scene:
Things have gotten so wild that in some instances theaters have shut down showings and police have been called. Theaters are showing special disclaimers begging kids not to trash theaters before the show.
I get why theater staff are fed up with the antics. This all seems like Gen Alpha’s much stupider, more corporate, sanitized version of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. But movie theaters have been in a pretty bad slump, and they’re desperate for anything that will get people to leave the couch and actually go to the theater. Maybe this is the path forward? Lean into any viral moment you can get, lean into call-and-response audience engagement, and especially encourage movie moments that require you to actually attend in person to really appreciate. Otherwise I’m not sure Gen Alpha will ever understand why they should see the inside of a theater.
Single Post Tariff Bounce
I said most of what I really wanted to say about Trump’s tariffs in last week’s update, so I’ll spare you another extended rant about tariff policy. But besides people talking about the stupidity of the tariffs themselves, there was an interesting social media angle to the story.
First, the curious case of the ‘Walter Bloomberg’ account moving markets by several trillion dollars. Walter Bloomberg is a semi-anonymous account that has a huge following in financial circles. It’s not associated with Bloomberg the company, but is well-known for instantly tweeting any big news that comes from the Bloomberg Terminal. In this case, on April 7th they tweeted:
Markets that had previously been in freefall immediately started rising again, gaining more than 2.4 trillion dollars in value. The problem was that both the White House and Hassett then denied this was true, nobody could find a source, and markets crashed back to exactly where they were before.
There are a couple angles to this you should think about. First, it’s a sign of how wildly Trump’s policies are so fluctuate day-by-day that we believe this kind of semi-anonymous, unsourced claim. Second, it’s a sign that X as a platform still has the juice. There are precisely zero posts on TikTok, Instagram or BlueSky that can create and then destroy trillions in market value. But X is still where the world’s decision makers congregate, it’s where the movers and the shakers are in media, politics, finance, etc. This isn’t even the first time a post has done this - remember the time when GameStop stock doubled because someone posted a picture of a guy leaning forward? X is in many ways worse than the Twitter of three years ago, but it’s still where things happen.
Anyways, maybe Walter was on to something, because two days later, Trump did in fact issue a large pause on news tariffs. Before he did that, he posted “be cool” on Truth Social and that it was a “great time to buy” at around 9:30am, before pausing tariffs a few hours later. Quoting Matt Levine at Money Stuff, I guess there are two options here:
Trump believed, Wednesday morning, that his tariffs were good for America and that this was a great time to buy, because of the tariffs. So he Truthed that. And then a few hours later he changed his mind and paused the tariffs.
Trump knew, yesterday morning, that he was going to pause the tariffs, and he accurately predicted that that would cause the stock market to rip, so he gave his followers on Truth Social a little preview.
Posts now rule the markets. Is this market manipulation? Insider trading? Were members of Congress involved? Hahaha don’t ask, you can now be punished for questioning the glorious leader.
Elon’s Game Drama
The saga of Elon Musk being a fake gamer never seems to end. I don’t want to talk about this every other week, but Musk keeps debasing himself in new, incredible ways.
Saturday Musk went live on X to stream Path of Exile 2, the game in which he is supposedly a world class player. He then proceeded to get killed by the tutorial boss repeatedly for an hour and a half while being abused by his chat:
Every part of this story is absurd
It’s absurd that a man that claims to be top-ten in the world at Path of Exile 2 would voluntarily livestream himself losing over and over to the tutorial, aka Baby’s First Boss Experience.
It’s absurd that Elon, who claims to be a PoE2 superfan, apparently doesn’t know how to turn off in-game chat. The reason all the abuse shows up is that by default, all messages to your profile in PoE2 pop up on screen. It’s an option you can turn off - but Elon seems totally unaware that’s possible and so we got gems like “please jerk off mr trump so he dies of a heart attack” and the user ELON_MUSK_IS_PATHETIC repeating “YOU WILL ALWAYS FEEL INSECURE AND IT WILL NEVER GO AWAY”.
In a little-noticed detail, Elon listened to an entire Grimes album throughout the stream, with his only skip being the song “You’ll miss me when I’m not around”. Remarkable.
Sitting in dead silence, listening to your ex-gf’s music, posing at being a cool gamer with the kids, taking constant abuse because you’re too dumb to realize there’s an off button for chat before eventually rage quitting… this is the most divorced anyone has been in human history. The man must have a humiliation kink, there’s no other explanation.
Links
The BBC seems stunned that government officials aren’t deciding policy by watching Netflix shows. I’m sure Adolescence is a very well made show, but what’s next? Are we setting drug policy based on Breaking Bad?
Chinese factories are fighting back against tariffs on social media, by openly advertising that you can buy luxury brand bags direct from Chinese factories for much cheaper than the actual luxury brand stores.
It’s always in Infinite Scroll first: The Atlantic proclaims There Was Never A Master Plan for Trump’s tariffs.
YouTuber arrested after sneaking on to uncontacted tribe’s island to bring them a Diet Coke.
The group ‘Stop Antisemitism’ is asking the Department of Justice to investigate children’s performer Ms. Rachel.
MrBeast opened a medical facility for survivors of child slavery in Ghana.
Trump’s tariffs killed a deal to save TikTok.
Posts
One of the biggest things on TikTok right now - a one-person multi-episode drama titled ‘The Group Chat’
Hypocritical, given that DOGE is flagrantly violating record-keeping laws by having all their own chats in encrypted, inaccessible chat tools like Signal.
subjective
The single exception is Captain America: Brave New World, whose opening weekend was just barely ahead of Minecraft’s second weekend.
If you’re overcome with a burning desire to know - there’s a fairly rare type of enemy in Minecraft that is a baby zombie riding on a chicken. It’s been nicknamed a ‘chicken jockey’, and the phrase functions as a sort of shibboleth where only dedicate players are likely to have any idea what you’re talking about.
I miss the rage era memes. Brain rot makes no sense to me.
Weirdly, the schizo van is missing some lettering in that Bluesky post and some recent reddit posts. I wonder if the owner has changed it up in the last decade or if people have photoshopped out some of the bits most likely to get flagged. Here's the OG from 10 years ago (def adds to the weirdness): https://www.reddit.com/r/Shitty_Car_Mods/comments/2llzxj/all_diseases_are_created_with_computer/