The Real Housewives of MAGA Twitter
When is a podcaster just another reality show star?
Welcome to the Weekly Scroll, a collection of the most interesting, important, and weird things happening on the internet this week.
It’s actually been a few weeks since we had a Weekly Scroll, so this week you’re getting two! Today’s edition has no paywall, and is available to all free subscribers, and there will be a second edition coming out tomorrow morning for paid subs. Join up as a paid subscriber and get access to posts like MAGA as Master Morality, Worst Tweets voting, and The Tumblr-fication of a Generation.
The Real Housewives of MAGA Twitter
I’m happy to bring you an update on the most important news of the week, news about a situation that has kept many of you up at night, nervously wringing your hands in worry, as though the world might fall apart if you weren’t soon to receive updates on this most critical of situations:
Erika Kirk and Candace Owens are meeting for a private conversation to defuse their ongoing feud.
If you haven’t been following this particular vein of insanity, firstly please take my congratulations on being a well-adjusted human being, and secondly, an explanation: Erika Kirk is Charlie Kirk’s widow. Candace Owens is an alt-right conspiracy theorist who also happens to have one of the largest podcasts in America. Owens has been pushing conspiracy theories since Charlie Kirk’s assassination that the suspect arrested for the murder didn’t do it - it was instead shadowy forces, possibly the French, but definitely Mossad1, who killed him.
In the taxonomy of conservative personalities I wrote about last year, Owens is a classic grifter. She’s in the game to get as much money and attention as she can.2 Controversy sells and any press is good press, so Owens has been leaning heavily into conspiracies and reaping the rewards. Erika Kirk, whose husband was murdered, thinks this is crass and has said so publicly. The two ended up in a feud, which you will be incredibly relieved to hear has now been set aside after a successful meeting on Sunday.
The whole thing is very much like a reality show, or as Jessica Riedl put it, ‘The Real Housewives of MAGA Twitter’.
The truth is that the dynamics for succeeding as a MAGA personality aren’t that different from what makes a successful Real Housewife. You need to be good in front of a camera, provocative, always getting into weird drama that doesn’t really have a reason to exist (but does get you attention), and you need to have a certain je ne sais car crash quality where people can’t look away, even if they want to. This is how you end up with posts like New York Young Republican attendee “Kevin Smith” confronts Groyper generals “Woman Propaganda” and “Vrillium” before they retreat to Nick Fuentes & Sneako.
If that sentence gave you schizophrenia, don’t worry. These are all just characters in a very stupid reality show called MAGA (that now runs the country). And just like one of the Housewives reunion shows, the characters in the post above do literally engage in a slapfight. Welcome to politics in 2025, I guess?
Bari Weiss
Meanwhile, let’s check in on our good friend Bari Weiss at CBS News:
Have you heard from ERIKA KIRK? Perhaps you’d like to read a column about the spiritual importance of ERIKA KIRK. Listen to this clip from ERIKA KIRK. Bari wants you to know it’s very important that ERIKA KIRK tells you ERIKA KIRK has thoughts about being ERIKA KIRK, the widow of ERIKA KIRK’s husband Charlie Kirk. Then you can ERIKA KIRK the ERIKA KIRK ERIKA KIRK.
It’s extremely crass to criticize a grieving widow, so up until now I’ve not said a single thing about Mrs. Kirk. But it’s becoming clearer and clearer that she’s using the current situation to become a conservative influencer/power player, and for some reason Bari Weiss has decided the sole mission of CBS News is to make this happen. Check out CBS News’s banner:
I want to take this moment to say that I fucking called it, and anyone with any sense could see this coming. Weiss isn’t purely Trumpian, but she is interested in pushing conservative culture war messaging above anything else, and I’m not sure why anyone would expect anything different to happen. But hey, at least Weiss is making sure she’s personally doing all the big interviews so that her star power keeps rising.
Indiana Republicans
Meanwhile, Indiana’s state legislature decisively rejected a plan to gerrymander the state despite pleas from the national party and Donald Trump.
What’s interesting about this is that social media may have played a decisive role in the outcome. Heritage Action, a think tank closely aligned with the Trump administration, posted a naked threat to Indiana state leaders on X:
President Trump has made it clear to Indiana leaders: if the Indiana Senate fails to pass the map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state.
Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame.
But the bullying and threats seem to have massively backfired. State legislators were apparently incensed by the tweet, with one texting a conservative journalist “Fuck Trump” after previously being on the fence. Another state senator was told by her granddaughter that she and all of her friends had gotten mean text messages about her grandmother, which led to the senator voting against the map. Those texts were part of an intense pressure campaign from the Trump administration targeting those legislators. Some of the senators were harassed and even swatted in the weeks leading up to the vote, and in the end Indiana’s heavily Republican state senate voted 31-19 to not advance the new gerrymandered map.
It’s a sign that less than a year into Trump’s second term, he may have already lost a lot of the juice that’s given him such a stranglehold on the party. Despite the social media campaign and despite the targeted text messages, the Trump administration’s threats were empty. Indiana Republicans defied him and there likely won’t be a real price for doing so. A few might face primary challenges, but even that’s not guaranteed because by the time they’re facing them, Trump will be a lame duck.
Republicans have undoubtedly been the party that’s made the best use of social media in the last five years, but that magic might not last forever. It might not even last through 2026.
Everyone Wants To Post
The founding thesis of this blog is that posting is the most powerful force in the universe, strong enough that billionaires will abandon their businesses to post, strong enough to get people to ruin their lives for literally no gain.
People routinely value the ability to post over money, sex, power, and personal relationships. I would not be at all surprised if there are people who’d rather go hungry than go without posting. See the new and revised Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:
I’ve often applied this thesis to CEOs, politicians and billionaires, but we have a new entrant: Charli XCX.
Ms. XCX has a Substack, and has written a few essays on the nature of cool and being a pop star. Matt Zeitlin comments: People who have accomplished everyone else’s dreams — billions of dollars of wealth, becoming a pop star, etc — themselves want nothing more than to post online and have people like and respect their posting abilities.
And you know what? The posts are pretty good! The realities of being a pop star is engaging, and The Death of Cool is a little bit uneven but ends in an interesting place, with reflections about how ‘brat’ started as underground/cool but was quickly mainstreamed by every major brand into cringe. Honestly, big respect to Charli. I hope we see more pop stars posting essays - both because some of them might actually be good, and because some of them are going to be utter trainwrecks.
Update on Hasan Piker
What’s Hasan Piker been up to since his tour of China, which garnered significant controversy for how openly he supported the country’s ruling dictatorship?
Hasan, now back in America, attempted to multicast his livestream on Twitch and Chinese streaming site Bilibili, but was almost immediately censored and shut down on Bilibili. Twice. The first time appeared to be a technical violation of the rules, but the second time was purely “This guy is talking politics and we don’t allow that”. You will be shocked to learn that Hasan proceeded to defend the censorship, with the argument “Well, every site has rules and I don’t always agree with them, but it’s fine”.
Links
It’s always on Infinite Scroll first - suddenly the mainstream media is waking up to the fact that YouTube is increasingly dominated by AI-generated Shorts content aimed at toddlers.
The EU hits X with $140M fine over business practices. As much as I love to make fun of X under Elon Musk, some of the ‘accusations’ seem ridiculous - the fine is, at least in part, due to how Musk changed the blue check mark.
If the rumored leaks about Gemini’s new image generation tool ‘Nano Banana 2’ are true, we’re about to have a very large deepfake problem, very soon.
Truth Social introduced a Grok-like AI bot, and it immediately started giving liberal answers to questions. Similarly, the Department of Defense’s new AI chatbot says his strikes on Venezuelan boats were ‘unambiguously illegal’. Funny how that happens.
Taiwan is banning some Chinese social media apps, ostensibly for ‘fraud’, but more likely for ‘our youth probably shouldn’t be mind controlled by the country that wants to eat us’.
92% of teens use YouTube, making it the most popular social media platform. Around 20% of teens say they use YouTube or TikTok ‘almost constantly’.
Posts
Owens loves antisemitic conspiracies the way a polar bear loves seals.
It feels like everyone has forgotten that Owens started her political influencer career as an anti-Trump liberal. She wrote sarcastic pieces about how small his dick was! But that didn’t get her any traction, so she pivoted into pro-Trump grifting and became wildly successful.
As someone who's quit "traditional social media" but can't get away from Substack or Youtube, I would love to see how teenagers are using it. If it's just Shorts, oof that's not good. But when I was a teenager I was watching Philip DeFranco for my news and every year I find a new channel I really enjoy. There's really great long-form content!
But people are probably just watching the Shorts.