Weekly Scroll: Big Ugly Bill
Plus! Soham Gets Fired and Cat Arms
The Big Republican Bill Is Now Law
The mega-bill being hyped by President Trump and the Republican party - and apologies, but I cannot physically bring myself to call it the One Big Beautiful Bill, it feels far too much like I’m doing their propaganda work for them - has been signed into law.
This blog isn’t a pure politics blog, so I’ll just say a few obvious things. A lot of people are going to get hurt here. Tens of millions will lose their healthcare. The bill guts scientific research funding, it cuts clean energy funding and subsidizes coal, it blows up the national debt, it creates what is basically a new ICE police state… all for the purpose of cutting taxes for millionaires. It sucks.
The reaction in Republican world has been interesting. There’s a lot of celebrating at having passed such a massive bill, of course. But a large chunk of the Republican party seems very aware how intensely unpopular it is. G Elliott Morris has a great analysis showing that it might be the most unpopular major bill of the past 30 years - and this is before we’re even dealing with the negative effects!
So we’re getting a lot of conservatives running away from the bill even as they voted to pass it. Senator Josh Hawley made a big show of criticizing the idea of slashing Medicaid before voting to slash Medicaid. God’s favorite coward Lisa Murkowski said “I struggled mightily with the impact on the most vulnerable in this country when you look to Medicaid and SNAP” and elaborated “Do I like this bill? No.” before voting yes on the bill. Good job Lisa. The House Freedom made a big show of posturing how tough they were. They protested that the Senate jammed the bill full of stuff they didn’t approve of, spent a few days talking tough… but in the end they admitted Trump is their Dom and they want him to give it to them good and hard as every single one of them voted to pass the bill with no concessions.
It seems like there are generally two camps in the GOP. There are Republicans aware of the bill’s unpopularity and somewhat embarrassed by their vote, and there are those celebrating in the most grotesque ways possible. Those celebrating the bill also seem aware of how deeply unpopular the bill is, because the only thing they seem to want to talk about is how the bill has more funding for ICE. JD Vance went so far as to say that the ‘minutiae of Medicaid policy’ was immaterial compared to ICE funding, which is a cool and normal thing to say about tens of millions of people losing healthcare.
Other conservatives are just ignoring the bill altogether to gleefully post about how they want to kill immigrants by feeding them to alligators. Some of the grifters are having such a good time with ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ that they’ve started selling merch about it. When asked “Will the alligators eat people and kill them?” Trump replied “I guess that’s the concept”.
This is in the same tradition as Kristi Noem making influencer videos in foreign torture gulags - every thing is now about the meme, about the hype video. I hate to reference my own work,1 but we already nailed this exact dynamic with JD Vance and Vice Signaling.
From that article:
What’s the point of vice signaling? Vance isn’t trying to explicitly say “I am a bad person”. Not really. What he’s trying to signal is loyalty to the team. He will degrade himself for the team. He will abandon moral virtue for the team. He’ll throw his family under the bus. He will support self-evidently evil, stupid things all to show loyalty to the tribe.
It’s easy to support the Trumpist movement when you’re saying things like “I think we should stop funding non-binary dance therapy”. Nobody’s going to fight you over that. Some people who normally disagree with you might even agree. But because it’s easy, you don’t get any real credit with the movement for saying that.
What gets you real credit is supporting the movement when it’s hard. When members of your group have done something heinous and you stand by them anyways. When you vocally support the really evil stuff, you get real credit for supporting the team no matter what. This is vice-signaling: Proving your loyalty by abandoning your principles. Showing that you will sideline any moral virtue and accept any vice if it means standing by your tribe.
JD Vance has long been the king of vice signaling, of degrading himself and abandoning his stated values to signal loyalty. And he’s putting on a fine show this week.
The political calculation that any bad policy can passed if you just pivot to screaming about immigrants is an interesting one. It’s pretty clear that Vance and co think cruelty to immigrants will not be electorally punished. Public approval of his immigration policy is already underwater, and continued ghoulish behavior is likely to drive even more voters away.
Trump, meanwhile, does not appear to even understand what’s in the bill he just signed. He’s too busy pantomiming alligator chomps and turning the White House into a cage fighting venue, in a move that would be criticized as too over-the-top in its symbolism if it was fictional
Anyways, this is not the place for detailed breakdowns of why the bill is bad. If you’re dying for more detail, check out these recent episodes I produced of the New Liberal Podcast:
Bonus Podcast Action!
Even hungrier for podcasts featuring yours truly? You’re in luck! I was a guest on the Cartoons Hate Her podcast, where we chatted about marriage, dating, life advice and happiness:
I was also a guest on The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg, where we chatted about Zohran Mamdani’s primary victory in New York, why debating the meaning of words is a waste of time, and small-l liberal politics in the age of Trump.
Soham Gets Caught
For the last few years people have speculated that for some folks, it would be possible to work more than one job at a time. Thanks to remote work policies this seems like this has become an actual thing - the /r/Overemployed subreddit has hundreds of thousands of users, and while not all of them are actually working multiple full time jobs some of them definitely are.
Companies typically hate this, but if you’re able to finish your work it might be very hard for them to catch you! So perhaps it’s a win-win. But because the internet extremifies everything, this led to a funny meme that goes something like this:
Apply to 10,000 jobs
Get 1,000 call backs
Get hired at 100 jobs
Work first two-to-four weeks at 100 jobs.
Get fired from every job, but still collect paychecks for those couple weeks
You have now several years worth of pay in just one month
Haha, nobody would actually do that, right? Working two (or even three) jobs is one thing, but you can’t just work a dozen jobs and totally check out of every single one? Right?
Soham Parekh appears to be running this exact playbook. Startup founder Suhail Doshi outed him on X, and then literally dozens of other startup founders also said “Wait I hired that guy too, and ended up firing him because he didn’t do anything!” Every one of those links is to a different tech founder/company, and I didn’t run out of examples, Substack started yelling at me because this post now has too many links. This guy was straight up working 5-10 jobs at any given time and didn’t care about getting fired because he’d just replace that one with a new job.
There are so many things to talk about here. There were obviously a lot of jokes and memes coming out of this. One poster noted that Soham’s real skill seems to be acing tech interviews and thinks he should pivot to interview coaching, which seems valid. Some people said this is a common outsourcing scam in India - one guy is an interview expert and does dozens of interviews, then pawns off the actual work to a team of flunkies. My single thought about this is that I have a guaranteed way to make sure your company never ends up in a Soham situation, and it rhymes with Shmeturn To Shmoffice, but that’s going to start a whole war in the comment section.
Predictably, now that his game is up Soham is now trying to use his newly-found infamy and pivot into raising money for a startup. He’s doing big tech podcasts, he’s admitting his sins, he’s vague-posting about his new singular venture. I hate to say I called this pattern years ago,2 but baby I called this pattern years ago:
More and more often celebrities - both internet influencers and actual celebrities - are realizing how important it is to Never Surrender. The primary lesson of the Trump years (at least in terms of PR strategy) is that you never really have to apologize for anything. No apologies, no backtracking. Always double and triple down, accuse your enemies of lying, exaggerating, and generally being evil. And if all else fails flood the zone with shit.
A Very Good Cat Post
Links
Perhaps the most deranged thing you’ll see this week: A guy whose friend died on the way to the Beyoncé concert made a series of insane dancing and smiling TikToks about ‘POV ur friend died on the way to the concert’, and then went to the concert anyway. The dead guy is in some of the videos!
Ok, never mind, this is even more deranged: Peter Thiel had a disastrous interview with Ross Douthat where he struggled to answer questions like “Are you personally the Anti-Christ?”, “Do you like democracy?” and “You do want humanity to survive, right?”. You can see Ross Douthat’s face change in real time as he realizes that the guy he’s effectively allied with might literally think of himself as a tool of Satan.
We did it folks, Tiny Chef might be saved!
‘Helen from Wales’ gained international fame for livestreaming Glastonbury on TikTok after the BBC cut the feed on controversial Irish group Kneecap. She ended up getting more than 1.8 million likes on the livestream and has been promised free tickets for life by the band.
Extremely significant news: After five years as champion, Cinnamoroll has been dethroned by Pompompurin as the world’s favorite Sanrio character.3 Sanrio fans are asking important questions like “Wait, does this character canonically have a butthole?”
Posts
This is a lie, I don’t hate it at all, go read the archives.
Still a lie, I love referencing my own stuff
Hello Kitty shockingly came in fifth???
God’s favorite coward Lisa Murkowski 😂😂😂
When will you be returning to office, Jeremiah? Since you're so supportive of it?