Weekly Scroll: Politics Yet Again

GOP 4channers, more Twitch drama, and a Very Mad Laptop Company

This week, the internet was filled with politics. I’m not happy about it either. I also hope we can go back to talking about dumb influencers and people arguing on Twitter about whether cats can be queer or not. But we’ve got a week until the presidential election, so politics is just going to dominate the internet until it’s over.

God willing we can move on to less important stuff soon, but for now it’s politics yet again. Let’s jump right in.

Young Freaks and the GOP

Donald Trump held a rally at Madison Square Garden, and it went about like you’d expect. Good for Trump in the sense of being a packed event and getting lots of media coverage, bad for Trump in that the main headline was “Even more racism than usual”:

This same right wing comedian did a joke about how his black friend carves watermelons for Halloween, because, you know, black people and watermelons! Hilarious stuff. Can you believe people claim that conservative comedy is bad?

The idea here is not to simply report that racism exists in the Trump Cinematic Universe - if we covered every instance of that we’d have a post every day and still no time for anything else. But I do want to make a point about the general world of GOP staffers and orbiters, especially the young GOP staffer class. The huge majority of GOP staffers in the 20-35 age range had their political awakenings in the most depraved dark corners of the internet. They come from 4chan, 8chan, FatPeopleHate, incel message boards, GamerGate subreddits, etc. They religiously follow alt-right personalities like Nick Fuentes, Stefan Molyneux, etc. This is who they are.

The GOP staffer class right now grew up in places that celebrated casual, semi-ironic-semi-serious racism and misogyny and nihilism. You remember those Ron DeSantis videos that had Nazi imagery? That’s not because Ronny himself knows anything about the Sturm Abeilung, but his 24 year old staffers making social media content sure as hell do. This all traces back to the alliance between Steve Bannon and GamerGate freaks, and I’m telling you that I’ve met the freaks and they are everywhere in the Republican Party today. That’s why they feel the confidence to stand in front of tens of thousands of people and tell obviously racist jokes. These weirdos are the everyday worker bees of Trumpism and the modern Republican Party, and they’re also who will be the next generation of GOP candidates and policy makers. God save us all.

More Adventures in Russian Disinformation

We talk every so often here about Russian disinformation campaigns online - how they work and about how people are not concerned enough about Russia’s efforts to influence US politics.

Well! Last week there was a fairly disgusting attempt to smear Tim Walz as a child predator which was immediately debunked because the video was AI generated and obviously fake. Turns out that Russian propaganda group ‘Storm-1516’ was likely behind the video in the first place. It’s pretty clear that Trump is in a deep, illiberal alliance with Vladimir Putin and Russia’s efforts to help elect him are pretty obvious at this point. Russia was also behind a fake video of ballots being destroyed that circulated in MAGAworld. At least they’re kinda bad at it and get caught most of the time?

In other news, Tim Pool has decided to step back from producing his podcast/video content full time.¹ You’ll remember that Pool was one of the conservative commentators accepting money from Russian handlers to produce pro-Russia content, making $100,000 a week for his unique brand of lukewarm vomit. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that he’s now leaving content creation behind to ‘focus on his family’ now that the Russian money has stopped. This is all much funnier once you realize Tim is not married and has no children, so nobody has any idea what ‘family’ he’s talking about. Maybe it’s code for his large beanie collection.

Twitch Update

The antisemitism drama at Twitch continues to spread. In the wake of controversy last week - and literally hours after I published my piece on Twitch’s problems with antisemitism - streamers named in the post like Frogan, Sneako, and others were all banned for a month.

There’s a pretty common pattern in these kinds of rolling PR nightmares. There’s a first incident where the internet sees a content creator do something awful. Then a bunch of vindictive social media detectives comb through their entire history of being online and discover more stuff that’s awful. Then it expands to related content creators and maybe the platform itself. That’s what we’re seeing here, and it’s causing a slow and steady drip-drip-drip of escalating PR fiascos for Twitch.

This week, after Frogan was banned, someone dug up an old stream of hers where she planned a Recreate 9/11 stream where she would bake cookies in the shape of the Twin Towers and a plane and then crash them together. Going back to Jeremiah’s School of Extremely Basic PR: If you are one of the most prominent Muslim streamers, perhaps a ‘Recreate 9/11 stream’ is a bad idea. We also had Hasan Piker bust out laughing at someone remembering the Israeli hostages this week, but the real juice is from Twitch itself.

Twitch corporate is leaking like a sieve, and it’s been revealed that developers knew for months about the Israeli account ban and deleted user support requests related to it. New tidbits are coming fast and furious, as it appears a significant amount of Twitch employee slack history has been leaked. It was also discovered that a senior Trust and Safety executive at Twitch was fired from her previous job for making anti-Israel statements.² All this has led to an advertiser exodus, which is grim for a site that’s already deeply unprofitable.

Stephen A Cracks the Debate Code

ESPN personality Stephen A Smith went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and gave a masterclass in how to deal with blowhards. This screencap is basically how it went:

Quoting Twitter user Dion: “Stephen A going on dumb guy political debate shows is like the Menswear Guy joining Twitter; he cut his teeth in a medium so belligerent & so vacuous Hannity has no frame of reference for it.” It’s like unleashing a tiger into a children’s petting zoo. The entire point of these shows - both political and sports debate shows - is that it doesn’t really matter if you make logical points, it’s all about presentation, confidence, and being demonstrative and loud. And I’m not sure a single person person in the world can do that better than Stephen A.

Extremely Mad Laptop Company

One bit of non-political internet for you this week to close out the post. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a company as mad as laptop company Malibal before:

I have absolutely no idea who this laptop company is or what their specific beef is with the various people listed. But as something of a hater myself, I cannot help but respect the kind of hate that would ban an entire state or country from buying my services based on the actions of a single individual. Imagine some New Yorker shit talked Jeff Bezos and the entire state lost their Amazon Prime privileges. Incredible.

Unfortunately, I may not be able to report on the situation further, as I’ve broken Malibal’s terms of service by browsing the site in Chrome:

Links

• Social media companies, under political and legal pressure from Republicans, have largely given up on moderating election misinformation.

• Bernie Sanders went on a live stream with Mark Hamill, Hank Green, Pokimane, Valkyrae, and a cat-eared femboy anime avatar VTuber. Folks, welcome to politics in the 21st century.

• Also in livestreaming politics - here’s Tim Walz playing Crazy Taxi with AOC.

Posts

• You will not be ready for how bad this C3PO costume is

• Some good texts

• Jealous Friends

• Self defense advice

1. He also throws his employees under the bus in his departure announcement

2. The statements themselves are not THAT bad, but it’s notable that she was fired for them.