Crashing the economy because you hate TikTok women

The Economics Of Free-Floating Psychosexual Resentment

Financial markets are in chaos this morning. The S&P 500 opened 20% lower from where it was two months ago. Meanwhile the Dow was down, and then was up, and now it’s down again. And international stocks are glitching out just as bad, with Japanese and Chinese markets both plunging almost 10%. In other words, shit’s fucked. Dust off your American Apparel super-V’s, baby, we’re recession bound.

Unlike the 2008 recession, though, which was — according to what I remember from watching the movie The Big Short three wines deep on a plane once — caused by people in Florida? buying houses? they couldn’t afford? our current economic collapse is the direct result of our very dumb president and the AI-generated math his team used to support his completely idiotic misunderstanding of how trade deficits work. Another famously Bad And Dumb Man, Dave Portnoy, has started calling today “Orange Monday,” which is, unfortunately, pretty good.

As we waited for today’s economic carnage, users on X, the everything app, spent the weekend trying to brainstorm a way to spin the looming market meltdown as being good, actually. And Max Lugavere, an anti-vegan author who has claimed that plant-based diets cause dementia, had a big hit, dusting off a recent right-wing boogeyman to remind the internet’s various lonely men what this is really all about: violent, seething hatred for women you saw in a TikTok video once. And a consensus began to form that, yes, actually, one specific video of women dancing has actually become a bizarre rallying cry for conservative men and even though video games and smartphones are about to cost as much as 50% more, it will all be worth it if it means women can’t make cute internet videos at work anymore. As X user @franzsherbert wrote, “In record time, ‘tariffs,’ for right wingers, has already ceased to refer to any real-world economic policy and become yet another locus of free-floating psychosexual resentment.”

If you don’t spend a lot of time in right-wing fever swamps, you may have completely missed the almost year-long meltdown conservatives have been having about this one particular video, which is most commonly referred to as the “Gen Z boss and a mini” video. It was posted to Instagram back in July by an Australian skincare company called tbh skincare. The original has since been deleted, but according to Know Your Meme, it had about two million views in its first 48 hours. The dance and song the women in the video are doing is a variation of “Boots and a Slick Back Bun” TikTok meme that was popular last summer.

TBH’s video made the jump to X thanks to an account that shared it, writing, “Is this the longhouse,” a reference to the far-right theory that modern America got too woke and is now, actually, an oppressive matriarchy. If you’re still not clocking why exactly this video is so triggering for X men, writer Clare Haber-Harris, who goes by the name Cartoons Hate Her, wrote an excellent essay last month about the “Gen Z boss and a mini” video.

“A lot of men (specifically, single and frustrated ones on the right who have a negative view of women) have a perplexingly reverse-SJW attitude toward women in the workplace,” Haber-Harris wrote. “They believe women are part of an oppressor class, who has for some reason been granted unfair degrees of privilege in the form of being hired for fun, pretend jobs. In their mind, almost every working woman has an ‘email job,’ specifically one that wasn’t available to men, and provides no value.”

If you want another example of conservative rage around what they often call “product mommy” videos, this 2022 TikTok of women product managers working remote from a pool caused a similar years-long freakout. And these viral outrage videos aren’t just amorphous right-wing digital chatter, the sentiment behind them has quickly become the main conservative cope strategy for Trump’s tariffs this week.

Right-wing columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon was on Fox News on Sunday arguing that Trump’s collapse of the global economy could actually help fix America’s “crisis in masculinity.” And investor Jason Howerton was posting memes on X this morning arguing the same thing, captioning a video of a guy jumping out of a plane with, “As soon as we bring back this energy to the common American man, we will be fully back. Why not you?” And podcaster and writer Laura Robinson said she’s seen data that shows that many conservative men want to hurt the economy to specifically push women out of the workforce. Even Trump has leaned into the masculinist messaging, frantically posting on Truth Social this morning, “Don’t be Weak! Don’t be Stupid! Don’t be a PANICAN (A new party based on Weak and Stupid people!). Be Strong, Courageous, and Patient, and GREATNESS will be the result!” Also, lol, what the hell is he even talking about?

I’ve seen all of this before, though. The dizzying mix of existential terror, the confusion from those who are still too offline to follow niche internet discourse, and the delusional conservative cope is exactly what the morning after the UK’s Brexit referendum felt like. I was living in London at the time and, just like this morning, it too was a country committing economic suicide to chase the ghosts of an imagined past while promising an impossible future. The days following Brexit, British conservatives told voters to trust that Britain would be able to recapture its place as a global superpower now that it was untethered from the woke bureaucrats of the European Union. But instead of imperial fantasies, American conservatives are letting Trump crush the global economy because they think that real men should work in factories and that real women should stay home and have their children. Like every other stupid fucking awful thing that’s happened to this country since 2015, it’s a ridiculously misguided attempt to return us to a form of American masculinity that never actually existed, egged on by the mass psychosis of pathetic men who spend their days raging over internet women all day. And they’re going to shove TikTok video after TikTok video of women dancing down your throat to convince you it’s worth it.

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at [email protected] and let’s talk. Thanks!

Make your details harder to find online

The most likely source of your personal data being littered across the web? Data brokers. They're using and selling your information - home address, Social Security Number, phone number and more. Incogni helps scrub this personal info from the web and gives you peace of mind to keep data brokers at bay. Protect yourself: Before the spam madness gets even worse, try Incogni. It takes three minutes to set up. Get your data off 200+ data brokers' and people-search sites automatically with Incogni. Incogni offers a full 30-day money-back guarantee if you're not happy ... But you will be.  

Unlock 55% off annual plans with code DAYDEAL at checkout.

A Good Post

Here’s a good Minecraft movie scene report if you’re struggling to understand what’s happening with all of that.

Did You Hear About The Protest This Weekend?

Here’s a weird thing that I don’t exactly know what to do with. This weekend, protesters gathered across the country to tell the Trump administration “hands off!” The demonstrations were organized by a network of different advocacy groups, one of the biggest being anti-Trump nonprofit Indivisible. CNN is estimating there were about 1,400 protests this weekend. This is all great, but the weird thing is… I didn’t even know they were going to happen?

I had virtually no idea these were planned until a friend on Friday asked me if I was going. And I would normally chalk that up to me just, idk, missing something in the shuffle. But it turns out I am not the only one who didn’t hear about them. I guess there was virtually nothing about them on X, which isn’t surprising. But I spend my day rotating between X, Bluesky, Reddit, and, most recently, Instagram (essay on that coming soon) and completely missed any chatter about them. I try and do my best to avoid getting trapped in a filter bubble so I can write this newsletter, but, also, this would probably be something a filter bubble would show me.

None of this is a bad thing, though. But it’s definitely a notable shift in organizing. Up until now, the biggest anti-Trump 2.0 movement has been Reddit’s r/50501 movement, which, like most Reddit movements, has devolved into a bunch of mod drama and infighting over what they actually stand for. While the “Hands Off!” organizers were pretty decentralized about everything, publishing a Google Doc that protesters could use that outlined three key goals: “an end to the billionaire takeover and rampant corruption of the Trump administration, an end to slashing federal funds for Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs working people rely on, and an end to the attacks on immigrants, trans people, and other communities.” And they used a political event organizing platform called Mobilize to track rallies across the country.

But I’m curious. Did you hear about these protests before this weekend? And if so, where’d you see them? Let me know!

Mano A Mano A Menswear

—by Adam Bumas

Trump’s tariffs led to a fight on X between style blogger Derek “The Menswear Guy” Guy and yellow belt keyboard warrior Jeremy “The Quartering” Hambly. In the comments, one brave X user stepped up to defend The Quartering’s honor, and Derek agreed to a physical fight, saying “meet me outside Uniqlo” (a deep cut style forum reference). Because this is the age of meme parties, soon there was a Partiful event with hundreds of Bay Area looky-loos signing up.

So what happened? There was definitely a fight that started early, but at press time, it’s unclear who either fighter was, or how genuine their altercation was. The original challenger’s X account has been suspended, and the early start meant there weren’t many eyewitnesses. Guy, has added fuel to the fire, saying he manipulated two of his reply guys to fight each other. We’ve reached out to Guy for comment lol.

IShowSpeed And The Chinese Century

Darren Jason Watkins Jr., the streamer better known as IShowSpeed, has been streaming from China for the last few weeks and even if you aren’t someone who follows Twitch, I highly recommend checking out, at least, the clips. Like the one above that is genuinely moving. (And kind of beautifully shot?)

The political ramifications of Watkins’ China tour have been fascinating to watch, as well. The most noticeable impact being just the very simple effect of young Americans seeing a version of modern Chinese life they probably haven’t before. And while it’s obvious that Watkins’ streams are being made, at least in part, with the help of the Chinese government — they’d likely be impossible otherwise — Chinese media is equally excited about the tour. CCTV13 made a special about his streams, thanking him for sharing Chinese culture with a global audience.

I, for one, would hate to be entering a trade war with China right as the country starts partnering with mega-famous American strreamers.

The Tariffs Have Thrown The Transformers Fandom Into Chaos

—by Adam Bumas

Some more niche drama for you! The Trump administration’s new tariffs are impossible to ignore, a rarity these days. Last week’s other big news on the internet, however, was Nintendo’s official reveal of the Switch 2. In theory, it would be easy for the “do we have to talk politics?” crowd to focus on things like the long-awaited release date for Hollow Knight: Silksong or that crazy new Donkey Kong game. But that just isn’t possible for a Japanese console, which was announced to cost 50% more than the original Switch, even before factoring in the tariffs, which meant Nintendo had to suspend all preorders everywhere. Trust the plan, anon.

We’ve been dismissive of “treatlerite” discourse before, but it’s absolutely true that it’s harder for any political movement to maintain popular support if it takes away your toys. A thousand versions of this terrified conversation are happening in miniature, in every hobby community with a major American consumer base. For a silver lining, though, it can make for some very spectacular arguments.

My personal favorite is happening in the Transformers fandom. TFW2005 is a fan forum that’s one of the oldest active online communities in the fandom. Its age — and the fact that it’s discussing toys and cartoons — means it tends towards older ideas like a “no politics” rule. On Friday, that was updated with a specific “no tariffs” rule. The problem is, tariffs could potentially threaten the existence of Transformers toys in general, so the forum’s administrators begrudgingly opened tariff discussion threads later in the day. Democracy in action!

Is This The Song Of The Summer?

Some Stray Links

• “Gen Z is flocking to the one social media platform millennials didn't ruin”

• “Science Stopped Believing in Porn Addiction. You Should, Too”

• “A lucky rascal or a feral critter that ‘should be euthanised’? Hunt for Valerie the dachshund divides Kangaroo Island”

• “The Evolution of a Folk-Punk Hero”

P.S. here’s a very stompy cat.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***