JD Vance is bad at this

Episode two of Panic World is out! It’s all about the conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating people’s pets (keep reading for more on that below). Our guest this week is disinfo researcher Kat Abughazaleh. We had a great conversation about the role of fact-checking in the election, the rise of BlueAnon, and the peculiar shape of Charlie Kirk’s skull and mouth. You can check it out here.

I also want to give a big shoutout to Multitude. They’re a a digital-first podcast and ad sales company that has partnered with us on Panic World. They produce, edit, consult, and sell ads for sustainable digital media projects and they’re going to be helping us fill our episodes with wonderful and delicious ads.

Eric Silver, the head of development at Multitude had these nice things to say about us: "Panic World is the tip of the spear for everything that Garbage Day has created. Ryan Broderick has assembled a crack team of people who understand podcasting from the inside and out, on the creative side to the business side, and we're already seeing how the show is breaking into the Explaining-How-and-Why-the-21st-Century-Is-So-Weird genre.” Thanks Eric!

JD Vance Does Not And Will Never Have The Soul Of A True Poster

Over the weekend, JD Vance went on CNN and admitted that the conspiracy theory he and his running mate, former President Donald Trump, have been spreading about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, was a bunch of bullshit.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do,” he told reporters. As if, one, that makes any sense and, two, that’s what he was even doing in the first place.

It was also, as Sam Rosenfeld, an professor at Colgate University, put it, yet another example of Vance’s “reflexive instinct to intellectualize his own debasement.” His deeply un-Trumpian compulsion to always let you know he’s in on the bit. The political equivalent of that weird toothless Dreamworks half-smile millennial men on Instagram do. It was also an admission of how desperate Vance is to seem like he matters. He wants to look like he’s somehow elevated from all the other Republicans sharing racist memes about Springfield while also, you know, sharing the racist memes. But if you actually look at how this moral panic has spread, it becomes very clear that Vance really doesn’t matter at all.

The current anti-immigrant hysteria in Springfield, Ohio, began in earnest on August 27th, when, at a City Commission meeting, self-identified influencer and mayoral candidate (lol) Anthony Harris claimed that immigrants were eating ducks in the town’s parks. At the same meeting, white nationalist Drake Berentz, who is affiliated with the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe and often goes by the alias “Nate Higgers,” got up and threatened the town’s Haitian community. The meeting was clipped and began making the rounds on white supremacist social networks and, several days later, white nationalist militia Patriot Front marched through the town and Blood Tribe members began doxxing residents.

As neo-Nazis were descending on Springfield, a post repeating the Haitian immigrants hoax started circulating in a private Facebook group called Springfield Ohio Crime & Information, which has around 8,000 members. On September 5th, the post was screenshot and shared on X by a user named @BuckeyeGirrl, who tagged Fox News, asking them to investigate. According to the timeline Garbage Day researcher Adam Bumas put together, this was the moment the conspiracy theory really started spreading.

The next day, @EndWokeness, a massive right-wing X account with over three million followers, shared the Facebook screenshot, combining it with a photo taken from an August post in the r/Columbus subreddit of a black man cleaning up roadkill. Also, just to be clear here, Columbus is 50 miles from Springfield.

By the weekend of September 7th, the conspiracy theory was all over X. Users began collecting random media of black people from around the internet and claiming it was from Springfield. They shared police body cam footage recorded in August in Canton, Ohio, (170 miles from Springfield) of a woman named Allexis Ferrell, who was accused of killing and eating a cat in public, and claimed it happened in Springfield. Also, Ferrell is not Haitian. X users also started recirculating Harris’ Commission meeting clip. By September 8th, it had gotten viral enough that Elon Musk and right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk were posting about Springfield.

It was not until September 9th, however, that Vance got in on the action, writing on X, “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country. Where is our border czar?” Per the Wall Street Journal, Vance’s team reached out to Springfield’s city manager, was told it wasn’t true, and still posted about it on X anyways. Another very un-Trumpian move. Just absolute clown shit.

The reason all of this matters is because the only thing Vance can even pretend to offer Trump’s team is being “the online guy,” and, as you can see, he’s not even good at that. He gives the game away every time. He’s late to the meme cycle. He’s actually trying to factcheck the insane garbage he’s posting. And he can’t even get through a CNN interview about it without caving. He imagines himself as some masterful right-wing dark web intellectual, but he can’t even keep up with Musk.

Adam Bumas contributed reporting to this piece.

Garbage Day Is Doing An Election-Themed Live Show!!!!

October 23rd! The Bell House in Brooklyn! It’s a new Garbage Day live show all about the election. It’s called “America, The Final Season”. Memes! Music! Laughs! Niche internet references! I’ve also got some great guests lined up, which I’ll be announcing soon. It’s going to be a blast.

👉👉👉 You can buy tickets here!!!

A Last Minute Song Of The Summer Contender

@mrticklechops

Music career ain’t progressing 😭❌ #beat #producer #kanyewest #fyp #funny #music

A Fascinating Look At The Terrible Future Of Content

I came across this thanks to the incredibly good X account Insane Facebook AI Slop. It’s a fully AI-generated country band on TikTok that is also publishing their “music” on Spotify. They don’t have a lot of followers on either platform, but they’ve generated eight “albums”. And all of them are terrible and also vaguely about Trump.

I came across an X post recently that argued that “AI is the aesthetic of fascism in the 21st century a la Italian Futurism,” which I’m not quite sure I completely agree with, but I do think there is a connection between far-right politics and generative AI. Fascism in the digital age really only has one coherent unifying goal which is false consensus. Memes, conspiracy theories, AI-generated slop — all of it is meant to be inescapable across the web. To create a feeling like something must be true or real because it’s everywhere, as we’ve seen with the Springfield, Ohio, story this month. Also, the right wing has terrible, just impossibly bad taste. So generative AI fits in pretty well.

Mozilla Is Shutting Down Its Mastodon Instance

This is probably not a great sign for both the fediverse and, also, Mozilla. As Platformer’s Casey Newton wrote on Threads, “Mozilla's entire strategy for the past 15 years has been making halfhearted efforts toward projects it doesn't understand and then giving up at the first sign of trouble. Google's money could be so much better spent.”

Mozilla’s Mastodon instance was not exactly huge. It only had a few hundred users on it, but folks are not happy that they’re pulling out of the fediverse. The top reply on the post above was from a furry calling them pathetic lol.

I also don’t think Mastodon is where companies like Mozilla should be investing their time. I’ve spent the last year really trying to learn as much as I can about the fediverse and, while I’m still a skeptic, my current feeling on it is that if we really want to build a decentralized, actually social web we need to think a lot bigger than Mastodon.

TikTok Users Are Making Videos With AI-Translated Audio Of Hitler’s Speeches

Just another normal day on the world wide web. Like with the Osama Bin Laden stuff last year, I want to be clear about exactly how popular this “trend” is. Especially because pro-Israel lobbyists have been very instrumental in the looming TikTok ban in the US and there tends to be a new “everyone on TikTok is an anti-Semite” story every couple months now. So are Hitler speeches the hot new meme for American teens? Not quite.

Abby Richards over at Media Matters For America has a good breakdown of how prevalent this stuff is. Most of these audio files have been deleted at this point, but before they were taken down, they were used a few hundred times, with a couple of these videos cracking half a million views. Which, for TikTok, is like a decent-sized hit, but not mega viral.

This is also not exactly a new or even TikTok-specific tactic for white nationalists online. 4chan users used to sneak Hitler quotes onto memes of Taylor Swift to trick people into sharing them all the time.

All that said, this is clearly enough of an issue that TikTok is trying to get ahead of it. If you search “Hitler” on the app right now, it takes you to an info page about the Holocaust.

The LCD Soundsystem Subreddit Has Banned Posts About The Dare

The mods for r/LCDSoundsystem put out a statement last week, announcing that posts about The Dare are now banned from the community. “We try not to mod too much around here but these posts about The Dare are getting a little ridiculous,” the mods wrote. “We understand The Dare is experiencing a huge come-up, what with his collab with Charli XCX and his recent album drop, but we fear if we don't step in, the subreddit will devolve into shitposting about The Dare.”

Smart move. You wouldn’t want to lose your edge.

Important Moo Deng Update

Some Stray Links

• Just want to make sure all of my British readers have properly suffered through this

• “MrBeast, Amazon Sued by Contestants on ‘Beast Games’ Competition Show, With Allegations Including Sexual Harassment and ‘Chronic Mistreatment’”

P.S. here’s living the dream.

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