Maybe the capitalists will get it right next time

I’m Not An Economist, But I Don’t Think This Tariff Thing Is Working, Guys

It’s been a week since President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” saved American masculinity by turning the country into an economic backwater. And he continued to double down on his tariff plan, which some are calling “the first effective malicious action from an unaligned AI,” by using every opportunity over the last few days to brag about foreign leaders begging him to make a deal. Which is curious, considering that the European Union will impose retaliatory tariffs next Tuesday. And after our glorious leader declared that he was going to raise tariffs on Chinese goods to over 100%, China decided to raise their own tariffs to 84% starting tomorrow. (Both Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are geminis 🫤) But you know things have really spun out of control when the Chinese Embassy is posting Ronald Reagan speeches on X.

Trump, via a Truth Social post, finally announced on Wednesday afternoon that there would be a 90-day pause on all tariffs and lower subsequent rates across the board, except for China. If there’s a god in heaven, that 90-day pause, like the one the TikTok ban is currently under, will be kicked down the road forever.

But in the meantime, let’s focus on what really matters amid all this financial chaos, like MrBeast’s chocolate, which is now actually prohibitively expensive to produce in the US due to the tariffs. MrBeast’s extremely intelligent fans are now demanding that he figure out a way to build a cacao plantation here in America. Might be a good format for season two of his Amazon game show.

In case you’re still not totally sure how seriously to take what’s happening right now, Bloomberg published a story this morning that literally opens with, “are things breaking?” And The Wall Street Journal reports that there are clear signs that “markets are dedollarizing.” Need another? The Economist is saying “bond-market convulsions look extremely dangerous.” It’s not a good thing when I, your friendly internet garbage man, have to google “what is the bond market?” (Just read this.)

As for why this is all happening, there are a few different ways to look at it. John Herrman in New York Magazine argued this week that Trump has turned the global market into a meme stock, the final terminal stage of the digital casinofication that began with the 2021 GameStop pump, where nothing matters if line go up and if line go down nothing definitely doesn’t matter. Which was somewhat proven this week, as Herrman points out, after a man who cosplays as the Bloomberg Terminal and goes by “Walter Bloomberg” on X briefly sent markets trending green after he posted a mangled Reuters headline that erroneously claimed Trump was reversing the tariffs. While David Atkins in Washington Monthly wrote that the tariffs are “a cultural purge designed to destroy white collar and knowledge work.” Both are likely true, but it’s also important to remember that, as New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote, "Trump’s tariffs are not a policy as we traditionally understand it. What they are is an instantiation of his psyche: a concrete expression of his zero-sum worldview.”

They’re also only one half of Trump’s zero-sum worldview, with the other half being tax cuts. Republicans in both the Senate and the House Of Representatives are fighting over how to pass Trump’s tax plan, which would extend his 2017 tax cuts along with possibly ending taxes on tips, taxes on Social Security benefits, and even abolish income tax. Which has always been the closest thing Trump has had to a grand political project — America reimagined as a country club for the world’s corporations. The tariffs are the membership fee. And he’s scrambling this morning over the possibility he might not be able to pull it off. The president frantically wrote on Truth Social this morning, “It is IMPERATIVE that Republicans in the House pass the Tax Cut Bill, NOW! Our Country Will Boom!!!” Written like a true panican.

Prominent Trump supporters are freaking out, as well. Massachusetts trash bag Dave Portnoy, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, even their widdlest fwiend Ben Shapiro are breaking rank over tariffs — likely because China’s escalation this morning means all of the dropshipping scams they funnel incels towards are about to become financially impossible to profit from. But according to a Vox piece this morning, the right wingers turning against the president over tariffs largely thought that they were voting for another four years of anti-woke saber-rattling and breezy market deregulation. There were a bunch of business leaders in Germany’s Weimar Republic who thought the same thing. Anyways, most of them died in jail. Maybe the capitalists will get it right next time.

As I wrote on Monday, I lived through Brexit in the UK. But I also was in Mumbai in 2016 during India Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “demonetization” scheme, which made existing ₹500 and ₹1,000 banknotes worthless overnight. Basically, imagine if everyone’s $5 and $10 bills just stopped being money. And I also spent most of the Bolsonaro administration living in Brazil, which tanked the real and led to regular inflation. So while I am definitely not an economist, I am somewhat uniquely positioned to tell you what to expect if these tariffs aren’t reversed. And I can very confidently say that the average American can’t actually imagine it. The comparisons to the Great Depression or Great Recession flying around social media right now don’t take into account how connected the global economy is now. The systemic rot I witnessed during the UK’s five-year-long withdrawal from the EU happened slowly. One day I just noticed stuff wasn’t as nice as it once was, didn’t work as well. And we just US-exited over night. While reporting on demonetization in India, we tried an experiment. Go around the city and see if a business could make change for a big banknote. It took all day and after a few hours I actually started to feel a new kind of dread I had never felt before: What happens when your money just doesn’t work anymore? And in Brazil during the Bolsonaro years, it wasn’t uncommon to just not be able to get stuff — cheese, certain kinds of meat, butter, wine — and if you could get it, there was no way to anticipate how much it would cost. Now imagine that with virtually everything.

But if you’re still having trouble envisioning what life under Trump’s tariffs could look like: Remember that boat that got stuck in the Suez Canal? And it shut down the global economy for a while? And everything got sort of expensive for a second? If that happens again, it probably won’t affect us. And that should really worry you.

Here Comes The Chinese Century

Want to know what to expect from our new Chinese-run global hegemony? Well, at least when it comes internet culture, we’ve got you covered. Over on Panic World this week, we interviewed Tianyu Fang, a Tech and Democracy Fellow at New America and one of the geniuses behind one of my favorite newsletters of all time, Chaoyang Trap House. He was nice enough to tell us all about how Chinese internet culture works and it was a great conversation. If you want to check it out, it’s on every major podcast platform, but you can also just click here.

Is This The Song Of The Summer?

@daily_brett

little pigman feat.@b-boy bouiebaisse #tomhomework #handsoff #pigman

Callout Posts Count As Legal Arrests Now

—by Adam Bumas

Relatable shitposts, sponsored content, and government decrees continue to merge together amid our ongoing horrific Posting Instrumentality Project. One of the trailblazers has been Libs Of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik and, yesterday, Raichik posted a picture where she and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, both wearing jackboot-meets-Lululemon chic, joined US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in detaining people they claim are illegal immigrants.

It’s just a post, but so is everything these days, so we have to take the most serious possible interpretation: The federal government’s law enforcement approves of Raichik’s sustained campaign of what The Advocate has described as “stochastic terrorism.” That we’re in a security state enforced by callout posts and meme accounts — one where, according to acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, deporting people will be as easy as ordering from Amazon Prime.

We have to take things that seriously, because the perpetrators are. StopAntisemitism is an advocacy group that’s used similar tactics to LibsOfTikTok to get people fired or blacklisted for pro-Palestine advocacy. And on Monday, they sent an official complaint to the Department of Justice, calling on them to investigate Ms. Rachel, a children’s entertainer who the New York Times has called “the modern Mr. Rogers,” who has voiced her support for both Israeli and Palestinian children. If posting is law, then posting must also be criminal.

OK, Some Of You Did Hear About The Hands Off Protests

Alrighty, after my little amateur survey earlier this week, I think I have a clearer picture of how the Hands Off protests spread and it paints a very interesting picture of how organizing in a post-Twitter America works. But, first, thank you to everyone who messaged me — except one of you, who called me a “brunch person” for asking the initial question.

Based on what I’ve heard from readers, many folks who pride themselves as being especially online totally missed the Hands Off protests until they were already underway. Meanwhile, those who watch local news, interact with local Facebook Groups, or listen to the radio did know about them. Some readers who follow digital activist spaces heard about them on Reddit and Bluesky, but an overwhelming amount of readers told me they heard about the protests from their boomer parents. Which is another fascinating wrinkle (no pun intended).

This lines up with Facebook data Garbage Day researcher Adam and I have been collecting since the election. As we wrote in a Sherwood piece last week, right-wing publishers like The Daily Wire and Fox News are doing very well on Facebook post-election, but liberal outlets and, most importantly, when looking at the Hands Off protests, local news outlets tend to actually outperform right-wing sites on an individual link or article level.

The two takeaways here being that boomers are fed up and their more localized social networking is actually a really untapped resource for Democrats, rather than, say, TikTok or something. And, more tangentially, even though Facebook is clearly astroturfing the News Feed with conservative content to suck up to Republicans, users are much more engaged around anti-Trump content.

Adam Saw The Minecraft Movie

—by Adam Bumas

Imagine if, through all of history, there had never been a movie with baseball in it. Not just the major leagues or the biggest players, but no one playing the game at all, no caps or bats. Now imagine they made a movie called “The Baseball Movie,” and it was Major League 3: Back To The Minors. Would the subpar writing or uninteresting direction matter, compared to the sheer power of being the first movie ever to show a home run or a Yankees jersey? 

This is why A Minecraft Movie is annihilating the box office. Baseball has a lot more history than Minecraft, but it was enough for the audience at my typically raucous screening last night. The cheering, cosplay-filled crowd was on such a hair trigger that they screamed “Absolute cinema!” at the Warner Bros. logo. Just seeing the game’s design and culture on film — like a scene in a Creeper farm or a nod to the late streamer Technoblade — were received like grand slams for the home team, with popcorn flying everywhere from the excitement. Or maybe it was just the chants of “chicken jockey!”

The movie’s disappointing reviews show it’s not very accessible to outsiders, or much good on its own terms. But the same feeling of both discovery and validation that gave us comic book movies was palpable. And I wasn’t immune — when I saw video game composers Daniel “C418” Rosenfeld and Lena Raine had credits in the film, I felt like we had all made it too.

Adobe Got Bullied Off Of Bluesky

Another brand tried to join Bluesky and ended up having to deactivate. This time it was Adobe. This seems like a pretty unforced error. If I was a predatory subscription-only software monopoly that recently went all-in on AI, I don’t think I’d make an account on a website full of leftist furries. But, hey, that’s just me. Guess Adobe’s social media manager couldn’t handle the curse of Ra:

But in all seriousness, this is becoming a genuine issue for Bluesky, one we’ve covered a few times. It’s really easy to be the cool, new anti-corporate social network up until the point where you actually need to make money. And, online, there are only a couple ways to actually make money. Subscriptions, which have never worked for a social platform at scale, advertising, which requires brands and users who are ok with brands, or some kind of revenue share with creators, which also rarely works at scale and usually only with porn or dropshipping, which, well, read above.

So let’s hope Bluesky is working on a fourth option!

The Recesso

Some Stray Links

• “Elon Musk Rage Quits Livestream After Being Cyberbullied by Gamers”

• “Donkey Kong Bananza leak throws a wrench in the Donkey Kong timeline”

• “Former Substack creators say they’re earning more on new platforms that offer larger shares of subscription revenue”

P.S. here’s a very uplifting post.

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