New Elon Musk crime dropped

Why Hasn’t Someone Arrested This Guy Yet?

On Sunday night, Elon Musk held a town hall in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he gave out $1 million checks to two voters. The event was in support of Republican lawmaker Brad Schimel, who is currently running for the state’s Supreme Court. “This will be important for the future of civilization,” he told the audience. Something I’m not totally sure anyone has ever said about Wisconsin before.

But this is not the first time that Musk has expressed interest in Wisconsin’s state politics. In January, he posted on X, “Very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!” He’s now decided to personally fight the fraud he’s so worried about by, you know, paying off voters. He also came up with a new local riff on his stupid X stance (pictured below). At least he didn’t Sieg Heil this time. Though he did rant about George Soros manipulating American democracy.

As The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote, “Not surprising, but absolutely wild to go on stage and blame bad things on a nefarious billionaire who is pulling on the puppet strings of politics while you are the richest man in the world who is on stage because he's spending millions trying to influence an election!”

In case you need even more Musk hypocrisy — as if pointing it out ever does anything — the morning before the town hall he was complaining on X about how Tesla protesters were paid crisis actors. Paying people to… to engage politically. What a concept.

As The Washington Post reported, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has become “a proxy war” for the Trump administration and Project 2025. The leading candidate, at least before Musk’s big payoff last night, has been Susan Crawford, a liberal judge, who is endorsed by a handful of the state’s current Supreme Court.

The other candidate, Schimel, has received a huge surge of support from various Trump World cretins over the last few weeks, after President Donald Trump declared that Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race would determine “the future of the country.” Once again, very flattering for the people of Wisconsin.

As for why Trump is so obsessed with the cheese head state, as The Associated Press noted, they’re expected to take a case that would change the state’s congressional districts, which could affect the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Oh, also, and this is probably just a coincidence, but Tesla is suing the state right now because they want to open their own dealerships and Wisconsin only allows third-party dealerships. (I actually think we should federally ban third-party car dealerships as a way to crush conservative fundraising, but that’s a point for another day.)

The most maddening part of this very maddening story is that Wisconsin’s Attorney General tried to sue Musk to stop his million-dollar giveaway and the state’s Supreme Court declined to hear the case without any further comment. The suit mentioned a now-deleted X post from last week where Musk announced the giveaway. He replaced the post with a new one, with tweaked language explaining those eligible for the million dollar checks were people who signed a petition against “activist judges,” not people who voted in the election. The original post was almost definitely a felony in Wisconsin.

And the institutional tepidness here is the real problem because the Trump administration, which, just for simplicity’s sake going forward, also includes Musk and his various companies, is getting more aggressive about consolidating power. Musk’s Department Of Government Efficiency is still meddling with the country’s digital infrastructure, but the coup’s eye of the storm is clearly shifting. For instance, Musk’s $2 million corruption lottery hit the same weekend that Trump, once again, threatened to run, or rather, stay in power, for a third term. After some back and forth with reporters on Sunday, he said that one method his team has looked at is running Vice President JD Vance as president and then making Vance step down and appoint Trump. Which is funny because it hinges on the idea that Vance could win a presidential campaign. The man can’t even wear pants properly. Of course, that’s also assuming Vance would have to actually get people to vote for him to win.

A Good Post

The Speed Of An AI Meme

The invasion of AI Ghibli art seems like it finally peaked over the weekend. On Friday, we wrote that it was worth trying to time out exactly how long the trend would last because we still don’t exactly know what the value or impact of an AI-generated “meme” is yet. Plus, this one arrived only a few weeks after the rare Vances meme, which gives us a good recent non-AI trend to compare it to. Seems like one week is about as far as it can go. Maybe it was the Israeli Defense Force doing it yesterday that finally ended the party. Or maybe it was the moron that Ghibli-fied scenes from Dune. Media literacy is more important than ever, folks. Meanwhile, it seems like rare Vances are going to flare up every time the vice president does something cringe and he seems pathologically incapable of not being cringe.

But the most likely explanation is that when memes can be immediately and infinitely generated, they have no real value beyond novelty. And even that is shrinking every time. There’s only so many ways you can get an AI to render 9/11 before it loses its punch. Which seems like an important insight for both Silicon Valley and Hollywood, where lots of very rich and powerful people are salivating over the idea of AI-generated entertainment. But if you’re still not getting the implications here, let me tell you a little story that I’ve told elsewhere a few times.

Back in the beginning of the generative AI boom, I went out for coffee with a big AI evangelist who was very excited about “building” and “making” things with AI — apps, TV shows, “art,” etc. After listening for a while I finally decided I needed to ask a question, one that, apparently, he had not considered. If AI gets as good as its biggest proponents think it’s destined to be, why would anyone build anything? Why would you build an app with AI? Why not just ask the AI to do that specific task for you? Something Amazon actually just launched this morning. Similarly, with entertainment, why would studios need to exist if you could “make a movie with just a prompt,” as you’re bound to see someone fantasizing about on X. Even if studios just become holding pens for intellectual property, eventually that IP becomes worthless from overuse. Or, to take it back to memes, if AI tools make internet content indecipherable from spam, at a certain point, why would anyone bother. If the AI gets good enough it devours it will devour its container. Whether it’s an app, a studio, or even a social platform.

Chappell Roan Went On Call Her Daddy

Did you feel a discourse bomb detonate over the weekend? Chappell Roan went on the Call Her Daddy podcast and the internet had a lot of thoughts! The bulk of the criticism I’ve seen about Roan’s interview was focused on her comments about politics. The two quotes that people have zeroed in on are, “I get a lot of fucking crazy questions that a lot of peers would not get asked and that's because I'm gay. I have my opinions, but I don't know everything about every topic I have opinions on. I don't know everything about being gay!” And the other one is, “How can these girls tour, write, perform, interview, sleep, eat, and fucking work out? How can they do it all and lead a team and be a boss and pay people and fucking be so politically educated?”

Which are, honestly, not that ridiculous. Maybe not the best, especially because of how closely Roan has aligned her ascent to queer aesthetics and art, but not the most boneheaded thing a 27-year-old could say. X user @fuglibetty had a pretty interesting take, writing, “Chappell Roan is just what inevitably happens when that fandom tumblr girl who says things like WLW and proshipping stumbles into an international platform. Her faux pas are all just because of that repressed drive to Callout Post. Gauche but ultimately harmless.” Which, depending on how online you are, might ring true to you.

But the drama around the Call Her Daddy appearance has, for me, I think, clarified the major contradiction with Roan’s career thus far. One that I don’t think is even specific to her. And it touches her politics, as well. In 2025, you cannot be famous — in the good way, where people like you — without trying to be famous. Internet platforms created a never-ending ladder of influence in which every rung you need to climb has to be deliberately and actively taken. The algorithm does not allow passivity. Even if you go viral once, you need to quickly figure out how to keep going viral to stay in the conversation. And so when Roan complains about all the attention she receives or confesses that she doesn’t have coherent political beliefs, the broad reaction is everyone else going, “then why are you here?” And before any Roan stans come for me, I’m not saying that’s the correct reaction. But that’s how the internet has reshaped the expectations of modern fame and, yeah, it does seem really fucking annoying!

The Grummz Stuff Is WIIIILLLDDDDD

The fine folks over at the Western Kabuki podcast and YouTuber MLYP dropped a bombshell over the weekend. They had been teasing a big investigation into Mark Kern, or Grummz, the leader of the new Gamergate movement. And boy did they deliver. The research was compiled into a video, which is embedded above. And Western Kabuki has a podcast episode about all of this forthcoming.

Kern has, for years, used his previous employment with Blizzard Entertainment as a way to convince gamergaters that he’s a game dev. His rise within that world is largely thanks to a lot of people who don’t understand how the video industry works believing that they finally got someone high up at a studio they know to admit that diversity and wokeness was ruining video games. But it turns out that Kern has had a few other projects over the years.

Allegedly, Kern was operating a hentai fetish web portal while using the screen name Debbi Chan for years. It also seems as if Kern’s mom was helping him? Incredible stuff. Pretty sure this counts as an example of Bidoof’s Law, once again, coming true.

Kern has responded to the investigation, writing on X, “The lefties went too far. They doxed me, tried to get me killed with bounties and went to the dark web to nab plain word passwords and emails to try to cancel me for stuff 20 years go (which turned out to be nothing). The put me in a position where I have no choice but to destroy their ideology.” Which doesn’t really mean anything, but I’m sure sounded cool to him when he wrote it out.

Some Real Good Male Living Space Content

A user on Reddit’s always-excellent r/malelivingspace asked the community over the weekend what they thought about the multiple safes that he was keeping in his living room for some reason. And the general consensus was, as the top commenter wrote, “Yeah looks like shit brother 👍”

The original poster clearly got a little frustrated with all the jokes about his weird living room safes and made another thread, asking folks what they thought about his bedroom.

To which a commenter wrote, “A safe would really tie this room together.”

A Real Good Costume

@probablyprisma

Surprise!! I hope you like it!!! 💞#diyproject #costume #diy #cosplay #foryoupage #fypシ #homemade #tutorial

Some Stray Links

• “Far-Right Influencers Are Hosting a $10K-per-Person Matchmaking Weekend to Repopulate the Earth”

• “You’re Here Because of Your Tattoos”

• “Michael Waltz’s Venmo Is Public, and It’s Full of Journalists”

P.S. here’s Nerpa.

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