Now we have Babydog

You May Not Realize It Yet, But You’re Already Forgetting About The Trump Shooting

Let’s start with the sorta-good news. The attack at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania this weekend did not give the former president any clear boost in the polls. In the same way that, reportedly, Milwaukee is not seeing much of a boost from hosting the Republican National Convention this week. Podcaster Robert Evans has a good video showing how dire the RNC looks beyond the TV cameras. Remember: These people are freaks and their beliefs are not popular and they will only succeed if they can convince you that they are.

The RNC did feature a dog on stage named Babydog, though. So maybe it wasn’t all bad.

We’re still no closer to understanding the exact motives behind Trump’s would-be assassin. According to a jaw-dropping report from Channel 4 in the UK, though, the Trump campaign did have the shooter’s family in a database from 2016 that was tracking gun owners in swing states and targeting them with political messaging.

We also know, thanks to a recent CNN report, that the shooter carried, in broad daylight, an automatic rifle, ammo, and a ladder for a mile on foot to get to the rally. His phone was also cracked almost immediately by the FBI, but didn’t offer any new clues as to what led to the attack. So for now, we’re still stuck in what Jon Stewart this week called the “reverse-demographic lottery,” the cycle Americans go through after every instance of domestic terror, where everyone waits to see if the attacker is revealed to be on “their team”. Though, the question is exactly how long the country’s attention span will last.

Writer Jason Pargin made a really good TikTok this week about this bizarre side effect of social media-driven news. Pargin, focusing on the 2020 Nashville bombing, which everyone did basically forget about, argues that because the motives of that attack were never clearly linked to a “team” — the bomber was mainly interested in shape-shifting lizard people — the story didn’t have much of a tail online.

“While there was plenty for us to talk about,” Pargin says. “There was nothing for us to argue about.”

The Trump shooting isn’t exactly the same — and even if investigators do find a document on the shooter’s hard drive outlining exactly why he did it, most people won’t believe it anyways — but social platforms incentivize ephemeral content driven, largely, by conflict, shaped by our identities. So unless something huge comes out before the next big news cycle, it’s likely that X user @crumbbutler’s prediction that, “everyone will totally forget about this in ten days,” will come true. For instance, now we have Babydog.

Charlie Warzel in The Atlanticwrote about this, as well. “The basic facts held attention for only so long before being supplanted by wild speculation,” he wrote. “It may be human nature to react this way in traumatic moments — to desperately attempt to fill an information void — but the online platforms so many of us frequent have monetized and gamified this instinct, rewarding those who create the most compelling stories.”

And this disorienting and disposable nature of social content and, thus, all content now, makes it all the more ironic that Silicon Valley’s various dark enlightenment wizards are rallying around Trump and his new vice president pick, Putin’s favorite little cowboy J.D. Vance.

All of Big Tech’s mid-life crisis guys are throwing in with Trump. Which they were probably always going to do, but the shooting has made them comfortable enough to admit it. Though, it’s also possible this is all just a grift to inflate the price of Bitcoin. Possible! But either way, boy blood vampire Peter Thiel has been financially backing Vance since, at least, 2019. Elon Musk plans to donate $45 million a month to the pro-Trump America Pac. And venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz reportedly plan to donate to a pro-Trump PAC, as well. Also, venture capitalist and podcaster (derogatory) David Sacks showed up on stage at the RNC this week, where he ate shit spectacularly.

And it’s easy to see how Silicon Valley’s ketamine dinner party billionaires think they’ve got this in a lock. They’ve installed Musk as the new owner of their favorite app, chased out most of the activists and journalists, lucked out with the Senate passing a bill to ban TikTok (the only social app they can’t influence), and now have their Bass Pro Shop stolen valor candidate in place as Trump’s Veep. All that’s left is to pump millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign and voila, they can start building the technofascist fully-automated dictatorship they’ve been dreaming about. Their new AI products will make it impossible to know what’s going on and their cyber army of hustle bros, TikTok landlords, white nationalists, and, of course, pornbots will make it impossible to ignore Trump on every social platform. It’s like Avengers: Endgame for guys who call their email jobs “the arena” and ruin parties by ranting too much about capital gains tax and/or their ex-wives. Except we can already see that that’s not working. They spent the four years dismantling the internet and now, they, hilariously, don’t realize they’re the last ones left inside the echo chamber.

The 2010s populism wave which Trump rode to victory in 2016, which guys like Andreesen, Musk, and Thiel are clearly trying to emulate, was dependent on a still-exciting digital public square, made up of millions of disparate groups using it to communicate. And what we were all posting only became Real News thanks to a still-relevant mainstream media that was able to curate it to something that felt it mattered. But normal people don’t use social media to communicate anymore. They use it to watch videos. And those videos don’t mean anything because the apps that want us to watch them want us to watch them constantly. But those videos did replace television. Which is a problem because now there’s no way to elevate the insane chatter that some users are still putting online. So now we’re left with an internet that is constantly screeching at us, but none of it can actually break through into culture. It’s what Kyle Chayka in the New Yorker this week dubbed the “brain rot era”.

So, yeah, spend your money. Flood the zone with Trump. But you’re not competing against anything that matters. You’re competing against Babydog.

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A Good Post

A Few More Stray Election Links

Sorry, folks! It is officially election season. I’m not pivoting into a full-on politics newsletter, but there is a lot happening right now.

First up, Trump’s Veep pick, J.D. Vance, has a very interesting Twitter history that is probably worth taking a look at. For instance, did you know he was following an account called “Mid Castiza of the Day”, which is some weird race science-based gooning account that posts a lot about Greco-Roman towelboys. He seems to have unfollowed it recently, but, weirdly enough, Marc Andreessen is still following it. Ok!

In other RNC news, Gen Z white nationalist Nick Fuentes is big mad about J.D. Vance’s wife (she’s of Indian descent). They also seem to think he’s a CIA plant. And, lastly, The Heritage Project got ratioed by a pensive horse sitting on his nutsack. (That links is sorta NSFW.)

Over on the other side of the aisle, President Joe Biden had an extremely gentle interview with Complex’s Speedy Morman. I wouldn’t exactly say that Biden did “good” or “made sense” or “spoke in complete sentences.” And I’m apparently not the only one that thinks so.

One of the top comments underneath the video on YouTube right now is, “This was a young dude having a convo at the bus stop with an old dude.” Not sure this that was the reaction Biden’s team wanted from the YouTube demographic.

Unfortunately, though, there was one more big election story that happened this week…

I Did Not Think That Tenacious D Would End Up Being The Dixie Chicks Of The Attempted Trump Assassination, But Here We Are

At a show in Australia this week, Tenacious D’s Kyle Gass was given a birthday cake on stage and told to make a wish. “Don’t miss Trump next time,” he said before blowing out the candles.

Video of the moment hit social media and things spun out of control almost immediately. Australian Senator Ralph Babet demanded the band be deported. Which, you know, seems serious, but there aren’t many things Australian politicians love more than deporting people.

Jack Black quickly announced that the tour was ending and that the band was going on hiatus. And Gass was also dropped by his talent agency.

I have seen more than few people arguing that Black should have defended Gass and that the only reason he didn’t was because he wants to keep playing Bowser in Mario movies or whatever. And it’s true that Black is the bigger celebrity of the two, but I don’t actually think the band is breaking up. Plus, I am going to assume that making a joke on stage about someone killing a president is probably not something most insured music venues will tolerate. So I don’t totally think there was much that could be done in this situation.

Though, I also want to push back on the idea that joking about the Trump shooting is somehow unprecedented. As X user @53gaDr3amca5t pointed out this week, there were memes about 9/11 literal minutes after the first plane hit the Twin Towers. Joking about a tragedy is normal and, honestly, probably healthy to some degree. Just maybe don’t do it on stage at a major music venue. Or, at least, just don’t do it in Australia.

Hamster Kombat Is Eating The Web

Garbage Day researcher Adam and I went long in Sherwood this week about a bizarre new crypto video game that’s climbing leaderboards on every major platform right now.

The game is essentially Cookie Clicker built on top of the messaging app Telegram’s blockchain. You click a hamster to earn coins and the hamster evolves — Mafia Boss style — into a bigger, more powerful hamster CEO. But, more insidiously, the game also has daily missions, which include watching Hamster Kombat YouTube videos, following Hamster Kombat on every social platform, and getting other people to download and play the game.

On X, Hamster Kombat is growing faster than Elon Musk. And on YouTube, it’s growing faster than MrBeast.

Toronto’s Joker Got SWATed

Toronto’s Joker is not Drake, but actually a TikToker named Michael Stamatakos. Though, I think his account has been taken down. He has a history of armed robbery and other crimes and also a bunch of vaguely Joker-themed face tattoos.

This week, before his account was taken down, he was SWATed by local law enforcement as he was livestreaming on tikTok and, unfortunately, it was hard as hell.

Where Is u/butchah69?

So, r/OkBuddyFresca is ostensibly a shitposting subreddit for the show The Boys. I’m not going to go into the, frankly, bad history of “OkBuddy” subreddits, but here’s the Know Your Meme page if you’re curious. The TL;DR is some are good and some are bad. r/OkBuddyFresca has evolved, though, over the last few years into a full on parody of both the show and also the main Boys subreddit. This is largely due to the fact that actual fans of The Boys are so stupid and dense that even showrunner Eric Kripke has done multiple interviews about how dumb they are.

One of r/OkBuddyFresca’s most popular users is u/butchah69, which is an account that pretty much exclusively just comments “Oi” underneath posts. Though, the account did do an AMA recently.

But now the account has gone dark. It’s last update was nine days ago and other users on the subreddit are getting worried. I’ll update you as this situation develops.

Jack Schlossberg Dennis Reynolds Edit Fancam 365 Brat Charli XCX

Oh, in case you were wondering, Schlossberg is making $250 an article for his Vogue column. Digital media is a meat grinder.

Some Stray Links

• If Books Could Kill on “Hillbilly Elegy”

• “Coreys”

• “Ozy Media, CEO Convicted of Fraud After Staged Goldman Call”

• GWAR covered "I'm Just Ken" for the return of TheAV Club’s Undercovered series

P.S. here’s the Walgreens Guys.

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