It's ok to enjoy this

You Can Have A Little Hope As A Treat

Vice President Kamala Harris did the unthinkable for a Democrat this week and made a good decision that everyone’s pretty excited about! She picked Minnesota Governor and headlight harness expert Tim Walz and debuted him at a rally last night. The big viral moment of the evening was, of course, when Walz referenced the meme that vice presidential candidate JD Vance had sex with a couch. Congrats to X user @ricksrudecalves for changing the course of American history. More importantly, Walz is now one of the most prominent politicians in the country to have said, in public, that Republicans are fascists. Let’s gooooooo!

Picking Walz was smart and not just because he seems like a nice guy who isn’t afraid to advocate for the bare minimum of a social safety net for this country’s most vulnerable. His coach vibe also fits nicely into Harris’ digital strategy, which I would call “TikTok Trumpism”. Here’s how it works.

First, and most importantly, she’s really leaning into pop music. There was obviously the initial Brat Summer meme, but she has also brought Megan Thee Stallion on stage and, last night, launched a Harris/Walz hat modeled off of Chappell Roan’s Midwest Princess hat. This is good marketing, but it’s also crucial for breaking through on TikTok and Instagram Reels, which both emphasize using trending audio and also aggressively filter out political content. Pop music is to 2024 what 4chan memes were to 2016. But Harris’ campaign is not afraid of being old school Trumpian when they need to be. They’re staging these kind of goofy, but also sort of endearing fake phone calls with her team, upgrading former President Donald Trump’s The Apprentice aesthetic for the Real Housewives watch party era. And her team is also being trolly in smart ways. There’s the “weird” line, but they’re also posting on Truth Social. And, finally, there are the clipped live moments. The aforementioned joke about Vance being a couch-fucker. Harris mocking Trump’s low attendance at rallies. I wouldn’t be surprised if she tries some crowd work next a la Matt Rife. If you put it all together it basically works like this:

And, yes, it’s important to remember that the internet is not real life. And neither are polls. But both the internet and polls are now saying that Harris picking Walz is winning over independents. Well, real independents. Not the guys who LARP as independents in newspaper columns. Like New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait who has emerged as the tut-tutting-est centrist of the week, deploying the columnist equivalent of asking to speak to the manager, demanding Harris and Waltz “pivot to the center now.” *fart noise that lasts a thousand years* As journalist Lydia Polgreen noted, is Harris really even all that left or is she just black?

But it’s not just centrists that are filling up their diapers at the moment. The right is scrambling in a way they really haven’t since former President Barack Obama’s first campaign. They’re calling Walz “Tampon Tim”. Weird. And trying to counter the couch meme by starting a meme that Walz had sex with a traffic cone. Also weird. And some are even claiming Walz once drank a gallon of human semen. Even weirder. Once-formidable conservative mastermind Christopher Rufo has spent the last 12 hours posting on X like he’s Seto Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh! Which I think means things are going badly. As Onion CEO Ben Collins succinctly put it, “the psycho 4chan bathroom pervert shit is just not going to work against this.” I mean, Fox News is publishing pro-Walz op-eds and libs are already writing fanfic about how Walz is their dad. It’s joever, guys.

The closest thing conservatives have to a coherent attack plan right now is a focus on Harris not picking Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. Right-wing (but largely anti-Trump) newsletter The Bulwark is reporting that that Trump’s inner circle was running oppo on Shapiro and feeding it to Harris’ camp. Kind of a weird strategy ngl! Journalist Bradford William Davis compared it to, “when Drake said he fed Kendrick that bad info about having a hidden daughter.” But based on X posts yesterday from Trump’s former senior advisor Stephen Miller it seems like the plan was to convince Harris to not pick Shapiro and then label her an anti-Semite for doing so. It might have worked better if Harris’ camp didn’t immediately leak that Shapiro was passed over because he was incredibly annoying during the interview process and Walz wasn’t.

But this is yet another instance of Republicans being caught a step behind. They launched Project 2025, picked Vance for veep, and branded themselves with Trump’s assassination attempt, thinking it was in the bag. But ended up looking like weird freaks and now they can’t pivot. All they can do is attack President Joe Biden weeks after he already dropped out of the race and go after Harris for a candidate she didn’t pick. They’re on the defensive and swinging at targets that aren’t even there anymore. You know who they should talk to? Walz. He used a 4-4 defense to take a high school football team that was 0-27 to the state championships in only three years. Pretty impressive!

I’ll put this disclaimer here one last time. We are still early. Anything can and probably will happen. But I will also say this: It’s ok to feel good right now. There are a million ornery leftists with user names like ThePostsEnjoyer, DSASimp, and BigNaturalsTankie who listened to too many podcasts and now can’t make the chemicals in their brain necessary to feel hope and they are going to continue to screech online that everything is 2016 forever. You should ignore these people as hard as you can for the next three months. They said Biden wouldn’t drop out. They said Trump’s assassination attempt would win him the election (I truly did forget it happened). And they said that Harris would pick Shapiro. Is Harris a perfect candidate? Of course not. The perfect candidate can not and, in a democracy, should not exist. But it is also not cringe to feel optimistic. It is not cringe to imagine something better than the deranged culture wars we have had to endure for the last decade. And even if Harris does shit the bed in the next three months and Trump somehow wins, it won’t have been cringe to say you went down swinging, letting yourself believe this might work.

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One Last Hit Em Track

In Case You Start Seeing References To The Longhouse

Contrary to what you might think, I do not have encyclopedic knowledge of far-right terminology and occasionally have to look these phrases up. For instance, last month, I had to look up what “the Longhouse” meant to understand what a weird fascist was saying about a random woman’s TikTok video. And I saw the term again in one of Christopher Rufo’s meltdown posts about Tim Walz yesterday.

Luckily, the only thing far-right weirdos love more than winking at each other in public is obsessively blogging about what their secret handshakes mean. Which is how I stumbled across an explainer for “the Longhouse” on First Things, a vaguely neoconservative religious publication. I think it’s likely the term will keep popping up, so here’s a quick rundown of what it means.

At its most basic, it’s a reference to a longhouse, or a communal hall used in past societies to gather and trade and interact. To a normal person, a place to meet and communicate with others is seen as a good thing. To a bunch of online conservatives, it’s a derogatory term for having to engage in society. If this sounds needlessly obtuse it is, on purpose.

But basically you can point at stuff that is modern and/or vaguely feminine and say “this is the Longhouse” and a bunch of esoteric nazis on X will say, “yeah exactly.”

Linda Yaccarino’s Cyber Hell Update: X Wants To Sue Advertisers Who Don’t Advertise With Them

Elon Musk made Linda Yaccarino film a hostage video this week explaining X’s new masterful gambit. The company filed an antitrust lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), and a bunch of huge advertising brands like Unilever, alleging they organized “an illegal boycott,” whatever that means, against X. You can read X’s full open letter here.

It should go without saying that all of this is meaningless and won’t stand up in court. A former FTC director called it a “hideous joke”. But that’s only because everyone thinks the point of this is actually getting advertisers back on the platform. The only reasonable explanation for all of this is that Yaccarino in a past life did something so heinous that the entire existence of Twitter has bent into some kind of horrific karmic punishment for her.

Google Is Officially A Monopoly

This week a court ruled that Google is officially breaking antitrust laws with their monopoly on search. I assume you already saw headlines about this, but maybe you are like me and desperate to understand what this actually means going forward. I found a good CNN explainer about what could come next.

First thing to note is that Google could appeal the ruling, but if they lose the appeal, the most likely change — which could take years to be implemented — is that Google could no longer broker exclusivity deals with third parties like, say, Apple. Right now Google pays Apple $20 billion a year to make sure Safari defaults to their search. If Google loses appeal, that would be illegal. But it’s also possible things to go further, including forcing Google to offer users multiple search engines to use and even breaking up the company.

Aminé’s “360” Remix Is An Incredible Vibe

Is Black Mold Is Piloting JK Rowling Like Transphobic Gundam?

X user @mushycrouton posited a very interesting theory about JK Rowling last week. Were the dark spots in her profile picture actually black mold that’s infesting her home and, thus, making her insane? This seemed like a pretty ridiculous notion until Rowling, uh, immediately changed her profile picture after @mushycrouton’s post went viral. It was almost certainly just wallpaper and not mold, but let’s play this out on the off chance it wasn’t.

I’ve seen many users, Americans in particular, question why a person as rich as Rowling would have black mold in her home. But as someone who has met wealthy British people irl I can confidently say that it would not be surprising to find out Rowling was rotting away in a damp manor house that’s slowly destroying her brain. That’s the typical upper middle class British lifestyle.

Adding more credence to the theory that a dangerous fungus could be operating Rowling like a meat suit that’s obsessed with where people go the bathroom, @mushycrouton is not the first user to notice what appears to be black mold creeping up the walls of Rowling’s home. Another user noticed the same thing back in 2022.

So, yes, it probably just bad wallpaper. But just in case it isn’t, I want to be clear, I don’t think black mold could make Rowling transphobic. I think she’s just like that. But the mold could probably help her post more.

A Good Unhinged X Account

In case the whole tweet doesn’t unfurl in the embed, click through. Also, just click through anyways because the account is doing an incredible bit.

Some Stray Links

• “Where Facebook's AI Slop Comes From”

• “The Gay Supermarket Sweep ‘Business Partners’ From the ’90s Have a Wilder Story Than You Know”

• “How M. Night Shyamalan Came Back From the Dead”

P.S. here’s a good 4chan thread.

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