The Special Elon Zone

Phase Two Of Trumpism Has Arrived

When President Donald Trump first entered office, I suggested that it would be useful to think of his second presidency in the form of seasons or phases. His first administration was largely punctuated by firings and, later, hearings, as new Weird Guys would enter the White House, step on some kind of institutional landmine, and get the boot. This is because in 2016 we still had a liberal establishment that could check Trump’s power.

The media was the first piece to go, chipped away at by a million viral videos. The Democrats were second. Things have gotten so bad in the last few weeks that Sen. Chuck Schumer has effectively gone into hiding. The last democratic institution left standing — though one very much battered by Trumpism — is the courts. The first phase of the administration used a flurry of executive orders and private contractors working for Elon Musk to essentially DDOS the civil service. Which only works up to a point. But over the weekend, the administration finally challenged the courts head on, bringing us into a darker second phase of Trump’s coup.

Weeks ago, when I outlined the three prongs of Trump 2.0, I didn’t go very deep on White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s anti-immigration plans because they hadn’t fully materialized yet. But we’re now finally seeing how they fit into the larger political project. On Saturday, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) violated a court order blocking the deportation of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. A White House spokesperson denied that they actually violated the court order, of course, and instead said that they deported the migrants before the court order was issued. “A single judge in a single city cannot direct the movements of an aircraft carrier full of foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from US soil,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

As Ken White, the first amendment lawyer best known online as Popehat, wrote on Bluesky, “My sense is that the administration has been looking for the optimal case in which to pull an Andrew Jackson — they may think this is it.” Which refers to the apocryphal quote from Jackson during the Trail of Tears, “The courts have made their ruling, now let them enforce it.”

If you’re wondering why we sent Venezuelans to El Salvador, it’s because Trump made a deal with El Salvador’s crypto-trading millennial fascist president, Nayib Bukele. The backwards hat-wearing hustle bro despot opened the Terrorism Confinement Center mega prison, or CECOT, in 2023 and has a $6 million one-year contract to house our deportees there. Border Czar Tom Homan told Fox News hosts this morning, “I'm proud to be a part of this administration. We're not stopping. I don't care what the judges think.”

The Federalist Society’s Will Chamberlain, one of the Boss Baby-looking guys that hold up the more respectable arm of the online right, has been very excited about illegal deportation making the jump from the far right to the mainstream right. Which is really what this is all about. Moving once-fringe extremist ideas into the realm of basic American conservatism. “Denaturalize and deport Mehdi Hasan,” Chamberlain posted on X after the journalist wrote, “Abolish ICE.” Chamberlain also got into it with Derek Guy, The Menswear Guy, after Guy replied, “All that forehead and no brain.” (Chamberlain, like many prominent conservatives looks like Megamind.) Chamberlain fired back at Guy, “Don’t worry, we’ll get around to you as well. I hear tailoring is a thriving industry in Vietnam.” Which was, obviously, a mistake. Because Guy then went in for the kill:

And it won’t stop at immigration law. The Trump administration now seems poised to attack anything that’s in their way. In fact, last night, Trump announced that he wants to nullify the pardons former President Joe Biden signed. An idea he seems to have lifted from the Heritage Foundation and Libs Of TikTok.

But this weekend’s conflict with the courts is not just an ideological victory for Very Online right-wing guys that look like they smell like milk. It also gives us the clearest picture yet of how the three factions that prop Trump up — Project 2025, blood and soil nationalism, and DOGE — fit together. And what kind of country they’re trying to build.

Following the deportation showdown, Silicon Valley’s favorite dark enlightenment blowhard Curtis Yarvin wrote a long-meandering thread on X that isn’t even worth linking to, essentially arguing that Trump needs to start mercilessly “bullying” the courts to end “the American civil-service state.” With the end goal being not just unchecked power for Trump, but the end of democracy. I think. He is really not a good writer. But many in his camp are excitedly chattering this morning about similar accelerationist notions. Trump versus the courts as a wrecking ball for all of America.
Which begs the question, what do they want to replace it with? Well, they’ve already told us.

In an X post earlier this month, investor and Bitcoin maximalist Balaji Srinivasan fantasized about what he called “The Special Elon Zone,” or a chunk of Texas given to Musk as a fiefdom he can do whatever he wants with. And a huge part of this idea is centered around what Srinivasan calls “border security.” An unregulated city-state with its own border patrol. ICE for mini-Silicon Valleys all over the country. And Srinivasan wants other big tech oligarchs to each get their own Special Zones. That’s ultimate goal here. Dismantle everything and give the spoils to the billionaires.

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Bean Summer

Who Is The Weird Scientist Guy On X?

He Jiankui is going very viral on X right now thanks to these really weird posts where he talks like a supervillain and stares at the camera like, well, a supervillain. If you’ve never heard of He before, he’s a Chinese scientist that was thrown in prison for three years for illegally CRISPR-editing human genomes in babies.

It’s not exactly clear why He’s account is blowing up now. He’s been posting surreal stuff on there for months. But if you see any memes with this guy floating around, that’s the context.

Boston’s Battle Of The Borg

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, the Boston Police Department is currently waging their yearly war against borg, or, “blackout rage gallon,” a drink that’s gotten pretty popular in the city over the last few years. It’s usually a gallon of vodka, dyed green, and sometimes you throw some liquid IV in there. Naturally.

The BPD confiscated a lot of borg this weekend. And, luckily for us, they lined them all up and took a photo of the jugs, a bunch of which have incredible names. Here are some my favorites:

• Damn I borgot

• Catch me outside how borg dat?

• Shippin up to Borgston

• Top of the borgin to ya

• Pablo Escaborg

Speaking of St. Patrick’s Day…

London Guinness Wankers

This is a fascinating little TikTok trend which I actually witnessed firsthand in London last month. Guinness appears to be transitioning into something similar to what Pabst Blue Ribbon was for millennial hipsters. While this is absolutely a thing in the UK right now, but I’ve noticed more Guinness popping up at dive bars in New York, as well.

The reason Guinness is having a resurgence right now is thanks to a TikTok drinking trend called “splitting the G,” where you take a big enough first gulp of Guinness to bring the foam line down into the middle of the G in “Guinness” on the glass’s logo. Carson Daly tried it on the TODAY Show this morning. He failed both times.

If you’d like a good video summing up the class politics surrounding the rise of the “London Guinness wanker,” this Instagram post is a good primer:

Texas Wants To Ban Lolicon

The Texas State Senate unanimously passed SB 20 last week, which bans the “possession or promotion of obscene visual material that appears to depict a child younger than 18 years old.” The bill is ostensibly focused on AI-generated pornography, which is an area desperately in need of regulation. But it defines it as “obscene visual material” and it also covers “cartoon or animation.” Which is problematic for more than a few reasons.

The biggest one being that “obscene” is a deeply nebulous term here. But the Texas State Senate has, also, stepped into one of the internet’s oldest and most annoying anime arguments. The term for anime and manga that features young girls in sexually suggestive situations is usually called lolicon. And, yes, the people online who are obsessed with this stuff are extremely annoying and weird about it. And the anime industry has created all kinds of rhetorical workarounds to make modern lolicon feel less gross. The most popular one being little girl characters in fantasy situations that are actually like thousand-year-old dragons or something.

There’s also all kinds of first amendment issues here, as well. So it seems likely this will make it’s way to the Supreme Court at some point. Which I am already pre-embarrassed by thinking about it.

The Minnie Mouse Basement Has Been Found

The origin of a very old internet image has finally been discovered. The cursed photo of someone in a Minnie Mouse costume skulking around a disgusting basement has been bouncing around the web for years and last week we finally figured out where it came from. The first big break in the case was a video published over the weekend by the YouTube channel ROOKIE. Someone with more information about the photo left a comment on the channel saying the picture was originally shared in a Facebook group.

And then users on Reddit were able to find a 2020 post from a user named @unlimitedbuffet back when Twitter was still Twitter with even more photos from the photo shoot. It was on Halloween and, yeah, they were just goofing around in a creepy basement. Mystery solved.

Paul Giamatti Gonna Do It Right

@bigstronggreg

Saturdays are 4 days boyz @chaycedonovan @hankpasta @Kelly Shuda #movie #night #boys #paulgiamatti #funny #dumb #song #original #fyp

Some Stray Links

• Tamagotchi vape

• “Sam Seder Knows His Viral Debate Was ‘a Little Bit Disturbing’”

• “China is building a video game juggernaut. It’s also a silo.” (We wrote this!)

P.S. here’s a good oil painting.

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