When was the last time you felt consensus?

Post World Vs. Article World

Reporter Will Sommer over in The Bulwark this week has a great piece tracking the rise of antisemitism on podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience and This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von over the last few weeks. “I suspect that, with the right ascendant politically and culturally, bad-boy podcasters have run short of DEI sacred cows to skewer,” Sommer wrote.

Sommer’s piece arrived this week alongside a big buzzy New Yorker feature probing similar depths: “Young men have gone MAGA. Can the left win them back?” The most exhaustive look yet at the question of “Where is the Joe Rogan of the left?” (I, personally, tend to agree with Luke Winkie over at Slate that it’s probably comedian Bill Burr. And not just because I’m from Boston.)

All of this soul-searching among the mainstream media — which in 2025 would be best defined as people who are paid full-time and get some semblance of health insurance and maybe a floating desk in an open-floor-plan office in exchange for doing some kind of journalism — basically boils down to, “What happened to American men?” Which is a little strange because we know. We’ve known for a decade that the “manosphere” (a term that, at this point, is like trying to define part of the ocean by calling it the “wet zone”) was a problem and yet we still ended up here. Which has led me think that there is a larger unspoken anxiety hanging over all of these election postmortems dropping in increasingly esteemed publications like The New Yorker. One that I had been struggling to articulate up until I interviewed Chapo Trap House’s Felix Biederman for this week’s Panic World. As Biederman so succinctly put it, at some point between the first Trump administration and the second, “Article World” was defeated by “Post World”.

As he sees it, “Article World” is the universe of American corporate journalism and punditry that, well, basically held up liberal democracy in this country since the invention of the radio. And “Post World” is everything the internet has allowed to flourish since the invention of the smartphone — YouTubers, streamers, influencers, conspiracy theorists, random trolls, bloggers, and, of course, podcasters. And now huge publications and news channels are finally noticing that Article World, with all its money and resources and prestige, has been reduced to competing with random posts that both voters and government officials happen to see online. These features are not just asking, “what happened to American men?” They’re asking, “why can’t we influence American men the way we used to?”

The death of Article World is affecting our politics more than anything else right now. As I wrote on Monday, during the first Trump administration, the president’s various henchmen would do something illegal or insane, a reporter would find out, cable news and newspapers would cover it nonstop, and usually that henchman would resign or, oftentimes, end up in jail. I’m not sure if the ChatGPT model that teaches fourth grade social studies in American elementary schools now covers this sort of thing, but this is why the media is typically called the fourth branch of the government (the other three being the executive, the legislative, and the judicial).

But because Post World has defeated Article World, the fourth branch doesn’t work the way it used to. The most damning example being the incident last month where 25-year-old Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffer Marko Elez resigned over racist X posts that included things like, “Normalize Indian hate” and “I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.” His posts were discovered by journalists, pressure was put on the executive branch to fire him, and he stepped down. A perfect Article World win. Except, days later, both Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance said they wanted to rehire him. It’s unclear if he ever resigned in the first place, let alone, was rehired — that, in and of itself, a loss for Article World — but he’s also being investigated by the Department Of Justice for sharing unencrypted personal information from the US Treasury. Maybe that’ll get him.

This also explains why Texas is trying to pass the “Forbidden Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education,” or “FURRIES” Act, based on a years-old anti-trans internet conspiracy theory. It’s why Trump’s team is targeting former President Joe Biden’s autopen-signed pardons after the idea surfaced in a viral X post shared by Libs Of TikTok. And it’s why US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is investigating random social media reports that military bases are still letting personnel list their preferred pronouns on different forms. Posts are all that matters now. And it’s likely no amount of articles can defeat them. Well, I guess we’ll find out.

Maybe it was the pandemic, maybe it was the insurrection, maybe it was the fact publications like Vanity Fair were still paying writers six figures AN ARTICLE!!! up until the mid-2010s while they were being devoured by social platforms. But Article World is dying, or maybe already dead, and Post World is ascendant. And it’s not just a political problem. It’s impacting music, fashion, celebrity, law, economics — I could go on and on here. We’ve replaced the largely one-way street of mass media with not even just a two-way street of mass media and the internet, like we had in the 2010s, but an infinitely expanding intersection of cars that all think they have the right of way. Think about it for a second. When was the last time you truly felt consensus? Not in the sense that a trend was happening around you — although, was it? — but a new fact or bit of information that felt universally agreed upon? Was it in the last two years? Was it this decade? And the most skilled and seasoned journalists in this country can continue to try to win that back. To use journalism to shift public perception and hold the powerful to account. An admirable and necessary endeavor. But unless the very architecture of the internet changes, it’s likely whatever they write will end up as just another post.

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New Panic World Episodes!!!

If you haven’t checked out Panic World in a while, now’s a perfect time to jump back in. We did an episode last week all about online hit men, with journalist Carl Miller. It turns out it’s actually much harder to order a contract killer on the internet than you’d think. And this week we’ve teamed up with Chapo Trap House’s Felix Biederman to answer the most important question of our time: Who turned Gen Z fascist? You can find that episode on our feed and also on the main Chapo feed.

A Good Post

A Weird Guy Is Doing A Weird Thing At Brown University

A conservative software engineer and journalist named Alex Shieh is emailing Brown University employees, asking that they fill out a questionnaire to “analyze administrative efficiency.” He’s essentially running a one-man DOGE. We got tipped off to this by a university staffer who wanted to remain anonymous. But Shieh has been vocal about the project on his X account, claiming to have emailed every administrator this week.

“It definitely feels like an Elon Musk audition tape thing,” the anonymous staffer told Garbage Day.

Shieh is logging Brown administrators on a database called Bloat@Brown, which is an apt name for a turd this huge. The scores it listed for different staffers aren’t online anymore because the site is currently experiencing a cyberattack, but in the emails he’s been sending out, Shieh said he was using “an algorithm” to measure things like “diversity” and “antisemitism”. “Brown hasn't said anything to us besides ‘do not engage’ with him and to forward people to our publicist,” the anonymous staffer said.

Shieh has managed to get a lot of press over the last few years, with multiple spots on Fox News and multiple opinion pieces in The Boston Globe. Expect more of this as little Muskian hustle zoomers figure out they can LARP as DOGE staffers at various institutions across the country.  

If you have a tip for Garbage Day, you can reach me on Signal at ryanbroderick.69420, happy to keep things anonymous or off the record.

The Crypto World Is Real Torn Up About The New Solana Ad

One thing I learned from my years covering cryptocurrency is that it is not a monolith. Are there a lot of deranged, borderline fascists that love crypto? Yes, but there are possibly even more crypto diehards that genuinely think they’re still building a new technological revolution. And it’s nice to have a dream, no matter how pitiful.

These two groups came to a head this week after Solana, a large crypto trading platform, published and deleted an extraordinarily cringe anti-woke ad.

I still monitor Crypto Twitter (Crypto X?), and I can confidently say that it’s pretty evenly split right now between users who liked the ad because of how reactionary it was and users who think the culture war, in general, is a pointless distraction. There were also a few users that think that everyone involved with the ad should “commit ritual suicide on cam and use that as the ad instead.” Ouch.

“Doritos” Made A Bluesky Account

An account claiming to belong to Doritos made an account on Bluesky last week. They didn’t use a custom domain, so it’s a little unclear if this is official, but most users treated it that way anyways. The overwhelming response to the account’s two posts have been some variation of “fuck off, brand.” Which, official account or not, is the real point here.

Bluesky will eventually have to figure out some kind of advertising strategy. No social network of its size has successfully stayed afloat without one. And the culture they’ve built on the platform so far has run completely counter to one where brands can post. It’s going to be a mess. And I, for one, can’t wait.

A Lot Of Dropkick Murphys Misinformation Swirling Around This Week

A lot of big accounts in the world of heavy music started sharing the same report that the band The Dropkick Murphys were banned from X on St. Patrick’s Day. This seemed believable because Dropkick frontman Ken Casey has been very vocal about MAGA supporters and there’s been a lot of videos circulating of him on stage heckling them at shows. One big account that circulated the rumor that the band was suspended was Knotfest, which is not a furry sex page, but, actually, Slipknot’s music festival. Who knew.

A bunch of huge actual publications picked up the story — because Post World has defeated Article World — and no one seemed to question it. Luckily, journalist Jacqueline Sweet reached out to Casey and found out the whole thing was fake. The band left Twitter in 2022, someone grabbed their account and was impersonating them, and they filed a complaint to pull it down. "Look, we pulled our account because we didn’t want to be part of that guy’s empire. But if we were still on there, I’m sure he would have suspended us by now,” Casey told Sweet. Hell yeah.

A Really Good Vacation Video

(This is almost certainly a bit, but the video is extremely funny nonetheless.)

Some Stray Links

• “The 9-to-5 pretenders”

• “The Dare Attempts To Crowdsurf, No One Catches Him”

P.S. here’s the perfect date.

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