Your school's anime club gets thrown out of CPAC

Nick Fuentes Had A Big Weekend At CPAC

On Friday, following a massive SPLC piece about far-right influencers that are still on Twitter, Nic Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and the de-facto leader of the Gen Z white nationalist movement called the groypers, had his Twitter account suspended. Twitter has not given any concrete reasons for Fuentes’ removal from the platform, but it was long overdue.

Fuentes then went to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas on Saturday. He and may other groypers aimed to have a “physical altercation” and went with the expressed purpose of being thrown out.

Here’s a video of them walking through the atrium of the Hilton Anatole.

I think the most interesting thing about this video is that not a single one of these guys knows how to wear a shirt or even walk like a normal person. They all move like the bug man from Men In Black.

If you’re confused why the groypers wanted to get thrown out of CPAC, they’re not fans of the current conservative status quo. I’ve written before about Fuentes’ scraps with other conservatives on issues like Israel. They were extremely critical of Trump not being reactionary enough. Groypers are the arm of the American right that are especially influenced by 4chan and incel ideology. Which probably explains why the video above looks like a college anime club on a field trip to Taco Bell.

Fuentes did deliver a speech over the weekend. But he and his followers were eventually kicked out, after running around CPAC, chanting, “white boy summer”.

The key thing here, I think, is that Fuentes and the groypers, though they look like they just pulled up to a Minecraft convention in their mom’s minivan, are much savvier than the millennial far-right influencers that came before them. Without his Twitter account, Fuentes will be a lot less publicly active, but make no mistake, he’ll be much harder to deplatform. (If that’s even truly possible these days.) He, himself, isn’t on YouTube anymore, but his clips are. He’s also still active on Telegram. And according to some estimates, he’s been making close to $100,000 a year streaming on DLive, a blockchain-based livestream platform that is super popular with far-right users.

Gen Z’s far-right movement has learned from the platform whack-a-mole of the last five years, much in the same way that Gen Z’s influencers have learned from the pivot to video crash to diversify their social platforms. Groypers are here and the fact they were able to publicly announce they were going to go get thrown out of CPAC and then did get thrown out of CPAC is a win for them, even if it’s completely idiotic.

Addison Rae Got “Fired”

Addison Rae is a famous TikToker. She’s one of those young people who just suddenly appeared like two years ago with millions of fans and a name that sounds like it was dreamed up by that chalkboard baby name lady.

Rae posted photos of herself with a microphone on the red carpet at this weekend’s UFC match, and tweeted, “I studied broadcast journalism in college for 3 whole months to prepare for this moment.”

People got very angry! The replies to her tweet are full of people who work in broadcast journalism who were angry that Rae was so dismissive about how hard it is to get into the industry. lol wow can you imagine someone who is pretty and popular getting undeserved opportunities in broadcast journalism? Did these people just wake up on Earth yesterday?

Rae then tweeted that she got “fired” due to all the backlash.

This is, it seems, not true. According to E! News, Rae did a social activation for UFC fighter Dustin Poirier because they’re from the same town and she wasn’t actually an official correspondent. The Twitter rage simulation continues on!

But my favorite reaction to all of this was actually from the Minecraft YouTuber Dream, who tweeted at Rae, “People tell you to get a real job and then are mad when you get one smh,” which is, honestly, an interesting point.

The Streaming/Theater Hybrid Release Content Explosion

Over the weekend, Marvel’s Black Widow was released in both theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access. It’s probably still too early to say whether streaming releases can beat theaters, full stop. The pandemic is still very much ravaging most of the world and, in the US, is actually getting worse again. But Black Widow was a box office smash, regardless.

It made $158.8 in theaters and $60 million dollars via Disney+ in-app purchases. We can also compare Black Widow to F9, which was not released on any sort of streaming app. Black Widow kicked its ass in terms of revenue.

But there’s another dimension to this that I find much more interesting. The fact that Black Widow was dropped on a streaming service means its content trail is much higher than F9. F9 was responsible for one pretty funny meme, where Vin Diesel’s Dom shows up in images and talks about family. But, for the most part, all of the images from the movie are still trapped inside physical theaters.

Black Widow, on the other hand, is everywhere right now. Don’t click on the tweet below unless you want spoilers, but as Insider video producer Irene Anna Kim noticed, there are Taylor Swift/Black Widow fancams all over TikTok.

Now, for traditional movies in traditional theaters, it may not matter if your movie is turned into internet content by fans. Although, I think the days where a good movie doesn’t also have some kind of second life online are over. I mean, even movies like Parasite and Uncut Gems have become long-running sources of viral content.

But I think for franchise entertainment like the Fast and Furious movies or the MCU, this kind of digital content trail is incredibly important. If you give your audience the movie right away, they’ll start screenshotting it and clipping it and remixing it, which will create a feedback loop that only helps bring in eyeballs to their streaming service.

One last interesting thing about how much of a cultural shift this has been: Fans were so desperate to talk about Avengers: Infinity War that they started using illegal cam recordings to take screenshots. To the point where a lot of the most viral Infinity War memes still feature low-res footage. In other words, let people meme your dang movie! You’ll make more money!

A Good Tweet

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It Did Not Come Home For England, Sadly

England’s Euros 2020 team did not win yesterday’s game. Italy beat England in a penalty shootout. But, in many ways, England did win the Euros, in terms of content yesterday. Most of the photos and videos of English fans that ended up on Twitter are so shockingly NSFW that I don’t feel comfortable putting them in this newsletter. But I wanted to include something as an example of how completely out-of-control the fans were yesterday. In passing, I had seen a video of an England fan doing a massive bump of cocaine as a crowd cheered him on, but I lost the link.

So I went on Twitter this morning and asked if anyone had a link to it, only to discover that there were actually SEVERAL viral videos of England fans doing massive bumps of coke. Anyways, here’s one of those videos.

An Incredibly Wholesome Reddit Post

Last week, a Redditor asked if he was an asshole for picking out the peas from his mom’s dinner while she had her boss over. The Redditor explained that he has autism and still lives at home and he doesn’t like peas because of their texture. Fair enough!

During a dinner his mom had organized for her boss and some colleagues, he began picking out the peas and putting them in a cup to feed ducks later. His mom’s boss, asked him some questions about it, and he was later yelled at by his mom for playing with his food.

The comment section underneath this post is absolutely great, with many users explaining to the OP the context of what was going on. But you should also totally check out the update that the OP came back to post. It’s just an incredibly sweet story.

TikTok Is Banning Crypto Shilling

This is wild! According to the Daily Mail, Tiktok is going after influencers who are promoting crypto currencies on the app. It’s part of a broader crack down on “fintok,” or the oftentimes bizarre corner of TikTok full of terrible financial advice.

Here’s how TikTok’s updated branded content policy reads:

The word is still out on how this will affect @teen.executive’s hotel soap system.

An Interesting Twist On The Good Tweet Embedded Above

I’ve seen a few tweets now about Twitter’s topic AI going haywire. Users were reporting that the “stupid like bugs” tweet was getting sorted into a topic for “Pizza” and another thread I came across recently noticed that discourse around the recent “Cat Person” development was being sorted into the “Animals” topic.

What I like about this is that when Twitter first announced Topics, it seemed like the feature that was meant to help users find content they liked, with the implication that it would also help them avoid discourse they didn’t care about. But it seems like Twitter’s commitment to terrorizing their community is so cooked into their AI that people who actually use Topics can’t even avoid random drama on the platform. Good stuff!

Another Good Tweet

Some Stray Links

• Insider goes deep on the digital nomads destroying Tulum, Mexico

• The New York Times asks if we’re in the Metaverse. I say, yes fwiw.

• “Soldiers watch the US withdrawal from Bagram Airfield through the lens of Pokémon Go”

• Reddit’s TERF problem has gotten worse

P.S. here’s a gender conceal party invitation.

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