Eight years ago, they called us cucks, libtards, and globalists. We were corrupted by cultural Marxism, teaching our kids to hate themselves. Four years ago they gloated over drinking liberal tears. They called us sheeple, groomers, vampires, pedos. We made up a pandemic so that we could brew up a kill shot, and force it on everyone after making ourselves soy-boy sick. We were exposing our kids to trans strippers in the library and showing them how to use buttplugs in kindergarten. When our children were sufficiently deranged and submissive, we drained them of adrenochrome and mutilated their privates.
JD Vance’s ONE JOB was to turn this bullying into policy, and encode it in the pages of Project 2025. Peter Thiel sent him forth to blend every shitpost into a radioactive slurry to power a cybertruck convoy carrying the titans of New Right capitalism into Washington.
He tried. He really did.
But then came the stories about him. That he fucked a couch. He wrote about it in his book, someone said. Someone else said he was getting off on dolphin porn. The lies spread, with glee and schadenfreude. And he folded. Like a foldaway.
Suddenly, all the green drained out of million shriveling Pepes and made the world verdant with hope. And from the middle of a cornfield football grid, Tim Walz manifests with his Big Dad grin and said, "Let’s roll up our sleeves and beat these creepy weirdos.”
Today we’ll talk about fighting conspiracy theories that started as jokes with jokes that defuse conspiracy theories. About what it takes to commandeer the attention economy, and how much of our souls we spend to do it. About the difference between meme wars and policy debates, and how far the Big Dad Energy vibes can take us.
Show Notes
RFK Jr.'s incredible disappearing campaign
Was J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy Really a True Story? All About the VP Candidate's Controversial Memoir
Walz on Morning Joe
The author of the viral joke post about JD Vance having sex with a couch breaks his silence
162 lies and distortions in a news conference. NPR fact checks former President Trump
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Harris-Walls messaging has not been all soaring, when they go low, we go high rhetoric.
There's another quality in the mix.
Dems have finally learned, it seems, to embrace trolling.
And we see it when VP candidate Tim Walz is at the podium, listing off how each successive crowd in the raucous swing state tour has been bigger than the one before.
And then he says, but nobody really pays that much attention to crowd size anyway, do they?
What would you do if you were framed for murder by a serial killer?
Introducing Natural Selection, Scott vs. Wild Bill.
I am retired FBI criminal profiler Candace DeLong, and my new series begins in the heart of a tropical paradise, where a darkness lurks.
Meet Scott Makeda, sailing on his boat with his family until one encounter changes everything.
I have the power of Satan.
Everybody will bow before me.
I burst out laughing.
I didn't know he was a murderer at that point.
That killer is Wild Bill.
What drives a man to murder?
And how does he continue to manipulate from behind bars?
Listen now to natural selection, Scott versus Wild Bill.
Comedy fans, listen up.
I've got an incredible podcast for you to add to your queue.
Nobody listens to Paula Poundstone.
You probably know that I made an appearance recently on this absolutely ludicrous variety show that combines the fun of a late night show with the wit of a public radio program and the unique knowledge of a guest expert who was me at the time, if you can believe that.
Brace yourself for a rollercoaster ride of wildly diverse topics, from Paula's hilarious attempts to understand QAnon to riveting conversations with a bonafide rocket scientist.
You'll never know what to expect, but you'll know you're in for a high-spirited, hilarious time.
So this is comedian Paula Poundstone and her co-host Adam Thelber, who is great.
They're both regular panelists on NPR's classic comedy show.
You may recognize them from that, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.
And they bring the same acerbic, yet infectiously funny energy to Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone.
When I was on, they grilled me in an absolutely unique way about conspiracy theories and yoga and yoga pants and QAnon, and we had a great time.
They were very sincerely interested in the topic, but they still found plenty of hilarious angles in terms of the questions they asked and how they followed up on whatever I gave them, like good comedians do.
Check out their show.
There are other recent episodes you might find interesting as well, like hearing crazy Hollywood stories from legendary casting director Joel Thurm, or their episode about killer whales and killer theme songs.
So Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone is an absolute riot you don't want to miss.
Find nobody listens to Paula Poundstone on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts
Hey everyone, welcome to conspirituality where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and
spiritual influence to uncover cults neuroscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Rimsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiratualityPod.
And you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
If you're using an Apple device, you can get all of our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions directly.
And as independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
Conspiracuality 219.
Dems learn to shitpost.
Eight years ago, they called us cucks, libtards, globalists.
We were corrupted by cultural Marxism, teaching our kids to hate themselves.
Four years ago, they gloated over drinking liberal tears.
They called us sheeple, groomers, vampires, pedos.
We made up a pandemic so that we could brew up a kill shot and force it on everyone after making ourselves soy boy sick.
We were exposing our kids to trans strippers in the library and showing them how to use butt plugs in kindergarten.
When our children were sufficiently deranged and submissive, we drained them of adrenochrome and mutilated their privates.
J.D.
Vance's one job was to turn this bullying into policy and encode it in the pages of Project 2025.
Peter Thiel sent him forth to blend every shitpost into a radioactive slurry to power a Cybertruck convoy carrying the titans of New Right Capitalism into Washington.
He tried.
He really did.
But then came the stories about him.
That he fucked a couch.
That he wrote about it in his book, someone said.
Someone else said he was getting off on dolphin porn.
The lies spread with glee and schadenfreude.
And he folded.
Like a foldaway.
Suddenly, all the green drained out of a million shriveling pepes and made the world verdant with hope.
And from the middle of a cornfield football grid, Tim Walls manifests with his big dad grin and said, Let's roll up our sleeves and beat these creepy weirdos!
So today, we're going to be talking about fighting conspiracy theories that started as jokes, with jokes that diffuse conspiracy theories.
About what it takes to commandeer the attention economy, and how much of our souls we spend to do it.
and about the difference between meme wars and policy debates,
and how far the Big Dad energy vibes can take us.
This week in Conspiracuality.
You guys probably remember the Died Suddenly documentary.
Julian, I know you're a big fan.
Yeah.
It's been used by anti-vaxxers as proof that thousands of people dropped dead after taking the COVID vaccines.
There was even a book about it that was recently covered by John Oliver in an episode about RFK Jr.
Now, of course, the people in the book died from reasons that had nothing to do with vaccines, and at least one of the teenage boys in the book died by suicide, and his photo was illegally used on the cover of that book, which added more stress and grief to the family.
And as John Oliver points out, RFK Jr.
still has the tweet promoting the book with that boy's photo on his timeline right now.
Yeah, he doesn't take anything down, right?
No, not that I've ever seen.
Except for his phone call with Trump, I guess.
Yeah, that came down.
Well, the main study, if you want to call it that, that was used to justify the film, the book, this whole ideology of people dying suddenly, has been withdrawn from the journal that it was published in, which is called Forensic Science Journal.
Now, it was originally written by well-known anti-vaxxers like Harvey Reich and Peter McCullough, who is one of the men behind the Supplements Grifters company, the wellness company, and he was also a previous Rogan guest.
But this study was actually an article in the pay-for-play Elsevier line of science journals, and this is the reason it was given for why it was withdrawn.
There's four bullets.
Inappropriate citation of references.
Inappropriate design of methodology.
Errors, misrepresentation, and lack of factual support for the conclusions.
And failure to recognize and cite disconfirming evidence.
You know, all the things that make a study a study.
Yeah, that's a pretty bad list, my gosh.
Yeah, and of course the authors are all up in arms saying that it's not fair.
Anyway, before withdrawing the article, the journal editor shared their concerns with the authors, and apparently the replies from Reesh McCullough and team were insufficient, so they had two independent peer reviewers brought in, and they found that their responses did not sufficiently address the concerns raised by the community, and that it was not suitable for publication in the journal.
So, of course, my first question is, why wasn't this discovered in the first round of peer review?
But given that Elsevier has a shaky history of publication, it's honestly not that shocking.
With these sorts of journals, it's not hard to actually get published, sadly.
Now, the misinformation around sudden vaccine deaths is still out there.
And just like the withdrawal of Andrew Wakefield's bogus study that connected vaccines with autism, I know that anti-vaxxers are going to take this new withdrawal as further evidence that there's a cover-up going on by the deep state.
In the journal's defense, I'm glad that the editors finally saw it for what it was, which is propaganda masquerading as science.
Yeah, for those who are really invested, it's not going to make a shred of difference.
They're just going to say that Elsevier is fake news, it's part of the lamestream media, that they're corrupt, they were paid off, and so on.
Most likely.
It's all the same reasons, the same argument as for why ivermectin turned out not actually
to be helpful with COVID, because all of the studies were suppressed.
This is the latest installment in the leopards eating people's faces party saga.
It's got a little bit of everything.
MAGA cult dynamics, guns, racial politics, QAnon-style conspiracism, and even some transphobia for good measure.
Everyone remembers Kyle Rittenhouse.
Yes.
You probably hadn't thought of him in a while, so you're welcome.
You know, this is the fresh-faced 17-year-old boy who chose to travel the 20 miles from Antioch, Illinois to Kenosha, Wisconsin with an AR-15 during civil unrest following the shooting of Jacob Blake in 2020.
Oddly enough, having arrived at an angry and chaotic riot over racial injustice carrying
a large semi-automatic weapon, events unfolded in such a way that he shot three men, two
of whom died.
And of course, Rittenhouse became a national hero to MAGA, who helped him raise hundreds
of thousands of dollars for legal fees.
Kyle was eventually found not guilty by reason of self-defense, which given the on-the-ground
details kind of made sense, but given that he had traveled 20 miles with an AR into a
protest, it did look to some, including me, that he thought it was a golden opportunity
to go shoot someone.
He and his mom, who drove him actually to Kenosha with his purely defensive assault rifle, then visited Trump after he was acquitted, as you do.
The president told the press that Rittenhouse shouldn't have had to stand trial.
He said it was prosecutorial misconduct.
And that Kyle was a really nice young man.
Or was he?
Cut to this past week, and the QAnon types in MAGA World had decided that the really nice young man had secretly been a woman all along.
They transvestigated the hell out of their boy, down to the younger and chubbier photos with circles and arrows and pseudoscientific analysis of how he actually had female skeletal markers.
We saw Kyle in his police cadet uniform, his firefighter outfit, looking very proud of himself, of course.
Even those famous pics of him strolling past police in a backwards ball cap nonchalantly carrying his gun.
And all of this now supposedly revealed that he was female.
Then, they made obviously photoshopped images of him in makeup and women's clothing.
Because A, what could be a worse insult for someone on the right?
And B, big if true, what more awful a betrayal could these bigots imagine?
Did this actually also invalidate his actions that day?
Like, was his aggression at Kenosha that he was acquitted for, was that just a mistake then or part of his profile that's now sort of compromised in their eyes?
I see you've fallen into my trap and assumed that there must be some consistency here in the conspiracy.
Yeah, I don't get it.
Past proves future or future proves past or something.
Yeah, none of it makes any sense.
This was part actually of a bullying campaign.
Triggered by the now 21-year-old Redmouse tweeting that he would be writing in Ron Paul's name on election day as a protest vote.
Why?
Because apparently Donald Trump is not, in Kyle's own words, uncompromisable enough on gun rights.
So on his end, this kind of smacks to me of Rittenhouse trying to draw attention to his mission because he's the new outreach director of Texas Gun Rights, a group that advocates for complete and utter freedom for anyone to get guns for any reason whatsoever of any kind.
It's going to be great, my dudes.
I imagine him saying, I'll apply pressure to Trump by adopting a position to the right of his.
And then turn around and say I support him later, after his people reach out to me with reassurances.
My 1.2 million followers on Twitter will love it.
And in the end, that's kind of what happened.
But over a 12-hour period in between, the hardcore MAGA QAnon cult weirdos clapped back hard against Kyle's disloyalty.
It couldn't be that he just had an original idea or disagreed with their dear leader on a policy issue.
No, he must be a Freemason, as evidenced by the symbolism of him standing with his hand tucked into his suit jacket in court.
He must be an infiltrator sent by the Cabal.
He's secretly a trans woman.
Most grotesquely, they did photo comparisons to a tragically murdered child, asserting that Rittenhouse was actually one of the supposed crisis actors.
at Sandy Hook. Oh wow, so it was just a total grab bag.
Yeah, absolutely awful. But I didn't think the leopards eating people's faces party would try to
eat my face, cried Kyle Rittenhouse before logging back onto Elon Musk's shitter and saying,
over the past 12 hours, I've had a series of productive conversations with members of the Trump team,
and I'm confident he will be a strong ally that gun owners need to defend our Second Amendment
rights.
My comments made last night were ill-informed and unproductive.
I'm 100% behind Donald Trump and encouraging every gun owner to join me in helping send him back to the White House.
So if you're keeping score at home, Rittenhouse, Tim Pool, and Joe Rogan all came out criticizing Trump, and within a day, all of them pledged their allegiance.
The independent thinkers all pledged their allegiance back to Trump.
Is that correct?
Yep, pretty much.
You know, I have to agree with Travis View here on QAA, who remarked recently that I think we're seeing a new mainstreaming of transvestigation And it's going to lead to really bad places.
Like, I think the Rittenhouse saga proves that even the most ardent MAGA supporters aren't exempt from it.
But, you know, just the week before we saw it more typically mobilized against Iman Khalif of the Olympics, you know, and she's recently retained legal representation in Paris with the intent to sue the social media titans who kicked off this, you know, harassment campaign for defamation.
I think a lesson here is that the warnings of trans rights activists over past years that transphobia can actually rebound and target anyone are on point, because in the absence of detailed medical data that is and should be private to every person, you know, the panic is really based on policing gender presentation according to this essentialist bias that's reinforced by looking at just pictures, like it's just pictures, it's just appearances, which just, you know, sort of feed into assumptions and bigotries.
You know, it's such a loaded topic, Matthew.
I think There's at least three things going on here that it's helpful to disambiguate.
I mean, the first is QAnon-style posting.
It's ludicrous.
It's paranoid.
It's conspiratorial.
It claims to expose the hidden truths, and it might use side-by-side photo comparisons or screenshots with arrows and circles as evidence.
So that's what we see with Kyle Rittenhouse.
Just as we saw it with Alex Jones-style claims about Michelle Obama being a man, we've also seen it with Candace Owens' fixation on the French president's wife, right?
The axiom here is that being trans is very bad, and the elites are hiding it for some nefarious reason.
Yeah?
Yeah.
It's the same style of reasoning that James Lindsay uses when he says Kamala Harris is flashing Luciferian Marxist hand signals from the podium because she looks like Baphomet if you squint your eyes just right.
Or with what we saw actually in 2020 with celebrities posting videos from home in which they didn't look as glamorous as they do on TV sets.
And that was taken as evidence that their adrenochrome supply was low.
So hashtag cabal.
This is all complete nonsense.
Then you have the second category and you know, you're bringing up these, these two now gold medal boxers at the Olympics.
And in this category, I think there are just trigger happy anti-trans culture war bigots who rush to claim that Imani Khalifa must be secretly transgender because her accomplished opponent at the Olympics after 46 seconds quit and said she'd never been hit so hard.
So obviously she's transgender.
She's hiding it.
And this is what Kamala Harris wants.
Men punching women in the face.
Hashtag woke Olympics.
And that's also just bullshit.
Then you have this third category, which is people who are neither QAnon conspiracists nor anti-woke transphobes.
And I think it's good to disambiguate some of this.
These folks are focused more on safety and fairness in women's sports.
Turns out there is this rare differences of sexual development or intersex condition called 5-alpha reductase deficiency 2.
Turns out it's 140 times more prevalent in elite women's sports than in the general population because of the physical advantages it gives.
And it's known that several previous gold medalists actually have this condition, most prominently South African runner Kastor Samanya.
And it's also known that both Halife and Lin Yuting were disqualified from the female category at the World Championships a year ago.
Based on two different rounds of test results that classified them as not meeting the genetic criteria for competition, according to that governing body.
Which hasn't shown its work, right?
We covered this last week.
Yeah, yeah.
So we, you know, there are sort of complicating privacy issues there, but that governing body has also fallen into disrepute.
Yeah.
So the truth is, as you say, we don't know for sure, but this is a real thing.
It's a real conundrum for everyone, for the athletes with 5ARD.
For their opponents and for the governing bodies.
And there's not currently an agreed upon policy solution.
So to me, lumping it all in together with the previous two categories that I've described here just seems like a mistake.
Well, but it does point to a trend that globally we have this very powerful influence that is rooted in gender essentialism that wants to fly off the handle and make assumptions about who is what based on very, very little evidence.
And then to take that to such extremes that it winds up being a global harassment campaign.
Those things are very, very much tied together.
Yeah, that's the second category.
So the third category is just saying, hey, you know, if someone has XY chromosomes and they have a specific set of advantages that are demonstrable, that's an issue that we're trying to sort out together.
Nobody in that third category made a fuss that led to the global harassment of Iman Khalif.
Nobody did that.
That's not where that was coming from.
Agreed.
People were considering that within the IOC, within the failed practices of the IAB, but nobody else was doing that.
You know, very sort of, you know, institutional granular level thing that was being figured out by institutions and their athletes and their coaches.
Great.
So, nobody was in that third category that was actually causing harassment online.
Well, that's not completely true, because there were some boxers who came out and apologized after they found out that she was not transgender, but immediately jumped on the train from the misinformation, later walked it back.
I watched at least two videos of professional athletes doing that, so I wouldn't say nobody, but I would say the speed at which it traveled made it very confusing for people who were in that third category.
Yeah, no, and Matthew, I agree with you that those are distinct categories.
That's kind of my point.
And I don't think that the sincere efforts to try to disentangle what is a very difficult issue for everyone concerned adds up, you know, essentially to transphobia or to...
But it's like a meta issue around how the DSD athletes are being classified,
then becomes justification for the harassment campaign because it's an underlying complexity.
But the underlying complexity is actually being dealt with by the appropriate officials in the IOC.
Well, I don't think it has actually been dealt with. I think we're in the midst of a difficult process.
Yeah, they're trying to figure it out.
Yeah, so I agree with you.
you, you can 100% try to wrestle with this very difficult situation that there isn't
really a satisfying solution for yet or perhaps ever while simultaneously condemning harassment
campaigns and spreading of misinformation and jumping to conclusions.
Okay, so right about now, I'm starting to wonder about the wisdom of having spent so
much time understanding the strange world of RFK Jr., who I think we should really now
tag Sideshow Bob.
We did a book chapter, we did a Time Magazine feature, we did about eight dedicated episodes, and now our man is circling the toilet, polling at 5% or less.
What was it all for?
Julian, Derek, what were we doing?
I think at the very best, RFK Jr.
has now assumed the role of backup media punchline for the political fail economy, following whatever J.D.
Vance has been up to.
J.D.
proudly says childless people are sociopaths, and RFK Jr.
says, hold my beer, there may be more of my family's former nannies out there who start accusing me of sexual assault because I'm no church boy, he said.
JD Vance tries to make a joke about Dems thinking that liking Diet Mountain Dew is racist, and RFK Jr.
elbows in and tells Roseanne Barr, who's the first celebrity to endorse QAnon, let me tell you about the time I dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park because my drunk friends thought it would be funny.
This was not in his freshman year, by the way.
He was 60 years old at the time.
So he hasn't done a campaign event since July 9th.
There's the assassination attempt on Trump, and right after that, Kennedy's son leaks a video of him talking with Trump.
You said correctly, Derek, that he took that down once it got leaked.
But they're on the phone together, and Trump is offering him a job.
And then the Harris substitution has cut his poll numbers at least in half, and as I'm writing this, he's still on the ballot on 29 states, but all of that is just probably moot because as of Monday this week, he lost a lawsuit in New York State brought by Democratic citizens challenging his claim that he's a current resident of Katona, New York, because of course he's been living in Malibu for years.
So the judge ruled that he lied about his permanent address, Who knew?
Who knew he could do such a thing?
And that was on the nominating paperwork.
And that invalidated the signatures that his campaign collected.
Look, I get my four addresses confused all the time.
And then there's my vacation.
I know.
Yeah, well, Kennedy immediately tweeted that, of course, this was an attack by the DNC, and of course he would appeal it.
Yeah, and the names of the streets on your house in the Hamptons and your place in Malibu,
they're kind of similar.
Yeah, well, Kennedy immediately tweeted that, of course, this was an attack by the DNC.
And of course, he would appeal it.
Elon tweeted in support of him.
But hey, he's got endorsements from Russell Brand.
You mentioned, Derek, that Joe Rogan and Tim Poole ran afoul of the MAGA crowd because they said positive things about RFK Jr.
on one day, and then hours later, you know, the MAGA followers went apeshit and they had to walk it back.
So I guess he's just got Russell Brand.
For me, I dug into Sideshow Bobby's life and times because I think there was a moment there when I thought he might be competitive or more disruptive in terms of splitting the Democratic vote.
But beyond that, I do find him a fascinating pastiche of cultic personality, New Age grift, and post-Catholic sentimentality.
I think I also just got bitten by the Kennedy bug.
And I think the larger reason, however, that we tracked him is that he came to embody the hopes and dreams of many yoga and wellness people.
Charles Eisenstein became an early adopter and then took a job as his messaging director.
Aubrey Marcus took ayahuasca and pledged to support Bobby to the end with a sword.
I think our take on this enthusiasm was that Bobby provided an erstwhile, apolitical wellness demographic with a long-awaited chance at social relevance.
The New Agers were finally set to bring their dreams into reality, and when Bobby announced his run in April of 2023, he provided them with a legitimizing redemption arc from their pandemic-era, red-pilled nonsense.
Yeah, so they didn't just have to support Trump, right?
Right.
That could be your take.
I mean, my take is that I was just drawn into how much anti-vax misinformation he continues to spread, so that was my main impetus for so much coverage.
Yeah, I mean, I guess my This Week in Conspiratuality on Sideshow with Bobby isn't so much of a story, but it's a question, which is, what will happen to the tens or hundreds of thousands of anti-vax Granola moms and plastic shaman types who are now watching their hero just cover himself in shit every day.
Like, what are they going to take away from this experience?
It seems like there's an obvious fork in the road, which is to either retreat into the apolitical self-project again, or to realize that politics is more than contrarian vibes and sort of like romantic nostalgia.
I think they face a hard question.
And I also think there might be signs that they are mulling it over because Charles Eisenstein hasn't published anything to his sub stack since June.
And on July 30th, Aubrey Marcus scrubbed his Instagram grid except for a single post that said that he was going dark for an indefinite period.
I mean, that could mean anything, including personal travails, but I think this comment on the Marcus Farewell post is pointing in a really plausible direction.
So, the commenter says, if I posted nonstop like a cult leader about RFK the way Aubrey has, I'd want to disappear also.
More will come out about this arrangement, which has been lunacy.
My vote would be that they return to the apolitical self-project because, as we've said often on this podcast, the roots of this very podcast go back to 2012 when we were talking about the fact that yoga people, wellness people, were not political.
At least for some of them, it appears that RFK gave them some semblance of politics or wanting to get engaged again.
Yeah.
So this gives them an easy out to be like, no, it's not about politics anyway.
And you already see that in coming out of COVID in so many ways, people saying, oh, this, you know, what we really need to focus on is the self.
So that's where I guess most of them would go.
Yeah, I think 2012 is a really good reference point, right?
Because what I remember watching during 2012 is all of these yoga and wellness folks getting super
caught up in the supposed Mayan prophecy and what it was going to mean when
December 23rd 2012 rolled around and everything changed and the
earth's poles reversed and the ushering in of the new whatever it
was going to be was going to happen and maybe it would be cataclysmic or
maybe it would just be we'd all be bathed in light.
The Great Awakening was very similar to that.
And in both cases, I think most of what we see is people acting like they never said
any of that stuff and just continuing to sell their products.
As we've been immersed in the undeniable wave of hopeful Kamala Wall's exuberance, the legacy
media recently dubbed it a return to joy in our politics.
We've had hip-hop stars and line drummers making the crowd sway and sing, and that one white kid who turned out to be a seasoned youth organizer named Parker Short briefly went viral for his enthusiasm, dancing and rapping along in the stands to Kendrick Lamar's They Not Like Us.
It got millions of views on TikTok and Twitter.
It was covered in print media and on local TV news in Atlanta.
It got him interviewed on MSNBC as well.
And that moment was indicative of the pop culture support for Kamala Walls and their deliberately aligning both with hip hop culture, especially in the South where they started the campaign, and with Gen Z.
While artists like Quavo, Megan Thee Stallion, Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, and Taylor Swift all may have some cross-generational appeal, the decision to incorporate social media branding that referenced Charli XCX's album Brat seemed like a savvy move appealing to voters who just came of age, and there's some sort of disagreement about how effective that was.
If the message is that they're really not like us, The difference in celebrity support underlines it.
So Trump has people like Kid Rock, Ted Nugent, Roseanne Barr, Jim Caviezel, Elon Musk, Amber Rose, and poor old Kanye West.
But the Dems have Beyonce, John Legend, George Clooney, Mark Cuban, Charlie XCX, and Barack Obama.
Speaking of which, is there a single former president who's actually endorsing Trump?
Beyonce's 2016 song, Freedom, has emerged as the official Democrat campaign anthem.
And the candidate's stump speech is a reclamation of freedom, patriotism, family values.
It's really hitting the spot as record crowds turn out for rallies to sing and dance and cheer on their newly ascendant heroes.
We could probably do an entire episode on the music that's being played at rallies, both sides of the rallies, which would kind of be fascinating.
But landing on freedom is such an important move.
I mean, first of all, the fact that Beyonce cleared it that day when the Harris campaign reached out says something because she doesn't Really like her music being used in a lot of places.
But that song in particular, I became a huge Beyonce fan with Lemonade, and that was on Lemonade.
And when that song came out, it was her bringing Kendrick up another level, because that's kind of what she does when you're ready for mainstream.
I mean, he was already huge, don't get me wrong, but a collaboration with Beyonce is a big thing.
And for them to basically take Critical race theory, which we know drives the right nuts, and put it into a song because the song is actually about having freedom as African Americans and that being the spotlight, that big picture view of what is driving that campaign, it means so many things as you flagged, but I don't want to miss out on that because
That was a very specific moment in time coming through the Black Life Matters moment, which obviously still is going on, but that particular period.
And now having that song represent everything about this movement is so on point, and I'm so glad that you cleared that music.
Yeah.
It feels really strong.
As we flagged at the top today, and as the topic of this episode alludes to, the Harris-Walls messaging has not been all soaring, when they go low, we go high rhetoric.
There's another quality in the mix.
Dems have finally learned, it seems, to embrace trolling.
And we see it when VP candidate Tim Walls is at the podium listing off how each successive crowd in the raucous swing state tour has been bigger And then he says, but nobody really pays that much attention to crowd size anyway, do they?
And obviously he knows he's digging at Trump's insecure obsession with a wry smile and the crowd gets it.
It's there when Kamala's now familiar stump speech compares her record as a prosecutor against Trump's record as a criminal.
And she primes the crowd for the punchline that she knows Donald Trump's type.
And when she taunted him as being afraid to debate her, but still having plenty to say about her behind her back, if you've got something to say, Donald, say it to my face.
Also the Harris campaign creating a truth social account and their first post was about crowd sizes and throwing pictures up there.
That to me was peak trolling in a good way.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Perfect.
And you know, the thing is she will get everyone chanting, say it to my face.
She'll get everyone sort of nodding along with like, oh yeah, you know his type and applauding that wildly.
But the moment the crowd starts chanting, lock him up, I noticed that both of them, both Kamala and Walls, are very disciplined in terms of shutting that down and saying, well, let the courts deal with that.
We just want to really beat him decisively in November.
So the pre-selection interview comments by Wahls during the Veepstakes that endeared him to a wider audience were about how Trump and Vance were just plain weird.
And everyone's been talking about this for a few weeks now.
Left-leaning pundits and Democrat surrogates were delighted to then take it on and use that word weird every chance they got when describing the other side.
This was new.
And interesting, maybe a little uncomfortable for some of us.
And we have some slightly different takes here on the podcast, which we'll get into shortly.
And then came the memes that made fun of JD Vance for completely fabricated claims that he had both couch and dolphin sexual fetishes.
And these tiptoed a little closer to Being willing to engage in a campaign of sexual shaming that also was based only on misinformation, as long as it advantaged our side, or really disinformation.
So I'm just thinking about the dividing line between these trolling tactics and, you know, how then it gets erased when Tim Walz quips to the roaring crowd in Philadelphia that he can't wait to debate Vance if he can get up off the couch and make the effort to show up.
So we've got this spectrum that I've been trying to outline here between Kamala and Walls' exuberant positive messaging, the celebrity culture star and soul power, and then trolling that calls Trump and Vance creepy and weird as hell.
And then this no-holds-barred post-truth meme warfare.
So, Matthew, where would you like to start?
I want to talk about the order of events a little bit because I think that speaks to our title today, The Dems Learn to Shitpost, with the capital D being pivotal because, you know, dirtbag leftists who begrudgingly vote Democrat year after year have been shitposting ever since Bernie got railroaded in
2016, according to them. So, here's how I see it. I think, you know, you might disagree.
We'll see. The viral rumor that J.D.
Vance fucked a couch, that came first. It erupted on July 15th from a single shitpost tweet. I'll
go into in a bit. It's eight days later that Tim Walz seems to naturally stumble into,
these guys are weird, his riff on Morning Joe, which was very natural, completely authentic,
off the cuff.
But within hours, the line becomes a standard Democrat talking point and basically functions as the family-friendly version of the couch fucking shitpost.
So we have two streams of, like, these guys are perverts discourse with each giving permission and energy to the other.
But, you know, the Harris campaign is only going to refer to one of them.
They're only going to run with one of them.
But by August 7th, wholesome coach Tim feels like he has the capital to bring those together, as you say, Julian, and make the couch joke at a primetime rally full of kids.
And that's where the capital D Democrats learn to shitpost.
So are you saying that he knew about the couch thing and he's kind of referencing it by saying that they're weird and it's only once he gets up a good head of steam that he... No.
Okay.
No.
No, I think it's like serendipity.
I think he shows up on Morning Joe, he does his thing, he speaks the way he speaks, and then when it takes off and it becomes part of the democratic marketing machine overnight, it's like the memo went out.
Everybody got the same bullet points.
And then these two things begin to blend together.
It was very clear online that the weirdness, the creepiness, it wasn't just weird.
Creepy got added in later, right?
And those all begin to fold into, you know, your feed becomes this blur of couch memes and then walls giving various speeches.
Like, there's a family-friendly version, and there's a Twitter shitpost version.
And those things, I feel, really begin to blend together, and the Democratic Party knows that.
And then he knows that, and that's why he pings it at the rally.
So, I mean, I think that to really look at how this new turn emerges, it might be good to go back to what people feel and think about Hillbilly Elegy, because this stuff focuses on J.D.
Vance to begin with.
Now, I didn't take the time to read the book, But there's a critical consensus at this point that I pretty much trust that it's his self-serving hero's journey out of a pastiche of time-worn Appalachian tropes.
The book pretends, critics say, to offer a psychohistory of the region, but really it served as a platform for a shifting and transcendent self-identity.
He sold it well enough to become a liberal media darling for a few years at the outset of Trump's first term.
And, you know, it was really a mouthpiece for a series of stereotypes that I think we all wanted to know better.
But now there's eight years of close reading and then watching him skitter just completely soulless towards any crumb of attention that's offered to him.
And that shows his apparent truth-telling to be as hollow as the crevice between two couch cushions.
Oh, you went there, you went there!
Of course I did.
Of course we're gonna laugh at the thought of him humping a couch, especially given how humorless he is about everyone else's sexuality.
He's a post-truth figure, cobbling together, shifting, incoherent ideas that serve money and power, and those ideas gain moral weight just simply through the algorithms.
We know that his politics are resentful, but it's the style that I want to point at here, because I think it says something about what happens when he gets trolled.
His style is postmodern lazy.
He's like a magpie, picking up shiny influences and recycling them through the lens of his own self-references.
It's all of the selfish relativism that Jordan Peterson whines about, but then can't recognize in himself.
Wow, this is interesting.
I want to see where you're going with this.
I think it's important, this post-truth, pseudo-philosophical repurposing of psychology and mythology, which we really know is what Jordan Peterson has been doing, towards a really ugly far-right ideology.
does seem to be the amoral shadow of the worst and most superficial interpretations of postmodern ideas that these guys rage about being at the heart of wokeness, right?
So I'm thinking about- That's exactly it.
Peterson and Vance and Lindsay and Chris Rufo, they all do the same thing, so much so that I might have a conversation with my neighbors who listen to Joe Rogan and they'll say, yeah, it's because of, you know, postmodern Marxism that we're in this terrible predicament.
Yeah, and so what they'll then do with it is say here that, you know, for example, the really low-hanging example is that Efforts to protect civil rights legislation from being gutted is really just rooted in racist impulses that divide people into categories when we're all just Americans.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, so in terms of right-wing political influence, this heritage that Vance carries snakes back through Sean Spicer as Trump's, you know, presidential press secretary.
Bush-era declarations of alternative facts ruling the day, and then, you know, Rush Limbaugh's attacks on mainstream media.
But in the online world, Vance is also the product of the trollosphere, where even the attempt to adhere to facts is held in contempt, where the rhetoric of memes has incubated, where QAnon began as a joke about a fictional White House insider revealing deep secrets that are bullshit.
Because bullshitting is Vance's leading strength, especially when it's clear that Trump chose him on the promise that he wouldn't cave like Mike Pence, but that he would support any future false claim of electoral fraud.
And as for Trump, NPR finds 162 lies and distortions in his 64-minute Mar-a-Lago presser on August 8th.
So, what does it mean, then, when the Democratic Party responds?
Not exactly in kind, because it's not coming from the top, but in a parallel form.
Business Insider did the great work of tracking down Rick, which is a pseudonym for the guy who launched the Vance fucks couches movement.
And, you know, that included inspiring someone who created fake screenshots of the made-up text as if it were part of the original e-book.
Very convincing.
I was actually taken in for about five seconds.
Now, Rick is an English Lit major who loathes Vance and felt compelled to do something absurd, but he's not comfortable with thinking that he's now being accused of peddling misinformation.
Here's his rationale from Business Insider.
Perhaps, Rick said, whether Vance actually had carnal knowledge of one or more couches is immaterial.
Rick suggested Vance making love to a couch may best be viewed as what Werner Herzog has described as the ecstatic truth, in Herzog's words, a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual, encompassing falsehoods that make some essence of the man visible.
Then this is what really pricks up my ears.
Rick said that he pseudo-authenticated his post with fake page numbers from Hillbilly Elegy in the style of Jorge Luis Borges, whose parodies of officialdom he always found hilarious, he explained.
And Borges, by the way, was a relentless critic of Nazism.
OK, so we have this guy who obviously has some education.
He's got a wicked sense of humor.
Here he is doing a straight-faced meta troll to the media as if his deliberately dishonest meme has some actual intellectual and political validity.
It's not literally true, but it reaches for something that is true about the essence of the man.
Yeah, it's essentially true.
And I think this would have been fine in 1995.
I don't think he really accounted for the internet.
And so here's the paradox for me, at least.
Vance's right-wing, lazy postmodern, self-referential pastiche gets cut to pieces on Twitter by a leftist postmodern joke that mimics the anti-fascist literature of 80 years ago.
Here we have two forms of disruptive bullshit.
But they're flowing in opposite directions.
One's trying to undermine democracy, and the other is trying to undermine the stuffed shirt.
But the problem is that Rick's brand of bullshit requires a particular prior commitment to satire, a drive to deconstruct the grandiosity of the conservative.
Hillbilly Elegy offered a meta-narrative of conservative resentment and redemption.
And as Francois Lyotard puts it, postmodernism is an attitude of incredulity towards meta-narratives.
And what Rick is saying is, J.D., you told us nothing about Appalachia or human psychology.
You basically fucked the couch.
And this is the same attitude that left-wing deconstructionists have always used to troll reactionaries.
But, on the left, that incredulity also applied to things like grand stories of legal and medical progress, the triumph of liberal democracy, the ascendancy of science, American exceptionalism, or capitalism as the final and best form of human economy.
So, traditionally, Rick's technique is at home criticizing the liberal center as it is criticizing the right, because like Vance, it also criticizes institutions of power and knowledge.
And that's where it gets messy, especially in meme form, because Rick can have this fancy left-wing theory behind how he tells the joke, but that's going to be lost on most people.
MAGA folks are not going to feel the ecstasy of Werner Herzog telling lies that are true.
They're going to remember that the entire blue wave of the country lied about J.D.
Vance's sex life for a cheap laugh.
And when that blue wave is next in charge of telling them to all, like, follow the science or please get vaccinated, they're going to have one more reason to say, like, why should we believe anything that you say?
They're going to say that anyway.
I mean, that's been a decade plus in the making.
We're not going to out-rationalize them.
It wasn't working.
It's not going to work.
We've been screaming about Project 2025 for nearly a year.
Up until three weeks ago, the entire project of the left has been like, hey, look at Project 2025.
And the right was like, meh, no, we're not going to look at that.
So the idea that we're going to speak across the aisle at this particular point in time is just absurd to me.
But we're also looking at a situation that, recently, Trump, in his flailing, has come out with this idea that Harris' plane was AI-generated, the crowd was around there, and then something came up that was pretty interesting.
And Renee Diresta brought this up, about the fact that AI doesn't just move in one direction.
You know, these AI images or voices or videos are going to influence us, but the actual fact that insinuating that AI could.
And on Morning Joe, they talked about the other morning that when the Access Hollywood tape came out, Trump said, what if that's an AI voice?
So this has been a long time in the making.
To the broader point, you brought up meme before.
And as it happens, I'm reading a book on nanotechnology at the moment.
And the author, K. Eric Drexler, discusses Richard Dawkins.
And I want to flag here, Dawkins has been in the news lately for a lot of shitty reasons.
And I'm not personally a fan at the moment.
But he is the man who coined the term meme.
And that plays a very big component in this story and in much of our online life.
And Drexler points out that Dawkins pointed out that successful replicators or memes
don't need truth.
And so when you're talking about this guy, Rick, and I also read that Business Insider
article, it was really funny.
But when you're talking about him, I would say he probably did a thousand posts that
were similar in some capacity to this over the course of his online life.
Like, you brought up shit posters.
This has been something that has been going on for a long time, just not at scale.
Sure.
So why now did that random post that he seems to be trying to justify for whatever way catch on?
It's because the audience was ready to accept it and there was an actual movement, and that's how memes move through cultures.
I post dozens of times, not that much, dozens of times per week.
All of my stuff doesn't go viral.
That's true for all of us.
All of a sudden, something catches.
We're like, oh, because there's an audience ready and waiting for that.
And so in this idea of whether or not this works, in my estimation, it absolutely works.
And that's because Thinking that this type of approach only appeals to or can appeal to a broad audience is fallacious by its very nature.
There is no language that anyone can speak that is going to appeal to everyone.
Whenever I hear a politician talk about unifying, I'm like, yeah, whatever.
You're just doing politician speak.
That doesn't appeal to me.
Fucking a couch?
It doesn't matter if it's true or not.
He is the type of guy that could.
I could foresee that.
And the genius of this move to me was that it took the wind out of his sails.
It got him off of all the bullshit he was saying and put him on the defense.
And from my perspective, this isn't a game.
This is real life right now, and it's been treated like a game in a lot of ways by the right.
So we're playing.
We're finally playing.
And guess what?
It doesn't always have to be fair for it to be effective.
And if that results in Harris Wall's victory in November, then this absolutely is worth it to me.
There's so many layers, right?
I mean, I think There's there's official Democrat platform.
There is political strategy in terms of like what the surrogates are saying.
Right.
There's the talking points.
There's the stump speeches.
There's which policies are being talked about.
There's the tactics of like, oh, I'm going to say I know Donald Trump's type because he's a convicted felon.
And then there's like random people on the Internet who are just posting stuff.
And so I think part of what we're talking about is random people on the Internet who are just posting stuff, who happen to be more left leaning, have They've experimented successfully, it seems.
They may have been experimenting before, but now it's come to all of our attention that they've experimented with a trolling kind of tactic that has been used by the right going back maybe 10 years or something in terms of this kind of online material.
Like, I never retweeted any of the couch fucking or the dolphin porn memes because it's like, it's not true.
It's just a dumb joke.
It's just dumb stuff that people post on the internet.
It's the meme as a joking art form that has some kind of political valence.
I think that Walls referencing it was a mistake.
And I think he made that mistake because I doubt that he is well-versed enough in internet culture or in like all of the stuff that we've been studying for
the last four years to understand that he's playing with fire.
Like, like you're saying, Matthew, when he invokes something like that for a cheap laugh, at the same time
it is just a cheap laugh. And I do like the meme that went around which said,
we will acknowledge that JD Vance, that we have no evidence JD Vance.
Vance fucked a couch the moment you acknowledge there's no evidence that the 2020 election was stolen.
So Julian, I do disagree with you on not enjoying walls because I think that personally, and we're going to get more into this in the last section, but I think that flattens him.
as a human being saying that should be off guard. I know politicians on the stump need to be held to
a higher standard in certain capacity, but part of the big dad energy we're about to talk about
to me is the fact that it's a guy who makes dad jokes, but also fucks around.
From where I come from, my culture in New Jersey, which I know I talk about all the time,
but the sarcastic dad figure, that is exactly the type of zinger that goes in and has layers,
as you said, of meaning that are important.
And so what I said earlier about there is going to be no one language that's going to appeal to everyone.
We're focusing on this issue today, and I think that's fine, but it is one moment of like, what, two hours of speech where most of it was policy and trying to bring joy back?
And it's just like that fucking ray gun bullshit Olympic breakdancing moment that people are not looking at all the amazing breakdancing going on because something co-opted all of it.
And so in that sense, I am sad that that's taking up so much oxygen, but I personally
don't think it was a mistake.
Okay, so then we come to walls.
And it's good because, Derek, I don't think it's about sort of rationalizing how we communicate
or expecting a better response from the MAGA universe.
It's about whether or not you're going to get back what you put out there when what we get from the MAGA universe is a politics of resentment and humiliation.
So, that's why I want to talk about Walls in this particular way.
Let the comment rip around these guys are just weird.
I laughed really hard because I recognize that guy.
I recognize that feeling.
And I also had some misgivings pretty quickly because as you said, Julian, there's several layers of communication at play.
And, you know, it put me in mind of how political analysts talk about the beer test, or, you know, is this a guy you want to have a beer with?
That particular comment, along with, you know, his mugging, his taking a beat for the laughs, it plays really well, and I think it passes the beer test.
Yeah, it definitely passes the beer test.
I think it does something else, too, though, Matthew, that maybe works on a couple levels.
There's this common sense, middle American, working class, Democrat archetype that Walls embodies, it seems, perfectly.
He's going to express some of the concerns that social justice elites have for a long time, but in language.
And with an affect that has, I think, a more productive impact, it's more relatable for most people.
The classic example is recently he's saying this line, the other guys want to make the least fortunate amongst us scapegoats and the punchline of their jokes.
But we see them as our neighbors.
Uh-huh, right.
Right?
And so with this kind of language, he just undercuts all of the culture war, woke versus anti-woke quicksand.
He doesn't invoke politically correct, scold kind of jargon-laden ideology and convoluted idiosyncratic analysis.
He just makes it about human decency as an American value.
And to me, when he calls the other guys weird, We know he's not calling them autistic or queer.
He's saying they've lost their human decency and they shouldn't be in charge.
Well, when he says it and it stays on the beer level, you know, in his mouth and, you know, making you feel like you're in the room, he can manage it.
He can finesse it.
He can go on to Ezra Klein's show later on and he can face the question, aren't you running the risk of alienating people?
Aren't you repeating that Hillary Clinton smugness with her comment about the basket of deplorables?
and he can respond to Klein with a lot of credibility.
No, it's not smug at all.
He'll say the Republicans who have been my neighbors all my life in rural Minnesota, I love them.
I'm commiserating with them about how weird their leaders have turned out to be.
But then another level takes over when the whole party, as I said before, just receives new talking points
with the words weird and creepy in boldface print, right?
Lifting those words right out of the Midwest and, you know, putting them into the corporate machine.
Whatever was personal or relatable about the comment has suddenly now gone big.
It's going to be in the mouths of surrogates in Albany and Sacramento, and they're not going to be able to pull it off in the same way.
And one of my first thoughts was, oh, oh, he taught in high school for decades.
And I'd expect that he'd be a little bit more circumspect with a word that is a staple in the bully's vocabulary, especially when it comes to, you know, the queer people that he spent his career actually advocating for.
And even there, Walz has context for his own usage of the term because he was the small town football coach that also started the first gay straight alliance in town.
Yeah, I didn't know that before we started working on this.
I'm really glad you said it.
And that kind of underlines what I was saying a moment ago, right?
That it comes back around to But, you know, he might not be as diplomatic as he presents himself on the Ezra Klein Show, because then he turns around and he does the couch joke at that first rally in Philadelphia.
And it comes on the tail end, however, of him saying something really powerful, which is that J.D.
Vance doesn't know anything about rural America if he thinks that it's all about bigotry and self-sabotage.
He said that it's truly shameful that this guy made millions writing a book trashing his childhood culture because that's not what we do to each other in small-town America.
So there are going to be a lot of people who say that I'm nitpicking here, but my main point is that we have to remember how much of the MAGA movement is driven by resentment, shame, alienation, low self-esteem.
And even low self-esteem is something that Walls addresses with his school teacher's experience when he says that everybody knows that bullies have nothing, they have no self-esteem.
But there's a next step to that emotional intelligence flow.
You don't rub their noses in it.
And that's kind of what I'm seeing.
If you think that the popularity of Trump amongst his supporters isn't wrapped up in their identification with him, as misguided as it is, despite his own open contempt for them, You're not going to worry about injecting more shame into the discourse and making his followers feel even worse about themselves.
But he's going to win or he's going to lose.
And if he wins, the insults and humiliation are definitely not worth it.
If he loses, the level of post-election chaos and political violence that the U.S.
will descend into will be related to how humiliated and how ashamed he and his followers feel.
Why was there an insurrection on January 6th?
In part, because Trump and his followers were incapable of losing without erupting, collapsing in shame and indignation that they then had to project outwards.
So, I've got two points.
They're pretty simple.
This stuff is something to be careful with.
And it's not because I feel precious about insults.
Like, I don't have any personal judgments about people who need to goof on JD Vance.
My worry is that it's kind of a tactical mistake that is also, at this point, covering up for a kind of vagueness with regard to policy.
There's no policy yet on the Kamala for President platform.
And secondly, Walls is good enough at Big Dad energy that he doesn't need to play dirty.
And I think he'll probably figure that out.
I hope he doesn't, because I think that would be a real tragedy, given the character that he is.
This entire conversation, it reminds me of What was happening around me too.
So you have a moment in time where all of a sudden there are men being held accountable.
And to step back, I don't think a Harvey Weinstein and an Al Franken are the same thing.
So I think things did get a little convoluted there.
But what I remember clearly are all of the close women in my life.
My wife, my family, good friends, all taking like a deep exhale at that moment because they looked at it and they said, oh, people are finally listening to what we've had to endure our entire lives.
And we had a really strong moment in time there that was beautiful and that started to heal some things and to bring people to account.
Not enough, but some.
And then what happens?
Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, and you have this really strong backlash that was fueled by what you said is correct, resentment, but it was a resentment that was just a mirror of people being like, hey, stop being such assholes.
Women don't deserve this.
And so we get to now, we get to weird and we get to creepy especially.
Two weeks ago, last week, what I start hearing is the same thing.
I hear the women in my life and people that are me online being like, oh, thank God, you're finally calling out these assholes for who they are.
Because these men are fucking creepy.
They're creeping on women.
Project 2025 wants fucking surveillance on our periods.
You want to take away healthcare from us?
That's just fucking weird.
It's a lot of other things.
It's misogynistic.
It's power-seeking.
It's all of the worst traits of this fucking masculinity movement that we've been enduring.
And all of a sudden, they see someone and watching the TikTok videos of women who are like, Tim Walz is the dad that I lost to Fox News.
I shared that with a bunch of people and they sent back saying I started crying watching
that.
Because finally someone steps up and said, these are fucking weird and creepy dudes.
So I'm not going to take that away from them because they actually feel justification.
And the idea that it's going to be some tactical error with what I said, that this is one moment
that's probably getting too much play out of a two hour speech between both candidates
is just short sighted to me.
And again, it flattens who people are and how they react in society.
And I think that once again, we're in a situation where it's like, listen to the women about what they endure all the time, because JD Vance is the guy they have to deal with.
And I personally don't want to take that away from him.
Yeah, I got a brief coming out on Saturday called Big Dad Energy, where I actually lead with that TikTok video that I sent you.
And that's been really, really powerful to look at, at that outpouring.
My point is that MAGA is a vibes-based movement.
It's running on resentment, grievance, venal desires.
And the reason that Project 2025 is so terrifying is that it shows the policy under those vibes, the organization under the chaos.
And, you know, Harrison Walls can talk about how bad it is after the drum corps bangs through, but you know what?
There's still no platform up on the site.
They're three weeks in.
I know they're three weeks in, but they're talking about, they're riding on vibes.
She called for a ceasefire and she said she was going to pursue that.
In the one moment in which she gets challenged so far on lockstepping with Biden on Israel policy, she shows the zip it hand.
And if you combine leaning into weird and creepy with policy vagueness, who are you starting to look like?
That's my point.
There's been a moment after that, though, right?
Yeah, the moment after that, when she met with the leaders of the Uncommitted movement, and there was a brief moment in the meet and greet.
Oh, that was before it.
Okay, it was before it.
But they said, they said, yeah, we think we're going to get a meeting with them.
And then her people came out the next day and said, no, actually, she's not making any concessions.
She's not, you know, going to be talking about You know, a weapons embargo or anything like that, she's not going to meet.
There's a way in which the party is running with something that's very juicy and really, really compelling.
And, you know, I think there's going to be people who are asking for a little bit more.
Yeah, absolutely.
You're right that it struck a note, Derek.
It's got to do more than that.
It's got to do more than that.
It's got to follow through.
But again, it's three weeks in and those policies will come.
I mean, the note that it struck was the note that was needed.
It re-energized or for the first time energized a lot of people.
So go with the vibes.
I am very confident that a predominant amount of policies that will follow from this It's not a red herring.
more in line with an America that I want to live in than if Trump were to win.
Of course, of course.
Nobody, nobody's like arguing that.
That's that's a total red herring.
Like you're not talking to a.
It's not a red herring.
It's it's the it's central.
It's it's it's the three of us talking.
Yeah, there's there's something that I feel you often miss in this is that no one is arguing
on this side that you should you should not be concerned about things like like Israel
It's more saying, who do you want to win?
In terms of what you think a better outcome is going to be for that and other issues that you're concerned about versus what we'll get with Trump.
Sure.
That's no question about that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then we had a brawl a couple of weeks ago about like when do you actually speak about those things and whether or not whether or not you're going to jeopardize the campaign.
Yeah, yeah.
Jeopardize who actually ends up winning.
In terms of the stump speech comment that you just made, there's two moments.
There's one moment where she's like, talk to the hand.
Yeah.
I'm the boss mama here, right?
And then there's another moment she had recently where she said, hold on a second.
This is really important.
We live in a democracy and so everyone's voice matters.
Let me reflect back what I'm actually hearing in the audience, if it's correct, and what your concerns are.
We are working night and day to try to make progress on that, and I absolutely hear your concerns.
We need to cease fire now.
The time is now, and we need to bring all the hostages back.
I thought that was a huge improvement on what she did the first time, and so did a lot of left-leaning commentators.
Was that the same speech as in Detroit?
It was a second occasion.
Oh, it was a different occasion.
It was the next day.
It was the next day or two days later.
It was the next day.
All right.
Yeah, good.
I mean, she's the nominee.
She has the power to go off book like that.
It's good that she does it.
Yeah, yeah.
And to respond to what's actually happening in the crowd.
Now, you know, with regard to this politics of resentment thing, It goes back to something I was saying earlier that I want to come back around to, which is there's been politics of resentment already, right?
That's what you're flagging.
And I feel like we've been in this culture war propaganda kind of, there's a back and forth that happens, right?
There's a rhythm in terms of the different tactics that people are trying in response to one another.
What we've tried on the left for a long time is to do a kind of very superior Jargon-laden, elite-sounding, college-educated analysis of the right and say, you are white supremacists.
You just don't realize it.
You haven't owned it yet.
You haven't worked through your white fragilities.
That's why you don't like it when we say so.
You are transphobes.
You are racist.
There's all of this labeling and then using actually quite convoluted graduate level theory to back it up.
That hasn't worked really well.
That has generated a whole lot of resentment.
Some of it actually warranted, because the people having that stuff put on them are like, no, those are not actually my beliefs, but now you're going to psychoanalyze me and say it's just my white fragility that stops me from owning it and recognizing it as true.
That I think is part of what created a lot of the anti-woke backlash in a way that was palatable to otherwise reasonable people who were somewhat on the left or somewhat in the center or maybe just undecided low information, you know, people who were, who were swayable by that propaganda.
To me, even though I have misgivings about some of the stuff we're talking about on this episode today, it cut through so much of that.
And what you end up seeing is people on the right not knowing how to handle with basically being punched on the nose when they're bullying.
And they're just like, oh, shit, I can't.
Oh, well, we're now J.D.
Vance is going to go on TV and say they are they're being schoolyard bullies and saying mean things.
It's like, really?
You're that.
Oh, is that what we're doing?
You know, it's there is a poetic justice about it.
And there is a sense in which it's it is diffusing something where people on the left often look like pearl clutching elites who are saying, how dare you?
And now we're saying, yeah, fuck you.
And there is something about that that I think definitely has some appeal.
It definitely has appeal and I'm with it.
I have misgivings.
I think the misgivings are warranted because, you know, we're talking about an entire movement that came out of a sense of deep alienation and humiliation.
Yeah, yeah.
The last thing I want to say about that is it seems at this point more likely to me that the people who are kind of redeemable, the people who might actually wake up from the fever dream, I don't know.
I don't know what the percentage is.
There's some, right?
There's a few, right?
I think there are some people who might wake up from the fever dream.
It is a really noxious, deranging fever dream that they've been in the grips of for MAGA, through QAnon, through all of it.
The people who can wake up out of it, I think, are more likely to hear a message like, you know what?
Those obsessions are just creepy and weird.
Then all of the social justice rhetoric that's been coming at them for a long time that they can make a stand against and say, well, I'm anti-woke because that's all just, you know, cultural Marxism or what have you.
Or they can go with Walls speaking directly from the heartland of Minnesota, where he motivated, he moved an incredibly progressive legislative agenda on a razor thin margin as a governor.
We don't need I'm not in favor of saying that people like to fuck dolphins in couches.
people who are already like very much charged up about that.
That's my point.
Oh, I'm not, I'm not in favor of saying that people like to fuck
dolphins and couches.
I think that's, that's like, I'm not endorsing that.
And I will see you didn't, yeah, you didn't share it, right?
It's, it's like, it's, it worked.
It got through.
You're happy for it.
No, no, no.
I, I, no, I'm not happy for it.
I don't think it got through.
I do.
It's just like, it's something that's happening that I'm observing in the, in the culture of internet trash.
Me too.
Here's this weird thing that floated by and it's like, Oh, that's interesting.
I'm not going to like give it my, my thumbs up.
One thing you keep saying, and first of all, Matthew, I want to acknowledge that it's fine that you have
misgivings.
You and I, and Julian and I, and all three of us have different ways of communicating based on our histories.
So Walls speaks much more to me, it seems, than you, and that's totally fine.
No, actually not.
Actually not.
I lived in Wisconsin for years.
My dad's from the Midwest.
I'm much more that than New Jersey.
And Minnesota humor is not New Jersey sarcasm.
They're different sounds.
But you just referenced a moment ago all the progressive legislation he's gone through, which is awesome.
Yeah.
But this is also who he is.
Have you watched every speech he's given over 20 years?
Whenever a TikTok is unearthed about his history, he's always speaking from the heart.
Yeah.
So this is obviously part of him.
So that's what I mean.
Don't flatten the man.
Yeah, maybe he'll get some talking points and maybe there are things to work out, but at the same time, This is effective.
So, from my perspective, it's working, and I don't think the collateral damage down the road is going to be very much compared to what we've had to endure on the right for a very long time.
Yeah, it sounds a little bit, Matthew, like you're making the case that, oh, if we, and this is something that you and I often debate, and you're on the other side of it sometimes, which is like you're saying, oh, if we're not careful, we might really upset those people on the right in ways that will be bad for us down the line if we, you know, if we shame them.
It'll be bad for us, it'll be bad for them.
Wal started the weird thing on Morning Joe by talking about how Thanksgiving dinners had fallen apart.
Yeah.
He's talking about weirdness and estrangement in the context of family, and I'm saying that that is a different conversational, interpersonal context that when it gets upgraded into this sort of corporate messaging machine, It takes on a different flavor.
It's depersonalized.
It becomes sharper.
And it works, and it works.
And I'm saying the fact that it gets lifted out of its cultural context, lifted out of its family origins, it makes it more alienating.
There will be a different impact than just standing in the room and listening to Tim Walz.
That's what I'm saying.
You can't say that.
You can't say that, though, because you're assuming that every other voice it goes into, it will be alienating.
And that's just not true.
I'm not saying every other one.
Some voices, but that's what you said earlier.
You said once it leaves him and goes to other people, it's going to be alienating.
No, it's not.
There are plenty of people who are using it in the same context.
And then like anything, there are other people who are going to take it and then just rip it to shreds and then use it maliciously.
We're talking about how he spoke to the nation because he landed on authenticity.
The thing that's authentic doesn't become a meme without losing a shit ton of emotional valence.
That's what I'm talking about.
There's an intelligence that gets stripped away when things get meme-ified.
That's it.
And then we pay for memes.
We pay for memes down the road.
That sounds like tone policing when people don't like... It's not tone policing!
It's just an observation.
I'm not telling you not to do it.
I said over and over again, I don't begrudge anybody for like laughing about the weird thing or the couch fucking.
I'm saying there can be a price for this.
Let's be sober and think about it.
That's it.
Well, the last thing that I might say is that there's a way that effective Big Dad energy sometimes utilizes healthy shame.
There's a difference between healthy shame and toxic shame.
And sometimes the Big Dad in the room just says, hey, quit doing that.
That's really weird.
Yeah, little boy, you fucked a couch is not healthy shame, right?
I know about the difference between, you know, healthy discouragement and unhealthy discouragement as a dad.
We're talking about the difference between you fucked a couch and, you know, Thanksgiving doesn't feel right because it's weird.
Those are different things.
We'll see if he goes back to it.
I doubt he'll ever reference it again.
We'll see, we'll see.
It worked pretty good, right?
It's hard to put that down once you get great feedback like that, isn't it?
I bet they're having conversations like this behind the scenes.
I hope!
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
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