A civil war inside the Democratic civil war

It's that time again! I'm going on a much-needed vacation. We'll be doing a lighter publishing schedule for the next week or so, but paying readers will still get their now-weekly Garbage Intelligence column from Adam Bumas this Friday and next week. So far he's tackled the thorny relationship between Kalshi and Spotify, tracked down director Uwe Boll to ask him for viewing figures for his film Citizen Vigilante, and wrote the definitive timeline of how Jimothy, the raccoon with short-spine syndrome, went viral.

There’s a whole bunch of odds and ends I want to cover today before I wander off into the woods and, hopefully, completely detox from my various screens and devices. So here’s some garbage for you.

The Democratic Civil War rages on. Last night was another round of primaries where the democratic socialists and socialist-ish Democrats walked away with big some big wins. Not among those wins, however, was Wisconsin State Assemblywoman Francesca Hong, who’s old bad posts kicked off a civil war this week among the insurgent wing of the larger Democratic Civil War (leftist politics, baby).

We’ll get to all that in a sec, but, first, here are some of the more interesting results from yesterday. Rep. Maryam Khan, and DSA member, won her Senate primary in Connecticut. Progressive Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan won her primary. And former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin ousted 14-term Connecticut Rep. John Larson. I wouldn’t classify Bronin as a member of the Democratic Tea Party (he was endorsed by Pete Buttigieg), but he is, at 47, pretty young… for a politician. As Dave Weigel over at Semafor wrote, “Democratic turnout in these races is smashing through records — not always to the benefit of the left. Elderly Democrats are struggling to convince voters that they deserve just two more years in office, to really fight President Donald Trump this time.”

As for Hong, it should be said that even for all the brain-melting discourse about her woke tweets or whatever, she lost by barely a couple percentage points. Though, it’s not entirely clear that, by the end of it, even the progressives and socialists wanted her to win. And I’m sure the establishment centrists of the Democratic Party are breathing a sigh of relief right now that moderate David Crowley won instead of a scary woke socialist, though I, personally, would not run a pro-AI data center candidate in 2026.

While Hong’s campaign has come to a disappointing end, it has, at the very least, produced one of the more insane discourse cycles in recent memory. It turns out there are a lot of white guys on the left who think inclusive language for women and minorities is a dumb fucking waste of time. Who knew?! Drop Site News reporter Julian Andreone wrote, “Americans love economic populism. They want another New Deal. But they are completely turned off by college campus culture warrior performative activism.” OK fine, let’s try it. Curious to find out if economic populism magically makes everyone stop being racist. Or do we just not care about that stuff anymore?

Oh, while we’re on that subject, UnHerd, which is like a British version of Bari Weiss’ Free Press, but even whinier and less relevant, published an incredible essay from a guy who claims his life was ruined after he was fired from a trivia-hosting gig because he pronounced the world “Nicaragua” in a way that sounded like he said the N-word. A true victim of the culture war.

Instead of wasting a whole bunch of time rehashing what I wrote on Monday, I’ll leave you with three takes that I agree with and think basically say the same thing about “wokeness.” First, up, we’ve got podcaster Robert Evans, who wrote, “Literally 100% of the bad things about ‘woke 1’ are just shit that sucks about social media. If you're complaining about ‘Woke’ and not Gamergate, it's because you're a disingenuous prick.” Next up, we’ve got journalist Brian Beutler, who wrote, “It wasn’t Weinstein or the George Floyd killing. It was the exposure of a number of towering injustices and a national majority’s inability to do anything about them via normal democratic processes. Power flowed to where people could have an impact.”

And, third, predating both of those takes, is my personal favorite analysis of social justice, the famous “trashed bathroom” thread from Twitter user @rootsworks. Give it a read! It’s worth it.

Just a quick thing I want to highlight. Nathan J. Robinson, the editor-in-chief of leftist publication Current Affairs, has been melting down about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on X all morning. He’s posted several times about how she rat-fucked Hong in yesterday’s primary.

Luckily for, well, me, I guess, he managed to synthesize a whole of what I just wrote above into one nice, very stupid post: “I can't believe people are really talking about AOC as a left presidential contender when on the eve of a critical primary she decided to produce a totally irrelevant news story about her parenting choices instead of backing the socialist.”

Ah yes, I can’t imagine why one of the most vocal advocates for healthcare reform in the country would be documenting her IVF journey!

Like most people, I do not think about James Franco anymore. I am aware that he is off on the fringes of culture doing weird stuff to get everyone’s attention. But I do not want to take the bait. Unfortunately, Variety reports that Franco is about to star in a vertical microdrama on the app Shortical. And I now feel ready to make a little prediction I’ve been cooking on.

The path back to fame (or something resembling it) for canceled actors has often been via right-wing dreck. Jonathan Majors and Armie Hamer both made profoundly racist action films this year. I think Franco has unlocked another model. There is a lot of money in vertical microdramas. And there are studios — and tech platforms — out there that are convinced they are the future of entertainment. Franco might not be the one who manages to reinvent himself by popping up in vertical microdramas, but mark my words, someone will. In the next year or two, a disgraced actor is going to blow up in a microdrama and have an army of young fans who don’t know any better and that discourse is going to make the woke 1-woke 2 stuff happening right now look very small potatoes.

Mike Clum, the documentarian behind the YouTube documentary, “The Dark, Sad Life of Boogie2988,” is back with another unbelievably grim watch. It’s called “The Sick Mind of EDP445,” which tells the story of Bryant Moreland, better known in a certain corner of YouTube as EDP445. Clum is building a body of work that I would call “prestige lolcow.” I can’t say it’s not well made, but I’m uncomfortable with the entire pursuit. Putting so much focus on the internet’s worst people makes my skin crawl.

An X user actually made it click for me as to why I feel this way. “Lolcow is true crime for boys,” @butleriano wrote.

I’ve been really fascinated by YouTube’s new “TV shows” and watching them closely. In the case of Outside Tonight, the show was greenlit by YouTube, and was meant to be the platform’s version of a late night show. The views and engagement on the channel across its first season, which wrapped after eight episodes this week, have been fascinating. Based on what I can see, views are almost exclusively coming from YouTube pushing it manually. Which is probably fine in the short-term, but a real problem for any future “TV shows” the platform wants to launch.

To put this succinctly as I can, YouTube, like every video platform, is a system that does not reward quality. In fact, it actively discourages it, if not outright punishes it. Good, well-made things happen on YouTube, of course, but every incentive on the app is pushing users to be more and more cutthroat. MrBeast is what happens if you give yourself over entirely to the algorithm. You end up with something gaudy, embarrassing, and consumed almost entirely by 12-year-old boys. To be “good” at YouTube, as in successful according to their own metrics, you must actively resist all the hallmarks of what would make a TV show or movie successful. You can’t care about plot, or jokes, or scripts, or sets, or costumes, or even storytelling. You’d make a lot more money and get a lot more views if you shocked your friend with a cattle prod in your bedroom on a livestream and then clipped it into a 90-second YouTube Short with a text bubble on it that right, “No one: / Me when I have a cattle prod:” or something.

YouTube, the platform, is obviously embarrassed by this. If they weren’t, Outside Tonight would look like a MrBeast video. That’s a fascinating conflict. To put this another way, “Do you think YouTube keeps trying to be a traditional TV channel because they, too, live in shame of what they’ve done to the entertainment industry?"

AdWeek published a crazy story last month that I missed completely. Cloudflare, basically the company in charge of how the most of the internet’s infrastructure operates, is currently in a showdown with Google.

As of next month, Cloudflare will, by default, block “multi-purpose crawlers” on webpages that have ads. This would, in practice, basically pull a whole bunch of websites off Google. The reason for that is because Google is currently going through another one of their “have their cake and eat it too” moments, otherwise known as monopolistic and anti-competitive business practices. Their new little trick is using the same crawler to list websites in search results and also scrape those sites for their AI. Sneaky, sneaky! Hope this doesn’t, you know, destroy the internet as we know it.

Anthropic is adding a watermark to all of Claude’s generations. And users won’t be able to opt out of it. As Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos wrote, “Claude's watermarking poses the question: Are you willing to proudly own that you write with AI?” Which is exactly where we’re headed with all of this.

As I wrote on Monday, we’re basically barreling towards a huge institutional showdown over intentionality. A decade-plus of tech companies weaseling their way into entertainment — first with user-generated content, then with streaming, and now with AI — has basically bifurcated the industry. There are now two kinds of TV shows, movies, songs, and books, ones that are meant to be actively enjoyed and ones that are meant to be passively consumed. And the debate that’s going to rage across the next five years or so is about which side is more lucrative.

And AI watermarks are an important first battle in this war. They will force not just the purveyors of AI slop, but also the enjoyers, passive and braindead as they are, to admit they have no problem with it.

Chris and Tim Vanderhook, the current owners of Myspace, have hinted that they want to bring the social network back. I’ve seen this misreported a bunch of social recently, with a lot of users assuming Tom Anderson was bringing it back. It’s also unclear what version of the site the Vanderhooks are referring to, seeing as how they came in quite late in its life cycle. But Tim said recently, “For us, it was all about the artist community that was the heartbeat that we saw, that we wanted to resuscitate.”

OK, so, I was a Myspace power user. I had two different band pages on there, on top of a personal one, and I used it to organize DIY shows, and basically spent every day of high school using it. I have also spent a decent amount of time going back and actually looking at Myspace and reassessing how it all worked in a modern context. So believe when I tell you, that shit sucked!!! The wall or comment sections of pages were totally jank. There was no central feed of activity. It was basically just a bunch of different inboxes you had to read every day. It’s only remembered fondly now because everyone who used it was a child at the time. As for the artist community on there, yeah, it was absolutely a place where a lot of music was discovered, but it was actually quite awful when it came to actual discovery. (Although, there was something kind of cool about the Top 8 feature functioning as a webring for bands to recommend other bands they were cool with.)

What I’m trying to say is, at this point, there is nothing Myspace offered or facilitated that hasn’t been drastically improved on. There’s nothing to bring back!

P.S. here’s a good flight tracker.

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