Cancel culture for thee, not me

Working in the viral content mines during the 2010s was, looking back at it, very strange. Once social media really broke through around 2012, young journalists like myself quickly learned there were a handful of perennial stories you would end up writing throughout the year.

After every awards show, we had a team collecting the best reaction memes. Every April Fools, my editor would put me on hoax duty. And every Halloween, we’d prepare for an onslaught of cancelations. Come November 1st, there would be a whole bunch of people plastered all over social media for their tasteless or downright racist costumes. And we’d of course go out and get the subsequent statements from institutions apologizing for individual behavior. The school that had to apologize for a teacher wearing blackface, the celebrity that lost their agent for wearing a turban, etc. You could pretty much set your watch to it.

I always chalked it up to the weird way that Halloween, in particular, was transformed by the internet into a national costume contest. What was once a fairly localized holiday, where costumes only really had to make sense to — or fit within the standards of — people in your immediate vicinity, at some point around 2013-2014, became a giant temperature check for the whole country. One a lot of people failed every year.

And Halloween has only become more online since 2020. There are now a whole bunch of people — especially people who tend to live in LA — who seemingly only dress up for photographs and videos and don’t actually wear their costumes anywhere. And a whole other cohort — usually people in New York — who wear costumes that only make sense in the context of a tweet that is shared afterwards. Both being symptoms of the post-COVID culture shift, where online matters more than offline.

And so, this year, our new very online Halloween collided with a right-wing digital machine that has spent the last year trying to co-opt, drown out, and weaponize social platforms. The end result being a dark inversion of my days “covering Halloween” a decade ago.

The old joke that conservatives are always about 5-10 years behind is, in this case, extremely true. Their new great and powerful propaganda apparatus is basically just a bad impression of digital media publishers from the 2010s. Thousands of BuzzFeeds and Pop Craves crawling for screenshots of users on apps like Facebook and TikTok being “inappropriate,” which they use to whip themselves up into a frenzy. Cancel culture for thee, not me. And the most common refrain you’ll see in these posts is some variation of, “They aren’t even hiding it anymore.” The “they” meaning liberals, or Jews, or women, or globalists, or antifascists, or whatever. As if this random person they’ve plucked from the feed is representative of the entire country.

Which is how we ended up with two conflicting trends happening simultaneously on X this weekend. Right-wingers were desperate to find liberals dressing up irl as zombified Charlie Kirk, hoping to squeeze a bit more outrage out of their martyr. And they were also the most brazen they’ve ever been about posting photos of themselves online wearing blackface.

Best as I can tell, conservatives on X only found one actual person who dressed up as Kirk, complete with a blood-splattered Turning Point USA shirt. A guy from Maine who used to work for a local news station and now hosts a podcast called The ‘Tism Report (as in “autism”). The local news outlet he used to work for put out a statement saying he hasn’t worked for them for years. October was the month the rest of the country learned what New Englanders have always known about guys from Maine, apparently.

Right-wingers thought they found a whole group of teachers in Colorado that dressed as Kirk, but TPUSA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet had to put out a statement on X sorta-kinda apologizing for directing violent threats at the teachers after the Vail School District Facebook page put out a statement explaining that it was a group of math teachers who wear blood-soaked “problem solved” shirts every year. “That being said, it's a very weird costume for teachers in general, but after what happened to Charlie, I'm absolutely floored they wore it again,” Kolvet wrote.

Meanwhile, Sen. “Based” Mike Lee had a meltdown over a meme of a Spirit Halloween “Fake Grieving Widow Grifter” costume depicting Erika Kirk. You hear that, guys? Please make sure to clear your Halloween costume with your local federally-appointed right-wing internet maniac until our state-mandated period of mourning is over.

The conservative pearl-clutching did not, obviously, extend to blackface. Brittany Venti, a right-wing biracial influencer, dressed up as a minstrel, captioning her post on X, “When that EBT hit.” And tradwife streamer Lilly Gaddis streamed for two hours in blackface on Halloween. She released a 15-minute video on X on Saturday, saying she wanted to dress up as the “scariest thing” she could think of, “the black woman.” There were a whole bunch of other examples, as well.

This is dark stuff, to be sure. And it’s also the clearest picture yet of how the right-wing playbook works right now. Threaten and intimidate users on public social feeds. Dox random people and scare away normal users from expressing themselves online. And then flood those same feeds with racist garbage to create the illusion that it’s normal and popular. The end result being an internet where you’re supposed to think actual people think something like this is funny:

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Much has been written about how embarrassing it is that thousands of Americans every year have to use GoFundMe to crowdfund money for healthcare. But the second Trump presidency is nothing but a series of even lower lows for the American experiment. Which is how we’ve ended up with Scott Adams, the far-right creator of Dilbert, begging on X for President Donald Trump to personally approve his application for Pluvicto, a new cancer treatment drug.

Adams has stage 4 prostate cancer that recently metastasized. “I am declining fast,” Adams wrote. “It is not a cure, but it does give good results to many people.”

“On it,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, sharing a screenshot of Adams’ X post.

It’s probably a little unfair to throw Adams’ old posts in his face right now, but people are doing it anyways. For instance, in 2023, Adams wrote on X, “Don’t ask a president to make healthcare or moral decisions for you. No one would respect that process.” And just this year, during the DOGE funding purge, Adams wrote, “I wonder what scientific breakthroughs or economic miracles did we got for the $49 million per year funding.” Well, Pluvicto it turns out!

Last week, we wrote about the AI-generated food stamps hysteria brewing on TikTok right now. Totally fake videos are circulating around the app, depicting black women ransacking grocery stores because the USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) was turned off due to the government shutdown. (A hobbled version of the program is coming back this month.)

As Garbage Day contributor Ellie Hall outlined, “These videos migrate to other platforms, specifically X, they rack up millions of views and get absorbed by the broader MAGA outrage machine.” And this week, they sure did.

The New York Post wrote a whole story about one of these videos and published it before realizing the video was AI-generated. They eventually rewrote the story with a teeny-tiny editor’s note. You can see screenshots of the before and after of the story on X here. The new version of the story is basically now just a big “well, the video was fake, but it could have been real.”

A young canvasser for Zohran Mamdani named Ella Devi bumped into the actor Wallace Shawn over the weekend and posted a selfie with Shawn to X. This wouldn’t be particularly notable, probably, if not for the fact that Devi called Shawn, “Dr. Strugis” from Young Sheldon.

A lot of old people got very mad about this. The New York Post even wrote a whole story about it. They’ve been on a real tear lately.

Devi apologized to all the angry old people in her mentions, writing on X, “‘Put some respect on Wallace Shawn.’ I am only 18 and have only seen him in Young Sheldon I’m sorry!!!”

Demi Lovato’s Halloween costume this year was Poot, the name a bunch of Tumblr users came up with for the blurry, unflattering edited picture of Lovato that went viral on the platform back in 2015. “Demi’s twin sister. She was locked in a basement her whole life. This picture was taken the first time she went outside. Her name is Poot,” Tumblr user ccstcrptc wrote at the time.

Tumblr users are very excited about the Poot costume, as you can imagine. “But did Poot dress up as Demi 🤔,” one user wrote lol.

P.S. here’s some good Vin Diesel content. (This was dropped in the Garbage Day Discord by user Samury.)

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