MAGA needs a new conspiracy theory

Garbage Day Live Is Tomorrow Night!!!!!

We’ve got two more nights this month in our residency at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn. Next Tuesday is all about Silicon Valley, with guest Peter McIndoe, the genius behind Birds Aren’t Real, and the week after that we’re diving into Trump’s first 100 days in office with podcaster extraordinaire Akilah Hughes. Grab tickets below while you still can. Last week was standing room only 👀

• July 15 — “Silicon Valley Ate The World”

• July 22 — “America Is Doomed”

The Epstein Crashout

On Sunday, President Donald Trump wrote a real big post on Truth Social sorta-kinda defending US Attorney General Pam Bondi’s complete bungling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

“What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’ They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB,” Trump wrote. “We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again.”

Trump went on to claim that the “Epstein Files” were actually written by former President Barack Obama and that they’re also a distraction from the real story, which is that the 2020 election was “Rigged and Stolen.” The whole post is a real “My ‘Not involved in human trafficking’ T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt” situation.

And the replies to Trump’s post are not good. With most users doing some variation of “very respectfully Mr. President, you need to kill all the pedos in the Democratic Party. Thanks I love you.” Even more interesting, when I tried to view Trump’s post this morning, Truth Social made me make an account to view it, something it has never done before.

Trump’s team has been teasing a big investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged client list for months. In March, they invited a bunch of hapless influencers to the White House and gave them binders full of publicly-available redacted documents related to Epstein, calling it “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.” Then, last week, they released edited footage from outside of Epstein’s cell, forgetting to clear the metadata, and declared that Epstein killed himself, there is no client list, and that the investigation was over. Phase 1 of 1, apparently.

As Gizmodo reports, it’s not just random weirdos on Truth Social that are now having a meltdown about the suddenly non-existent Epstein List right now. Most of Trump’s biggest influencers are starting to turn against the president or his administration.

They’re mad because the belief in a “global pedophile ring” is arguably the central tenet of Trumpism — something I genuinely don’t think Trump actually understands. Because, as I’ve written before, I don’t think Trump is particularly online and I, personally, think he sees most of his diehard online base as weird losers and dupes. I mean, I would if I was a 79-year-old real estate grifter running for president. But, even more important for Trump’s influencer army, the promise of eventually revealing — and jailing and executing on live television — the names on the much-hyped list of powerful pedophiles is a reliable source of traffic and income for right-wing content creators. And the president just spoiled the whole game.

All of this was figured out a decade ago. Though we wouldn’t feel the effects for a few years, America’s politics and its media ecosystem changed forever on August 16th, 2014, when a man named Eron Gjoni wrote a blogpost titled, “The Zoe Post.” It accused his ex-girlfriend, game developer Zoe Quinn, of being part of a conspiracy where women in video games were influencing the media by sleeping with games reporters (among other things). The post was shared that same day to 4chan and quickly ballooned into the movement we all know as Gamergate, which has since evolved into a multi-headed hydra of overlapping reactionary movements for fans of comics, video games, and nerd culture.

Gamergate was seized on by the then-still-emergent right-wing digital media. Publishers and influencers on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube realized it was perfect for content. An ever-sprawling alternate reality game full of characters they could come back to over and over again to farm rage. But even to this day, Gamergate and its spin-offs have a ceiling because, you know, most normal people do not care about nerd shit. But two years later, following the March 2016 leak of the Democratic National Committee’s emails, the same template — a vague conspiracy of liberal power structures and sexual impropriety pushed on anonymous message boards like 4chan — was applied to something people actually do care about, American politics. Which is how we ended up with Pizzagate. Which alleged that Hillary Clinton's campaign chair John Podesta was running pedophile rings in the basement of pizza places across the country. It would go on to become the foundation of QAnon. And it turns out, if you spend a decade telling very unwell people that a global cabal of liberal politicians and celebrities are trafficking children, they will eventually believe you and want to see some results!

And so Trump’s influencer army is currently facing quite the conundrum. There is no doubt that a huge chunk of MAGA internet personalities are genuine demagogues, but that world, as a whole, is only as expansive and organized as it is because posting about Trump is good for business. Even if a Democrat is in office. Online social platforms prioritize time-on-site and engagement metrics and enraging conservatives and terrifying old people is great for that. But the president just took away their biggest boogyman. If their God Emperor Trump isn’t going to be the one to finally reveal that every prominent liberal is a pedophile, who will? Many right-wing influencers on X are already trying to pivot, of course, but they know it’s not going to work. Modern fascism needs the biggest conspiracy you can come up with to fuel it. Something so all-encompassing and existentially terrifying that it can it fill up every feed, warp every meme, dominate every conversation. And as darkly funny as it is to watch these worms freak out right now, the more pressing question to consider is what will they successfully replace it with if this truly is the last time the Trump administration brings up Epstein?

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Horse Edit

@medusa_._1

No horses were harmed in the making of this edit

All Roads Lead To The Browser

Both OpenAI and Perplexity are teasing AI-based on browsers. According to a Reuters exclusive, OpenAI’s browser will be a direct competitor to Google Chrome and is largely a play for user data. The thinking being that if OpenAI has even more access to what users are doing online they can customize ChatGPT to psychologically manipulate you even more intimately.

Comet by Perplexity has already rolled out to their “Max” subscription tier. It seems much more focused on “agentic AI,” or an in-browser AI that can, per the company’s demo video for Comet, do things like fill out Google Maps or even pull up specific YouTube videos.

In many ways, the grand project of the AI revolution is to reduce the internet to the browser. In the same way that the even grander project of the AI revolution is to reduce all apps to one app. And we’re already seeing the disastrous effects of AI’s continued flattening of everything.

New York Magazine had a big feature earlier this month arguing that AI, along with a complete bottoming out of traffic from social platforms, is basically ending internet publishing as we know it right before our very eyes. And Puck’s Julia Alexander wrote on X last week that, according to SimiliarWeb, any site getting traffic from AI summaries is basically paying for it.

“The only real traffic beneficiaries of ChatGPT were those who entered financial partnerships with the company,” she wrote. “And that should be a terrifying thought to anyone who cares about how and what information is surfaced to next generations.”

Now, imagine an entire browser that works that way and nothing else.

Elmo Hacked

Yesterday, the X account for Sesame Street’s Elmo was hacked. It wasn’t completely apparent that it was hacked at first, seeing as how most Verified X users are spewing insane racial hatred on the platform 24/7 now. I wondered if maybe Grok had pushed some kind of Muppet-themed update or something.

Sesame Street, in a statement, said they’ve deleted the messages — many of which were demanding Trump release the Epstein List — and are working on getting control of the account back.

This is probably a good time to mention Garbage Day’s new policy when it comes to X, which we started on Friday and will continue to work on. We don’t want to give X any more traffic than we have to, but we also do want to track where things are online come from and amplify the few good voices left on that platform. As we see it, X in 2025 is basically the same as 4chan in 2014. Yes, there’s some good stuff on there, but sending unsuspecting users there isn’t responsible. So going forward, we’ll only be embedding X video clips when there is no other option, continuing to screenshot anything else if we need it, and diminishing X links as much as we can in general. When we do have link out to X, we’ll be noting that in the text or marking them with a warning, as we did in Friday’s issue. We’ll continue to tweak and monitor — and cover what happens on the site — but we don’t want our readers accidentally ending up there if they’re trying to avoid it.

Speaking of which…

You Can Finally Goon With Grok

Fun fact: Elon Musk is buying ads of his own posts and the above thread advertising Grok’s “Companions” mode was underneath a post for Perplexity’s Comet browser. Yeah, fair enough, who needs an AI that can book plane tickets for you if you’re busy with a virtual anime girl.

Also, it doesn’t seem like this is just a random avatar for Musk. As one X user pointed out, he has a long history of being really into Misa Amane from the anime Death Note and it’s definitely not a coincidence that his Grok goonbot looks exactly like her.

Anime Horse Girl Racing Fans Are Supporting A Real Race Horse Now

Fans of Umamusume: Pretty Derby, the anime horse girl racing game that is having a big moment this summer, have become obsessed with a real Japanese racing horse.

You see the anime girls in Umamusume are based on real horses — this is not an uncommon trope in anime, see the battleship girls anime. And I guess the anime girl version of very real racehorse Haru Urara is very popular among players. The real race horse was so famously bad there’s a whole section about it on her Wikipedia page. Here is a comparison of the anime girl version and the real horse lol.

Anyways, fans discovered there’s a service in Japan that will deliver grass to a farm and they are buying ton of it and having it sent to Haru Urara. According to Dexerto, they’ve ordered 2.5 tons of grass so far.

The grass delivery service posted on a huge thank you message on X, writing, “Fresh grass is a perishable item. The amount that can be shipped per day varies by ranch, so it is expected that it may take some time to ship the fresh grass ordered. To ensure that the sentiments entrusted to us by everyone are not wasted, we will ship delicious fresh grass as appropriate, and we kindly ask for your patience until shipping.”

The Jet2Holiday Hits The Club

@zlister1

I will never be over this 🤣thanks @Chris Stark for being stupid-joy initiator. Arena tour next? #jet2 #jet2holidays #jessglynne #nothingbe... See more

Some Stray Links

• “The Gen Z stare”

• “How incel language infected the mainstream internet — and brought its toxicity with it”

P.S. here’s some lettuce cookie bars.

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