Oh no, the Democrats are our only hope

You Can’t Post Your Way Out Of The Epstein Mess

As someone who follows the right-wing fever swamp pretty closely, I can confidently say that President Donald Trump’s biggest online boosters are simply not equipped to handle the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. The most charitable interpretation of what we’ve seen so far from both The Wall Street Journal and the House Oversight Committee pretty much proves that the president was, at the very least, a close personal friend to the world’s most notorious pedophile. And that’s a lot to try and knock down in a couple viral posts.

House Democrats this week released Epstein’s “birthday book,” a 238-page tribute to Epstein written by figures like Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, and billionaire Les Wexner. You can view the book here and normally I’d say you’d be forgiven for not having the stomach for it, but I actually think every American needs to see it. If only to fully understand the context that surrounds the president’s letter to Epstein. There is literally no other way to look at this book than as a collection of love notes sent by pedophiles to each other. Or, as The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote, “The Epstein birthday book is full of contributions from wealthy and powerful people who appear fully aware of Epstein’s attraction to ‘girls.’ In fact, they seem to celebrate it and, in some cases, allude winkingly to Epstein’s predatory lifestyle.” Most of the men named in Epstein’s birthday book are either not commenting on it or outright denying it. Though, the UK ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, has said he “regrets” being “associated” with Epstein.

So far, Trump’s digital foot soldiers have experimented with a few tactics for combatting the increasingly damning revelations coming out about Trump’s relationship with Epstein. A few, like right-wing Charlie Kirk, screenshot below, have simply tried to say the Trump letter is fake. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt trotted out the line that the letter is a “hoax” of some kind. House Speaker Mike Johnson even briefly tried to claim that Trump was an FBI informant surveilling Epstein. Others, like Jessica Reed Kraus, who goes by @houseinhabit on Instagram, have taken a bolder path, claiming Epstein’s victims are just grifters trying to “make millions” trying to “incriminate the president.”

But none of this is really working. The media isn’t playing ball, nor are civilian internet users. So, this week, right-wingers have tried a different strategy, pushing a local crime story to the top of the national conversation to try and drown out Epstein chatter.

Right-wing influencers on X have swarmed the story of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee who was fatally stabbed by a man named Decarlos Brown Jr. while riding the light rail in Charlotte, North Carolina. They are flooding X with posts calling for Brown’s execution, writing unimaginably racist screeds about how this was bound to happen because Brown was black and Zarutska was white. The level of xenophobic bloodlust on the platform this week would make 4chan users blush. Right-wing commentator Matt Walsh wrote in an X post containing a screenshot of the security camera footage of the attack, “This image provokes deep visceral rage in every father who sees it. I can’t even fully articulate it. It’s primal. We want scalps. We want heads on pikes.”

And the right-wing rage machine has been able to amplify this story fairly effectively. Trump took to Truth Social to demand Brown get the death penalty and promised to continue expanding his federal occupation of Democrat-run cities. And Leavitt tore into the media for failing to report on the stabbing. (Right-wingers only know about it because they were all sharing security camera footage of the attack that was published by a local news affiliate. It even still had the watermark on it.)

But will this work? It’s a question I’ve been asking all summer. Sydney Sweeney’s jeans couldn’t drown out Epstein. Cracker Barrel’s new logo couldn’t either. So what about a race war?

The answer will, I believe, come down to the Democrats. As of this morning, they have signaled that they plan to keep pushing on this. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer plans to force the Senate to vote on whether the Epstein files are released to the public. There’s a bipartisan proposal in the House demanding the release, as well.

And even just a vote on the files’ release would be a big hurdle for a Trumpist propaganda machine that is already falling over itself with the drips and drops of the files it’s encountering online. Republicans, desperate to protect their orange-skinned demagogue, would assuredly vote against it, solidifying themselves as the party that either either no longer believes in a global network of pedophiles or, possibly worse, the party that no longer cares about it anymore. And that’s a tough sell when you’ve been using child traffickers and predatory liberal elites as your big boogeymen for the last decade. And I, for one, would not want to have to explain to my heavily-armed, wildly conspiratorial base of supporters lusting for blood why they finally can’t get their list of names. Or worse, explain why the names of all my friends are on it.

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A True Hero

Instagram user funkeun runs around Seoul making sure manhole covers are lined up correctly. Please click through to his page and watch all of his videos. They’re incredible.

Bluesky Is Full Of Cartoon Porn

—by Adam Bumas

In Monday’s issue, we covered the paradox of Bluesky. The platform’s explosive growth after last year’s election has dwindled to marginal pre-election numbers, but everyone from pundit Nate Silver to Vice President JD Vance seems to find it important enough that they’ve been talking about that stalled growth for months and months.

Worryingly, that same paradox is supporting the entire creator economy right now. There is clearly a disconnect between the engagement figures that keep the money flowing and the wheels turning, and the reality of whether those numbers reflect anyone (viewers or creators) actually giving a shit.

That’s why I thought it was important to mention on Monday that consistently, around 5-10% of all the most popular posts on Bluesky are sexy cartoons. That matters because they exist completely outside of this paradigm — advertiser-unfriendly, completely free of AI, with all its engagement reflecting people who asked for it and enjoy it. A recent survey from Meltwater bears this out, finding that online conversation about Bluesky has almost 10-times the volume of conversation that Meta’s Threads generates, which consistently puts up much bigger engagement numbers than Bluesky does. 

And even though I doubt much of that conversation about Bluesky concerns hentai, its consistency shows the priorities of the platform and its users. Though, I do think it’s worth talking about how hard Bluesky’s most visionary perverts are working to hornify the bugs from Hollow Knight: Silksong. At time of writing, more than 80% of the top results for “Hornet,” the game’s main character, is art that renders her much sexier than she is in the game. Is this the kind of growth we should be tracking?

(You can click here if you want to see thicc Hornet.)

The AI Slop Media Experiment Will Fail

OpenAI is producing an animated film with “AI-generated visuals.” It’s called Critterz and it’s premiering in 2026. The movie reportedly has a budget of $30 million, which seems like quite a lot for a movie that is relying super duper hard on AI imagery. But according to the movie’s promo page, the entire thing isn’t being generated with an AI. What they’ve done is ask OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 for character models and backgrounds, poorly animated them with OpenAI’s video model Sora and some human animates, and then added (human?) voice actors. You can watch the short film the movie is “based” on here. It looks like shit and sucks.

AI slop is not just coming for Hollywood, however. A new company called Inception Point AI is currently generating thousands of podcast episodes a week as a way to game programmatic advertising. Like Critterz, they’re all awful and no one on Earth will ever have a meaningful experience with any of them.

As bad as all this sounds, though, I’m sort of excited. An AI-generated movie flopping is actually very good, at least from an accelerationist standpoint. It brings us closer to the emperor-has-no-clothes moment for this technology. And a podcast content farm running what is effectively large-scale ad fraud is also great. It just brings us one step closer to the complete collapse of the digital ad industry 🙏🏻

Want to hear more about AI slop infecting the entertainment world? What a coincidence! We have a Panic World episode this week all about that. Our guest is an up-and-coming music critic named Anthony Fantano.

A Garbage Day Discord User Picked Up Paul F. Tompkins’ Chipotle Order

Comedian Paul F. Tompkins posted on Bluesky yesterday that his Chipotle order had mistakenly ended up at a hotel in Chicago. He told users that if they could get to the hotel, the chicken burrito was theirs. And, low and behold, a few hours later, a Bluesky user named @patrickw posted a photo with the bag.

Huh, that’s interesting… There’s a user that goes by PatrickW in the Garbage Day Discord. Wait minute! It turns out it was the same PatrickW.

PatrickW kept the Discord updated last night as he made his trek to the hotel to nab Tompkins’ Chipotle order. “Oh my God I have so many bsky notifications,” PatrickW wrote last night. If you’d like to add to that notification list, you can follow his account here. Excited to see which celebrity’s lunch order Patrick eats next.

Turnstile Just Made Tiny Desk History

Hardcore band Turnstile (please don’t email me if you don’t think Turnstile counts as a hardcore anymore, I only have so much time left in this one precious life of mine) played NPR’s Tiny Desk this week. It’s a very good performance! The fact that Turnstile played with a horn section actually means they’re a ska band now.

Anyways, Turnstile frontman Brendan Yates made NPR Tiny Desk history by doing a sorta-kinda stage dive off the aforementioned tiny desk. Goes hard. The stage dive happens around 14:00.

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Some Stray Links

• “I Am An AI Hater”

• “Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo wants to take on Politico Playbook from the left”

• “Do Media Organizations Even Want Cultural Criticism?” (In my experience, no, not really)

P.S. here’s how it feels to use tap to pay.

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