Republicans astroturfed themselves

Just a heads up: We are off the rest of this week. We all need a break lol. It’s been a busy couple months over at Garbage HQ. See you all next week!!!

The right-wing maniacs that call X, the everything app, home spent the weekend in free fall as they learned that all of their favorite accounts, like @cb_doge, @America_First0, and @InvankaNews_ were all being run out of countries like India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Macedonia. If you’ve never heard of any of these accounts, that’s ok, it just means you have friends and family who care about you.

Over the weekend, X’s new head of product, Nikita Bier, announced that the platform’s new “About this account” feature would be rolling out to users around the world. X now shows basic information about when an account was created, how many times it’s changed its user name, and, most importantly, where it’s based, according to the app store it’s associated with.

We first wrote about this update last month. News that it was coming kicked off a round of discourse about whether or not it constituted as doxxing. But I imagine there was also a heavy dose of anxiety at the idea that it would confirm what we’ve all kind of known for a while: There is an entire universe of scammers and puppet accounts pretending to be American Trump supporters — and men’s rights activists and trad wives — online because it’s an easy way to farm engagement. Or as author Joe Kassabian wrote, “It's important to point out all of these fake accounts targeted American conservatives because they are the easiest marks in the world.”

Let’s run through who’s running what and from where. The aforementioned @cb_doge, who has 1.7 million followers on X and was once believed to be a Musk alt account, is run out of India and is affiliated with the MyDoge crypto wallet, which is also run out of India. The @timeswmariana, which presents itself as an Israeli woman, or at least, mainly posts about Israeli women, is based in “South Asia.” A network of fan accounts for Trump family members, including @erictrumpfan1, @barrontnews_, and @trumpkainews are all run out of Macedonia (known for its extensive troll farms targeting American right-wingers). An account called @emma_brunette95, which describes itself as an “American patriot” and relationship coach and has over 600,000 followers is based in “West Asia.” The list goes on and on. The Daily Beast collected a bunch more.

The update also finally, without question, confirmed that right-wing influencer Ian Miles Cheong does not live in the US. He was long believed to be based in Malaysia, but it actually turns out he’s currently posting from the United Arab Emirates. “X isn’t America only. Go to Truth Social if you want that,” Cheong wrote on X. To which right-wing influencer Matt Walsh replied, “You've never set foot in America and yet you spend every day trying to influence our culture and politics. You talk about our country exclusively and never say a word about your own. If you don't see why that might rub Americans the wrong way, I don't know what to tell you.”

One of the funniest examples of how absurd this has all been is the account @_WarHamster, a user with 20,000 followers that describes itself as “America First,” and wrote in 2024, “Call me old fashioned but I don’t think folks from foreign countries should be allowed to vote in our elections.” Which now has a new Community Note on it that reads, “This user purports to be from the USA, but their account is based in the United Arab Emirates, which doesn't have elections.” Similar Community Notes are now getting placed underneath all the pro-America content being shared by the @America_First0 account, which is based in Bangladesh.

This has all been especially painful for X users who are, as a baseline, extremely racist. And they are now suffering through the psychic torment of learning that users, predominately from the Global South, are behind some of the bigger right-wing accounts on the site. Making things even more confusing is the influx of fake screenshots accusing different users of being based outside the US.

I’ve seen some big Democrat accounts point at all of this as proof that foreign actors have been trying to manipulate American voters. “Seeing all of these MAGA accounts get exposed as foreign actors trying to destroy the United States is a complete vindication of Democrats, like myself and many on here, who have been warning about this,” Democratic influencer Harry Sisson wrote. And, yeah, maybe, depending on how you define “foreign actors,” I suppose. But I’d actually argue all of this proves something much sadder and grimmer.

Republicans became so obsessed with Twitter that they pressured and even helped fund Elon Musk’s purchase of it in 2022. And since its been rebranded as X, they’ve only become more reliant on it, at the expense of both the platform’s business and cultural relevance. Now they can’t really function without it, like the poor souls still posting on 4chan or Neopets. They use X to coordinate propaganda, create policy, and as a jobs board for Trump’s second administration. Using its likes and shares in the place of actual leadership. And now we know that a staggering amount of the accounts Republicans have been relying on for viral feedback are either apolitical con artists milking their hatred for clicks or pitiful anonymous fascists LARPing America’s culture war because they can’t wage one at home. And from where I’m sitting, all this isn’t proof that shadowy foreign actors are destroying America. It’s proof that the American right has spent better part of the last decade letting algorithmic spam tell them what they want to hear, astroturfing themselves into believing that some silent majority out there believes in their worthless MAGA crusade. When all they were doing was chasing the approval of faceless accounts who realized their political movement was so hollow, so braindead simple, so spiritually worthless that they could easily earn a few Musk bucks by posting AI-generated photos of blonde women in American flag bikinis promising a Thousand Year Burger Reich.

According to an exclusive from Reuters this week, the Department of Government Efficiency is officially done. It was meant to continue for eight more months, but a spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management told Reuters that it “doesn’t exist.”

It’s a sad and miserable ending for Musk’s little sandbox, but in its short time it was able to cause unimaginable chaos and destruction both home and abroad. Seemingly to accomplish nothing.

As reporter Sam Stein wrote on X, “The legacy of DOGE is not that it failed. It's that it destroyed: Faith in real cost conscious governance, the careers of committed government employees, scientific research and the biomedical breakthroughs that come with it, countless lives of the world's poorest.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced over the weekend that she plans to resign in January of next year. In a statement she released, she wrote that “there is no ‘plan to save the world’ or insane 4D chess game being played.” Seemingly referencing the idea in QAnon circles that there is some greater plan the Trump administration is following.

It’s worth noting, however, that Greene is waiting until after her congressional pension to vest before resigning. Thank you, fellow patriot 🫡

You can decide how seriously to take this, but there is chatter among Republican insiders that Greene will not be the last Republican to resign before next year’s midterms. I suppose it has to be extremely painful to be completely indoctrinated by far-right brainrot and then actually get a glimpse of how the government functions. Or as X user @elizabethbelsky wrote, “Something very funny about sending a true conspiracy theorist who believes that a cabal of pedophile elites are running the country to Congress and she just finds out that the cabal of pedophile elites running the country were the guys on her side all along and then quits.”

Hard to find a darker, weird nexus of internet culture than the video embedded above. It’s an interview between tween TikTok star The Rizzler and Russian internet personality Hasbulla Magomedov, who has dwarfism. The video was produced by former Barstool Sports host Caleb Pressley and sponsored by DoorDash. Pressley is also selling “Rizzbulla” merch.

All of the words I just wrote might be completely bewildering to you, but there’s easily a 70-80% chance that knowing at least some of this will help you interact with family members at Thanksgiving later this week.

Redditors on the r/MovieTheaterEmployees subreddit noticed that the new commemorative cups for Wicked: For Good read, “Go on you’re free, fly fly,” written in a font that is a little too close together. So it looks like the cups reads, “Goon, you’re free, fly, fly.” Not ideal probably. (If you happen to encounter one of these cups in the wild please email me lol.)

Over on Reddit, one user asked if they were selling well and the original poster confirmed that, yeah, they’re selling pretty well. Another user just wrote, “Fill it!”

P.S. here’s a good Thanksgiving reminder.

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