Right-wingers want every woman to be a mom and also hate moms now

In 2022, Elon Musk effectively moved the hub of the online far right from chan sites, subreddits, and random message boards to Twitter. This was widely celebrated among the right wing, who had long believed that they were not represented in Twitter’s marketplace of ideas (they, obviously, were). But this has had some unexpected — and possibly disastrous — consequences.

The biggest one is that the online right is now far more reliant on the news cycle than they were before. And, under Trump 2.0, this also now includes official accounts for the federal government. Even though Musk added a non-chronological For You tab to Twitter when he renamed it X, the app still moves within news cycles — big topical discussions pegged to the major headlines of the week. Which means most right-wing trolls now are basically operating as unpaid, under-paid, or uncredited interns for more established right-wing tabloids. The New York Post and Fox News get a lot of mileage out of Chaya Raichik’s Libs of TikTok.

Now that X’s algorithm demands video content just like every other platform does, this largely means that the great and powerful cyber army that birthed Pepe the Frog and Gamergate in the 2010s has basically been reduced to a bunch of people reuploading TikTok videos that are tangentially connected to whatever’s in the news at the moment. And because most of the big players still orbiting the MAGA world are either weird incels themselves or writing for them, nine times out of ten this manifests as a whole bunch of losers whining about women on their feeds. A very good example of this was back in April 2025, when Trump supporters resurfaced an old TikTok video from an Australian skincare company and claimed that they were happy the economy might implode if it would meant women couldn’t work anymore.

Ezra Klein in The New York Times wrote about this over the weekend, arguing, “X, like the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings, corrupts whoever controls it. Possessing it feels like power, but it ultimately deforms and isolates you.” And you’d have to be pretty deformed and isolated to start a harassment campaign about young mothers on TikTok.

For the last three weeks, the country has followed along with the Lindsay Clancy trial, a perfect storm for the 2020s internet. She’s been charged with the murders of her three children, which she does not deny. Her defense is arguing that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis. The story has become a neutron bomb of gender discourse, true crime brainrot, MAHA anti-big pharma narratives, and even pulled in the astrology community. If you want to peer into the void, head over to the r/DuxburyDeathsFreeTalk subreddit, which has about half a million users at the moment. But the most overwhelming narrative I’ve seen is the all-out assault from the right wing on mothers.

The repugnant blob of mens rights activists, MAGA influencers, manosphere podcasters, and fascists that get their micropayments from X’s dwindling Verified user ad revenue program are not just demonizing the women who have come out in support of Clancy — though, they are certainly doing that — but are also yanking any old video off TikTok they can find of women talking about postpartum depression or the pressures of motherhood and inciting an unimaginable amount of harassment against the original poster.

This is best seen with the recirculation of @livingthrulove’s 2024 ice throwing video. When it was originally posted, it kicked off a huge amount of debate about what’s acceptable for mothers to share on social media. In the video, she throws ice in a tub because she’s a new mom and she’s frustrated and angry. The video has been watched nearly 50 million times and it, along with @livingthrulove’s entire account, are now being brigaded by right-wing weirdos after a bunch of X users reposted last week. Brian Atlas, the sad little worm that hosts that Whatever podcast, where he screams at OnlyFans models, shared the ice throwing video, writing, “These are the same women who will tell you men punching walls is abusive. But throwing ice cubes in a rage in your home is not?” And another Verified user, going by @LukaLev on X, is posting TikToks from young mothers, stay-at-home moms, and Clancy supporters two or three times an hour at the moment.

But as I wrote above, this is not exactly good for the right wing, especially as they trudge closer and closer to the midterms. Sure, vilifying a bunch of astrologers making videos about Clancy’s birth chart makes for good Fox News fodder, but uncontrollable and increasingly unintelligible digital foot soldiers who have been miring in culture war toxic sludge for nearly two decades going after, just, mothers, is not particularly savvy. There are a lot of big issues hanging over the upcoming election — and the 2028 presidential showdown that is just around the corner. Affordability, healthcare, America’s relationship with Israel, the question of de-MAGA-fication, AI regulation, to name a few. But I suspect the biggest reckoning will be role of X in shaping our politics. And as for how that will go, well, I’ll just say this: There are a lot more users on X talking about TikTok than there are TikTokers talking about what’s happening on X.

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Continuing our theme from above, the State Department is having a tricky time navigating the new right-wing media environment at the moment. It turns out deranged X users have very different incentives — and worldviews — than the conservative journalists Republicans are used to working with.

Jennica Pounds, who goes by DataRepublican, accused Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers of being part of the “Deep State” (technically true, I guess) and setting her up to “commit a crime.” It seems like Rogers was trying to send her previously unreleased documents about the State Department’s work on tackling disinformation. After Pounds freaked out about it on X, Rogers replied, “lol, these are my text messages and documents. The ‘markings’ are FOIA redactions required even for voluntary disclosure. To prove this isn't a ‘trap,’ I will happily disclose the documents myself.”

A lot happening here and I’m not sure what’s worse. The idea that the State Department is texting documents to random X users or the idea that the X user doesn’t know what FOIA redactions look like. As Semafor’s Ben Smith wrote in a reply to Rogers, “Seems like the alternate information space you are trying to nurture needs some work.”

I’ve been waiting for a company to finally connect all the dots here. I’ve written before that the end point of consumer social media is a permanent flow, or goon, state. Time-on-site metrics have led every major platform to simultaneously morph into basically Keno, a TV screen that hypnotizes you into gambling. Or, I suppose, it’s like if you put slot machines in a strip club that was also cable news or Bravo or whatever.

Anyways, I’ve started calling this murky netherworld of livestreaming and gambling apps “Chudtech” — Kick, Kalshi, Polymarket, Pump Fun Go, Duel. Infinite slop feeds the country’s vast population of sweatpants men can stare at in their goon caves all day long. And, finally, a company has bundled it all together.

Crshmarket is a livestreaming app and a prediction market. Though, I’ll say I’m a little disappointed by how humdrum it is. I went over there today and it’s mostly just a few users betting on Rocket League streams.

Here’s what gets me with all of this stuff. You could, if you wanted, make the ultimate Chudtech platform. An unrelenting nightmare called Goon World or something, where you can gamble, place bounties, and donate directly to a user base of white nationalists, pornstars, and mentally ill loners, directing them to degrade themselves or others on livestreams all day. Versions of this exist, at least partially, but aren’t really popular. Instead, that kind of behavior happens on the periphery of other, more mainstream apps. Which leads me to believe that the rancid state of social media right now is either being caused by over-moderation on these platforms or caused by these platforms monopolizing audiences. Basically, if you had smaller, freer, more open networks, this junk would be a lot less prominent and, likely, less profitable.

Dhar Mann, a YouTuber that runs a viral slop factory in Burbank, California, is partnering with Disney. Mann has a 20-episode order and it seems likely his show will be similar to the weird gas leak morality tales stuff he posts on YouTube. Videos such as “RICH GIRL Won't Let Poor Girl To Her Sleepover” (2.4 million views), “Strict Dad Takes Kid’s Phone For A Week” (2.5 million views), and “Classmates Record Autistic Girls MELTDOWN” (2 million views). As with every other major studio trying to compete with YouTube by becoming a crappier version of YouTube, this is a desperate and bad move and the content that Mann makes online, which is clearly meant to trick children into clicking on it, will, almost certainly, be unable to compete with like, uh, every Disney movie ever.

While we’re talking about YouTube, they are changing how views work on the platform. As of today, a YouTube view will be counted the minute a user plays the video. It used to have a minimum watch-time requirement. YouTube said in a blog post that this is about standardizing metrics. Hilariously, YouTube’s creator earnings will not be changed. Those will still run on “engaged watch hours” and “engaged views.”

That’s because YouTube is tired of their publicly viewable metrics looking rinky-dink compared to TikTok, Instagram, and X. They want to look just as big and popular, but they, of course, do not want to pay for it.

Do you feel that? A great disturbance across the fandom internet? It seems like everyone has suddenly come together to completely trash an upcoming adult animated movie called Lesbian Space Princess. The movie’s not out yet, but the reviews seem pretty good! So what gives? Why have the internet’s various fan armies decided they hate this thing?

Well, here’s my take on this little episode and, also, fandom culture at large right now. Before the Tumblr porn ban and the full launch of TikTok (both happened in 2018), a whole lot of fandoms were quarantined away from mainstream culture. Doctor Who, Undertale, Steven Universe, Supernatural, etc., they all had distinct communities with distinct identities and while there was plenty of infighting, the users in these subcultures were left to their own devices. (It was a big deal when Doctor Who added a cringe Whovian character in the 50th anniversary special.) The only fan armies members of the media, for instance, would really encounter were pop star fandoms on Twitter.

But fan armies don’t really have central hubs anymore. They’re both very accessible and, also, increasingly use identity politics to find each other online. It’s not just that you and other users like Hazbin Hotel, it’s that you are queer and mentally ill and so is everyone else who watches Hazbin Hotel. This is a relatively new development. And it creates a bit of a trap for studios. It’s never been easier to make your tropey fandom checklist production, but it’s also never been easier to screw up big time by not reading the identity politics right when you do it. I thought this Letterboxd review for Lesbian Space Princess made some interesting points about how complicated this can get.

But I also just think that once fandoms, at large, left the confines of Tumblr and Reddit and Archive of Our Own, and exploded across the web in the late 2010s, they became much more susceptible to larger political sea changes. It’s very hard to tell where your fandom ends and another community begins. And the same right-wing reactionary pressures that are, for instance, causing country songs to hit number one on the Billboard charts are also impacting how ostensibly progressive and overwhelmingly queer fandoms are communicating. So it’s almost impossible now to know if something like Lesbian Space Princess is at the center of a hate campaign because it’s apparently tone deaf when it comes to trans issues or if it’s at the center of a hate campaign because because a bunch of right-wing freaks are mad that it’s a cartoon about lesbians.

P.S. here’s a pretty good TikTok.

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