Here Comes The Smarm Wave

Last week, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar started going viral on X after she shared a photo of herself with former football players from Mankato West High School that were at the Democratic National Convention to introduce Gov. Tim Walz. She gave it the cheeky caption, “Put me in coach. Last night with the team…”

X users then resurfaced not just a similar photo of Klobuchar’s that she took with firefighters last year, but other photos of women politicians from Minnesota who have also posed with shirtless firefighters. As one user wrote, “why does Minnesota have the horniest senators in the country?” (I had to search “Minnesota horny” to find these posts this morning and you should absolutely not do that.)

All around, it was a cute moment. Another example of America’s Very Online trying to find ways to re-embrace the Midwest after a decade of Trumpism convinced everyone that the entire middle of country was a far-right hellscape. But then something funny happened. Klobuchar acknowledged the meme.

I would have filed this away as just a fun bit of social media marketing if it weren’t for an X post from Transportation Security Administration posted only a few hours later. “Peanut Butter is a liquid. We said what we said,” the TSA wrote on X.

Now, full disclosure, I am very comfortable saying I loathe the TSA. I fantasize about running for president on a single-issue platform of abolishing the entire department and imprisoning everyone responsible for its creation. But I digress. Their post was not well-received and was even community noted because peanut butter is, in fact, not a liquid. It’s a non-Newtonian fluid.

And it was this double-whammy of Klobuchar hornyposting and the TSA using TikTok girlie voice that hit me like a truck, giving me a grim, but unshakeable vision of the future if Democrats win in November. Brat summer is ending. Here comes smarm fall.

In Tom Scocca’s seminal 2013 Gawker essay, “On Smarm,” he divided early-2010s discourse into two camps. On one side was “snark,” the "hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt,” that defined Gen X’s hipster twilight years. And on the other was “smarm,” the “anti-negativity” worldview that young millennials at the turn of the last decade believed was liberating culture, allowing a million sellouts to flourish. Looking back, smarm won. At least for a while. Journalism effectively died, digital media definitely died, we sleepwalked into fascism, and nothing culturally interesting happened for like seven years. And another smarm wave is coming. Though, things are a little different now.

When Scocca was writing his smarm essay, there really wasn’t a leftist media apparatus in the US to speak of. Nothing that could pushback against the PR-friendly, brand-safe, access-obsessed media landscape that realized it was finally their time. Gawker did start leaning left more deliberately, but three years after “On Smarm” was published, the site was gone. Along with many of the other digital media newsrooms following similar political awakenings. But the Trump years would go on to birth an entire ecosystem of smaller, but in many ways more influential leftist digital media. Much of it very bad! But some of it has lasted. In fact, the de facto king of “breadtube” at the moment, Hasan Piker, was at the DNC last week. It’s pointless comparing Twitch views to traditional media, but his streams were very popular. Well, up until he was kicked out.

Piker has since explained a bit more about why he thinks he was given the boot. It was likely over his refusal to ignore the pro-Palestine protesters outside the convention. But it was a big moment. One that is much harder to for the Democratic establishment ignore or write off. Unlike the world of 2013, you can’t easily paper over outrage with no-haters smarm and relatable content when people like Piker have direct access to young audiences. Though, that doesn’t mean Democrats aren’t going to try.

According to what I’ve read and a few conversations I’ve had with folks over in the world of politics, my understanding is that Vice President Kamala Harris’ meme frenzy this summer was largely due to timing. Not just in picking the right meme at the right time to co-opt, but also the short window her team had for creating a digital strategy. President Joe Biden abruptly dropped out, there wasn’t a clear sense of what Harris should be doing online, and her team had a bunch of millennials on staff who had spent the last decade cosplaying the 2008 Obama campaign and were finally let off the leash. Even a month later, it’s clear that Harris’ big July was lightning in a bottle. Which is, of course, why every other politician and government agency is going to spend the next six months (or four years) trying to copy it. And it’s going to result in some of the worst, most embarrassing posts of all time. Is Kathy Hochul an almond mom? Does the CIA have rizz? Was Mitch McConnell’s newest public stroke out demure and mindful? Guys, this isn’t even a bit. Mindy Kaling called Nancy Pelosi “the mother of dragons” at the DNC last week.

Welcome to your future. And it’s our job now to scream “this sucks ass” as loudly as we can back at the screen until no one ever tries it again.

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Some Powerful Beyblade Content

The Costco TikTok Guy Used To Host A Man Show Rip-Off Podcast

You have no doubt seen the Costco Guys by this point. Well, now it’s the Costco family, as more and more cast members have been added to the lineup. The main duo though are AJ Befumo and his 11-year-old son Eric, who goes by “Big Justice”. Rolling Stone has a good piece on Befumo’s whole operation.

I’ve had a couple funny revelations about Befumo’s channel. The first being that he’s not based in New Jersey, but Florida. (I just assumed lol. The family used to live there, but now they live in Boca Raton.) It also seems like they didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Seven years ago, Befumo co-hosted a podcast called Essential Guy Talk, which was sort of like The Man Show, but kind of wholesome. I said “rip-off” in the headline only because I just wasn’t sure what else to call this. They were basically just talking about beer and sports.

According to Justin Gaynor, a producer on On Cinema, the show was primarily streamed on Facebook and had a very aggressive marketing strategy. “They spammed about it so aggressively in the local New Jersey beer group on Facebook that people basically bullied them out of the group for being so annoying,” Gaynor wrote on X.

The CEO Of Telegram Was Arrested In France

Pavel Durov, the CEO and founder of Telegram, was arrested in Paris over the weekend. Contrary to what Elon Musk has been shrieking about, French President Emmanuel Macron denied that it was politically motivated. Though, it’s probably worth taking that with a grain of salt.

Per The Associated Press, the Paris prosecutor’s office has officially said that Durov was arrested for, “complicity in selling child pornography and in drug trafficking, fraud, abetting organized crime transactions and refusing to share information or documents with investigators.” In other words, all the stuff people use Telegram for.

The most interesting part of this story is the role Yulia Vavilova, a 24-year-old “crypto coach,” may have played in it. Vavilova was traveling with Durov when he was arrested and posting everything to Instagram, including geolocation data. Though, it doesn’t seem totally likely that Vavilova was the reason Durov was arrested. French authorities told the AFP they were confused as to why Durov would even enter the country when he knew he was wanted by local authorities.

If you’ve been out of the loop on Telegram, you may not know that it has morphed into a huge hub for crypto gaming in the last couple years, thanks to the TON, or Telegram Open Network, a custom blockchain that is now fully integrated into the app. It’s what’s driving a new wave of deeply spammy clicker games that are blowing up right now. Garbage Day researcher Adam and I recently covered this whole world for Sherwood.

All Girls Need Are 10 Drunk Cigarettes

This was dropped in the Garbage Day Discord by CharismaticMegafauna. Yes, the song is AI-generated, but I’ve decided I’m ethically fine with AI music, at least, if it’s funny.

Regional Mikus And Inter-Asian Yuri Fan Art

There are two big fandom stories happening right now that are not in any way related, but do appear to be slowly colliding into each other. The first is the “Asian yuri Hetalia” trend. If you understand what any of those words mean, I apologize.

Hetalia is an infamous manga and anime where different countries are personified as high schoolers. It’s infamous both because it sucks and because its fans are cringe and oftentimes weirdly fascist. But in this instance, it’s being referenced because Asian women are drawing different cartoons of their respective countries giving up men and deciding to date the women of other Asian countries. This is where the “yuri” term comes in. “Yuri” is a Japanese term for comics, TV shows, and video games that depict “girl’s love.” It’s not always gay, but it’s usually gay.

The inciting incident for the “Asian yuri Hetalia” wave happening right now — you can see some examples here — was the revelation that South Korean men have been using Telegram groups to organize the harassment and assault of women. One of the groups discovered, that was used to AI-generate non-consensual sexual material, had over 200,000 users in it. Here’s a good thread collecting the work of women across Asia that are now drawing yuri fanart in protest. Going to put a pin in this here because I need more room to go further into Korea’s gendered cyber wars, which are heating up again right now. So stay tuned.

Over in a completely different pocket of the web, a user drew a Brazilian version of the Japanese vocaloid Hatsune Miku and now there are tons of other artists doing their own spin. (Brazil usually shows up at the start of different meme Olympics like this.) Here’s a good thread collecting the popular ones, but I’m a particularly big fan of Massachusetts Miku (naturally) and Northern Italian Miku.

Now, as I said, these two things don’t have anything to do with each other, but the fact we have two very massive fanart projects happening simultaneously is definitely interesting. As X user @rintubein wrote, “The east is inventing yuri Hetalia and the west is inventing Hatsune Miku Hetalia. Welcome back 2012, but better.”

My Brain Can’t Accept That This Was Made In Minecraft

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s Thomas the heterosexuality vampire.

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