Desperate For An Enemy | On Wednesday, Garbage Day contributor Ellie Hall wrote about the origins of “trantifa,” the right-wing conspiracy theory that there’s a sprawling network of trans left-wing “antifa” extremists about to descend on Portland, Oregon, and… uh… do something? And the far-right influencer responsible for the trantifa myth, Andy Ngo, was one of a handful of Trump World personalities who was invited to the White house this week for a panel on, what else, the dangers of antifa. | Before we go any further here we have to — yet again — state very clearly that “antifa” isn’t a thing. It’s not an organization. It doesn’t have members. It’s fake. It’s a nickname for antifascism, the (mostly) left-wing political opposition to fascism. There are symbols, practices, and songs that antifascist movements across history have used, but there is no head of antifa handing out molotov cocktails and balaclavas to people. In fact, that three arrows sign you sometimes see at protests was first created by the Social Democratic Party of Germany during the Weimar Republic (more on that in a sec). And “Bella Ciao,” the antifa song getting attention after it was written on a bullet used by alleged Charlie Kirk killer Tyler Robinson, is believed to have started as a 19th century Italian worker song. Who knows, depending on how things go, maybe giant frog costumes will become an antifascist protest symbol for future generations. In several Asian countries right now, the flag from One Piece is going through a similar transformation. But the Trump administration can’t acknowledge any of this. | President Donald Trump is desperate for an enemy to justify the extreme force he wants to deploy on blue states and is trying his hardest to convince people that antifa is so dangerous that, as Attorney General Pam Bondi said at the roundtable this week, they need to be exterminated like ISIS or Hamas. The Trump administration also has a nearly pathological habit of accusing their enemies of being exactly like them. Which is why they think the left is a dark money-funded domestic terror cell full of pedophiles and spree shooters that wants to destroy America. | Also in attendance at the roundtable was a real who’s who of Charlie Kirk understudies, including Nick Sortor, the influencer we wrote about on Monday, who keeps getting his ass beat in Portland, conservative NPC Jack Posobiec, and the aforementioned Ngo. All of whom were happy to play along with the president and pretend like antifa both exists and is very dangerous. NBC News had a good piece on the bizarre rhetorical pretzel Trump and his goon squad had to tie themselves into during the roundtable, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem going so far as to claim that Democratic governors were “covering up” antifa terrorism. | It doesn’t make sense and it also doesn’t have to make sense. And everyone in attendance — except Noem maybe, she looks like the kind of person that would fall for one of those sheet over a mirror TikToks — knew they were lying. In fact, Posobiec, an influencer who never ascended to Kirk’s level because he just can’t stop going full Nazi, said at the roundtable, "Antifa has been around in various iterations for almost 100 years in some instances, going back to the Weimar Republic in Germany." What happened to antifa after that, Jack? | | The idiotic antifa roundtable was not just a simple tedious policy meeting however. Though Trump was so bored that he appeared to briefly fall asleep in his chair. Like everything the Trump administration does publicly, the roundtable was meant to transmit a narrative across the multiple levels of the MAGA media landscape. The regime’s propaganda works like a meme. They wait for something useful to bubble up online and then reward the influencers that got it to trend by inviting them to an idiotic press conference to talk about it. And now right-wing influencers, far-right militias, and trigger-happy cops and soldiers can all say that they are hunting an invisible enemy and that enemy now has a name. And this enemy will encompass more and more of us as the administration grows less popular. | It’s why ICE is building a social media surveillance operation. And why the White House is racing to codify anti-Antifa policies into law via the National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 watchlist. And it’s why some Americans are already fleeing the country. | On Wednesday, Rutgers University professor Mark Bray, a US citizen, tried to fly to Spain with his family after being targeted by MAGA influencers over his work as a historian of antifascism. As Bray wrote on Bluesky, when he got to his gate his reservation suddenly disappeared. He managed to finally make it to Spain yesterday on a second flight. | Jonathan V. Last, in The Bulwark this week, was extremely blunt about the dangerous moment we’ve suddenly arrived at. “Either what Trump is doing is legal, or it is illegal. If it is legal, then Trumpism must be defeated and there then must be a concerted effort to reform the law — and possibly even the Constitution — to prevent the next authoritarian attempt,” he wrote. “If it is illegal, then eventually, someone has to go to jail for what this administration is doing to the country.” | And it seems very clear that this regime is going to do everything in their power to make sure neither of those outcomes happen. | | A Good TikTok |  | Watch now on TikTok | @x.z.a.k.x | sounds a lot cooler from my perspective .. 🤘😂🤘 @Fall Out Boy thank you for the timeless banger 🤘 #fy #falloutboy #funny #meme #musiciansoftiktok |
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| | I’m Getting Real Worried About The AI Bubble, Guys | Deutsche Bank this week told its clients that basically AI is the only thing keeping America afloat right now. “In the absence of tech-related spending, the US would be close to, or in, recession this year,” they said. And if that doesn’t freak you out, former Morgan Stanley investor Ruchir Sharma said this week that the entire US economy has become “one big bet” on AI. And if THAT doesn’t freak you out, Bloomberg published an absolutely horrifying chart outlining the completely circular nature of the AI industry, calling it “an increasingly complex and interconnected web of business transactions” that is “artificially propping up the trillion-dollar AI boom.” | “At stake is virtually every corner of the economy, with the hype and buildout of AI infrastructure rippling across markets, from debt and equity to real estate and energy,” they wrote. Is that bad lol? | So we all know what happens if this goes wrong — we’re all very, very poor for a long time — which is why I think it’s worth talking about what these companies think will happen if this works. The big bet here is that AI will completely transform the global economy and everything else downstream of that. Figures like OpenAI’s Sam Altman are operating under several assumptions. First, they believe that artificial general intelligence, an AI model so complex it has human agency and reasoning, is possible. Second, they believe that in the near future there will be economies run by these AI and economies that aren’t, just as there were industrial and agrarian economies in the early 20th century. And, third, and most important, they believe that these eventual AI economies will outperform economies not being run by digital assistants and large language models. | And those are some pretty big assumptions to gamble the country’s economy on, I’d argue. | | Big Discord Leak | A massive trove of Discord verification photos were leaked this week. I’ve seen some reports on X that hackers were able to get ahold of over two million government IDs and licenses. Discord is saying only 70,000 users were impacted. Either way, it’s bad. The photos were being used by Discord to verify users’ ages, as part of platform’s new compliance with the UK Online Safety Act. Thanks, England. | Discord’s user base is particularly sensitive to keeping their identity hidden, it’s a huge hub for young LGBT communities. And there are a lot of users worried about being outed thanks to the leak. | Now imagine this happening all the time with every service you use. That’s what the internet will be like if more and more governments start pushing for age verification laws. | | One Of Turkey’s Biggest TV Studios Is Making An Entirely AI-Generated Show (It Looks Like Shit) | Turkish production company Ay Yapim is releasing a new show called Surlar, or Castle Walls. It’s three 15-minute episodes made with a custom video diffusion model called AYDNA 1.0. They drew up storyboards and fed them into the model, which was pulling from Ay Yapim’s “licensed catalog.” This is basically them saying, “We probably own most of the images the AI is generating we think.” | You can watch the trailer below. It looks awful. “Simply disgusting,” one commenter wrote on YouTube. |  | Castle Walls - Trailer |
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| The quality of the AI generations in the trailer is decent, but I’ve noticed that AI doesn’t really seem to understand what a scene is. I assume it’s because most of the models are trained on trailers that were ripped from YouTube. I have yet to see an AI-generated video that can handle anything other than a montage. | Limitations aside, a show like Surlar is, of course, the dream for AI in Hollywood at the moment. Feed your studio’s human-made movies and TV shows into an AI model and then infinitely generate a bunch of slop for a fraction of the price it would cost to make anything new. The only problem is that it all sucks and no one wants it. | So we’re heading towards two possible outcomes with AI-generated entertainment. It either gets good enough that people don’t care anymore (bad, not super likely) or people get inundated by so much of their taste just gets worse and they give in (also bad, slightly more likely). | | A Try Guy Tries Wrestling |  | Watch now on TikTok | @seagullse | Dude cannot go a day without being in front of a camera. The pivot is crazy. #nedfulmer #tryguys #aew #wrestling #nedfulmerscandal |
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| Disgraced Try Guy and former wife guy, Ned Fulmer, continued his weird post-scandal media tour with an appearance at Ring of Honor Wrestling this week. It seems like it was just a bonus match, though, and wasn’t filmed for TV. Fulmer’s wrestling name was “Nasty Ned,” in case you were curious. | | A Real Good Late Night Performance |  | Hayley Williams: True Believer | The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon |
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| | Some Stray Links | | | P.S. here’s a biblically accurate Furby. | ***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually*** |
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