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Last week, an animal conservationist and OnlyFans content creator called Squirrel Daddy's Instagram famous squirrel, Peanut, was euthanized by New York authorities following a raid on his animal sanctuary in upstate New York. Under normal circumstances, this would simply be a tragic tale of some overzealous state wildlife officials killing off a beloved pet, which its owner, Mark Longo, aka Squirrel Daddy, acknowledged that he knew was illegal to own. But in the past 72 hours Peanut has become martyr for the entire right wing internet, who is using Peanut's death to rally support for Trump days before the election. On Saturday, the official Twitter account of the GOP House Judiciary Committee posted about Peanut. Elon Musk posted about Peanut multiple times over the weekend. The Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece decrying Peanut's death as an example of "abusive government" and tried to tie the incident to crime on New York City subways and Democrat-run government. And right wing crypto accounts have begun boosting a forthcoming Peanut meme coin.
Longo is an animal lover who rescued Peanut and a raccoon named Fred over a year ago. He said that he had tried to return Peanut to the wild, but the little animal couldn't survive on his own. Longo didn't have the heart to abandon the squirrel, so he cared for Peanut and began posting his adventures with the animal online. Peanut became a social media sensation and amassed hundreds of thousands of followers across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. The squirrel received A-list treatment and even slept in his own bedroom. But after receiving a complaint about his animals (possibly made by someone jealous of Longo's skyrocketing OnlyFans revenue), authorities from the New York state departments of Environmental Conservation and Health raided Longo's house last Wednesday. Longo was served a warrant and the officials removed Peanut and Fred from his possession. They claimed that Peanut bit a police officer, and so they had to euthanize him to test for rabies, but Longo doesn't buy it. He told several media outlets that Peanut has never harmed anyone and that it would be extremely rare for anyone to get rabies from a squirrel. “They treated me like I was a terrorist," Longo told one outlet. "They treated this raid as if I was a drug dealer. They ransacked my house for five hours."
Longo and his wife, Daniela, established P’Nuts Freedom Farm Animal Sanctuary in April 2023. The sanctuary is home to nearly 300 animals including horses, cows, alpacas, and a Macaw parrot. Longo said that he was in the process of getting Peanut certified as an educational animal when he was abruptly killed. Longo and his wife are currently running a fundraiser to try to push for wildlife management reform. "What transpired during this week has been nothing short of a tragedy and a disgrace to the New York state," Longo said in a TV news clip posted on Sunday. On TMZ Longo said that Peanut's murder was an abuse of power by the government. Right wing Twitter users seized the moment and began posting thousands of AI generated images of Peanut decked out in MAGA gear, along with poems and tributes to the animal and diatribes about how the squirrel's death is indicative of a left wing government that's gone too far. "REMINDER: The Democrat Party hates innocence," a MAGA account named Steven tweeted to his 22,300 followers. "They hate all things pure, gentle, and defenseless… This is why leftists and Kamala hate Babies, cats, dogs, Peanut the Squirrel, and Fred the Raccoon. VOTE TRUMP."
With just days to the election, the fact that tens of thousands of MAGA Twitter users are attempting to get the public to avenge the death of a pet squirrel by voting for Trump feels desperate as hell. As one user put it, "The online right is desperate for a narrative to materialize, and they’re trying to brute force it with the timer running out." Polls just 48 hours out are showing Harris pulling a slight lead and the right wing internet seems to be spiraling. With nothing substantial to grasp onto, they have coalesced around the story of Peanut out of convenience, attempting to ascribe a political agenda to the animal's death. To me, this is indicative of a campaign and culture that is Too Online. Trump’s base has always consisted of droves of hyper online weirdos and radicalized internet communities, but lately their attempts at ginning up controversy and attention have been falling flat. For instance, over Halloween weekend, a slew of right wing figures posted themselves wearing garbage bags in a misguided attempt to clap back at Biden seemingly calling Trump supporters “garbage.” Unfortunately, most people who saw their costumes assumed they were doubling down on comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s comment calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage" at Trump's MSG rally last week. Either way, they just looked kind of weird and it didn’t go anywhere.
As Jane Coaston wrote for Vox in 2020, “the Trump campaign has spent significant time focusing on issues that are most of interest to conservatives who spend hours of each day on Twitter, and thus believe that the issues discussed on that platform (or even the machinations of the platform itself) are of critical importance to every American.” The squirrel thing is a perfect example of this dynamic, which Trump’s biggest supporters seem to be falling victim to once again. One user compiled a long thread of the most deranged AI generated MAGA squirrel images.
“I generally avoid using terminally online,” said Emerson T. Brooking, director of strategy and a senior resident fellow at The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, which studies disinformation. “That said: it is TERMINALLY ONLINE to think that the fate of a squirrel microcelebrity would turn even a single vote, much less swing the election, as thousands of far-right influencers now seem to believe.” "I cannot think of a clearer example of the echo chamber on the right than this," entrepreneur David Weiner posted. “The squirrel story is entirely created, consumed, and shared within a closed loop. Literally no one outside of Twitter knows or cares about it and certainly isn’t basing their vote on it." I too cannot imagine a single person switching their vote this late in the game because some local wildlife officials or cops killed a squirrel at an animal sanctuary. The entire narrative feels like a desperate hail mary from blue check Twitter personalities with atrocious political instincts.
In so many ways the internet is now our default reality, but if Trump loses on Tuesday it could be, in part, because his supporters failed to see beyond it. While the Peanut incident continues to provide bait for bottom of the barrel MAGA Twitter engagement farmers, it’s wild that Trump’s biggest supporters are wasting precious air time right now bloviating about a squirrel, rather than making their case to voters.
As one user put it, “Love that their closing argument is ‘…government overreach killed this squirrel, but we don’t care that government overreach is killing women with abortion bans.’ A real winning argument.” What I’m readingJonathan Haidt Started a Social-Media War. Did He Win? Haidt has been attacking academics who actually study the effect of technology on children after they’ve debunked his moral panic pseudoscience. - Chronicle of Higher Education Ad Man You might think you’re immune to political advertising. In Montana, I learned the hard way: None of us are. - Slate Who’s Afraid of These Gen Alpha Queens? Tweens on social media are terrifying their millennial counterparts. Are their fears justified? - Bustle X Algorithm Feeds Users Political Content—Whether They Want It or Not A WSJ experiment finds that accounts supporting Trump and Harris dominate feeds of new X users who wanted cooking and crafts. - WSJ The Big Squeeze: Why Everyone in Hollywood Feels Stuck That promotion isn’t happening. Forget that raise. And your Boomer boss isn’t vacating that corner office anytime soon. Inside Hollywood’s Great Malaise. - THR Why is horror so popular right now? Horror is dominating cinema, with films like The Substance, I Saw the TV Glow, and Longlegs just a few of the genre’s 2024 box office hits. But what’s behind its surging popularity? - Dazed How ‘chat’ became the hottest Gen Z slang word Teens are taking slang from the screen to the schoolyard. It’s reshaping the way that they connect with each other and the world. - Slate More fun stuffMore teen girls smoke weed than boys now. Brian Jordan Alvarez could never. Kai Cenat got NPC streamers Miles Morales and Pinkydoll to farm subs for him while he slept. (he also got swatted by a troll and temporarily banned from Twitch) McDonald’s posted its biggest decline in global sales in four years. Bubble hem skirts are back. Baby Gronk is desperately clout chasing the Rizzler. A wonderful blog post about crossing the USA by train. Chinese people are increasingly forgetting how to write characters by hand. People are paying thousands of dollars to learn how to be content creators. A Google Street View glitch is showing strange “businesses" in the middle of the ocean. The feature appears to be populating ghostly, liminal-looking commercial interiors— like a Street View of a bathroom aisle in a Brazilian hardware store— in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The swiftie fandom continues to go full Qanon:  Amazon reviews as literature. Will we ever get good phone charging cables? Seems like a no. People are selling home cooked meals on Facebook Marketplace. Why are there so few Matt Levines? The voice actors for Franklin and Lamar from GTA 5 remade their legendary scene, shot for shot. Dentists are pulling healthy and treatable teeth to profit from implants. ... Subscribe to User Mag to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of User Mag to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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