The Upcoming Showdown Between The Courts And Reality

This morning, a reader named Daniel sent me an email with the subject line, “You were right,” which is my favorite kind of email to receive from readers. Please continue to tell me I’m right all the time thank you.

In the body of Daniel’s email was a link to the X post from photographer and writer Joe Flood, screenshot below, which shows January 6th insurrectionists Shane Jenkins and Dominic Box inside the White House Press Room during a recent tour. Jenkins was sentenced for assaulting a law enforcement officer and had brought a tomahawk axe to the Capitol Building. Jenkins also spent his time in jail selling election denial merch. And Box was also sentenced to two felonies for his role in January 6th, as well.

What Daniel’s subject line was referring to was a recent episode of my podcast Panic World which posed the question, “was January 6th a success?” It ended up giving our guest that week, long-time friend and Atlantic writer Charlie Warzel, a bit of an existential crisis. But after he was done hyperventilating, he ultimately agreed with me that, yes, the insurrection was probably successful for President Donald Trump and his supporters.

It’s a bit of a trolly question, of course, and my own riff on an idea I’ve seen kicked around leftist circles for a while, which is “long term, was 9/11 a success from the perspective of Osama bin Laden?” (If you want to hear my 9/11 argument, buy me three to four beers and I’ll lay it out for you lol.)

But assessing what January 6th means for America’s political landscape is a complicated question. One that the Trump administration is clearly struggling with. In fact, you could argue that the managing of January 6th insurrectionists is the biggest issue of Trump’s second presidency. Huh, I guess it’s not so easy to hold an authoritarian regime together without a Night of Long Knives, is it?

Trump entered office earlier this year amid a wave of concessions for the insurrectionists. He pardoned more than a thousand of the rioters back in January. He’s floated the idea of compensating them, as well. The Department of Justice recently reached a settlement with the family of slain insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt. And, as Rolling Stone reported, Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin has a nonprofit that’s raised money for January 6th defendants.

But January 6th insurrectionists, like any modern political movement, are heavily shaped by online disinformation, a hydra with many heads that even Trump can only barely contain. And now that Trump has successfully installed members of his regime into positions of power across the government this year, his followers are beginning to demand confirmation of the insane garbage they’ve been mainlining on social platforms for the last five years. For instance, FBI Director and guy who definitely knows what to do with his eyes in photographs Kash Patel, in a recent Fox News interview, had trouble balancing the reality of his new role with popular conspiracy theories about the FBI’s role in the insurrection. Host Maria Bartiromo asked Patel if undercover FBI agents were “egging people on” during the breach of the Capitol Building. To which Patel responded, “We have answers coming.”

We aren’t at the dangerous point where Trump’s regime is enshrining in law lies to appease online conspiracists, but we aren’t far off either. In February, the Trump administration made a big show of finally revealing who was on Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs, giving out binders full of redacted, already public information about the case to a cadre of hapless influencers. The idea being if you give the idiots something to gawk at, they might get distracted for a while. A real baby with keys situation. But it went down like a wet fart because these people are obsessive freaks and have nothing but time and posts on their hands. And I doubt it’s a mistake they’ll make again. Which is why it’s easy to imagine a moment in the near future where Trump-controlled departments drum up phony “investigations” to keep his base safely cocooned in their filter bubble. Oh wait, that’s already happening. And Trump has already turned against the Supreme Court, who recently ruled that his deportation scheme is illegal. He also appears to be currently threatening to prosecute Bruce Springsteen. So we are clearly heading to a showdown between the courts and reality, the defining moment of any ascendant dictator.

And all of this had led me to the conclusion that, yes, January 6th was a success. What kind of success we don’t know yet, but the pieces are all there. “January 6th succeeded in it's goal,” Activist Jason Charter wrote yesterday, sharing Flood’s post about Jenkins and Box at the White House. “Trump can do whatever he wants and he's arresting dissidents (judges and politicians). We are screwed.”

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A Good Post

The Politics Of The Dating Profile

An editor of mine once said something very prescient over lunch. I’m paraphrasing, but it was something to the effect of, “Instagram will lead to the invention of the guillotine of the future.” Meaning we were never supposed to have this much access to how richer people live and he thought it would eventually lead to violent revolution. And I’ve wondered if that’s true — not just for rich people, but everyone. As in, what are the long-term effects of seeing other people have what we want?

Which is how I view a lot of dating app discourse. Not only do those apps force you to go through the mortifying experience of fitting your life into an algorithmically-friendly template, it also shows you a near-endless stream of seemingly happier, hotter, and often richer people that you, in theory, want to sleep with. And after a very long time swiping, you realize that those people do not want to sleep with you. A psychological effect that has to be crushing even for people who aren’t incels.

So when a fresh round of Male Loneliness Discourse kicked off on X last week, after a man named Hayden revealed on newly-resurrected 4chan that he swiped right nearly two million times on Tinder and only ever got one date, I was ready to, well, not take his side, but go into with a slightly open mind. I was wrong lol.

The overwhelming reaction from weird guys on X is that Hayden should move to Thailand and become what they called “a passport bro,” or a man who moves to the Global South to prey on women. Or they’re screeching that Hayden isn’t jacked enough. Which is because most men online can’t conceive of love and companionship beyond the confines of exploitation or self-loathing.

Meanwhile, all of the women who saw Hayden’s profile, and subsequent screenshots of it that have hit the internet, immediately clocked that something is real weird with this guy, ignoring the fact all of his photos seem to involve him holding giant fish.

But all of this, for me, feels very similar to what algorithms have done to other parts of life. Dating apps aren’t as public, so it’s harder to track, but I think it’s a hugely important and often overlooked vector for radicalization. One that’s worth discussing as the psychosexual impact of America’s fascist movement become more bold and apparent. But, also, women just aren’t interested in big dead fish, I think.

What Does Media Mean Now?

Earlier this month, gaming website Polygon was sold by Vox Media to Valnet, an e-slop farm that publishes a bunch of sites you accidentally click on when you’re trying to find real articles about stuff you care about. I wrote a bunch for Polygon at the start of the pandemic and they were always really good to me. The staff over there were some of the best in the biz and most of them were fired during the sale.

Polygon video producer Simone de Rochefort, who survived the transfer to Valnet, sent a barnburner of an email to Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff, which you can read here. Here’s another good piece about Polygon worth checking out, as well.

This was all bad enough, but The New York Times reported this morning that tech journalist and podcaster Kara Swisher and her co-host Scott Galloway inked a new deal with Vox Media and are getting $40 million four-year contracts. And, as many have noticed, The Times story does not mention the Polygon sale. Also, the claims that Swisher and Galloway’s podcast is making as much as they claim it does are a bit dubious.

All of this has led me to ask the question I opened with up top. What does this say about The State Of The Media Now? And from where I’m sitting, it doesn’t say anything good. If a company like Vox can’t figure out how to properly monetize and support a website in 2025, but feels comfortable dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into a podcast where the hosts have more name recognition than Vox does, things are real bad. And when it all goes bust, Swisher and Galloway will be fine. Will the same be said for media brands?

A Road Trip On The Internet

Developer Neal Agarwal has a new game that we’ve gotten more than few emails about recently. It’s called Internet Roadtrip and it’s basically Twitch Plays Pokémon for Google Maps. They’re currently trying to get to Canada.

When I checked it this morning there was more than a thousand users in there controlling the virtual car. They were cruising around Maine arguing about whether or not they should be going up Route 9 (it won’t work, doesn’t go to Canada). But as someone who has done that drive before, watching everyone scream at each other about how confusing it is to navigate backroads in Maine felt very true to life.

r/malelivingspace Back With Another Heater

I suppose this one is thematically linked to the big fish Tinder guy up above. A user on r/malelivingspace, one of my favorite unhinged internet communities currently, decided to share photos of his “post divorce pad,” which he eventually had to delete after all the users overwhelmingly replied, “yeah, we can tell you’re divorced.” Classic.

But the most brutal comment I found in the thread was from one user who wrote, “Great post divorce space! But you know, maybe change it all out before you try to reenter the dating world lol.”

A British Guy Experiences Spice For The First Time

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s a real good Craigslist ad.

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