00:04:01.960It's not its government name. I can't make myself do it.
00:04:05.720But that's a platform that is like totally refusing to combat this information at all.
00:04:12.240And in fact, Musk seems to be using the platform to like spread some disinformation about like voter fraud, various like pro Trump sort of theories and memes that are getting amplified there.
00:04:25.340But then on the other hand, it still has this, you know, addicted cohort of left-wing users who are doing things like, you know, spreading this viral, like, disinfo joke about J.D. Vance boning a couch.
00:04:42.380I want to note that, like, it's not like there is some shadowy organization behind every social media platform being like, we are going to make sure everyone's divided in their own political bubbles.
00:04:52.360It's really just the way like social media algorithms work where, you know, they show us what we like to see and then, you know, kind of depending on how we engage with it, they know like, okay, show more of that content and more of that content and not any content you probably won't engage in because again, like they want to keep you on the platform.
00:05:10.280And so, yeah, with X especially, I mean, you mentioned this kind of Twitter-addicted left-wing
00:05:17.320bubble. I think I'm one of those kind of clinging on to Twitter's glory days. But yeah, the whole
00:05:25.700disinformation thing, I think we talk about this in Close All Tabs in our second episode, I believe.
00:05:31.920Yeah, no one is invulnerable to spreading disinformation. I think that's a point we
00:05:36.700are trying to make in this episode, where when we talk about disinformation, we're thinking about
00:05:40.700some insult on the far right spreading horrific lies about a presidential candidate. When in
00:05:47.520reality, it can be something as simple as retweeting a picture of J.D. Vance in the IKEA
00:05:53.320sofa section. Can I ask, in researching the podcast, did the couch thing take off on Facebook?
00:05:58.740I mean, the very fact that I have to ask you this question, hoping that you somehow reactivated or
00:06:03.520created a Facebook account you may be too young to even had one but I certainly I've lost my I
00:06:09.080lost my Facebook login years ago sorry to my Facebook followers which I'm sure I still have
00:06:14.320so I have no fucking way of knowing actually um did the couch take off there did they have kind
00:06:19.980of an echo discourse or did it just not happen okay so I do have a Facebook account um and it0.94
00:06:25.240is active but not to post on it I'm I'm very active on Facebook marketplace I'm really on
00:06:31.380the hunt for that good, good vintage furniture, solid wood kind of thing. But really, as we
00:06:38.080researched in the episode, this couch rumor started on and spread on Twitter specifically.
00:06:44.220And the reason it was able to spread so quickly is because of the way that Elon Musk just stripped
00:06:49.580away all of Twitter's moderation and disinformation reporting and any kind of guardrails when it
00:06:55.960comes to spreading false information. I don't know if it made it to Facebook's post part. It
00:07:05.300certainly didn't make it to Facebook marketplace. Wait, the couch section didn't go wild.
00:07:11.580I mean, if anyone found it, please send it to me. But it did really... Basically, it spread
00:07:20.100um across twitter kind of jumped platforms made it to tiktok made it to reddit made it to instagram
00:07:28.060even though instagram uh and meta are known for suppressing political content this is kind of
00:07:33.920what broke through you know i saw so many reels so many meme accounts posting it um and of course
00:07:39.320like there is no disclaimer saying like okay jd vance did not actually um you know do anything
00:07:45.560with a couch we should maybe clarify like for yeah for our listeners who are not like broken
00:07:52.640brained internally online as three of us are this is a rumor that went viral i think around the time
00:08:01.040he was announced as the vp candidate back in july and i don't know morgan maybe you would know more
00:08:07.720about this than i did but like the version i saw of it actually had like a photoshopped page
00:08:13.100supposedly from hillbilly elegy describing this uh sexual act with a couch so it started with one
00:08:20.540tweet from this person with like literally 1700 followers on twitter um a tiny account really in0.99
00:08:26.800grand scheme of things and you know it made the rounds on like shit post twitter on like chronically0.94
00:08:32.100online twitter where people when he was nominated as um you know the vp candidate people were like0.97
00:08:38.260ha ha, this is a joke about him doing explicit things with a couch. I don't know if we're allowed
00:08:44.520to curse on this episode. Oh, absolutely. Okay. Well, the joke is that he fucked a couch
00:08:48.560in lurid detail. And so it started with that, kind of never really broke through. And then0.99
00:08:56.100there was an assassination attempt on Trump. And then Joe Biden stepped down as a candidate.
00:09:01.740And in that kind of excitement of it was like a two-week time period, this couch rumor started
00:09:07.060going around again, which is it's not common for like a post or meme to pick up weeks after
00:09:12.660the original one started. And so that's when someone posted this like photoshopped image of
00:09:19.720like what seemed like a scan of a page from Hillbilly Elegy where it explains in very graphic
00:09:25.840detail how this, it's again fake, I have to like say that, but in very graphic detail how much0.94
00:09:32.960jd vance wanted to fuck a couch when he was an adolescent boy it's so it's so interesting to0.91
00:09:38.360think about the fact that like it starts on twitter lives there for a while and then gets0.98
00:09:42.200resurfaced and only then secondarily makes it over to tiktok and instagram which kind of makes it a
00:09:48.480bit unusual right i would i would imagine that in 2024 more meme material sort of comes out of
00:09:55.400instagram and tiktok right and and um would then secondarily show up on twitter does that does that
00:10:01.140seem right i think twitter used to be a great originator of memes um but i think when elon
00:10:07.420musk took over everyone started kind of jumping ship and um that kind of there's still that kind
00:10:12.620of fun chaotic energy on twitter but it's it's definitely dampened quite a bit um with i think
00:10:18.140tiktok being the main originator of a lot of memes now and like having that spread over i think like
00:10:24.320reels is just starting to like become an originator and having that crossover to tiktok and twitter
00:10:30.840But yeah, I think this is the first time in a long time that we saw, or first time since
00:10:35.040Musk's takeover, that we saw a meme take off on Twitter.
00:10:38.480And I also don't think that it would have been able to spread as far as it did or cross
00:10:43.060platforms the way that it did if Twitter had more robust disinformation on rails and any
00:11:57.960It destroyed his Google results forever.
00:12:02.300It was a perfect sort of contrast between his extremely religious right political views and an extremely vulgar, like, inside sex joke of, you know, the outgroup that Rick Santorum with his political power antagonized, right?
00:12:21.660And it's also, I think, one of the earliest moments when the internet became real life, when an online joke had a impact on national politics, you know?
00:12:37.900And I mean, as I talked to my former TechCrunch colleague, Amanda Silverling, about this, and as she put it, in 2004, search engine optimization was like wizardry.
00:12:47.740And so it was just like mind blowing that so many people search Santorum that if you
00:12:53.840search Santorum back then, you wouldn't get Rick Santorum, the political candidate, you0.99
00:12:58.060would get Santorum, this very vulgar definition for anal sex.1.00
00:13:53.480If you saw a legitimate enough looking website and like the website that the Santorum definition was, I guess, like housed on, looked like a news site, you know, and it looked real enough, like you would assume it was real.
00:14:07.120Well, I mean, I think the site itself actually acknowledged, like we want as many people to click on this.
00:14:11.900And part of what happened was that TV hosts, I believe, including Stephen Colbert, would direct their viewers to do this.
00:14:20.120There's also kind of an interesting old media integration.
00:14:23.640But it is so fascinating to think back to that.
00:14:26.400I mean, I was a constituent of Rick Santorum at the time, just in case any listeners feel bad for him.0.99
00:14:33.500The reason Savage did this was that he compared gay sex to man on dog sex.0.99
00:14:38.040So, you know, hold your sympathy a little bit.0.98
00:14:41.500But it's so fascinating to sort of see how this kind of replays in a different register on different platforms using kind of the different ways in which we maintain and communicate facts around elections, right?
00:18:12.840And Twitter is the one that like is so bad at getting us to buy anything at this point
00:18:18.740that like the political stuff gets interesting again right that you're like why am I seeing this0.99
00:18:23.320like someone paid money to like give a gay man in San Francisco like this shit like exactly yeah0.99
00:18:29.060like what what did you think I was gonna have like an aneurysm and like click on this like this is0.99
00:18:33.800the only way I would ever buy this but that kind of actually makes it a little wilder compared to
00:18:39.380the as you say the over-confected kind of nature of of TikTok and and Insta where really you're0.97
00:18:46.240just like okay you you look deep inside my soul and we're like this is this guy's gonna fucking0.97
00:18:50.680love this shit and and i did and i did yeah the ads that were being served on twitter because0.98
00:18:55.800like all the major advertisers pulled out of twitter and now the ones taking their place are0.99
00:19:00.360like these advertisers that like would not have been vetted or would not have made it through
00:19:05.000vetting on the old on old twitter when it was still twitter um and it's crazy because even like
00:19:11.420right-wing political candidates are posting and getting these straight-up white supremacist ads
00:19:17.580under their posts and saying, like, hey, I don't – that's not what I meant. Even political
00:19:22.840candidates, very conservative political candidates are starting to distance themselves from this.
00:19:26.800What about the stans? Because we had the entry, and I would say a kind of densely
00:19:36.480memefied entry of kamala harris into the presidential race after joe biden's withdrawal
00:19:43.020i remember there was a brief period in the internet time when there were like a hundred
00:19:49.260thousand coconut tree jokes oh my god yeah because of this weird story she told about her mom
00:19:55.480yeah like imploring her to like like historicize more right yeah it was like a very like i grew
00:20:04.200my parents were bay area professors story whereas like my mother and you know she sounded kind of
00:20:09.360like wacky and zanned out a little bit maybe and so like part of it was about harris's personality
00:20:18.540and its perceived um incongruity with the office to which she was aspiring to right like that kind
00:20:24.460of incongruity is always uh at the core of a lot of internet humor i think especially when it's
00:20:30.000like, okay, this dignified or supposedly dignified position actually has this undignified person in
00:20:35.700it. It's part of why Trump is so memeable, right? But then the coconuts almost took on a life of
00:20:41.680their own in this very interesting way. And did you have any thoughts on that flash in the pan
00:20:46.440moment? You know, I think a lot of it was, you know, yes, Harris is, I guess, she's just very
00:20:52.560charismatic as a person. And it's so different from what we had gotten used to with Joe Biden
00:20:58.760as president and Joe Biden's campaign. I mean, the resounding message among young people,
00:21:05.960progressive young people in 2020 was settle for Biden. It's like, it's not Trump. Maybe we can do
00:21:12.240something with this. And I think at the time, Harris presented this younger version of the
00:21:17.480party where she's just a lot more charismatic. She's a lot more animated. She says these kind
00:21:23.720of like zany things that you know your like cool aunt would probably say like when she's like three
00:21:30.880glasses of wine deep you know um and i think like that i think like just that was so so vastly
00:21:38.600different from what people were used to from the white house that they kind of ran with it um and
00:21:44.860again i think a lot of it was kind of like desperation for anything different the the two
00:21:48.740memes from 2020 involving her kind of already pointed in that direction right like there's the
00:21:54.720the one where they're sort of editing her dancing into you about to lose your job and then there's
00:22:01.140the we did it joe right which both yeah sort of exactly are like sort of her off the cuff and like
00:22:05.800maybe right she's like in running short running pants and you're like this is a future vice
00:22:10.080president it's a little funny and it's always you know i see what you mean there's a looseness
00:22:15.120to her that that well biden couldn't really bring to the table and certainly couldn't the more he
00:22:22.880declined i guess too yeah there's also just the in terms of the audience i think part of it was
00:22:28.160the giddiness of relief right yeah especially after that debate performance which was also
00:22:34.160memed uh like a lot of i remember a lot of internet jokes about biden's face from that
00:22:42.540debate which had this look of like confused like absent confused terror right yeah um and it
00:22:50.460was a still image that sort of represented the emotional state of the would-be democratic
00:22:56.840yeah looking at that debate performance right and then so that um terrified despair that was
00:23:04.340somewhat laughed about um in the ironized way that people uh deal with depression and anxiety
00:23:10.700in online vernaculars then got like transformed into this like euphoric exhaling um when we were
00:23:19.160all coconut pilled in yeah july and august yeah right exactly i mean when i think the energy after
00:23:27.280that debate and you know after the assassination attempt on trump where you know kind of gave him
00:23:33.460a lot of ammo and made him look very like almost like martyred in a way um and i think the energy
00:23:40.500among a lot of like the left was just kind of like overwhelming despair um and um i think when
00:23:48.220kamala harris stepped in a lot of that memeing was because people were just so relieved yeah
00:23:53.020that there was you know maybe a chance like maybe a candidate who could debate trump accurately
00:23:59.160Yeah, that gets a really interesting question, right? You're kind of describing a kind of shift of memetic energy from like the right to the left and then right from the left to the right and then back to the left. Now, of course, as you point out, this is it's a little hard to say for sure, because we're often being served only the content that we already agree with.
00:24:18.020But like, do you think that there is such a thing? Like, is there, is there generally a side that has an easier time kind of winning these kind of online, online meme wars, right? Like, or is it just that we applaud the ones that we find funny and interesting? And then the other side is like, slaps their, you know, slaps their knees over something that like, they find funny that I look at, I'm like, that's not for me.
00:24:43.300um yeah how do you do you think that there is a kind of object can we objectively say like no
00:24:47.800there is this kind of energy that that kind of shifts from one side to the other i think if
00:24:51.600you're talking about like who has an easter time memeing um in a more widespread mainstream way
00:24:57.620i would probably say conservatives do because they're just less uh i guess concerned with
00:25:04.320uh you know they'll go for the throat in a way that a lot of very centrist democrats
00:25:09.300are more reluctant to. On further left, in my very, very chronically online circle, it's like,
00:25:17.760yeah, I see a lot of those memes just kind of responding in the same way. But I think for the
00:25:23.740longest time until this election cycle, a lot of very centrist Democrats were really leaning into
00:25:31.340Michelle Obama's whole, when they go low, we go high. We don't stoop to their level.
00:25:35.420And I think the couch fucking thing was really the first time that we saw that kind of group of people be like, you know what? No, we are going to stoop to that level.0.97
00:25:43.840This was aided, I think, by the, in my opinion, really brilliant Tim Wall's political strategy that they completely stopped him from doing later in the campaign. And I sort of wish they just let him keep doing it because he went on TV and he called them weird.
00:25:59.860Yeah. And he claimed the mantle that is very sort of native to these online formats of like judgment, of mocking judgment. Right. Yeah. Which is like a position of great confidence. Right.
00:26:16.420You need to be sort of immune to shame and, as you said, Morgan, like willing to actually insult and hurt and be cutting towards your enemies, which had been completely absent from democratic politics, as you mentioned in that Michelle Obama model.
00:26:33.300Yeah, exactly. And we see there is such a stark difference, I think, in the energy going into the DNC over the summer where you had people like Democrats, like career Democrats, calling Republicans weird. You had Elizabeth Warren, of all people, cracking couch jokes.
00:26:50.400Yeah. And I don't know, just compare that to now where Kamala Harris is campaigning with Liz Cheney and, you know, trying to court very moderate Republicans. It's just a very stark contrast to how they started the campaign.0.98
00:27:03.580Yeah. The mocking fun. Yeah. Like sucked out of the room. It was something really turned on a dime after the DNC.
00:27:10.480Yeah, exactly. I mean, we still see hints of it. I mean, we saw Tim Walls calling Elon Musk a dipshit on TV, and I think that was like a little breath of fresh air. But they didn't continue that strategy throughout this campaign.
00:27:24.900There are kind of two things at work here.
00:27:27.060On the one hand, we all participate in online discourses at their most rambunctious, let's say.
00:27:33.780And at the same time, and I'm guessing that that's why, you know, an NPR affiliate asked you to do a podcast about it.
00:27:39.720We're also kind of invited to judge them a little bit, right?
00:27:44.740And this is something that I, in my own work, have really struggled with.
00:27:47.960And I don't always think that that's a very productive way of looking at it.
00:27:51.060To just be like, look, if we're going to be messy, let's be messy.
00:27:54.180Like, it's not like, you know, you don't have to own the moral high ground. You don't have to. Right. If like if you're dealing with a bully, call them weird. It's totally fine. Kind of seeding the insurgent energy to the other side is clearly what 2016 was all about. Right. There's this book by Angela Nagel that I don't love, I have to say, but like it's called Kill All Normies, where she kind of makes the claim that basically by 2016, really the kind of subversive energy, the transgressive energy lived on
00:28:24.180the alt-right with sort of an overly pious lefty online culture as its kind of perfect foil. Again,
00:28:30.280I don't necessarily buy that, actually. I think that's contrasting the Hillary Clinton campaign
00:28:34.700with like a bunch of shit posters, right? It's like, that's not the same thing. But at the same0.99
00:28:41.080time, there's something to that, right? Like the perception that whether a campaign will go down
00:28:46.280a little bit into the gutter or into Twitter, which is often the same thing, the Democrats
00:28:50.620don't seem to have a great deal of comfort with that, even in 2024, right?
00:28:54.960Yeah. I mean, and we talked about this in our first episode of the podcast, but 2016 was,
00:29:00.040and I think the Democratic Party for every election really since then has really tried
00:29:04.940to take this moral high ground. And that was primarily perpetuated by like very centrist
00:29:11.500Democrats who, you know, were kind of trying to maintain that like political civility.
00:29:15.700But I mean, during 2016 on further left, like democratic, socialist and very progressive
00:29:22.500areas of the internet, you had like Bernie Sanders' dank meme stash where these chronically0.98
00:29:27.180online shit posters were churning out memes at the same rate that 4chan's pro-Trump posters0.99
00:29:34.020And so I think like this kind of willingness to engage in political discourse in a way
00:29:41.420that isn't so civil and is a bit more vulgar.
00:29:45.700has always existed on both ends of the political spectrum. It's just that I think more centrist
00:29:52.180political figures are finally starting to engage with that and starting to let that moral high
00:29:56.980ground slip now. Yeah, I mean, it's exactly right. I mean, it's the difference. Maura and I just did
00:30:01.200an episode where we watched a video that Elon Musk posted, a pro-Trump, basically like fan edit,
00:30:09.440and it broke our brains. It was horrifying. God. But that's the thing, right? It's the owner of
00:30:14.460the platform, finding a meme and liking it and putting it on his feed, right? And same with
00:30:22.140Trump. Trump, often some of his most offensive posts have been retweets of other people's memes,
00:30:29.160right? And that's the difference. You will not get at POTUS under Joe Biden or Kamala Harris's
00:30:36.740account being like, here's a dank meme I dug up from Dirtbag Twitter or whatever.
00:30:41.840Right. This might be a moment to turn to gender, which is technically our beat, you know, because I think part of what we're sort of circling around and not saying here is that this vulgar affect, this sort of vernacular of like mocking gross cruelty, right? This is something men do, or at least they do it a lot better and more comfortably, and they have a ton more social permission to do it.
00:31:08.100And so the Nagel thesis that the far right is where the insurgent, impish, irreverent energy is, I think is partly a symptom of this gendered realignment between the parties, right?
00:31:26.620Because the Democrats have a lot less room to mouth off and be, you know, angry and cruel because a lot more of them are women, a lot more of their voters are women and a lot more of their candidates are women.
00:31:38.520Yeah. I mean, just very briefly, just to give readers a sense of what Maura is saying, because this is exactly right.
00:31:44.220Nagel writes that basically on the left there had been during the 2016 election, quote,
00:31:48.600a strange mixture of ultra sensitivity, sentimentality and was what was once considered radical social constructionist identity politics.
00:31:55.920And like, basically, all that is lady coded, right?
00:31:59.320Because she's basically saying like, it was a bunch of outraged school moms versus like1.00
00:32:22.240Wade was overturned, we saw a lot of young women on Twitter reposting memes.
00:32:25.920being like, all right, well, here's how to send hate mail to the Supreme Court. I think there is0.96
00:32:31.380a bit more willingness to engage there or posting or primarily female K-pop stans flooding abortion1.00
00:32:40.240snitch hotlines with kind of vulgar fan edits or vulgar fan fiction. I think that as the younger0.95
00:32:47.840generation who has been online and has kind of been exposed to this more irreverent kind of
00:32:53.360internet humor comes to age and becomes more politically active, I think that that's going
00:32:57.760to change. But yeah, I agree for the most part. The younger the women, the more they're willing
00:33:04.500to tell politics to go fuck themselves online. Exactly. That gives me hope of the future.1.00
00:33:12.380Yeah, exactly. I mean, I remember reporting on this, I think last year or two years ago, but
00:33:17.440you know, when the trans snitch lines opened up where, you know, a lot of very conservative states
00:33:23.340were trying to get people to report doctors who provided gender affirming care, people flooded it
00:33:28.580with like straight up like Shrek porn. And so I think that that I think that respectability is
00:33:35.320starting to shift a little as people realize that, you know, taking the world high ground isn't always
00:33:41.020that effective. This might bring us to something you said on your podcast where you said that
00:33:46.980Kamala's social media team is actually doing pretty well, right? What do you think that they've gotten
00:33:52.180right? I think that they've been very good about being quick to respond to internet trends without
00:33:59.240making Kamala Harris do the internet trends. Kamala HQ, for example, her TikTok page,
00:34:11.740they're posting fan edits of Kamala Harris. They're posting kind of like dunks on Trump,
00:34:17.860But you don't see Kamala Harris out here saying, like, Pokemon, go to the polls.
00:34:23.500You don't see her – like, they're posting the brat edits.
00:34:26.380But you don't see Kamala Harris herself saying, I am brat girl summer, you know.
00:34:31.040And I think that's a difference here between – I think that's where the line is with, like, making politicians, you know, seem fun and approachable and kind of spreading their political messaging but not making them cringe.
00:34:45.520it would ruin her immediately it would ruin the bit immediately if they had her do it yeah i mean
00:34:51.140if you had kamala harris out here saying like you know i i want club classics you know it's over it's
00:34:58.620like you know like that that video of uh president obama going over his summer playlist and they're
00:35:04.980like oh you like 365 by charlie xcx and he was like yes i love 365 by charlie xcx
00:35:11.160One of your guests, Katten Barge, points out that this kind of fandom is really effective only if it feels bottom up, right? If it actually kind of, if it feels democratic, right? I think she even says, we the people make these memes. It's not, you don't get to tell us what we mean.
00:35:30.840I think that for me that clarified two things. One is that may well have been why Trump memes in 2016 were so successful because he didn't have a good campaign. So he like you had these shit posters basically creating an online campaign for him that he may have been mostly unaware of or like only sort of like dimly aware of.
00:35:52.120And then the other thing that made clear to me is that most of the time when it's not an election year, of course, we watch corporations interact with memes in some way.0.99
00:36:05.980And that is where that line you're describing between, oh, that's cool and that's cringe is so clear where he's like, oh, yeah, you had it.
00:36:16.280You were riding the wave just for a second and now you're just getting crushed under it.
00:36:19.640you know um and it's this interesting thing that we that it is a relationship that we are learning
00:36:25.800mostly in dealing with like pepsi yeah much more so than we learn it in dealing with elizabeth
00:36:31.720warren yeah exactly i mean trump's uh digital strategy in 2016 was completely different than
00:36:37.600it is now i mean now he's on the podcast circuits he's trying to like court the whole yeah you know
00:36:41.840like edgelord boy side of the internet and you know back then all he had to do was retweet you
00:36:47.720know, those memes of himself as Pepe the Frog and people went wild, like that just fed the
00:36:53.840But it's not like his campaign was the one pushing out Pepe memes.
00:36:57.920morgan you just talked about trump like trying to be on the like young dude edgelord podcast
00:37:23.680circuit right which means that there is this new way where it's not as organic this time around
00:37:31.000right he's trying to make this like very deliberate very avowed and candidly very online
00:37:37.980pitch to young men right and young men in this election were recording uh on november 1st so
00:37:46.740they are projected at least to go pretty sharply to the right and towards trump and how have the
00:37:52.600memes been gendered this time around? Yeah. I mean, well, Trump got the clearly
00:37:58.640coveted Jake Paul endorsement. So I think that's all you need to know.
00:38:03.080Oh my God. Yeah. Jake Paul, the very controversial YouTuber who's gotten kicked out of
00:38:09.080West Hollywood many times. And over the summer, Trump really did go on that kind of like podcast
00:38:16.400Circuit. He went on Logan Paul's podcast, Jake Paul's older brother. Logan Paul is also very
00:38:23.660controversial and most known for trying to sell energy drinks to children. I'm sure their parents
00:38:29.300love that. Yeah. Very highly caffeinated too. Oh my God. It's a Panera lemonade for children.
00:38:36.740And yeah, he went on Aiden Ross's Twitch stream and Aiden Ross is like literally – he's like
00:38:42.480a white – or aligned with white supremacy and got kicked off Twitch for hate speech.
00:38:47.780And so he's really – he was really making this appeal to like teenage boys.
00:38:53.300And I think it's interesting that, you know, Kamala Harris's campaign has really
00:38:58.000campaigned on like reproductive rights, like the – especially since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
00:39:03.740They went on Call Her Daddy and did a whole episode specifically on access to abortion.
00:39:10.040um and she i think kamala harris is like her whole messaging has really been targeted toward women
00:39:16.920they're putting out ads you know saying like hey like your your husband can't intimidate you out0.99
00:39:22.900of voting like your vote is private and there's you know a lot of controversy over that too on
00:39:27.620the right where people on the right are saying like oh you think like conservative women are
00:39:32.180just all married to abusive men but like i think that kind of messaging is necessary and i will
00:39:37.380note, though, that in the last few weeks, the Kamala Harris' campaign has really started
00:39:43.860shifting gears and trying to target young men online. They may not be the same young men who
00:39:50.600would watch Aiden Ross' stream or listen to Jake Paul, but they are still young men online. They
00:39:56.960did a stream. Tim Walls streamed with AOC and played Crazy Taxi on her Twitch stream.
00:40:05.120um Kamala Harris went on like all the smoke which is primarily a sports podcast but um yeah so they
00:40:13.120are trying to engage with like men online and I don't think you know the men who consume that
00:40:20.120kind of media would vote for Trump or would even listen to you know Jake Paul or Aiden Ross but
00:40:26.320it's still the same demographic of like young men online is there a way for a campaign to be
00:40:32.240too online right because i remember during the like ron de santis very brief presidential run
00:40:38.440one of his staffers actually got fired because he posted this video full of these like really
00:40:43.700dense obscure references to right-wing memes that you would only really even be able to recognize
00:40:50.060if you were spending like like several hours a day on 4chan right and that included the white
00:40:55.300supremacist symbol something i only learned about through this um episode called the black sun
00:41:01.020And so this kid gets fired, right? But it added to this general sense of the DeSantis campaign and DeSantis himself as being this sort of like unwholesome, uncool kind of the internet, right?
00:41:22.460And I'm wondering like where the line is between like courting this like very specific audience that you can see online and then like alienating everybody else.
00:41:32.260Yeah, I think it's interesting that Kamala Harris's campaign has really tailored their digital strategy to each platform.
00:41:40.060So their TikTok strategy, for example, is kind of like this irreverent fan camp style humor that you wouldn't have seen in 2020 at all versus her Instagram strategy tends to be a little bit more buttoned up and a bit more official versus her like TV ads.0.99
00:41:57.220She looks like your standard basic politician.
00:41:59.640It's like you're seeing different versions of her in every part of the Internet, depending on where you are.
00:42:05.100So I think it's more about how you tailor your digital strategy.
00:42:08.400I will say one example that stands out to me as someone who was artificially online was John Fetterman in 2022.
00:42:16.920He had a very brilliant digital campaign led by Annie Wu, who's now working with the Democratic Party, I believe.
00:42:24.440But, you know, she was very smart in the way that she presented him as this, like, very fun, relatable candidate who could respond to memes, who could be on trend, who could, you know, be relatable to, like, some random 21-year-old in Pennsylvania.
00:42:40.440But that didn't carry over it once he was elected into his actual politics.
00:42:45.780You know, like now he is just known for taking money from APAC and being like very, very
00:42:54.240vocally pro-Israel, you know, amid this horrific war.
00:42:58.880And you don't see any of that kind of like goofy, like relatable side to him that you
00:43:04.680saw during his campaign that you saw on TikTok because that wasn't him.
00:43:08.540That was someone else being very smart about how they presented him and how they, you know,
00:43:34.700But the Santa's example, I think it gets to a second problem, right?
00:43:37.500There's the inauthentic politician or the inauthentic online presentation that eventually kind of comes back to bite you.
00:43:43.040But there's also another one, right, which I think you got in the case of DeSantis, which is that on the right, it seems the membranes between these different media ecosystems are really degraded, meaning you find yourself suddenly kind of giving a stump speech to a bunch of like, I don't know, like truck drivers or whatever.
00:44:06.660and you're like basically just referring
00:44:33.360because at some point you might be speaking1.00
00:44:34.720complete gibberish to just anyone else who is not currently you know you know a b-tard or or0.94
00:44:41.720whatever they're calling themselves these days yeah and then you get to the question of like1.00
00:44:45.220okay well which of like who from this demographic is actually going to vote who's actually going to
00:44:50.420show up to the polls versus you know who's just engagement bait baiting yeah that's the other
00:44:54.440thing right like i was thinking about this with with elon musk being right elon musk had like with
00:45:00.180the with the combination of the blue check you know him handing out blue checks for money basically
00:45:05.040and no one else having them anymore yeah um combined with like what you were talking about
00:45:10.860like the fact that all these advertisers fled basically every single tweet that he that
00:45:17.640sends out or anything that trump sends out like basically there's gonna be or that any
00:45:23.460trump surrogate sends out basically um you're gonna get like pages and pages of these blue
00:45:28.840check replies that are clearly just engagement bait right where you're like this is none of this
00:45:34.080interesting none of this is funny um these are people hawking crypto or like weird weight loss
00:45:40.020things or like commemorative coins or whatever like that is that that's the other problem right
00:45:45.740that like at some point the the commercialism of it might take over and you might actually not
00:45:50.040win anyone over to your cause you might win them over to the cause of commemorative coins but
00:45:54.340you're not supposedly in this for the commemorative coins you're in it for
00:45:57.340the presidency right yeah i mean and you're lucky if those are even real people i mean so many on
00:46:02.200twitter now or so much of twitter now is just uh these blue check ai bots who are using chat gbt
00:46:08.300to like you know come up with the most generic boring answer possible just to farm engagement
00:46:13.240and further monetize their account like they're not they're not there to add to any sort of
00:46:18.180political discourse they're just there to get their coin and leave all right so they're they're
00:46:22.200basically they want followers and then they'll sell the account is the idea well i mean yeah
00:46:26.380that and also now you can monetize your twitter account um based on certain like uh you know
00:46:31.540metrics i'm not super familiar with like what the exact specific specificity is but like basically
00:46:36.560if you have a monetized blue check account and you're just getting a ton of engagement it doesn't
00:46:41.820matter you know where you fall in the political spectrum it's like you're you're just using chat
00:46:46.980gbt to like respond to as many tweets as possible to get as much engagement as possible and amass
00:46:52.780followers and you know get money i'm gonna throw away my phone i mean i know i know it's so bleak
00:46:58.340i know i know and sometimes i like want to scroll like i see a funny video and i want to see the
00:47:02.620replies and it's just all the same like yeah or you know it's and or like they're using other
00:47:07.900people actual human beings responses and posting that and it's just it's bleak it's like a it's
00:47:13.820kind of like a like wasteland out there but i can't give it up twitter twitter degraded so much
00:47:19.840so fast just in its usefulness but also when it's like in its tenor i can like picture i can like
00:47:26.400post like a cute picture of my dog on twitter now and then i'll get like like six to ten replies1.00
00:47:33.360immediately being like and you should go fucking kill yourself bitch and i'm like yeah my dog you0.99
00:47:38.240know it's like it's not it's nuts um god yeah and so like but this this is i think you're touching1.00
00:47:46.620on something that's like the the sheer quantity of slop not just on twitter but on all these
00:47:51.980platforms now right has added to something that adrian and i have talked about a little bit before
00:47:58.780which is just the like intense ephemerality of the news cycle especially as it gets metabolized
00:48:03.820on social media and of the of the memes from the news cycle right like when i remembered the kamala
00:48:10.720or kamala uh coconut memes that felt like i was talking about like something that happened
00:48:15.680like 20 years ago. And it was actually just like eight weeks ago, actually. And there's a way in
00:48:24.960which these things get made universal. Suddenly they seem like they're everywhere, especially
00:48:30.220if you're in one of these online silos where they really can be everywhere for you. And then they
00:48:35.260disappear, right? And something we were talking today about how the Washington Post just ran
00:48:42.880a story about these new voters like gen z 18 20 year olds who are voting for the first time
00:48:50.600and a lot of them had never heard of the access hollywood tape before yeah and now it's going0.98
00:48:55.920viral on tiktok because people are like i can't believe this guy said this shit and he became the0.98
00:48:59.760president yeah and it's it is an artifact of history it makes sense that they wouldn't have0.99
00:49:06.340heard that if they were 10 in 2016. But to me, it seems like such an indelible and specific part
00:49:15.960of this historical moment, right? But it's also able to just be disappeared by this churn of all
00:49:22.060the content. Yeah, exactly. And it's interesting because the Axe Hollywood tape, to me, feels so
00:49:27.900burned into my memory. I think partially because – I mean, I'm in my late 20s. I'm almost 30.
00:49:33.780But that was the first election where I could vote for president. And it just felt so like there was just such a cognitive dissonance in that. And it's shocking to me because that felt like such a historic election, being able to vote for a woman for the first time and then everything that happened after.
00:49:54.040but you know to someone who's freshly 18 like that was you know just a blip in their day you
00:49:59.860know and i do think that um i think that the internet has actually because the way that the
00:50:05.460internet is kind of this like everlasting archive of content i mean it's becoming more and more
00:50:09.980hellish every day to find that content but um because it's just such a like archive of content
00:50:14.320i think that if anything that kind of memory what is allowed to continue to exist um i don't know
00:50:22.780If, you know, if that had happened, for example, in like 2000 and people were voting in 2012, would we have remembered that versus now, you know, that Access Hollywood tape will always exist somewhere online.
00:50:35.480And every year someone is going to find it and that's going to somehow affect their political consciousness.
00:50:41.320Everything lives forever online, even though it also disappears immediately.
00:50:49.260Yeah. Some things disappear immediately. In other cases, you get, you know, Santorum and it's just going to be there forever, you know.
00:50:57.580I was just so entertained when we were working on that episode. I was so entertained that Santorum is still like, I think, the third Google result.
00:51:05.040I mean, it'll be in his obituary, right? I mean, that's really, I mean, it's powerful.
00:51:11.920It really has cast a pall over that man in life.
00:51:16.160I mean, like, and I say this with zero sympathy, but like, just kind of awe, just kind of awe.
00:51:21.100Like, it's really, this dumb joke is going to be part of who this person remembered to be.
00:51:30.840I think when we were working on the episode, we decided it was too vulgar to, you know, make NPR listeners listen to what Santora means.
00:51:41.920So we were kind of just like tongue in cheek. We're like, well, you can look it up online. And after that, like three of my friends texted me and they were like, I had no idea what Santorum was. So I looked it up. I think it's just so funny. And they're like, and I think that's hilarious and also horrifying. And I just think it's so funny that 20 years later, it's like, this is still happening.
00:51:59.920you know the santorum example is one where different communities could kind of join in on
00:52:06.420it right google was there for everyone um and i think that's that's kind of significant whereas
00:52:11.820a lot of the other memes we've been talking about really are kind of i mean you have an entire
00:52:17.240episode on basically it's about stands and their relationship to political campaigns and that's
00:52:21.860of course a little bit different there are fandoms that that kind of um transfer their
00:52:27.320allegiance to certain cultural properties basically to the to the political candidates right um
00:52:34.900and and that's a little bit different right like that that that's sort of like how moira and i did
00:52:40.660an episode on warhammer 40k among other things and we found out that that's a big that basically
00:52:45.700there are warhammer 40k stands super imposing trump's face on like space marines in that and
00:52:51.560we're like what the fuck yeah we had no idea but like there it is right um but that's a very0.68
00:52:57.020different like you have to you really are becoming in that moment an anthropologist like sort of0.98
00:53:01.300like parachuting into you know another village and being like what are you guys doing here
00:53:05.540whereas like santorum is all about the ability to buy in over and over again and like your friends
00:53:10.500now googling it now being like lol or like yikes uh yeah um like the like in group and out group is
00:53:17.620is a is a is a pair that comes up a couple of times in the in your podcast can you say a little
00:53:22.740about that? It's like, is there, are there, what about inward facing memes and outward facing
00:53:27.900memes? Cause most good memes, right. Do have an outside. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would kind of
00:53:32.680characterize it as like, there are some memes that just appeal to a broader audience. Um,
00:53:37.200and some that are really just meant to stay within a community. Um, I mean, I've, for example,
00:53:41.900like I have been in Stan culture for many, many years. Like I'm going to use one direction as
00:53:47.740an example because RIP Liam Payne. But I was a huge One Direction fan in high school and in
00:53:55.600college kind of fell out of it. And it's interesting because now we're seeing this
00:53:58.520resurgence of One Direction and these kind of vintage 13-year-old One Direction moments and
00:54:04.960people circulating these memes that were huge in 2013, 2012 that never really broke beyond
00:54:12.120this little One Direction bubble on Tumblr and Twitter. And now, because they're now more
00:54:20.760culturally relevant right now, they're breaking into the mainstream and people are just starting
00:54:25.380to be exposed to these kinds of memes. So that's what I think by in-group, it's like people who
00:54:30.680are involved in that specific community would be in on a joke versus the out-group is kind of just
00:54:36.200like the broader masses yeah does it matter in that context that basically with trump we had a
00:54:43.060candidate in 2016 who was a plausible object of standing because he'd been on tv right like
00:54:51.640you didn't happen to stand the hot guy on the wb show you stand the mean guy from from the nbc show
00:54:58.400instead and then similarly like that he kind of partook of twitter as basically twitter's victim
00:55:05.340more than he was really a master at it and then same with elon musk right like in some way does
00:55:10.600stan culture independent of like i mean you know i i too belong to some of these fandoms and i i you
00:55:16.060know i we all know about toxic stan culture but stan culture can also be very lovely yeah but it
00:55:21.300does seem to do is it does seem to kind of short circuit a little bit the the the connection between
00:55:27.240the economy or between business and media on the one hand and politics on the other right that like
00:55:32.860you get someone like Elon Musk, who's a media consumer first, and then is like, I have to buy
00:55:37.760the platform on which I read things I do not like, right? And we have Trump, who is like first a TV
00:55:43.320actor, who then sort of, you know, is able to transmit that kind of fandom into kind of a
00:55:50.560political loyalism. So is that kind of, is stand culture kind of a sign that there are certain
00:56:00.200firewalls between our media ecosystem and our politics are just kind of collapsing?
00:56:04.980I think so. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think Trump's 2016 campaign, he wasn't necessarily
00:56:11.420standable because in the traditional sense, he wasn't hot. He wasn't particularly charming. It's
00:56:18.160not like he had a really broad following. I think the root of that standing was really because
00:56:23.400he was seemingly an outsider in DC politics and he was running against Hillary Clinton,
00:56:30.060who was incredibly accomplished, but, you know, was symbolic of this political institution that
00:56:36.760a lot of people thought was broken. And I think like the root of the standing was because he
00:56:41.960seemed so subversive to a lot of people at the time. And some politicians now, like I think some
00:56:49.580politicians develop stans because – or develop this kind of like fandom around them because of
00:56:56.160their actual politics or because of like their personalities. Like, you know, Alexandria Ocasio
00:57:00.900Cortez, for example, has her – this like very wide group of supporters because she's so engaged
00:57:07.500online and because she engages with the kind of people who would be very attuned to stan culture.
00:57:15.200whereas someone like Bernie Sanders is completely different. He also has a lot of stands online but
00:57:23.280he's just like a grumpy old man from Vermont. Just people like his policies. So I think there
00:57:28.160are different reasons for standing but it's really about how you use your popularity.
00:57:33.800It can be either about your organic comfort in those worlds or your complete
00:57:41.280foreignness from those worlds right like yes like what is appealing about bernie sanders isn't just
00:57:46.680that people love his policies it's also that they could love him in a way that they know
00:57:51.060what is so asynchronous right how he lives his life right yeah exactly oh it is that gap
00:57:58.820yeah yeah it's just like bernie sanders famously says that he doesn't have apps on his phone
00:58:03.840and a couple weeks ago that's an accomplishment i know and a couple weeks ago he was on that
00:58:10.200Twitch stream with a bunch of Twitch streamers answering questions, talking about why it's so
00:58:15.660important to vote this year. And one of the streamers showed up as a VTuber. And there's
00:58:23.280just like this moment of like, what is going on? Because Bernie is trying to talk about the
00:58:29.180importance of abortion access and calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. And then this guy who's
00:58:34.500a digital kind of like wearing a digital avatar as like a cat an anime cat boy is like like you
00:58:42.000know senator sanders do you know what a vtuber is and bernie is like no i don't anyway yeah and so
00:58:49.720yeah it's a kind of like again he seems like such an outsider to the internet that the internet is
00:58:55.960like kind of has kind of adopted him these fixated dare we say parasocial attachments that people can
00:59:02.700get in a stand culture that have facilitated this like merger of political and consumer identity
00:59:08.820it occurs to me and this might be like a decent like last note for us to end on right that this
00:59:15.080is also something that happens in the inverse right because people also build these political0.88
00:59:19.560consumer identities around like absolutely hating shit yeah i think i think this was a real factor0.95
00:59:26.380in 2016 with Hillary Clinton. Yeah. And you do see a sector of the online, I think like specifically0.98
00:59:34.680like center left, like liberal community that has really organized themselves around hating the shit0.99
00:59:40.860out of Donald Trump and just like reviling him. And this is what brings, you know, one theory of0.97
00:59:47.320Kamala Harris's campaign is that people can, that people hate Donald Trump more than they hate1.00
00:59:53.500women right and she can bring them all together to hate this one fucking guy yeah enough to to0.95
00:59:59.800win the election um and so i'm interested in like yeah and and you know like adrian you noted that0.96
01:00:07.420this is a uh podcast called in bed with a right so like this is i'm not judging anybody for
01:00:12.020organizing their identity this way this is also something i do this is an anti-fandom podcast
01:00:16.480and you know and like who among us has not gone and like watch the instagram story of like0.99
01:00:22.420a frenemy you know just to be like and what is she up to now she looks like shit0.97
01:00:28.120um but like what is the force of this anti-fandom online is it like is it one-sided is it taking0.97
01:00:38.000root sort of everywhere it seems like it's a it's a really dynamic factor that i haven't really seen
01:00:44.820theorized a ton. Yeah. I think it's really funny that you mentioned this kind of like blue wave
01:00:49.300resistance lib genre of Twitter that unfortunately we don't really see as much anymore given the
01:00:55.680quick, quick death of Twitter. But yeah, I think it's interesting because yeah, in 2016,
01:01:01.960there was this whole cohort of people who really banded together in their hatred of Donald Trump