Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!
The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the most interesting, strangest, and funniest stories from around the social internet.
This week, we’re talking about whether fitness is fascist, the legacy of Charlie Kirk memes, rapid developments in AI, and a very important egg update.
Nyet, Comrade, doing push-ups is fascist!
There are lots of things you might learn from attending a socialist conference. Apparently one of those things is that getting in shape is fascism.
At the Socialism 2026 conference in Chicago this week, a panel called “Health Fascism, Body Politics, and the Anti-State State” featured writers Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Da’Shaun Harrison and artist Artie Vierkant discussing the intersection of socialist politics, disability, and physical fitness. This panel, as you might expect given its title “Health Fascism,” produced some spectacular clips.
“We have to give up the fantasy of being fitter than the fascists,” Adler-Bolton told attendees. “Fitness is a measure of relative disposability under capitalism.” The left, she argued, should not try to “beat fascists at their own game” by becoming “fitter, more eugenic.”
“In fact, the more dysgenic the better, I think,” she said.
Harrison went after GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, saying that “The political deployment of GLP-1s is fascistic.” Harrison further argued that we live in a world “fixated on genociding fat people” and that the Western world is “waging war on fat flesh with diet culture as a primary weapon through body fascism.” The clips, which were posted by Stu Smith, a Manhattan Institute researcher who frequented livestreams of the conference, predictably went viral on Twitter and were roundly mocked.
Many prominent left-wing commentators took issue with the online furor: Left-wing journalist Noah Kulwin posted, “If you engage in almost any way with the right wing hacks clipping Socialism 2026 then you have permanently lost some respect from me.” Leftist podcaster Adam Johnson complained about the “grimy [right-wing] pile on” and “out of context clips spread by the worst humans on earth.” Adler-Bolton herself got into it, saying that “everyone taking the bait from right wing troll accounts” was simply proving her point.
The least interesting part of all this is the question of whether fitness is fascism, or whether weight loss can be fairly called genocide. Those propositions are inherently ridiculous. Of course GLP-1 drugs are not in any way equivalent to genocide. Of course “the more dysgenic the better” is an insane thing to say.
But what is interesting is how intelligent people operating inside a political movement arrive at such bizarre conclusions, and why their allies seem to be completely incapable of acknowledging their absurdity.
Let’s take one possibility off the table. Socialists like Adler-Bolton and Harrison aren’t faking it. They aren’t saying ridiculous things that they don’t believe — they have a long, documented history of sincerely expressing these ideas. Adler-Bolton co-wrote a book titled Health Communism in 2022 that “examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness.” Harrison has their own book, Belly of the Beast, where they document “the modern genocide of fatness and fat people.”
But that still leaves the question open. How do ridiculous ideas like this develop?
Psychologist Philip Tetlock1 has written extensively about a concept he calls “sacred values and taboo cognitions.” These are ideas that people place outside of normal cost-benefit analysis, values that are so important that the idea of even considering trade-offs against them is morally repugnant.
You may begin from a reasonable starting point, like resistance to eugenics. But if anti-eugenics becomes a sacred value, then a statement like “Obviously it’s better to be healthy, but disabled people also have moral worth beyond their physical fitness” can itself begin to seem suspect: Why are you conceding that one kind of body is “better”? Better according to whom? It’s ideologically purer to simply refuse the qualifier altogether — it is not better to be healthy.
When you introduce this style of thinking on a group level, these totemic beliefs can quickly become subject to a kind of moral outbidding. At the Socialism 2026 conference, you’re not going to get any special recognition for saying something like “We should treat disabled people with respect.” That’s assumed from the start. You probably won’t even get any credit for saying that the current system is highly discriminatory against fat or disabled people. Everyone at the conference already believes that.
But when you take it one step further than anyone else has — when you say that fitness is fascistic, and that, in fact, the more dysgenic we are, the better — then you might actually impress people. That’s showing real commitment to anti-eugenics politics!
Because anti-eugenics is a sacred value, nobody will call you out on how ridiculous that sounds. You don’t criticize your own side! Arguments are soldiers, and any admission that your side said something wrong is like stabbing your soldiers in the back. In Adam Johnson’s thread referenced above, he’s explicit about this dynamic:
It doesn’t matter if you agree with what Adler-Bolton said. It doesn’t matter if it’s patently insane. She’s promoting the sacred value; she’s expanding “the circle of solidarity” and thus she must be defended.
There’s an extra layer of absurdity sprinkled on these episodes by the abundance of academic jargon. Words like “fascism,” “violence,” “genocide,” and even “fitness” are all stretched far past their normal usage. And while that may be standard practice in the sociology journals of the world, it leaves regular people mystified. The “genocide” of fat people involves … them living longer, healthier lives via weight loss? On a voluntary basis?
I’m still waiting for all of these irate defenders to defend these ideas on their merits.
There are eggs in the milk drawer
You might have questions. Going to the original thread in the r/roommateproblems subreddit should make it clear — there are eggs in the milk drawer. We’ve all tried it before. It seems like a time saver. But you can’t have eggs in the milk drawer.
Things keep happening with AI
Things seem to be speeding up in the world of AI! Here are just some of the things that have occurred in just the last week or so:
OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, a dramatically more capable model that can do things like build entire worlds in Blender in minutes and beat the video game “Portal” without human intervention.
The “rogue AIs” narrative got substantially worse — it turns out that beyond the HuggingFace hack, there were other swarms of rogue OpenAI agents that escaped their testing environment and coordinated behavior autonomously on German wiki pages. Reuters reports that this has actually happened with more than 10 sites.
Not to be outdone, Anthropic announced that its models had also escaped their sandbox, uploaded malware to public Python repositories, and used said malware to steal credentials and break into databases. Oh, and also that Anthropic had thwarted several attempts to build biological weapons with Claude.
OpenAI announced by far the most important AI math advancement ever — that it has a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem. Navier-Stokes is one of seven “Millennium Prize Problems,” considered to be among the most important and difficult unsolved problems in mathematics. Navier-Stokes has been unsolved for almost 90 years, and OpenAI’s swarm of agents took 88 hours to find a solution.
But! In a dramatic twist, two mathematicians have accused OpenAI of learning that they were close to a solution and stealing their work to finish the job. The mathematicians announced they had solved an important step in the problem while partially using OpenAI’s Codex, and they seem to believe that OpenAI used their conversation to find a full solution.
Yet more math — there are now rumors that OpenAI and Anthropic may have each solved an additional Millennium Prize Problem.
Cybersecurity firm Calif disclosed an AI-developed virus that could have hijacked any WeChat simply by calling them — without users even picking up the phone. This “zero-click” hack could have given attackers complete control of any of the more than 1.4 billion WeChat accounts worldwide.
Amid all these advances, an Anthropic researcher dramatically quit and accused both Anthropic and OpenAI of “gambling with our lives.”
I typically refrain from making predictions about the future of AI, but I will note the following facts. AI capabilities continue to advance rapidly, without slowing down, in both practical and theoretical tasks. It seems to be getting harder to keep agents or swarms of agents “inside the box.” And the people closest to the industry seem to be the most worried about the potential for disaster. Combine all of this, and it really seems like (as The Argument columnist Derek Thompson noted) “AI safety is having a moment” in the popular consciousness.
The Kirkiversary
The anniversary of one of our nation’s most important political events happened this week. I refer, of course, to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which the youths are calling the Kirkiversary.2
Contra Ezra Klein, Kirk did not practice politics “the right way.” He first made his name doing lowest-common-denominator slop videos like “Charlie Kirk Humiliates Purple Hair Trans Activist,” then graduated to promoting conspiracy theorists like Jack Posobiec of “Pizzagate” infamy and helping efforts to steal the 2020 election. He was a malignant force in American politics, and we shouldn’t have to pretend he was a noble soul just because he was murdered.
Immediately after his death, there was an intense campaign to canonize Kirk as a modern-day saint. He was allegedly murdered by someone with left-wing views on LGBTQ+ issues, which led many prominent right-wing leaders like Chris Rufo, Elon Musk, Sean Davis, and Laura Loomer to call for a government crackdown on the left.
But, one year later, Kirk has acquired a strange second life as an absurdist internet punchline. If you’re over the age of 25 or just reasonably well-adjusted, you may not know that bizarre Kirk-related memes and video edits have flooded the internet over the last year (a prime example here). These jokes often have little or nothing to do with Kirk the person and transcend partisanship. There are reportedly children out there who don’t even realize he was a real person, who only know him as a meme.
I’ve written before about how technology profanes the sacred, and the attempts to enforce a sense of solemnity around Kirk’s death almost certainly contributed to his meme status. In today’s online environment, declaring something sacred may just make profaning it more attractive. Quoting comedian Mike Drucker, “the right wanted to turn Charlie Kirk into their Reichstag Fire, but instead they accidentally turned him into their Harambe.”
Hunter Biden’s memecoin scandal
Hunter Biden released a memecoin this week, because of course. The coin immediately crashed, losing 95% of its value, while one mystery trader made off with more than $900,000 in profit, because of course.
Before the memecoin’s release, gonzo journalist YouTuber Andrew Callaghan — whose warm 2025 interview with Hunter helped kick-start Hunter’s resurgence in popularity — gave his channel’s email list of subscribers to Hunter, seemingly lighting Callaghan’s credibility on fire (and maybe violating the law?) for no good reason.
To return to one of my hobbyhorses — integrity is underrated. We shouldn’t elevate bad people in politics or media, regardless of whether they have the right views or agree with us. And Hunter is a bad person. Even if you think the scandal around his laptop was overblown, it’s still very easy to see that Hunter is a scumbag. He’s a drug addict who cheated on his wife, cheated on his taxes, and shamelessly monetized his relationship with his father.
And yet, over the past few years, some folks on social media have become Hunter fans because he’s charming on podcasts and dunks on the people they also want to dunk on. We were subjected to articles like “How Hunter Biden Won the Internet” and “Hunter Biden Is the King of MAGA Trolling.”
Folks, just don’t promote scumbags. It always ends in tears (or in crypto rug pulls).
Links
The U.S. Open gave media credentials to around 100 social media influencers for this year’s tournament, and, shockingly, they’re now having influencer drama. Fans and players are frustrated as clueless creators (most of whom were not actually credentialed) have been talking through points (a big no-no in tennis), lighting up ring lights in the middle of play, and ignoring what’s on the court to take hundreds of selfies.
TikTok is adding polls, voice notes, and image carousels to its comment section. TikTok comments are an utter wasteland, so the best I can say is that this can’t really make them worse.
Australia may require an “algorithm off” button for social apps. In context, the country’s attempts to restrict teen social media usage don’t seem to be working, so maybe this is its next fumbling step?
Despite claims of improved detection tools, there are still hundreds of child abuse ads running on Meta platforms.
Influencers keep trying to contact uncontacted tribes.
Posts
Also of Superforecasting fame.
Let’s hope it was full-fat whole milk in the drawer, otherwise those eggs are complicit in fat genocide.
I'm not sure anti-eugenics is the starting point, the original sacred value, that leads one to health-fascism. That seems like too much of a given. Most people would think "eugenics bad" is a fundamental, even sacred, belief without ending up anywhere near the same end point as these people. I think the original starting point and sacred value might be "everybody is equal in every way" or "inclusivity at all costs."