Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!
The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.
The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.
Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.
If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.
This week, we’re diving into a bizarre Lego legal drama, trying to figure out why social media keeps thinking politicians are dead, and investigating whether Lionel Messi is an agent of Israel.
It’s time to talk about Lego drama
Some families save for college the old-fashioned way. But the Mansells, a previously unknown Oregon family, had other ideas.
Over 15 years, the 83-year-old patriarch, Ed Mansell, amassed about $200,000 worth of collectible Lego sets. This was apparently an investment strategy to fund the education of the family’s younger members.
In late 2023, they decided it was time to cash in and contracted with a specialty store called Bricks and Minifigs in Oregon to sell the Lego sets. This kicked off what must be the most chaotic Lego-related legal drama in the history of the internet.
Here are the alleged basics (though you can read far more detailed accounts here or here):
Bricks and Minifigs is a franchise of a larger chain, and it got into a dispute with its corporate overlords. At some point after selling some of the Mansells’ Lego sets, it was forcibly taken over.
After the corporate takeover, Bricks and Minifigs denied having any knowledge of the consignment agreement; it didn’t think it owed the Mansells anything and essentially told 83-year-old Ed to pound bricks.1
Various lawsuits were filed among the Mansells, the previous franchise owners, and corporate, but the most important development was when a YouTuber named Reckless Ben began covering the drama, releasing a video titled “I tracked down the thief who stole $200,000 of Lego.”
Over the course of making several videos on the subject, Reckless Ben took a… let’s say a permissive view of what sort of behaviors are appropriate for an investigative YouTuber, using questionable tactics like repeatedly showing up at people’s private residences and impersonating a delivery man.
At the same time, local police began harassing Reckless Ben and potentially violated his rights numerous times. Reckless Ben accused them of having links to interested parties in the case.
The entire saga is incredibly messy and nobody came out looking very good.
Every bit of this is wrapped up in pending legal action, so stick an “allegedly” in front of all these statements, but the store owners weren’t very careful in their handling and documentation of the Lego sets. Corporate B&M seems to have lied several times about what it did with the merchandise. The police stopped Reckless Ben for extended periods of time without real justification and violated their own procedures.
But it’s Reckless Ben himself who’s the most interesting figure here.
With the caveat that I am not a lawyer, it seems fairly likely that Ben did actually commit several crimes over the course of creating his videos. Prosecutors have charged him with stalking and trespassing over the aggressive tactics he used to try to confront B&M executives. He might be facing real legal trouble as a result of getting involved.
The Mansell family really did get screwed over in this case. But because of the publicity Reckless Ben and his 1.6 million subscribers brought the case, they’ve now raised more than $500,000 on GoFundMe and seem to have a better chance of recovering their property.
I find this scenario fascinating, because in the future, a larger and larger share of journalism will look like Reckless Ben: social media-based, gonzo, with little knowledge of traditional media norms but plenty of ability to get people angry online.
There’s a long history of people who can’t get justice turning away from formal legal institutions and appealing directly to public outrage to try to support their cause. And some of those folks were willing to dramatically harm themselves in order to make a point — as Scott Alexander once put it, “sometimes setting yourself on fire sheds light on the situation.”
So, is Mitch McConnell dead or not?
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