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 the online Right’s collective freakout, how Threads still hasn’t become a thing, and why stan accounts keep ending up as political prisoners.
The Right’s no-good, very bad week
It’s not the best time to be a MAGA soldier online. Poll after poll shows that Democrats are massive favorites to take back a majority in the House of Representatives next month, and they’re increasingly viewed as favorites to take back the Senate as well. The Argument/Split Ticket model currently gives Democrats an 89% chance of winning the House, and a 61% chance of taking the Senate. Trump’s approval is now at -26 with likely voters. It’s hard out there!
Surely the online Right has cooked up some fantastic responses, right? What have the loyal patriots of the MAGA machine been doing as the electorate turns on them?
Well, Chris Rufo — the Manhattan Institute fellow famous for kicking off the right’s war on critical race theory — decided to devote a full episode of his podcast to “The Indian Question.” The “question” at hand is literally just the existence of Indian Americans and whether or not white people should feel disgusted by them. I watched the entire 72-minute podcast so you don’t have to (and you gremlins better subscribe to The Argument because god knows I’m not doing that for free), and it’s as bad as you’d suspect something echoing the Jewish Question would be.
Rufo, along with his co-host Jonathan Keeperman — better known as @L0m3z on Twitter, where he’s argued that best response to the left is “shut up fag“ — argued at various points that Indians can never assimilate as long as anyone can notice that they’re different, that racism against non-white Americans is actually good because it’s a form of “hazing,” and that meritocracy is probably a flawed idea because Indians keep winning the spelling bee.
The typical exchange is Rufo trying to launder white nationalist talking points with some more reasonable-sounding justification, followed by an objection from Keeperman that no, let’s be very clear, we just think the Indians are gross and don’t need to have a reason why. Rufo then typically gives a little “this crazy guy!” grin, concedes the point and moves on. I wish I was making any of this up.
Keeperman: There are a lot of people for whom… the preference to live in a homogeneous society… there’s not like some rational reason necessarily for it. They just like it better in the way that certain people like certain kinds of foods better. They don’t owe a kind of reasoned explanation for why they prefer a slice of pizza to a burrito or something.
Which makes sense, because being disgusted by another race of person is exactly like preferring pizza to burritos.
The episode drew significant pushback in conservative circles, probably because it was 25% too open about the kind of white nationalism that lurks under the surface of so much modern right-wing politics. But Rufo’s podcast wasn’t the only racial controversy this week — the right also had a miniature war over whether or not it was anti-white racism for Sarah Huckabee Sanders to air an ad depicting a white man on welfare.
And far-right Twitter personality @Howlingmutant0 — best known for racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic jokes that have attracted the attention of followers like Vice President JD Vance — was stunned that after years of cultivating a fanbase of white nationalists, he faced a revolt from that fanbase after it was revealed he has a mixed-race child.
But hey! This is all just internet stuff, podcasts and influencers. Maybe right-wingers in office are doing better.
Jack Smith, the former special counsel in charge of investigating Donald Trump, was on the Hill this week to defend his scrutiny of the president before Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The title of the hearing was “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters.”
It all went south for Republicans during questioning by Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., whose inquiries about whether Smith attended an Atlanta Hawks basketball game completely fell apart.
The questioning was meant to somehow establish that Smith had improper ties to Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis, who indicted Trump in a separate state case over alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Schmitt is visibly grinning to himself during the exchange, revealing texts Smith’s staff sent about attending a basketball game.“I don’t think you know that we have this stuff,” Schmitt says smugly before accusing Smith of perjury.
What a bombshell!1 But wait! It turns out that some poor staffer made a mistake. They either forgot that women’s basketball exists, or confused the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes, as Smith confirmed that he was actually at a women’s college basketball game between Maryland and Iowa, and nowhere near Atlanta.
The moment was so humiliating it spawned the first ever Congressional Surrender Cobra.2
What makes the entire thing so funny is how utterly confident Schmitt was that he had a major, blockbuster scandal to reveal. It’s common to build a press strategy to try and amplify big moments in Congress. Right as Schmitt’s line of questioning was falling apart, conservative influencers were tweeting seemingly pre-prepared talking points. After the hearing, Schmitt had a recording of the Charlie Kirk Podcast lined up to celebrate his big win, and bumbled his way through it without ever acknowledging he got the only fact that mattered completely wrong. And Schmitt had, just that morning, been pumped up by Axios as a potential VP candidate for 2028. RIP to Schmitt’s VP chances (Born Sept 29th, died Sept 29th).
Things went no better on Pennsylvania Avenue: The White House deputy chief of staff posted a six-second clip that may have been thinly veiled QAnon signalling while the president tried to rebrand AI as SI (superintelligence).3
But this is all dude stuff — I bet at least the right’s women are being normal! Haha, no, the big women’s stories out of MAGA this week are a conspiracy that Candace Owens is a secret lesbian and an article about an anti-feminist “groypette” who was shocked, shocked when her groypers turned on her.
Why is MAGA being overrun by scandals, insane nonsense, and infighting? This is what happens when a party is facing electoral disaster and knows it. The political media is having a field day writing article after article about Republican midterm panic. The war with Iran remains toxically unpopular, the price of gas is still high, and there’s little good news to focus on. Small wonder that the online right is collapsing into failed conspiracy theories, racist nonsense, and back-stabbing.
Gaga Daily was in jail
The X account @GaGaDaily was like any other popular stan account: posting videos, memes, and more about Lady Gaga to an audience of almost half a million followers. But in February of 2024, the account suddenly went silent for more than a year. Now, we finally know what happened:
The New York Times has more detail — the account belongs to a Belarussian man named Kirill, who was arrested in February 2024 for participating in 2020 anti-government protests. He spent two years in a Belarussian prison before being released, and he now lives abroad. Lady Gaga, disappointingly, has not commented.
Oddly, this isn’t the first time a stan account creator has found themselves jailed for geopolitical stances. In 2019, a Taylor Swift fan account announced they’d been inactive for about two months because they were jailed for refusing to join the Israeli Defense Forces.
Stop trying to make Threads happen
These days, there’s a specific type of story that gets written a couple of times per year. I don’t know if there’s a Central Bureau of Promoting Threads or if it’s just irresistible, but every so often, we get the “guys, Threads is really happening this time!” article. This week, it’s from Wired, who declares that Black Twitter is thriving on Threads.
For some reason, journalists keep trying to make this particular brand of fetch happen. They point out that Threads hit 500 million monthly active users this summer. They compare it to Reddit. They seem very eager for Threads to break out.
Yes, Threads has a lot of “users.” But while that metric is kind of real, it’s also kind of fake. Threads is heavily integrated with Instagram and Facebook, and many of its “active users” are people who accidentally click through to Threads content while on those other apps. The hottest meme on Threads this summer was “Richard has passed,” which is a joke about how lots of Facebook users are posting on Threads without even realizing they’re doing it.
So while Threads technically has users, it seems to be a fully vaporware userbase. They don’t spend any time there. Check out this graph of average daily time spent by active Android-app users by social network:
Threads is losing to Pinterest and LinkedIn!
More than just not being an app where people spend any real amount of time, Threads also doesn’t generate culture. Love it or hate it, Twitter is still essential for understanding online culture and politics, and it still has a remarkable density of people whose posts go on to become major news cycles or generate cultural discourse. Threads has none of that. The quality of content there is so bad that the tech writer Max Read dubbed it the “gas-leak social network.”
That’s probably why only 3% of Americans say they get news from Threads, a number so low that it runs into the Lizardman’s Constant. When was the last time someone showed you an awesome Threads meme? When was the last time an important cultural moment happened on Threads? Has it ever? I’m begging you all, stop. Stop trying to make Threads happen. It’s not going to happen.
Links
TikTok has agreed to pay Alabama $100 million in another instance of a social media company settling with a state government over claims of social media harms to children. As part of the settlement, TikTok also agreed to a number of product changes like time limits for teens, nighttime usage restrictions, a default non-personalized feed, and a ban on cosmetic filters for teens.
Pop singer Sia has sold a 50% stake in her musical catalog for $180 million. These deals are becoming more and more popular, and are part of a phenomenon I’ve written about before: Older, previously released art is smothering new art.
The Hollywood Reporter, in addition to tracking broadcast TV, streaming hits, and box office grosses, is now tracking the internet’s most popular microdramas.
I have been having an unreasonable amount of fun playing “Unusual Suspects”, a game where you do police sketches of various fictional characters.
Mattel released a “Hanukkah Barbie,” and it went poorly.
Posts
Sidenote: It’s not even clear what this ‘bombshell’ would have proven. That Smith and Fani Willis were … in the same city on the same day? Okay?
I also strongly recommend this incredible view of Alabama Senator Katie Britt, who looks like she’s having ‘Nam flashbacks as she realizes what’s happening.
It’s also been alleged that insiders may have scooped up prominent .si domain names ahead of the announcement.
>When was the last time an important cultural moment happened on Threads? Has it ever?
I'm actually curious if anyone has an answer to this - does anything important happen on Threads? Does anyone regularly use it? If you do, I want to hear your experience! What are you seeing? Why are you there?
The Manhattan Institute/City Journal HAVE to expell Chris Rufo. You can't have essential urban policy analysis taken seriously while your senior fellow is joking but not joking about racially purifying the nation