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.
This week, we’re talking about the DataRepublican drama on Twitter, how the Trump administration is incorporating influencers, and why it’s dangerous to have cranks like that inside the government.
The morons are the government now
One of the more notable features of the second Trump term has been the administration’s clear desire to build up an alternative pro-MAGA media ecosystem outside the traditional press. This has manifested itself in several ways.
Trump-friendly billionaires have been buying social media networks. The Pentagon pushed out virtually all traditional media with its press policies and instead credentialed a new set of right-wing publications and influencers. Trumpworld believes that the mainstream press is hostile, so why bother dealing with them when you can work directly with pro-Trump media who will spin everything you do sympathetically?
This is likely what Sarah Rogers, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, thought she was doing with the pro-MAGA Twitter account DataRepublican.
Last week, Rogers messaged DataRepublican (real name Jennica Pounds) some files that Pounds was free to leak, saying, “I wanted to give you the option of ‘breaking’ the story as sort of a gift.”
Rather than publish the documents, Pounds had a multiday freak-out in which she accused Rogers of trying to somehow “entrap” her and trick her into committing a federal crime. In a now-deleted tweet, she said, “It’s not okay when the Deep State sets you up to commit a crime. I have never been more angry in my life.”
This set off a firestorm of activity on MAGA Twitter. Eventually, Rogers had to reply to the thread herself, saying that she obviously wasn’t trying to entrap Pounds. She publicly posted the documents herself to show that they weren’t meant to get anyone in trouble.
Despite this, Pounds continued frenetically posting about how the Deep State was trying to get her1 until a day later when she deleted a number of posts and posted an apparently AI-generated apology tweet, followed by an essay that somehow tried to tie her outburst to Charlie Kirk’s death (and was also likely AI-generated).
To state the obvious: Pounds is a conspiracy theorist and an imbecile. She is weapons-grade stupid. She has a history of posting Pepe Silvia-style diagrams to explain the connections between groups and individuals she sees as part of the Deep State, and she’s incredibly quick to jump to paranoid conclusions about benign activities.
This is almost certainly why Pounds didn’t understand that she was being fed a scoop like a baby bird by an extremely friendly official, instead imagining that shadowy forces were out to get her.
Pounds is prone to misunderstandings, to put it lightly:
She claimed that a queer activist was funded by the State Department and may have had “foreknowledge” of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
She claimed, while working for the Department of Government Efficiency, to have melted a hard drive by processing a whole 60,000 rows of data.2
She outlined an economic plan whose central pillars were “get 1T budget surplus” (no details on how) and default on the debt.
Pounds also tends to describe fairly banal political interactions in conspiratorial terms. She accused Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of being tied to a sinister elite cabal because he works with a Republican nonprofit organization. She also accused Senate Majority Leader John Thune of being controlled by the newsletter Punchbowl News because he appeared on its podcast.
Amid all the drama, reporting revealed that Pounds is actually a Department of Defense employee (and this was later confirmed by the Pentagon). This means that, bizarrely, Pounds is both working for the government and operating as a freelance “journalist” reporting on the government.
The entire episode is deeply embarrassing for everyone involved, and it’s very funny if you enjoy laughing at ridiculous internal-MAGA drama. But it can also teach us several important lessons about the modern MAGA movement.
The important dividing line in MAGA isn’t moderate vs. extremist; it’s operators vs. marks
Any conspiracy movement contains two key types of people — those who sell the conspiracies and those who believe them. These boundaries aren’t always black and white, but the distinction is important. The few intelligent voices within MAGA understand that “Deep State” is a useful political framework. The true believers think there is literally a Deep State agent hiding under every rock.
Rogers is an operator. She understands that some information is more “newsy” and exciting when leaked from sympathetic social media accounts rather than formally released by the government. She’s playing the inside game and expected DataRepublican to be on the same page. Take the leak, go out there, make some content, generate some press in the direction we want you to.
But Pounds, as we’ve noted, is an idiot. She’s trained herself to see every unusual event as evidence of a multilevel conspiracy, and that’s what she saw when she was DM’d a scoop by a friendly insider.
The stupidity is selected for
Every political coalition and every ideology includes a few stupid people. But the modern right has built a movement that actively selects for stupidity.
Donald Trump was often kept in check during his first term by the adults in the room — serious people who would push back on his worst ideas or literally hide documents from him. They were able to do this because Trump had not yet built out a full MAGA staffing system, instead relying on traditional Republican personnel. But in his second term, almost all of the traditional, non-MAGA Republicans have been replaced by freaks, loyalists, and influencers.
This is why you see so many stories about why the GOP has a “groyper problem” in its young staffer class. As one senior GOP staffer interviewed by Politico put it:
“Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence … We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”
To be an influential voice inside MAGA, you need certain attributes. First and foremost, you need to be unquestioningly loyal to Trump. This will put you in uncomfortable positions at times, because you’ll have to defend obviously half-baked ideas — and given Trump’s frequent unreliability, you might have to defend both sides of an argument. This removes a great number of intelligent and principled individuals, leaving a crowd of sycophants, grifters, and idiots.
Previous administrations have had partisan media ecosystems, but Trump has eliminated the firewall between the idiots and the government. Barack Obama had social media on his side and plenty of liberal bloggers. George W. Bush had Fox News. But there was an implicit presumption that the cynical media hacks and content creators existed in one world, while the serious political minds existed in another.
Not anymore: Pete Hegseth is the current secretary of defense, not because he had any notable qualifications for the job but because he was a loyal voice for Trump on Fox News. This is also why Jeanine Pirro is currently a U.S. attorney. Dan Bongino was a conspiratorial pro-Trump podcaster before being tapped to be deputy director of the FBI (he has now left the department). Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been one of the nation’s leading anti-vax kooks for decades, and he’s currently in charge of our vaccine policies.
It’s bad enough that people like Pounds have huge audiences online and enormous influence over our political discourse. But it’s horrifying that this is the level of person now staffing government agencies.
And Pounds is just the beginning: Hegseth appears to be building a Pentagon troll army of MAGA influencers who now work for him directly. In addition to removing traditional outlets and credentialing MAGA social media personalities, Hegseth has prominent influencers like “InfantryDort” working directly in his office, while other prominent pro-Hegseth accounts have refused to say whether they’re employed by the Department of Defense.
Stupidity + power might be even more dangerous than cynicism + power
I can only imagine Rogers’ frustration in trying to hold the hand of her supposed ally Pounds, explaining to her in terms even a moron could understand that they’re actually on the same side. This is what comes from cynical operators trying to direct gullible idiots, like herding cats that all think the 2020 election was stolen.
The cynical operator knows which programs have value and tries to understand where the boundaries of good sense are (even if they plan to violate those boundaries). They realize that actions have consequences and must be carefully considered. They plan.
Cranks, when given power, have none of this caution. They take every connection as evidence of conspiracy and are more than happy to scream those conspiracy theories to the world, even when they’re the ones holding actual positions of power.
Pounds is, in a very literal sense, the Deep State, but she’s still convinced that the Deep State is out to get her. And in her current role, she’s dangerous. The combination of paranoia, stupidity, and conspiracy might seem amusing when it’s someone posting through it on Twitter, but not when they have their hands on actual levers of power.
Giving people like this access to classified information, prosecutorial authority, and control over policies related to science, the military, and trade has been a disaster for our country. The damage that the kooks can do is no longer quarantined to the internet.
Links
Australia banned social media for users under 16. This caused the percentage of 13- to 15-year-olds using TikTok to drop from 27% all the way to 26%. The rate of 10- to 12-year-olds using TikTok actually increased. Experts say that children are obfuscating their ages, using VPNs, or just not encountering the age checks at all.
Meta will pay up to $17.1 billion in a landmark settlement with 47 states over claims that its platforms endanger children. It has agreed to make major changes like adding new parental supervision controls, limiting teens to two hours a day, and blocking the app during late-night hours.
Meta is also running ads challenging YouTube and TikTok to implement the same restrictions.
Disney inked a deal with YouTube creator Dhar Mann to create new content, likely for Disney Plus. I tend toward skepticism of these kinds of deals: Mann’s content is, bluntly, low-quality slop designed to hook young kids mindlessly scrolling YouTube. I have doubts it works in the context of a paid streaming service.
What are user-generated content (UGC) creators, and who’s paying them to make political content?
Posts
Including having her actual mother post in her defense. On a personal note: I think I would prefer euthanasia to needing my mom to defend me from an online controversy.
For my nontechnical friends: This is like claiming your pickup truck broke down because you tried to haul a whole 60 pounds of cargo in the bed.
This is so spot on - and one thing I learned is “everyone wants to think they’re smart and a good guy” and probably because of that, there also seems to be an absurd amount of needs on MAGA to “demonstrate their intelligence” in the most performative and absurd way possible as the amount of people who are cynical AND competent enough is limited.
Again Pete Hegseth prob represents this but MAGA’s obsession with “white people as intelligent one” I think is very telling
I've heard Trump White House staffers in person trying to convince each other that the obvious time share scam they both bought into is not a scam. These are not serious people.