Episode 39: The Meme Wars with Morgan Sung

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dog.

And I'm Woirdone.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrienne, today we are talking about the meme wars of 2024.

That is, we are talking about the way that the internet and online culture and the communities and vernaculars that emerge there affect our political scene.

And we have probably the best person

as our guest today to talk about that with Morgan Sung.

Morgan, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

This is great.

So we should say Morgan is a tech journalist specializing in the intersection of digital culture and politics.

She hosts the podcast Close All Tabs, which is an election podcast series from KQED here in San Francisco.

And I've liked her work for a long time.

I think I first came across your reporting on the hounding of Miss Rachel, the popular children's entertainer who my daughter is a huge fan of.

And so like this, this one hit home.

Justice for Miss Rachel.

Exactly.

And

I also wanted to shout out your take on Meta's Twitter clone Threads, which

we were just saying came out 48 hours after that product launched.

And to my mind, still remains the definitive verdict on why it was never going to go anywhere.

Right.

And the title is, You Can't Post Ass, Threads is Doomed.

And like, yeah, that says it all.

And you know, I really wish that Threads was more fun than it is, because I would love a lifeboat off of Twitter right now.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah.

So we should say right off the bat that, like, this isn't necessarily, of course, a new conversation.

One of the things I really love about Close All Tabs is that you really get into the long history of our online discourses, right?

That this is not really that new from spreading Santorum via $27 donations to alt-right memes and Cambridge Analytica.

It seems like we returned to the question of online discourse and what it does to our politics with some regularity.

But it's also important to notice that I think we're not having the same conversation each election cycle.

It's actually, I feel like the conversation we're having this year is different from the one we had in 2020, is different from the one we had in 2016, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think what really stands out, I think every election cycle when it comes to the internet and covering the internet, it's kind of like what fresh new hell is the internet going to do to this election.

And like you said, it's a little different every time.

And I think this year is really about the fact that we're all so divided.

We all exist in such siloed realities because of the way that social media algorithms kind of just, you know, suck us into little worlds and then leave us there.

create, you know, kind of create our own little echo chambers.

And it started in 2016 to some extent.

But really, I think this year we are,

we are not talking to people outside of our political, or it's very rare to be talking to people outside of our little political bubbles.

Yeah, and I'm glad that you mentioned that sort of like siloing that these algorithms can create, because one thing that I think we're really dealing with this year is that the election looks very different and is being handled very differently depending on which platform you're on.

So we're dealing with some platforms that are really looking to keep political speech out.

And by that, I namely mean like the meta properties, right?

Yes.

So we've got the sort of like sinking ship of Facebook, but we've also got their like assless, charmless Twitter competitor threads.

And then we've got their mega juggernaut Instagram.

These are all platforms that have like algorithm, algorithmically deprioritized political content, right?

But then we're also dealing with like the newly Elon Musk-owned Twitter, or shall I say X?

You shall not.

If you're asking,

not its government name.

I can't make myself do it, you know.

No.

But that's a platform that is like totally refusing to combat disinformation at all.

And in fact, Musk seems to be using the platform to spread some disinformation about voter fraud,

various pro-Trump sort of theories and memes that are getting amplified there.

But 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

disinfo joke about JD Vance boning a couch.

Yeah.

You know, I 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.

It's really just the way like social media algorithms work where, you know, they show us what we'd 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.

Cause again, like they want to keep you on the platform.

And so, yeah, with like X especially, I mean, you mentioned this kind of like a Twitter addicted left-wing bubble.

Um, I think I'm one of those kind of clinging on to like Twitter's glory days.

But yeah, like the whole disinformation thing, I think we talk about this in close all tabs in our second episode, I believe.

Yeah, like no one is invulnerable to spreading disinformation.

I think that's a point we were trying to make in this episode, where when we talk about disinformation, we're thinking about like, you know, some insult on the far right spreading like horrific lies about a presidential candidate.

When in reality, it can be something as simple as, you know.

retweeting a picture of J.D.

Vance in the IKEA sofa section.

Can I ask in researching the podcast, did the couch thing take off on Facebook?

I mean, the very fact that I have to ask you this question, like hoping that you somehow reactivated or created a Facebook account, you may be too young to have even had one, but I certainly, I've lost my, I lost my Facebook login years ago.

Sorry, to my Facebook followers, which I'm sure I still have.

So I have no fucking way of knowing, actually.

Did the couch take off there?

Did they have kind of an echo discourse or did it just not happen?

Okay, so I do have a Facebook account and it is active, but not to post on it.

I'm very active on Facebook Marketplace.

I'm really on the hunt for those like that good, good vintage furniture,

solid wood kind of thing.

But really, as we researched in the episode, this couch rumor started on and spread on Twitter specifically.

And the reason it was able to spread so quickly is because of the way that Elon Musk just stripped away all of Twitter's moderation and disinformation reporting and

any kind of guardrails when it comes to spreading, you know, false information.

And I don't know if it made it to Facebook's post part.

It certainly didn't make it to Facebook marketplace.

But it did.

Wait, the couch section didn't go wild.

I mean, I mean, if anyone found it, please send it to me.

But it did really, it's basically it spread across Twitter, kind of jumped platforms, made it to TikTok, made it to Reddit, made it to Instagram.

Even though Instagram and Meta are known for suppressing political content.

This is kind of what broke through.

You know, I saw so many reels, so many meme accounts posting it.

And of course, like, there is no disclaimer saying, like, okay, J.D.

Vance did not actually,

you know, do anything with a couch.

We should explain the couch for

like for, yeah, for our listeners who are not like broken-brained and terminally online, as three of us are, this is a rumor that went viral,

I think, around the time he was announced as the VP candidate back in July.

And I don't know, Morgan, maybe you would know more about this than I did, but like the version I saw of it actually had like a photoshopped page supposedly from Hillbilly Elegy describing this sexual act with a couch.

So it started with one tweet from this person with like literally 1700 followers on Twitter, a tiny account really in the grand scheme of things.

And, you know, it made the rounds on like shitpost Twitter, on like chronically online Twitter, where people, when he was nominated as,

you know, the VP candidate, people were like, ha ha, this is a joke about him like, you know, doing explicit things with a couch.

I don't know if we're allowed to curse in this episode, but

okay.

Well, the joke is that he fucked a couch

and in lurid detail.

And so it started with that, kind of never really broke through.

And then Trump, there was an assassination attempt on Trump.

And then Joe Biden stepped down as a candidate.

And in that kind of like excitement, of like, it was like a two-week time period, this couch rumor started going around again, which is, it's not common for like a post or meme to pick up weeks after the original one started.

And so that's when someone posted this like photoshopped image of like a, what seemed like a scan of a page from Hillbilly Elegy, where it explains in very graphic detail how this, it's again, fake, I have to like say that, that,

but in very graphic detail, how much J.D.

Vance wanted to fuck a couch when he was an adolescent boy.

It's so interesting to think about the fact that like it starts on Twitter, lives there for a while and then gets resurfaced and only then secondarily makes it over to TikTok and Instagram, which kind of makes it a bit unusual, right?

I would imagine that in 2024, more meme material sort of comes out of Instagram and TikTok, right?

And

would then secondarily show up on Twitter.

Does that seem right?

I think Twitter used to be a great originator of memes.

But I think when Elon Musk took over, everyone started kind of jumping ship.

And

that kind of, there's still that kind of fun, chaotic energy on Twitter, but it's definitely dampened quite a bit with, I think, TikTok being the main originator of a lot of memes now and like.

having that spread over.

I think like Reels is just starting to like become an originator and having that cross over to TikTok and Twitter.

But yeah, I think this is the first time in a long time that we saw, or first time since Musk's takeover, that we saw a meme take off on Twitter.

And I also don't think that it would have been able to spread as far as it did or cross platforms the way that it did if Twitter had more robust disinformation guardrails and

any kind of moderation whatsoever.

Yeah.

And as you point on in the episode,

such a fun callback that one of the people who spread the rumor initially was Dan Savage, famous for spreading Santorum back in the back in the day.

Maura, do you want to explain to our listeners who might be too young to remember what spreading Santorum is all about?

Rick Santorum was a really extreme evangelical politician, I believe from Pennsylvania.

So very brief briefing.

Senator from Pennsylvania.

Very briefly ran for president, right, in a Republican primary.

And Dan Savage, the sex columnist and podcaster,

assigned a very

disgusting

anal sex byproduct, the name Santorum.

And he held a contest to name, to be fair.

Dan Savage did not decide to do this.

Dan Savage said, what should we name after him?

And what you're referring to was the winner, I believe, of that contest.

And this

ended Rick Santorum's political career.

It destroyed his Google results forever.

It 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 out-group that Rick Santorum, with his political power, antagonized.

Right.

And it's also, I think, one of the earliest moments when the internet became real life, when an online joke had an

impact on national politics, you know?

Yeah.

And I mean, as we, I talked to my former TechCrunch colleague, Amanda Silverling, about this.

And as she put it, in 2004, search engine optimization was like wizardry.

And so it was just like mind-blowing that so many people searched Santorum that if you searched Santorum back then, you wouldn't get Rick Santorum, the political candidate.

You would get Santorum, this very vulgar

definition

for anal sex.

Right.

Like it kind of shows not necessarily what we on, what online we kind of regard as objective.

It's about where we go to find something that is true of our world, right?

2004 was the age of Google.

It was the age where you assumed if it's on Google, it's got to be true.

And there, the first thing,

the first thing is about lube.

Okay, so there must be that, right?

Right.

And today we go on social media platforms to find out what is the case and so that is where we're most vulnerable i would say to having someone show us something that is not in fact the case and we're like okay cool we're run with that like i feel like on google i'd be a lot more suspicious right

like like i can't believe they're baking recipes anymore like now that they've aiified but like Back then, like Google really was

extremely reliable.

If 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.

Well, I mean,

I think the site itself actually acknowledged, like, we want as many people to click on this.

And

part of what happened was that TV hosts, I believe, including Stephen Colbert, would direct their viewers to do this.

There's also kind of an interesting old media integration.

But it is so fascinating to think back to that.

I mean,

I was a constituent of Rick Santorum at the time, just because, just in case any listeners feel bad for him, the reason Savage did this was that he compared gay sex to man on dog sex.

So, you know,

hold your sympathy a little bit.

But

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?

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, it's, it's this, it's, you know, the delivery is different, but at its heart, it's the same.

So, that might be a good time to bring us back up

current, right?

So, like, what are the biggest platforms where memes about this election cycle have been going on?

What are the ones that you've noticed most?

Which is the most memeable of our candidates?

Like, what has the climate been like on your beat this cycle?

I haven't noticed a lot of election memes on threads.

Um, and like we talked about,

threads is kind of a little bit like LinkedIn Light, it feels like at times, where it's very, you know, buttoned up, it's very, very, you know, a bit stiff.

I've noticed a good amount on Instagram, though, that can actually get around, you know, Meta's political content suppression.

TikTok is a huge one.

It's, but TikTok is interesting in that it's so algorithm, algorithmically driven.

It's very, very unusual to be served any content outside of your preferences.

I think other social platforms,

there's more of a chance to see things outside of your own bubble.

And on TikTok, I've noticed, like, I see a lot of political memes that align with my political views, but I have to go out of my way to find content that like conflicts with my political views.

But it doesn't mean that it's not there.

It's still there.

It's just harder to find if you're not in that audience.

And shockingly, Twitter is still going strong.

I think this election is keeping Twitter alive.

It's like the last dying gasps of air are the couch fucking memes.

Twitter is an interesting one, right?

On the one hand, we'll talk about the role Elon Musk plays in this, because of course, having an owner who himself shares disinformation and shares memes is really interesting.

I mean, it's also morally objectionable, but even it's also interesting in that, like, Zuckerberg was not out there like being like, you know, like helping Russian bots, right?

He was very much, you know, like, oh, we're just providing the platform.

That's not what Musk is doing.

He is a Twitter user first and the owner kind of secondarily.

But something I wanted to ask about is like, is it just me or does Twitter seem to serve me ads that directly contradict my political beliefs?

Oh, yeah.

It's all just like, I mean, not even just pro-Trump shit.

It's also just like, want to buy gold.

And I'm like, what?

Yeah.

I'm not that.

I'm old, but I'm not that old.

I'm not falling for this.

Right.

Like, it's weird stuff.

It's weird crypto, like crypto, but political crypto for me.

Yeah.

And I'm just like, I'm not in this audience.

And then that and like bad t-shirts.

They're, they're really trying to tell me like like real like Facebook wine mom type pro-Trump t-shirts where it's like, you know, like red, white, and blue with a random like ego, like eagle superimposed on it.

That's just like, I stand with, you know, and it's but in comic sands, but not ironically.

And yeah, I think, I mean, Twitter's advertising is kind of a mess, as is the whole platform, but you know.

That's the interesting thing, right?

That like we're kind of, and this is something you get into on the podcast as well.

These are content delivery mechanisms that are really optimized for

they're supposed to be optimized if they make money for getting us to buy shit, not necessarily to vote a certain way.

And Twitter is the one that like is so bad at getting us to buy anything at this point that like the political stuff gets interesting again, right?

That you're like, why am I seeing this?

Like someone paid money to like give a gay man in San Francisco like this shit.

Like exactly, yeah, like what what did you think I was going to have like an aneurysm and like click on this?

Like this is the only way I would ever buy this.

But that kind of actually makes it a little wilder compared to the, as you say, the over-confected kind of nature of

TikTok and Insta, where really you're just like, okay, you, you look deep inside my soul and we're like, this is, this guy's going to fucking love this shit.

And I did.

And I did.

Yeah.

The ads that were being served on Twitter, because like all the major advertisers pulled out of Twitter and now the ones taking their place are like these advertisers that would not have been vetted or would not have made it through vetting on the old, on old Twitter when it was still Twitter.

And it's crazy because even like right-wing political candidates are, you know, posting and getting these like, you know, straight up white supremacist ads under their posts and saying, like, hey, I don't, that's not what I meant.

Like even, even political candidates, very conservative political candidates are starting to distance themselves from this.

What about

the stands?

Because

like

we had the entry, and I would say like a kind of like densely meme-ified entry of Kamala Harris into the presidential race after Joe Biden's withdrawal.

I remember there was a brief period in internet time when there were like 100,000 coconut tree jokes.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

Because of this weird story she told about her mom

like imploring her to like

historicize more, right?

Yeah.

It was like a very like, I grew, my parents were Bay Area professors story, whereas like my mother, and you know, she sounded kind of like

wacky and zand out a little bit, maybe.

And so like part of it was about

Harris's personality and its perceived

incongruity with the office to which she was aspiring to, right?

Like that kind of incongruity is always

at the core of a lot of internet humor, I think, especially when it's like, okay, this dignified or supposedly dignified like position actually has this undignified person in it.

It's part of why Trump is so memeable, right?

But then the coconuts

almost took on a life of their own in this very interesting way.

And did you have any thoughts on that, on that flash in the pan moment?

You know, I think a lot of it was, you know, yes, Harris's,

I guess.

She's just very charismatic as a person.

And she was just so, it's so different from what we had gotten used to with Joe Biden as president and Joe Biden's campaign.

I mean, I, the, the resounding message of on among young people, among progressive young people in 2020 was settle for Biden.

You know, it's like, it's not Trump.

Maybe we can do something with this.

And I think at the time, like.

Harris presented this like younger version of the party where she's just a lot more charismatic.

She's a lot more animated.

She says these kind of like zany things that, you know, your like cool aunt would probably say like when she's like three glasses of wine deep you know um

and i think like that i think like just that was so so vastly different from what people were used to from the white house that they kind of ran with it um and again i think a lot of it was a kind of like desperation for anything different the the two memes from 2020 involving her kind of already pointed in that direction, right?

Like there's the one where they're sort of editing her dancing into you about to lose your job.

And then there's the We Did It Joe, right?

Which both sort of exactly are like sort of her off the cuff.

And like maybe, right?

She's like in

running pants.

And you're like, this is a future vice president.

It's a little funny.

And it's always, you know, I see what you mean.

There's a looseness to her that,

well, Biden couldn't really bring to the table and certainly.

couldn't the more he declined, I guess, to yeah.

There's also just the, in terms of the audience, I think part of it was the giddiness of relief, right?

Yeah.

yeah especially after that debate performance which was also memed uh like a lot of I remember a lot of internet jokes about Biden's face from that debate which had this look of like confused like absent confused terror right like

and it

was a still image that sort of represented the emotional state of the would-be Democratic voter looking at that debate performance, right?

And then so that terrified despair that was somewhat laughed about

in the ironized way that people deal with depression and anxiety in online vernaculars then got like transformed into this like euphoric exhaling when we were all coconut pilled in

July and August.

Right, exactly.

I mean,

when I think the energy after that debate and, you know, after the assassination attempt on Trump, where, you know, it kind of gave him a lot of ammo and made him look very like almost like martyred in a way.

And I think the energy among a lot of like the left was just kind of like overwhelming despair.

And

I think when Kamala Harris stepped in, a lot of that meme was because people were just so relieved

that there was, you know, maybe a chance, like maybe a candidate who could debate Trump accurately.

Yeah.

That gets at a really interesting question, right?

Like 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.

But like, do you think that there is such a thing?

Like, is there a, 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

slaps their knees over something that they find funny and that I look at and I'm like, it's not for me.

Yeah.

How do you, do you think that there is a kind of objective?

Can we objectively say, like, no, there is this kind of energy that kind of shifts from one side to the other?

I think if you're talking about like who has an easier time meming

in a more widespread mainstream way, I would probably say conservatives do because they're just less,

I guess, concerned with, um, you know, they'll go for the throat in a way that a lot of very centrist Democrats are more reluctant to.

Um, you know, on like further left, um, in my very, very chronically online circles, like, yeah, I see like a lot of those memes just going, kind of responding the same way.

Um, but I think for the longest time, um, up until like for the longest time until this election cycle, a lot of like very centrist Democrats were were really leaning into Michelle Obama's whole, like, when they go low, we go high.

Like, we don't stoop to their level.

And 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.

This was aided, I think,

by the, in my opinion, really brilliant Tim Walls 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.

Yeah.

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?

You 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.

Yeah, exactly.

And we see, there is such a stark difference, I think, in like, you know, the energy going into the DNC over the summer where you had like Republican, or you had people call like Democrats, like career Democrats calling Republicans weird.

You had Elizabeth Warren, of all people, cracking couch jokes.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah, the mocking fun.

Yeah.

Like sucked out of the room.

It was something really turned on a dime after the DNC.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, we saw, we still see hints of it.

I mean, we saw Tim Wallace calling Elon Musk a dipshit on TV.

And I think that was like a little breath of fresh air.

But that's, they didn't continue that strategy throughout this campaign.

They're like kind of two things at work here.

On the one hand, we all participate in in online discourses at their most trampunctious let's say and 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 we are also kind of invited to judge them a little bit right be like oh we're not at our best and this is something that i in my own work have been have really struggled with that i i don't always think that that's a very productive way of looking at it to just be like like look if we're going to be messy let's be messy like 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 him weird.

It's totally fine.

Kind of ceding 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, right, 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 the alt-right with sort of an overly pious, lefty online culture as its kind of perfect foil.

Again, I don't necessarily buy that actually.

I think that's contrasting the Hillary Clinton campaign with like a bunch of shit posters.

Yeah.

Right.

It's like, that's not the same thing.

But at the same time, there's something to that, right?

Like the perception that

whether a campaign will go down a little bit into the gutter or into Twitter, which is often the same thing, the Democrats don't seem to have a great deal of comfort with that, even in 2024, right?

Yeah, I mean, and we talked about this in our first episode of the podcast, but 2016 was, and I think the Democratic Party for every election really since then has really tried to take this moral high ground.

And that was primarily perpetuated by like very centrist Democrats who, you know, were kind of trying to maintain that like political civility.

But I mean, during 2016 on, you know, further left, like Democratic socialist and very progressive areas of the internet, you had like Bernie Sanders dank meme stash where these chronically online shit posters were churning out memes at the same rate that you know 4chan pro-Trump posters were.

And so I think like this kind of

willingness to engage in political discourse in a way that isn't so civil and is a bit more vulgar has always existed on both ends of the political spectrum.

It's just that I think more centrist political figures are finally starting to engage with that and starting to let that moral high ground slip now.

Yeah, I mean, it's exactly right.

I mean, like, it's the difference.

Maura and I just did

an episode where we watched

a video that Elon Musk posted, a pro-Trump, basically, like fan edit.

And it broke our brains.

It was horrifying.

God.

But that's the thing, right?

Like, it's the owner of the platform finding a meme and liking it and putting it on his feed, right?

And same with Trump.

Trump.

often some of his most offensive posts have been retweets of other people's memes, right?

Yeah.

And that's the difference.

You will not get at POTUS under Joe Biden or, you know, Kamala Harris's account being like, here's a dank meme I dug up, you know, from Dirtbag Twitter or whatever.

Right.

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, right?

Or at least they do it a lot better and more comfortably, and they have a ton more social permission to do it.

Right.

And so the nagel thesis that the far right is where the insurgent, like impish, like irreverent energy is, I think is partly a symptom of this gendered realignment between the parties, right?

Because 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.

Yeah.

I mean, just very briefly, just to give readers a sense of what Maura is saying, because this is exactly right.

Nagel writes that basically on the left, there had been during the 2016 election, quote, a strange mixture of ultra-sensitivity, sentimentality, and what was once considered radical social constructionist identity politics.

And like, basically, all that is lady coded, right?

Because he's basically saying like yeah uh it was a bunch of outraged school moms versus like male shitposters so i think more is exactly right yeah i think it's starting to shift now um just because um you know since the overturning of robie wade and since many younger people are starting to become of age and become more politically conscious and able to vote i think there's i think there's a shift there um for example when robie wade was overturned we saw a lot of young women on twitter reposting memes being like all right well here's how to send uh hate mail to to the supreme Court.

You know, I think like there is a bit more willingness to engage there or, you know, like posting or like K-pop primarily female K-pop stands flooding abortion snitch hotlines with like kind of vulgar fan edits or vulgar fan fiction.

I think that's, I think that as the younger generation who has been online and has kind of been exposed to this more irreverent kind of internet humor comes to age and becomes more politically active, I think that that's going to change.

But yeah, I I agree for the most part.

The younger the women, the more they're willing to tell politics to go fuck themselves online.

Exactly.

That gives me hope

in the future.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, I remember reporting on this,

I think last year or two years ago, but,

you know, with when the trans snitch lines opened up, where, you know, a lot of very conservative states were trying to get people to report doctors who provided gender-affirming care,

people flooded it with like straight up like Shrek porn.

And so I think that that, I think that respectability is starting to shift a little as people realize that, you know, taking the moral high ground isn't always that effective.

This might bring us to something you said on your podcast where you said that Kamala's social media team is actually doing pretty well, right?

What do you think that they've gotten right?

I think that they've been very good about being quick to respond to internet trends without making Kamala Harris do the internet trends.

You know, you don't see

like Kamala HQ, for example,

her TikTok page, they're, you know, they're posting fan edits of Kamala Harris.

They're posting,

you know, kind of like dunks on Trump, but you don't see Kamala Harris out here saying like, Pokemon, go to the polls.

You don't, you don't see her, like they're posting the brat edits, but you don't see Kamala Harris herself saying, I am Brat Girl Summer, you know?

And I think that's, that's a difference here between, um,

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.

It would ruin her immediately.

It would ruin the bit immediately

if they had to do it.

Yeah.

I mean, if you had Kamala Harris out here saying, like, you know, I, I want club classics, you know,

it's over.

It's like, you know, like that, that video of President Obama going over his summer playlist and they were like, oh, you like 365 by Charlie XCX?

And he was like, yes, I love 365 by Charlie XCX.

One of you guests,

Katen 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 says, we the people make these memes.

It's not, you don't get to tell us what we mean.

I think that to 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, basically, 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.

And then the other thing it made clear to me is

that,

right,

most of the time when it's not an election year of course we watch corporations um interact with memes in some way and like that is where that line you're describing between oh that's cool and that's cringe is so clear where you're like oh yeah you you had it you were riding the wave just like for a second and now you're just getting crushed under it you know um and it it's this interesting thing that we that it is a relationship that we are learning mostly in dealing with like Pepsi.

Yeah.

Much more so than we'd learn it in dealing with Elizabeth Warren, whatever.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, Trump's digital strategy in 2016 was completely different than it is now.

I mean, now he's on the podcast circuits.

He's trying to like court the whole, you know, like edgelord boy side of the internet.

And, you know, back then, all he had to do was retweet, you know,

those memes of himself as Pepe the Frog, and people went wild.

Like that just fed the meme making more.

But it's not like his campaign was the one pushing out Pepe memes.

Morgan, you just talked about

Trump like trying to be on the like young dude edgelord podcast circuit, right?

Which means that there is this new way where it's not as organic this time around, right?

He's trying to make this like very deliberate, very avowed, and candidly, very online pitch to young men, right?

And young men in this election were recording on November 1st.

So they are projected at least to go pretty sharply to the right and towards Trump.

And how have the memes been gendered?

this time around?

Yeah, I mean,

well, Trump got the clearly coveted Jake Paul endorsement.

So I think that's all you need to know.

Oh my God.

Yeah, Jake Paul, the very controversial YouTuber who's gotten kicked out of West Hollywood many times.

And over the summer, Trump really did go on that kind of like podcast circuit.

He went on

Logan Paul's podcast, Jake Paul's older brother.

Logan Paul is the also very controversial

and most known for trying to sell energy drinks to children.

I'm sure their parents love that.

Yeah.

Very highly patient, too.

Oh my God.

It's a canera lemonade for children.

And yeah, he went on like Aiden Ross's Twitch stream and Aiden Ross is like literally, he got kicked.

He's like a white supremacist or aligns with white supremacy and got kicked off Twitch for hate speech.

And so he's really make, he was really making this appeal to like teenage boys.

And I think it's interesting that, you know, Kamala Harris's campaign has really campaigned on like reproductive rights like the especially since robie wade was overturned um they went you know they went on call her daddy um and did a whole episode specifically on access to abortion um and she i think kamala harris has like her whole messaging has really been targeted toward women they're putting out ads you know saying like hey like your husband can't intimidate you out of voting.

Like your vote is private.

And there's, you know, a lot of controversy over that too on the right, where people on the right are saying like, oh, you think like

conservative women are just all married to abusive men but like i think that kind of messaging is necessary and i will note though that in the last few weeks the kamala walls or kamala harris's campaign has really started shifting gears and trying to target young men online.

They may not be the same young men who would watch

Aiden Ross's stream or listen to Jake Paul, but they are still young men online.

Like they

did a stream,

Tim Walls streams with AOC and played Crazy Taxi on her Twitch stream.

Kamala Harris, but on like All the Smoke, which is primarily a sports podcast.

But

yeah, so they are trying to engage with like men online.

And I don't think, you know, the men who consume that kind of media would vote for Trump or would even listen to, you know, Jake Paul or Aiden Ross.

But it's still the same demographic of like young men online.

Is there a way for a campaign to be too online, right?

Because I remember during the like Ron DeSantis very brief presidential run, one of his staffers actually got fired because he posted this video full of these like really dense, obscure references to right-wing memes that you would only really even be able to recognize if you were spending like like several hours a day on 4chan, right?

And that included the white supremacist symbol, something I only learned about through this episode called The Black Sun.

And 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?

Yeah.

Like it turned off the normies.

And 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.

Yeah, I think it's interesting that Kamala Harris's campaign has really tailored their digital strategy to each platform.

So their TikTok strategy, for example, is kind of like this irreverent fan cam style

humor that you wouldn't have seen in 2020 at all, versus her Instagram strategy tends to be a bit more buttoned up and a bit more official versus her like TV ads.

She looks like your standard basic politician.

It's It's like you're seeing different versions of her in every part of the internet depending on where you are.

So I think it's more about how you tail your digital strategy.

I will say one example that stands out to me as someone who was artificially online was John Fetterman in 2022.

He had a very brilliant digital campaign led by Annie Wu, who is now working with the Democratic Party, I believe.

But, 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

be relatable to like some random 21-year-old in Pennsylvania.

But

that didn't carry over it once he was elected into his actual politics.

Now he

is just known for taking money from APAC and being like...

very,

very vocally pro-Israel, you know, amid this horrific war.

And you don't see any of that kind of like goofy, like relatable side to him that you saw during his campaign, um, that you saw on TikTok, because that wasn't him.

That was someone else being very smart about how they presented him and how they, you know, strategized his digital campaign.

But so I think that's the difference is like whether or not a politician is being portrayed accurately.

Um, and again, like, it's not like you see Kamala Harris on TikTok doing TikTok dances.

It's her staff taking existing clips of her and making it fun.

So, you could code switch, but you you can't like outright bullshit.

Exactly.

Or at least that seems to be the distinction.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

But the DeSantis example, I think, it gets to a second problem, right?

There's the inauthentic politician or the inauthentic online presentation that eventually kind of comes back to bite you.

But 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.

And you're like, basically just referring to one Twitter meme after the other.

And you're like, oh, wait, like online broke my brain, right?

Like this is not, this is not

the audience for that.

And I think that that's kind of, I guess I'm pointing to the flip side of what you were saying earlier, that like, basically there's a lot more direct communication between, or there was in 2016, 2020, between Trump and the kind of like meme lords of 4chan.

Well, that has an advantage.

It has also a huge disadvantage because at some point you might be speaking complete gibberish to just anyone else who is not currently

a B-tard or whatever they're calling themselves these days.

And then you get to the question of like, okay, well, which of like who from this demographic is actually going to vote?

Who is actually going to show up to the polls versus, you know, who's just engagement baiting?

Yeah, that's the other thing, right?

Like I was thinking about this with Elon Musk being

right.

Elon Musk had, like, with the, with the combination of the blue check, you know, him handing out blue checks for money, basically, and no one else having them anymore,

combined with like what you were talking about, like the fact that all these advertisers fled, basically every single tweet that he

sends out, or anything that Trump sends out, like basically there's gonna be

or that any Trump surrogate sends out, basically,

you're gonna get like pages and pages of these blue check replies that are clearly just engagement bait, right?

Where you're like, this is, none of this is interesting.

None of this is funny.

These are people hawking crypto or like weird weight loss things or like commemorative coins or whatever.

Like that is, that's the other problem, right?

That like at some point, the commercialism of it might take over and you might actually not win anyone over to your cause.

You might win them over to the cause of commemorative coins, but you're not supposedly in this for the commemorative coins.

You're in it for the presidency, right?

Yeah.

I mean, and you're lucky if those are even real people.

I mean, so many on Twitter now, or so much of Twitter now is just these blue check AI bots who are using ChatGBT to like, you know, come up with the most generic, boring answer possible just to farm engagement and further monetize their account.

Like they're not, they're not there to add to any sort of political discourse.

They're just there to get their coin and leave.

All right.

So they're, they're basically, they want followers and then they'll sell the account is the idea.

Well, I mean, yeah, that and also now you can monetize your Twitter account

based on certain like, you know, metrics.

I'm not super familiar with like what the exact like specificity is, but like basically if you have a monetized blue check account and you're just getting a ton of engagement, it doesn't matter, you know, where, where you fall in the political spectrum.

It's like you're, you're just using chat GBT to like respond to as many tweets as possible to get as much engagement as possible and amass followers and, you know.

get money.

I'm going to throw away my phone.

I know.

It's so bleak.

I know.

I know.

And sometimes I like want to scroll.

Like, I see a funny video and I want to see the replies and it's just all the same.

Like,

or, you know, it's, and or like, they're using other people, actual human beings' responses and posting that.

And it's just, it's bleak.

It's like a, it's kind of like a, like wasteland out there, but I can't give it up.

Twitter, Twitter degraded so much, so fast just in its usefulness, but also in its like, in its tenor, I can like picture, I can like post like a cute picture of my dog on Twitter now, and then I'll I'll get like

six to 10 replies immediately being like, and you should go fucking kill yourself, bitch.

And I'm like, it's my dog.

You know, it's like, it's not, it's nuts.

God, yeah.

And so like, but this, this

is, I think you're touching on something that's like the

sheer quantity of slop, not just on Twitter, but on all these platforms now.

Right.

has added to something that Adrian and I have talked about a little bit before, which is just the like intense intense ephemerality of the news cycle, especially as it gets metabolized on social media and of the memes from the news cycle, right?

Like when I remembered the Kamala or Kamala coconut memes, I felt like I was talking about something that happened like 20 years ago.

And it was actually just like eight weeks ago, actually.

And

there's a way in which these things get made

universal.

Like suddenly they seem like they're everywhere, especially if you're in one of these online silos where they really can be everywhere for you.

And then they disappear, right?

Yeah.

And something I've, we, we were talking today about how the Washington Post just ran a story about these new voters, like Gen Z

18, 20 year olds who are voting for the first time.

And a lot of them had never heard of the Axis Hollywood tape before.

Yeah.

And now it's going viral on TikTok because people are like, I can't believe this guy said this shit and he became the president.

Yeah.

And it's, it is an artifact of history.

It makes sense that they wouldn't have heard that if they were, you know, 10 in 2016.

But to me, it seems like such a indelible and specific part of this historical moment, right?

But it's also able to just be disappeared by this churn of all the content.

Yeah, exactly.

And it's interesting because the, you know, the Access Hollywood tape to me feels so burned into my memory.

I think partially because i i mean and i'm i'm in my late 20s i'm like almost 30 but that was the first election that i could vote for you know where i could vote for president and it just felt so like there was just such a cognitive dissonance in that um you know and it's shocking to me because that felt like such a historic election you know being able to like vote for a woman for the first time and then you know everything that happened after but you know to someone who's freshly 18 like that was you know just a blip in their day you know?

And I do think that, um, I think that the internet has actually, because the way that the internet is kind of this like everlasting archive of content, I mean, it's becoming more and more hellish every day to find that content, but because it's just such a like archive of content, I think that if anything, that kind of memory is allowed to continue to exist.

I don't know if, 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 and every year someone is going to find it and and that's going to somehow affect their political like political consciousness everything lives forever online exactly what also disappears immediately yeah

it exists somewhere you just have to find it yeah some things disappear immediately and the other in other cases you get you know centaurum and it's just yeah

it's just gonna be there forever you know

i was i was just so entertained when we were working on that that episode.

I was so entertained that Santorum is still like, I think the third Google result.

I mean,

it'll be in his obituary, right?

I mean, that's

really, I mean,

it's powerful.

It really has cast a pall over that man's life.

I mean, like, and I say this with zero sympathy, but like, just kind of awe, just kind of awe.

Like, it really,

this dumb joke is going to.

be part of who this person remembered to be.

It's really kind of astonishing.

Yeah.

And And it's really funny.

I think when we were working on the episode, we decided it was too vulgar to

make NPR listeners listen to what Santorum means.

So 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.

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.

You know, the Santorum example is one where different communities could kind of join in on it, right?

Google was there for everyone.

And I think that's kind of significant.

Whereas a lot of the other memes we've been talking about really are kind of, I mean, you have an entire episode on basically, it's about stands and their relationship to political campaigns.

And that's, of course, a little bit different.

There are fandoms that

kind of transfer their allegiance to certain cultural properties basically to

the political candidates, right?

And that's a little bit different, right?

Like that, that's sort of like how Moira and I did an episode on Warhammer 40k, among other things.

And we found out that that's a big,

that basically there are Warhammer 40K stands superimposing Trump's face on like space marines in that.

And we're like, what the fuck?

Yeah.

We had no idea, but like, there it is, right?

But that's very different.

Like, you have to, you really are becoming in that moment an anthropologist, anthropologist, like sort of like parachuting into another village and being like, what are you guys doing here?

Whereas like Centaurum is all about the ability to buy in over and over again.

And like your friends now Googling it now being like, LOL or like yikes.

Like in-group and out-group

is a pair that comes up a couple of times in your podcast.

Can you say a little bit about that?

It's like, is there, are there,

what about inward facing memes and outward facing memes?

Because most good memes do have an outside.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I would kind of characterize it as like, there are some memes that just appeal to a broader audience and some that are really just meant to stay within a community.

I mean, I've, for example, like I have been in stand culture for many, many years.

Like, I'm going to use One Direction as an example because

R.I.P.

Liam Payne.

But I was a huge One Direction fan in high school

and, you know, in college kind of fell out of it.

And it's interesting because now we're seeing this resurgence of One Direction and these kind of vintage, like 13-year-old One Direction moments.

And people are circulating these memes that were huge in 2013, 2012 that never really broke beyond,

you know, this little One Direction bubble on Tumblr and Twitter.

And now,

because they're now more culturally relevant right now, they're breaking into the mainstream.

And people are just starting to be exposed to these kinds of memes.

So that's what I think like by in-group, it's like people who are involved in that specific community would get, would be in on a joke versus the out-group, which kind of just like the broader masses.

Yeah, does it matter in that context that basically with Trump, we had a candidate in 2016

who was a plausible object of standing because he'd been on TV, right?

Like you didn't happen to stand the hot guy on the WB show, you stand the mean guy from the NBC show instead.

And then similarly, like that he kind of partook of Twitter as basically Twitter's victim more than he was really a master at it.

And then same with Elon Musk, right?

Like in some way, does stand culture independent of like, I mean, you know, I too belong to some of these fandoms and I, you know, I, we all know about toxic stand culture, but stand culture can also be very lovely.

But it does seem to do is it does seem to kind of short circuit a little bit

the connection between the economy or between business and media on the one hand and politics on the other, right?

That like you get someone like Elon Musk, who is a media consumer first,

then is like, I have to buy the platform on which I read things I do not like, right?

And we have Trump, who is like first a TV actor,

who then sort of, you know, is able to transmit that kind of fandom into kind of a political loyalism.

So is that kind of, is stand culture kind of a sign that

these kind of, that there are certain firewalls between our media ecosystem and our politics are just kind of collapsing?

I think so.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I think like

Trump's 2016 campaign, he wasn't necessarily standable because in the traditional sense, you know, like he wasn't hot.

He wasn't like

particularly charming.

It's not like he had a really broad following.

I think the stand, the root of that standing was really because he was seemingly an outsider in DC politics and he was running against Hillary Clinton, who was incredibly accomplished, but, you know, was

symbolic of this political institution that a lot of people thought was broken.

And I think like the root of the standing was because he seemed so subversive to a lot of people at the time.

And some politicians now, like I think some politicians develop stands because, or develop this kind of like fandom.

around them because of their actual politics and or because of like their personalities.

Like, you know, alexandra ocasio-cortez for example has her this like very wide group of supporters because she's so engaged online and because she engages with the kind of people who would

be very um attuned to stand culture um whereas someone like bernie sanders is completely different um he also has a lot of stand online but you know he's just like a grumpy old man from vermont just people like his policies so i think there are different reasons for standing but it's really about how you use, you know, your popularity.

It can be either about your

organic, you know, comfort in those worlds or your complete foreignness from those worlds.

Exactly.

Like, yes.

Like what is appealing about Bernie Sanders isn't just that people love his policies.

It's also that they can love him in a way that they know

is so asynchronous.

Right.

It's how he lives his life.

Right.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Oh, it is that gap.

Yeah.

Yeah.

it's just like bernie sanders famously says that he doesn't have apps on his phone and a couple weeks ago

i know

and a couple weeks ago he was on that twitch stream with a bunch of twitch streamers talking about you know answering questions talking about why it's so important um to vote this year and you know one of the streamers showed up as a vtuber and there's just like this moment of like what is going on because you know trump or bernie is trying to talk about the importance of abortion access and you know calling for a ceasefire in gaza and then this guy who's a digital kind of like wearing a digital avatar as like a cat an anime cat boy is like

like you know senator sanders do you know what a vtuber is and bernie is like no i don't anyway yeah and so yeah it's a kind of like

Again, he seems like such an outsider to the internet that the internet is like,

has kind of adopted him.

These fixated, dare dare we say, parasocial attachments that people can get in a stand culture that have facilitated this like merger of political and consumer identity.

It occurs to me, and this might be like a decent last note for us to end on, right?

That this is also something that happens in the inverse, right?

Because people also build these political consumer identities around like absolutely hating shit.

I think this was a real factor in 2016 with Hillary Clinton.

Yeah.

And you do see a sector of the online, I think, like specifically like center-left, like liberal community that has really organized themselves around hating the shit out of Donald Trump and just like reviling him.

And this is what brings, you know, one theory of Kamala Harris's campaign is that people can, that, that, that people hate Donald Trump more than they hate women, right?

And she can bring them all together to hate this one fucking guy enough to win the election.

And so I'm interested in, like,

yeah, and you know, like, Adrian, you noted that this is a podcast called In Bed with a Right.

So, like, this is, I'm not, I'm not judging anybody for organizing their identity this way.

This is also something I do.

This is an anti-fandom podcast.

And, you know, and like, who among us has not gone and like watched the Instagram story of like a frenemy, you know, just like, and what is she up to now?

She looks like shit.

But like, what is the force of this anti-fandom online?

Is it like, is it one-sided?

Is it taking root sort of everywhere?

It seems like it's a, it's a really dynamic factor that I haven't really seen theorized a ton.

Yeah, I think it's really funny that you mentioned this kind of like blue wave resistance lib genre of Twitter that unfortunately we don't really see as much anymore, given the

quick, quick death of Twitter.

But yeah, I think it's interesting because yeah, in 2016, there was this whole cohort of people who really banded together in their hatred of Donald Trump and their hatred of conservatives.

And I think that it was so effective because they themselves didn't need to have like individual political stances that were different from each other because they were united under this like combined.

just, you know, hatred.

And so like, I think they part of it is like, it's so successful because you don't need to, you know, hash out your differences with each other if you have like a common enemy.

You know, you don't see them like arguing over, I mean, sometimes you do now, but like back then in 2017, 2018, you didn't see them like arguing over the intricacies of healthcare or, you know, like their stances on,

you know, car taxes.

You saw them being like anyone but Trump.

And so there's that where like you don't this combined hatred is, you know, you don't need to have your own individual political stances that might conflict with someone else's because you just share this one hatred.

And the other is that it's really good engagement.

Like there is a whole, there was for a minute, a whole cottage industry of people who built platforms just dunking on Trump tweets.

Like as soon as Trump tweeted, you had like the quickest people just absolutely dunking on him in the quote tweets.

racking up a couple hundred thousand likes easy.

And so I think that it's really easy to get engagement when you're hating on something.

And it's easier than to get engagement when you're supporting something.

It's it's it lends itself to humor more, I think.

Being a hater, there's just more jokes in it.

Yeah.

And it's something that we are, again, like, I think we're more used to in pop culture, right?

I mean, like, we've talked about the stands, but the anti-fan, anti-fandom has mostly been theorized in pop culture studies, I think.

Yeah.

Right.

Like hate watching, fantipathy, right?

Right.

Haters are gonna hate hate hate hate right like it's it it is basically um the we much more frequently follow cultural products with that kind of blinding blinding just distaste um

than we do politicians who after all kind of Like I was once incensed about Bobby Jindal.

I haven't thought about Bobby Jindal until I just said the words Bobby Jindal.

Like, I don't know what he's doing.

Like, he's probably like, he has a gardening show.

What do I know?

But, like, you know, there are actors that are still driving me to distraction.

And, like,

they're not going away, right?

Like, in some way, we live longer with our pop cultural kind of fixations than we do with our politicians.

One noted exception, I guess, being Donald fucking Trump.

But

largely, right?

Like,

democracy tends to be worse at serving us these kinds of enduring icons of our own hatred than capitalism, right?

If you're not a Marvel fan, well, the last 20 years have been a long, dark trip, right?

And I wonder if that's another moment where kind of our consumer behavior actually sort of spills over into our political discourse.

Yeah, totally.

I think so.

I mean, we talk about stand culture,

and I think stand culture is inherently consumerist.

It's inherently, you know, built around buying products from the people you stand or buying products

in relation to what you stand, whether that's, you know, Funko Pops or

Make America Great Again hats.

And I think you, you mentioned like hating, you know, I think something like hating is just so low stakes compared to supporting something.

I wish I could like, I go out of my way to watch, to like hate watch movies just so I can like give them one star in Litterbox.

I wouldn't go out of my, whereas like going to see a movie, like buying a ticket to see a movie that I might want to watch, I'm a lot more reluctant to do that

versus just waiting for it to come out and hating on it.

And I think right now the question is whether or not this kind of consumerism will translate to showing up at polls.

You know, I think it's really easy

to buy a hat supporting a candidate or, you know, buy

stickers supporting, you know, like white dudes for Harris

versus actually showing up to the polls.

And, you know, even now in the last week, I've seen so many tweets of people saying, like, oh my God, I didn't know you had to actually register to vote.

That's crazy.

I like bought all this stuff.

I thought that would make it,

I didn't think I'd actually have to register.

And it's like, oh, my God.

Oh, God.

Yeah, I know.

So it's interesting.

This whole conversation about stand culture and politics also is,

I think, a bit fraught because there's just, you can stand someone, but like lack.

there's the public education system is just so broken that you can stand so you can stand a politician and and lack the knowledge about how to actually support them versus something as simple as you know seeing a trump tweet and dunking on it a lot easier it is yeah you know i think you've what i've really learned is that no matter which way the election goes we're we're still doomed yeah pretty much

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a, it's going to be a long, it's, this whole cycle has felt so long.

I don't know why.

Every election feels longer.

This, I'm like, it's been a couple of months since Harris announced announced her campaign.

And yet, I feel like I've lived

years.

There wasn't even a primary really on the Democratic side.

And I feel like it's been going on for several thousand years.

I know.

Morgan, I learned so much from you.

I think you've got this insight into these dynamics.

And you told me things I'd never heard before and really helped me see this in a new way.

So now, whenever I'm online getting yelled at by a bot, I'll think of you.

And I'm so honored.

Don't hate him, Mara.

He's just engagement farming.

I know.

Every time, every time you post a picture of your dog, I will think of the

faceless people just

posting their little AI-generated hate at you.

The Med with the Right would like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Calvis.