The Week in Tweets and Memes
This week was all over the place, with some substantial news and some true banality.
Before we get into it, if you’re a free subscriber but you’ve been meaning to take out a paid subscription, you can buy me a coffee drink a month by upgrading your account today!
Ok, on to the week in tweets and memes.
Justice Clarence Thomas’s billionaire “friend,” who apparently is (checks notes) also a collector of Nazi Memorabilia, was in deeper with Thomas than first reported, not only lavishing luxury trips worth millions on him and his wife Ginni, but also (checks notes again) purchasing Thomas’s family home nine years ago, remodeling it, and for years acting acting as (checks notes one last time)…the landlord to his mother? You know, normal stuff that Thomas for some reason never reported.
This was almost too easy to satirize.
But seriously, I’m sure the Chief Justice is on it!
Continuing the “Hollywood script” nature of the news lately, Airman Jack Teixeira—a 21 year old racist and antisemite who railed about the raids at Ruby Ridge and Waco—was charged with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and classified documents.
Wow, change the age, and it’s Donald Trump!
That wasn’t lost on Marjorie Three Names, who somehow made this about Biden while supporting treason.
There are many weird things about this intelligence leak, but among the weirdest is that the documents were held on a Discord server called “Thug Shaker Central” used by Teixeira and his gaming friends. The leaker’s motive appears to have been to impress his friends there with what he could do.
The right spent much of the week angry about Bud Lite and its single, limited influencer promotion with a trans person. They were so butt-hurt that they called for a national boycott, and things got silly really quickly.
Kid Rock decided he needed to shoot up some Bud Lite in protest. You can watch the video here.
But the internet has receipts and is forever.
The next response is NOT satire. But it is unintentionally hilarious and could have been an SNL short.
You can watch his whole cringey video here. It’s really quite something.
Apparently, someone checked, and Ultra Right beer is ultra expensive, too.
Grifters gonna grift…
Actor Kevin Sorbo, who hasn’t worked on any projects in a very long time, decided to make up stats about the boycott.
But after this tweet, again from the great Kevin Kruse, we may have to report a murder…
Billionaire man-baby whom nobody likes, Elon Musk, decided to slap NPR and later PBS with misleading tags saying that they were “state-affiliated media” and later “government-funded media.” Both news organizations promptly suspended their posting on Twitter in protest. Musk responded with maturity and grace.
Meanwhile, Musk’s attacks on the Substack platform (including my current inability to embed any tweets using links so I have to take screenshots, yay!) drove even his most loyal ”Twitter Files” lap dog, Matt Taibbi, to bail on him. This sums up the situation well:
Musk’s childish antics and his inability to understand how advertising and brand safety actually work makes life more difficult for my own ad-driven business with each passing day. Maybe I could learn a new skill, e.g. folding jeans really, really fast like this guy randomly does in this video:
Speaking of must-watch videos, a Nebraska state senator, Machaela Cavanaugh, who has been fighting tirelessly for trans kids and their families against a truly deplorable, bigoted, and harmful bill, took to the podium once last time. She had been able to filibuster and grind normal business in the capital to a halt for many weeks, but the GOP finally got around to their hateful legislation. She addressed those families she had fought for in a speech yesterday. Oh my heart. You can watch it here.
I needed to smile after that, so I went straight for the dumb dad jokes. There’s actually an account for these, and I admit, I check it a lot.
This follow up….
Remember, a great pun is its own reword!
Have a terrific weekend, and I’ll see you here tomorrow for the week’s look ahead.
Jay
Once again, thanks for the laughs based on the utter stupidity of some people. Senator Cavanaugh is a legend. The Democrats need more like her and her fighting spirit. The fact that she did all she could and she's still apologizing is exactly what's wrong here. It's the Republicans who should be apologizing to every group of people they continue to target with their hateful policies. I can't wrap my head around the kind of heartless, soulless minds that come up with this stuff. It must keep them up at night, making mental lists of all of the cruel things they can do to people, because they can. This is why accountability matters. Until that happens we will all be subjected to their hate. My empathic heart continues to break.
Retelling dad jokes, and you're not even a dad.
You're a faux pa, Jay.