- Today in Tabs
- Posts
- The Gulf of Bees
Goddamn, fascism is boring. Elon Musk is fighting with another babymama? I care about that only slightly more than Elon Musk cares about his thirty seven other children. Elon Musk? Elon Musk, Elon Musk Elon Musk Elon Musk. Elon, Musk. Elon Musk DOGE Elon Musk Musk DOGE Musk Elon DOGE Elon. Musk Elon DOGE chainsaw Musk meme Elon Musk DOGE Elon Elon, Elon Musk.
I thought Dan Boingo (sp???) was something Facebook invented so the engagement leaderboard wouldn’t be 100% Shrimp Jesus. But now I have to know that not only is he real (I guess) but he will be in charge of the FBI along with Director Crazy Eyes.
Garbage Ryan wrote about the internet outrage overwhelm cycle, and Kyle Chayka noticed that everyone’s just trying to escape it now. Where are the Democrats? Where are the mass protests? Personally I think everyone has figured out that this is just a show, and we’re bored of it.
If Trump Season One was a galvanizing historical threat to the Republic, so far Season Two is a re-tread with a lot of the same tropes but more D-list celebrity cameos and a much less coherent plot. Season One dropped all kinds of tantalizing clues and engaging side quests that ultimately never tied together or went anywhere. Steve Bannon’s secret death penalty? The Piss Tape? Gorpman and Bleemer? There was the whole coup thing in the finale and now we’re supposed to believe that no one bothered to do anything about that? They just let him run again? Come on, that’s not even realistic. And now they’re trying to do Trump-Russia all over, like do they think we forgot? And the Post Office thing didn’t even make it past one episode.
I’m not saying this isn’t real, or that it isn’t bad, or that people aren’t being hurt, because it is and they are. I’m just saying it’s also intensely boring. They’re trying to overwhelm us with nonsense and it’s working. I am overwhelmed with nonsense. We desperately need to montage through to the part where Donald Trump dies on the toilet while straining to expel an impacted Big Mac and well-done steak bolus and J.D. Vance, hands shaking from the accumulated stress of a presidency unexpectedly thrust upon him, and the accumulated heavy metals from RFK Jr.’s mandatory “Secret Health Juice,” accidentally blinds himself with his eyeliner wand, leaving President Mike Johnson to declare that the former Republican Party will now be known as the New Founding Fathers and the United States of America will be renamed New Israel, and the Purge begins immediately.
I guess now that I’m gaming it out, we should probably montage past that part too.
Today in Crabs:
Also Today in Politics: “ICE Prosecutor in Dallas Runs White Supremacist X Account,” Steven Monacelli in the Texas Observer. Long Live the Real King. Mike Masnick: “While Democracy Burns, Democrats Prioritize… Demolishing Section 230?” Perfect, thanks guys. The last voyage of the S.S. United States. Did you know MapQuest still exists? They made a “Gulf Of” generator.
In a just world, the saga of the murderous trans/vegan/Rationalist navy would be the biggest news in the world, and the only story anyone was talking about. In Wired Evan Ratliff gathered all the Zizian cult loose ends into one big pile of loose ends:
The more time I spent following the group that some called the Zizians, the more their story started seeming itself like some kind of basilisk. Just by virtue of having examined its events, you were trapped in its world, subject to its terms. Inside that world it felt like some future evil was rapidly approaching, ominous events waiting just beyond the horizon. But speaking of them could usher them faster, closer. I was certain the story as I understood it was incomplete but unsure where to look to complete it. Or if I did, whether I could tell it without attracting the basilisk’s gaze myself.
Also Today in Crime: The Verge sent Mia Sato to “the hottest ticket in New York,” the Luigi Mangione hearing in Manhattan. They also sent Molly Crabapple to sketch it, and the results are perfect.
Illustration by Molly Crabapple for The Verge
“What Felt Impossible Became Possible,” Dan Sinker on the rise and fall of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.
“The Baldwins is grimmer than you imagined.” You have no idea how grim I can imagine it being, Kathryn VanArendonk.
Drink the Pharaoh juice. What’s the worst that could happen?
Today’s Song: DJ Cummerbund, “Everybody and the Sunshine Band”
I’ve been made aware that my youngest child reads Tabs but skips directly to the sign-off and footnotes, and is extremely disappointed by a recent lack of both. So here, in a place I know they’ll read it, I’d like to acknowledge that “In Australia they call it ornorvirus” was their joke, which I stole.1
1 I also stole it on Bluesky. All the greats have a writing staff, I have no regrets.
Reply