How do I get a chunk of that sweet Russian propaganda money?
Plus: I got kicked out of the Giants subreddit; a massive AI music scam; Trump's new muse; what should really scare you about Elon
Alright, we’ve got a lot to cover here. It’s still shorts weather most places, so we’re gonna be all Rangelife Shorts today. Some shorts will be shorter than others.
Let’s start with two items around the weird culture of sports fandom.
I got kicked out of the SF Giants subreddit for asking about a player’s walkup music. I’ve been a casual participant in the SF Giants subreddit for years. People often compare fandoms to religions or cults, and I think that’s fair, especially if you view religions and cults as for-profit enterprises that exploit people’s loyalties for revenue. Which is basically how sports work.
Well, I got kicked out of the cult for asking about the walkup music for the Giants’ young franchise catcher, Patrick Bailey.
Quick context for the non-sports fans: each player in Major League Baseball chooses a song that plays when they come up to bat or enter the game as a pitcher. Most ballplayers are normies who pick mainstream hits. Some guys goof around. Some become iconic.
Bailey is originally from small-town North Carolina, and he has the air of a southern good ol’ boy, often wrapping an American flag doo-rag under his catcher’s helmet. When I went to my first game of this year, I couldn’t help but notice his new walkup song: “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)” by the late Toby Keith.
Keith released this song in early 2002, a few months after 9/11. While a lot of artists during that time recorded and sold songs about sadness, tragedy, strength, and unity, Keith’s song was about the thrill of revenge. We were done mourning. It was time to spill blood. The lyrics include:
Hey, Uncle Sam put your name at the top of his list
And the Statue of Liberty started shakin' her fist
And the eagle will fly, man. It's gonna be hell
When you hear mother freedom start ringin' her bell
And it feels like the whole wide world is raining down on you
Oh, brought to you courtesy of the red, white, and blueOh, and justice will be served and the battle will rage
This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage
And you'll be sorry that you messed with the U.S. of A.
'Cause we'll put a boot in your ass
It's the American way
Keith originally only performed this song for troops at USO shows, but someone eventually convinced him of its commercial potential, and so it went platinum. It even re-charted when Keith died unexpectedly earlier this year.
It’s not a timeless song; it’s very much rooted in the righteous anger following 9/11. So it seemed like a strange choice for a ballplayer born in 1999.
Anyway, I wondered if Patrick Bailey had ever been asked about it. I’m just a curious cat. That’s why I have a couple friends who call me Whiskers.
I couldn’t find anything on Google, so I asked the Giants’ subreddit. Then all hell broke loose. The 50 replies mostly broke down along three lines: (1) “Maybe he loves America. Are you stupid?” (2) “I’m so sorry he hurt you by picking a song that’s not from the Approved List of Wokeness. Do you want to censor him?” (3) “Yeah, that is kind of weird. Maybe he’s thinking this…” (Not too many of that last one.)
Within a couple hours, the post was taken down by the moderators.
Now, I don’t think I did anything wrong. But since I’m an adult, I didn’t complain or file an appeal or demand “FREE SPEECH.” I had failed to read the room. What had been an interesting source of conversation at a few games I went to with friends this year was poison to the Giants fandom.
I’m not mad at anyone. I learned more from the responses than I’d bargained for. I’m back on the subreddit. The Giants are having another miserably mediocre season. The stadium is mostly empty most nights, and so the subreddit is pretty depressing, too. I’m glad I could get some people to stop wallowing for a minute and instead be angry at someone they imagined to be social justice warrior.
By the way, I’ve thought about it a lot, and my walk-up song would be Fugazi’s “Waiting Room.” Don’t expect me to swing wildly outside the strike zone, buddy. I am a patient boy.
Washington Commanders exec got fired for saying true things on a date. Remember James O’Keefe? He’s a conservative movement guy who in the ‘00s and ‘10s tricked people into private conversations under false pretenses, and then secretly recorded and deceptively edited them. Imagine Borat, but with real stakes.
Years after being forced from his own organization, he’s still around, and his latest — investigation? prank? — was getting a PR exec with the Washington Commanders (formerly the R*dskins) to say things during what he thought was a romantic date.
This executive said the NFL locker rooms are overwhelmingly homophobic, that Jerry Jones is racist, and that “most of the fans are high-school-educated alcoholics.” Spot the lie.
[He also] called the league's social justice initiatives "performative."
"It's not done out of the goodness of their heart," he said. "It's to make as much money as possible. The NFL cares about the bottom line, like any corporation, above all else."
Enteen said because the league makes so much money, "they can faux prioritize DEI for the sake of good publicity."
Anyone who has even remotely followed the NFL, its owners, or their anodyne “End Racism” initiative will know all this to be pretty spot-on.
The executive was fired. I’m still not sure exactly what O’Keefe was trying to accomplish here, but congrats on destroying yet another person’s career. Can’t wait to see your October surprise.
They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating. They’re eating the pets. By the time I publish this, the debate will be a week behind us, so I won’t get too deep into what happened there because you already know.
Before the debate, I still heard two pundits refer to Trump as “unpredictable,” and I don’t think that word means what you think it means. Harris clearly predicted how Trump would react to what she said, and the reason she won the debate is because he swallowed every piece of bait she left for him.
Probably not a lot of people predicted that Trump would pick up the racist pet-eating story that had been chewing its way through right-wing-fantasy media over the prior weekend, but what happened was incredibly predictable, because it’s been happening over and over for nine years. Once again, Trump said something stupid and racist, all the sane normal people leapt to debunk it, he doubled down, and his minions desperately tried to prove the fantasy was real. His less-dumb supporters are now mad at the majority of them.
Most Trump supporters tell pollsters they believe the pet-eating story, but that doesn’t mean they specifically believe it’s true. It’s more like Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” — it just feels true if you’re the kind of person who finds immigrants to be scary or offensive.
Springfield, Ohio, has basically gone into lockdown because right-wing dolts are calling in threats. The Proud Boys marched. Flyers are appearing that claim to be from the Klan.
Debunking the original story — the Haitian immigrants are here legally, and they don’t eat pets — is beside the point. The larger issue is that Trump is still repeating every inflammatory thing he sees on the internet, as if he were just another senior citizen bitching with his fellow golfers at the country club.
Oh, and another mentally ill guy tried to shoot Trump, and we’ll all forget about that in a few days again. They didn’t even interrupt football for this one. It’s just another symptom of a country where anyone, no matter how mentally ill, can access a military-style rifle and all the ammo they can afford. It’s the guns, stupid.
Somebody joked that Democrats should propose another assault rifle ban, but call this one the “Protect Donald Trump from Assassination Bill” since apparently the lives of synagogue worshipers, Wal-Mart shoppers, and 1st graders aren’t valuable enough to protect.
One other exciting piece of election news. James O’Keefe isn’t the only right-wing troll from the ‘10s to re-emerge last week. We also have evidence that Laura Loomer, a true nutcase from deep in the racist right-wing abyss, has worked her way into Trump’s inner circle and his private jet and maybe his heart.
Loomer is too racist for Marjorie Taylor-Greene. Loomer also called Lindsey Graham gay, which is the kind of candor we only see in Washington when you’re being secretly recorded on a fake date.
And the drama is getting so think that we got this mind-bender from Nazi-adjacent gadfly Milo Yiannopoulos.
Here’s a grifter claiming that a fantasist is bragging that the world’s biggest liar has praised her oral sex skills. It’s an impossible logic puzzle. What could be true here? What is reality anyway? What if we’re all just existing in an alien simulation, or the dream of an ancient god?
Bonus: Laura Loomer as port-a-potties
You don’t have to be crazy to work here... I’ve always suspected that a major headwind that Trump would face is just the general unreliability of his weirdo cult followers. One prime example is in Michigan, where campaign staff and paranoid volunteers are fighting and splintering over nonsense.
Russian disinformation hits new highs. Remember 2016, when Russian bots swarmed social media to build a fake grassroots that was both pro-Trump and pro-Russia? They were so successful, they organized rallies thousands of miles away and even convinced a guy to put his wife in a cage dressed as Hillary Clinton.
The information environment has evolved a lot in the past eight years, and so did Russia’s strategy. Last week the DoJ busted a Russian op called Doppelganger, a multimedia plan to influence citizens in multiple democracies. This operation included a project hilariously called Good Ol’ USA, which paid popular American influencers to make content to their specs.
"They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream,’” Gambashidze writes in one document outlining his “guerrilla media” plan. “It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in/for the United States.”
The same document is full of racist and conspiratorial claims, including that Republicans are “victims of discrimination of people of color.” It adds that white middle-class people are being discriminated against with high inflation and rising prices, while “unemployed people of color end up being privileged groups of the population.”
And the goal of the campaign, from the beginning, was crystal clear: “To secure victory for [Donald Trump],” Gambashidze wrote in the Good Old USA Project planning document.
Conservative YouTubers didn’t need to anyone to tell them to make content with these themes, because this was already how they built their audiences. But the “we should stop spending money helping Ukraine” angle was newly lucrative for these creators. Some made hundreds of thousands of dollars from Putin’s influence operation. Others did it for free. Suckers.
Elon Musk should be freaking you out. Yes, it’s weird and awful that he jokes about impregnating Taylor Swift and political assassinations. What we should find freaky is that the world’s richest man, who is also one of the biggest defense contractors, who has a monopoly on space communications, who also owns one of the largest platforms for real-time information, is actively trying to get his guy elected president. And the quid pro quo is that Musk — again, a major defense contractor — would be in charge of deciding which federal programs to kill. It’s the definition of conflict of interest.
Musk is a eugenicist, a fantasist, truly a broken man, who already wields massive power in financial and technology markets. The government exists to counteract that power, not expand it!
An explosive mayor’s race. Sao Paolo has more than 11 million people. Their mayor’s race is exciting. One candidate dared another to hit him with a chair at their debate, and that dare was accepted. Political violence is never acceptable, but it’s good content.
An amazing interview: Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick interviewed fashion critic Max Berliner. Look, to me, fashion is visual static. The way that some people see American football as just guys crashing into each other, that’s fashion to me. But this interview is fascinating, because it’s also about the splintering of culture and the triumph of capitalism. The names of the people and the fashion labels are meaningless to me, but I hung onto every word.
AI is making corporate fraud easier and weirder. We’ve covered here how AI is destined to transform music production, including my hypothesis that a majority of the music produced in certain genres (like EDM and country) will be synthetic within a year or two. It’s already happening!
But now here’s a new one: a man in North Carolina, with the help of an AI music startup CEO, ripped off Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and YouTube for millions of dollars by producing thousands of AI tracks, and then sending an army of bots to “listen” to them.
Soon they won’t need the bots. They’ll just upload 10,000 songs, delete the 9,990 of them that nobody’s listening to, and make money on the rest. The music industry will be more democratic than ever!
Delayed gratitude. The National Gallery in London is renovating, and during their demolition they found a bitchy, 34-year-old note from a donor. Love it.
When will Phoenix rise from the ashes? Yesterday was the first day that Phoenix’s high temp hadn’t exceeded 100 degrees in 113 consecutive days. You read that right. Until yesterday, the last day it didn’t reach 100 degrees was May 26. People move there for the weather! “You don’t have to shovel sunshine.”
I wonder how Melania feels about T.Rump auditioning his next wife in public. Or maybe she’s his next hush money recipient. (Now he knows how not to show it on his books.)
OK, but apropos of the Giants subreddit, can we make T-shirts that say Free Rangelife?