The Grift That's Smothering the Resistance
Social media community building against Trump feels good and achieves nothing
I wasn’t on Twitter during the Arab Spring. It sounds like it was a big deal. Millions of people across a continent throwing off the shackles of tyranny and demonstrating for the first time the power of online organizing. It’s widely regarded to be the least shitty thing that Twitter ever did.
Not that Twitter was entirely responsible for it, but it’s often cited as having been a major organizing factor and a proof of concept for social media and new technologies to be used for the greater human good.
So what would it look like if that kind of energy came to America? If fascism came knocking at the home of democracy, a nation where the vast majority of people are hooked up to the World Wide Web and definitely know how to use it? Is this the era of the American Spring?
The nightmare scenario that Americans have always been warned about has arrived. A president with no respect for or interest in the norms and traditions of his office or country, who claims dictatorial authority, who respects neither congress nor the judiciary. His footsoldiers have begun rounding people up—not just the undocumented, but also visa holders, permanent residents, and possibly citizens (we don’t actually know)—and disappearing them without trial or due process to concentration camps in El Salvador. They are being deported not for breaking any law, but for being Hispanic and having tattoos—literally any tattoos. Again, these are law-abiding legal residents who have not been charged with any crime.
The president has unilaterally appointed the world’s richest man to lead a government department he made up, with no congressional approval or oversight, that evidently has powers nearly equivalent to the president himself. Elon Musk, effectively the co-president, has been granted the power to shut down any agency that he feels like, terminate the employment of anyone in the government at will, impound congressionally approved funds, and even cancel government contracts and award them instead to his own companies.
The actual elected president, in the meantime, is governing by executive order, declaring it illegal to be transgender, to criticise the government of Israel to any extent, or to study climate science. He can’t actually do any of these things, mind you—it’s the exact same play as that gag from The Office where Michael Scott declares bankruptcy by yelling “I declare bankruptcy”—but when you’re a climate scientist and FBI agents come knocking at your door and strongly insinuate that you should try a new career if you don’t dream of an early retirement in a Salvadoran death camp, then what Trump is allowed to do kind of shrinks behind what he fucking is doing.
The Democratic party under Chuck Schumer has folded like an ironing board for some reason and abdicated what little power they actually still wield in favor of their preferred technique of trying to grow his heart three sizes with the power of love and full capitulation. Trump and Musk, for all appearances, display closer allegiance with foreign dictators like Vladimir Putin, Nayib Bukele, and Viktor Orban than they do with the opposing party of their own country. It is only March, in year one of a four year administration, noting that the idea that Trump will remain in power for only four years is ludicrously optimistic.
Shit seems bad, is what I’m saying. Let’s check out what Twitter looks like:
Fuck.
But we already know this about Twitter, the place is a dumpster. Bluesky is the same, though—every social media site right now seems to look very much like this if you haven’t whipped your personalised algorithm enough into submission.
I keep my social media feeds well disciplined—if a site makes it possible to populate my feed with only people I follow, that’s what I’m using. It’s why I practically never use Meta products anymore unless I want to check up on what one of my friends from uni from 15 years ago is posting, followed by three straight boomer jokes and just a shit ton of AI videos featuring Simon Cowell, Shrimp Jesus, and giants building pyramids.
That said, I really had no idea what anyone was talking about when rumours started that Donk and Brittney had been banned from Bluesky.
Everybody, we gotta save Donk and Brittney! Donk and Brittney are in trouble, sign the petition for Donk and Brittney, like and follow.
We’ve got this, guys, we’ve just gotta free Donk and Brittney for community solidarity. Just sign, share, follow, and subscribe. Repost and share, we have to bring the community together, bring it together like only Donk and Brittney can.
And have you SIGNED and REPOSTED enough? You should repost this again, George, you should repost it again to put it back up to the top of the timeline. Donk and Brittney need your support, they need 400 more signatures. 400 more signatures to bring back Donk and Brittney and you have to follow as well, and follow back.
If these people had pulled out this level of energy for Kamala Harris last year then we’d all be sipping on coconut cocktails right now and peacefully existing in the context of all in which we live and what came before us. Instead we have White House Chief Secretary Big Balls “throwing his heart out” to Pepe the Frog while cutting healthcare for AIDS orphans.
If you’re like me and you’ve never heard of Donk and Brittney before, they are a couple of Twitter memeposters who evidently got started in 2020 and run a pro-Democrat group called Blue Crew, who I guess promote solidarity and community among Democrat voters by helping them all find each other, and… and then what?
Basically the grand plan here is that everyone in Blue Crew follows everyone else in Blue Crew. This is achieved by searching various hashtags and following anyone who uses those hashtags, and following-back anyone who follows you. Then, you endlessly spam memes, macros, and AI slop about how much you hate Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and retweet each other, and follow, and don’t forget to smash that like button.
Then, when the next election rolls around, you all go out and vote for the person you were going to vote for anyway.
Now don’t get me wrong, I find it very difficult to scrape together much animosity for a group of people who are trying to push positive vibes out into the world in the name of all of the causes I also subscribe to. At this point sufficient credentials to enter my good books are that (1) You oppose Trumpism, and (2) your reasons for opposing it aren’t “it’s not racist enough.” (the Nick Fuentes clause).
The trouble is when this kind of insufferable nonsense floods the arena and begins to look like that thing Tetsuo turns into at the end of Akira, just a planet-cooking avalanche of AI slop and poorly assembled image macros.
Now, I kind of get what’s happening here. There is true enthusiasm on display. I can totally see a bunch of middle aged winemoms and cringedads cracking their knuckles, firing up the MeidasTouch podcast or, if they’re feeling really spicy, Sam Seder, and going to work with the Blue Crew reposting and dropping likes and followbacks. Posting stuff like “I agree!” and “You said it girl !!”
Bluesky actually released a feature called “starter packs” that makes this worse—it’s a mass follow feature that’s intended to allow people to, for example, follow everyone associated with a particular news organization with one click. Blue Crew have utilized it to enable you to follow hundreds of their people in seconds, and they roll a new one out periodically, as special events, like you’re collecting rare Pokémon.
Bluesky has been silent on their reasons for banning Donk and Brittney but it seems like they felt this shit had grown way out of control, and now they have to hold their ground and stand firm on their policy of not basing moderation decisions on volume of complaints. It means they have to weather hundreds of emails from distressed users who feel they’re missing out on valuable content like this:
Like I said, I get it. I understand what’s happening. Engaging in this type of behaviour day after day releases the same kind of brain chemicals as on-the-ground activism, except it’s easier. It’s easier because you’re not really doing anything. But you feel like you’re doing something. You’re raising awareness! You’re building community!
You’re racing to the finish line on a stationary bike.
It would be easy to paint me as a hypocrite for not leading by example, but the fact is I’m neither American nor a resident of America. While we can’t do much directly we do have a lot at stake in America getting its act together. Fascist regimes only care about borders in one direction. I work for an educational institution. Trump’s regime has begun actively sabotaging our research because the existence of what he perceives as wokeness anywhere in the world is interpreted as a national security threat. It’s the Cold War all over again except this time the US is on Russia’s side and it’s the rest of the West that’s in his crosshairs.
Can we expect CIA dark operations to infiltrate and topple our governments next? I don’t think that’s too much of a stretch—Elon Musk is openly investigating the price tag of buying elections in Germany and Britain to get the ball rolling. America, we need you guys to do something. Imagine our horror watching everything unfold just in the past couple of months and seeing the Democratic Party and the Blue Crew responding to it in much the same way as those YouTube pop science videos of the ants that get stuck marching in a spiral for weeks until they all starve and die.
Donk and Brittney, as far as I can tell, don’t take monetary donations, so it feels odd to describe what these people do as a “grift,” but it absolutely is in the sense that they are grifting you for attention and praise. That’s the currency that they are sapping out of their followers whether they’re conscious of it or not.
And there’s something deeply insidious about what is ostensibly a protest movement against the Trump administration, having the full attention of thousands of dedicated eyes and ears, and in these crucial first weeks, deciding to pull all of those people’s attention and energy away from what Trump is doing and focus it instead on your attempts to get unbanned from a fucking social media site.
That’s all they do! While Trump has begun straight up kidnapping random student protesters and sending them to foreign gulags, Donk and Brittney are holding online rallies and mass conference calls and petition after petition after petition to try to bully one website into rescinding their suspension. These two dipshits are not running for office!
Petitions, by the way, are another illusion of action that works as a pressure valve to make you feel like you’re achieving something. Petitions are roughly as effective as thoughts and prayers, and given the choice I actually prefer thoughts and prayers because at least then you’re being quiet and keeping to yourself.
Protests—real ones—are happening. But the mainstream media won’t cover them, because the mainstream media have all turned into scared little bitches ever since Trump started threatening to imprison them and his followers started threatening to murder them. Oh, and the billionaire owners of outlets like Washington Post and the LA Times aren’t exactly eager to make enemies of the Regime. Even mere hundred-thousandaires like Matt Taibbi are avoiding too much boat-rocking.
It’s an echo chamber. It’s a treadmill. And if more people don’t break out of this hypnotic ant mill then I’m truly afraid for what’s coming. If Donk and Brittney think Bluesky jail is harsh, wait until they see El Salvador.
Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Bluesky?
When Twitter was hijacked by a wealthy ideologue back in 2022 to amplify far-right voices and serve as a recruitment tool for the MAGA movement, the market did what the market tends to do and spat out a dozen alternatives for those who weren’t happy with the situation to migrate to. Many of them were sort of just clones of Twitter. Only one of them is routinely pilloried by the mainstream media as a dangerous and even socially harmful den of toxicity.
Also, "Donk and Brittney" sounds like the name of one of those insufferable drive-time morning radio DJ pairs that make me want to drive through a guardrail.
Just reading that sapped my energy for . . . well, life.
On a more serious note, did you read _Politics Is For Power_ by Eitan Hersh? I remember him making the podcast rounds (i.e, https://www.vox.com/2020/3/11/21172064/politics-is-for-power-eitan-hersh-the-ezra-klein-show ) and thinking that he had a reasonable point and, based on the screenshots in your post, we may be moving further away from changing this reality:
"Most people who are daily news consumers belong to zero organizations and have worked zero times in the past year with other people on a community problem. So, most people are not doing anything."