DC WAS MAGA BURNING MAN
| PROTESTS | We need to talk about the QAnon Shaman and all those cringe coup* lewks
(GIF via NewModels)
Damn, 2021 did not come to play.
I was going to spend today’s newsletter extolling the virtues of Dry January and being “social media sober,” but the MAGA gurls storming DC and temporarily turning it into their own Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone snapped my resolve to stay logged off. (Still, 11/10 recommend doing a drugs + social media detox this month; also I’m leading a workshop on rethinking sobriety for Berlin’s CTM Festival on Jan 17, HMU if you wanna join!)
So I spent all day yesterday glued to my screens, watching at least ten Twitch livestreams while deliriously thumbing through Twitter texting friends and lurking the discourse on Discord. Cataclysmic news events unfold like data tsunamis, with the real action happening in a memer-commentariat metaverse far far away from the Boomer traditional news chatter.
A couple hours into my marathon news binge—as my brain was besieged by images of pasty white dudes in animal horns and fur cloaks roaming the halls of the Capitol Building—it became evident that this idiotic mob’s antics were not made for TV, but for TikTok. All these Trumpers swagged out in headdresses like Buffalo Bill cosplay, all these anarcho-primitivist ass, caveman LARP looks? This is what thirst trapping for social media virality (and virility) looks like in the age of QAnon-—where these costumed cavemen plunder physical reality as endless material for photo-ops to be deployed in the real battleground of memetic warfare.
In fact, I am going to posit that what happened yesterday was not a coup but a carnival, in both the Burning Man and Bakhtin sense of the word. I’ve been writing a lot about the purpose of partying in political resistance—most recently in this sprawling essay I wrote for Document Journal—and the libidinous chaos scaling the walls of Capitol Hill yesterday had some serious Meth ParTy Energy. This is dark euphoria.
If yesterday’s carnivalesque uprising was a populist insurgence of angry peasants, then the bare-chested pseudo-Vikings flexing their pecs, the MAGA hat-donning stoner bros puffing doobs at Pelosi’s desk, and especially the doofus grinning idiotically while stealing a podium—these were the clowns and the jesters.
As I unpacked in my Document piece, carnivalesque elements have always been a part of protests; at the 2013 Gezi Park occupation in Turkey, for example, people walked around dressed as clowns, mimes, and other fantastical creatures, and images of police beating a man dressed as an angel went viral on social media—sparking even more fervor as the protestors’ joy in the face of police violence weakened the state’s authority. Protesters even adopted a slogan from young radicals in 1960s Paris: “Laughter is a revolutionary act.”
This is not to draw some kind of false equivalence between Gezi Park’s very real resistance and yesterday’s pseudo-coup. But I do think that the absurd antics that happened yesterday, all those made-for-TikTok photo shoots, have a darker effect of destabilizing the serious sanctity of the state by desecrating its command post of power, while furthering the alt-rights dominance of memetic warfare.
Look, I’m not gonna cynically pretend that yesterday wasn’t sad, scary, and deeply shameful all at once. The very serious consequences of what the fuck just happened will reverberate long after this first wave of shock and anger subsides. (The insane infosec headache for the officials whose offices were ransacked makes me nauseous just thinking about it.) But in the face of such an inane and insane chain of events, is there anything we can do but expel tear-tinged lols?
So, girl, I am here to talk about two of my fave CRINGE COUP* LEWKS.
(*Please don’t reply-guy me to say this wasn’t a “real” coup. All I know is this sounds better than “attempted autogolpe lewks.”)
OK. Obviously, we gotta start with the QAnon Shaman, aka Jake Angeli, a 32-year-old aspiring actor from Arizona who was by far the star of this shitshow.
We have all seen this lewk before. This is the lewk of Burners who never got the memo that Native American headdresses are not appropriate festival attire, and just snorted an entire vial of ketamine so they can take their dusty asses to a desert rave to fist pump to shitty playa house. Literally this lewk is so problematic that Native News Online had to release a statement saying that QAnon Shaman is NOT Indigenous.
The bottom left pic is actually from a Trump rally in Phoenix last year. Apparently, QAnon Shaman is a local celebrity and has been a fixture at recent Arizona rallies to protest the election results and COVID closures of businesses. According to The Arizona Republic, he actually admitted that his desert rave drip is a deliberate strategy to attract attention so he can more easily proselytize about child-molesting lizards or whatever QAnon stans believe. (On his YouTube, which was disabled last night, QAnon Shaman wears a SHROOM SHIRT in front of a wolf moon poster and talks about inter-dimensional parasites.)
And you know what? This sort of sartorial stunting works. This legendary photo-op is already canon:
This morning, the gays were sending me QAnon Shaman starter packs for you to COP THIS DROP like this was an extremely cursed conspiracy edition of Blackbird Spyplane.
Next, we need to talk about another lewk that got way less media hype than QAnon Shaman but is actually my all-time fave:
I mean this level of drip is like Game of Thrones dropped a collab with the DC riot police. And that look in his eyes? That is the look of when you hit the DMT vape a lil too hard and the cops are around the corner so your friend tells you to “just act normal.”
How the fuck did this guy end up with a wooden staff, police bulletproof vest, and plastic riot shield, you ask? According to this video interview, IT WAS A GROUND SCORE. Like dude just scooped it up from the floor like it was a discarded coke bag at Coachella!
According to Gothamist, Dissociated Dan (yeah that’s what I’m calling him) is actually Aaron Mostofsky, son of Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Shlomo Mostofsky—a prominent modern Orthodox figure in Brooklyn and former president of the National Council of Young Israel, who was backed by the Brooklyn Democratic Party last year.
Aaron aka Dissociated Dan has some supremely racist views of his own, as evidenced from this Facebook post he wrote (“Chinese chick” “kung flu” smh) that was tweeted by his brother (ya’ll, I went a little too deep down this wormhole).
Whatever. I will be cackling over this dumbass forever. (That fascist flag, on the other hand, is no joke.)
Beyond the realm of the furries, there were several other coup lewks that were widely circulating on social media, such as this congressman with a plastic bag respirator over his head—(it was apparently given out to lawmakers to protect them from tear gas)—as well as this guy holding up a broom with a sign that says COUP FLU FIGHTER.
IDK. This shit seemed so funny yesterday but now I just feel depleted and deranged. (Maybe I shouldn’t have taken that shroom microdose this morning…) Anyway all of these clown carnival coup lewks remind me of annoying Burners who took too much acid and think that wearing a flamboyant costume gives them a transgressive personality, and I’m over it. So I’m leaving you with my own fit pic—caption this lewk in the comments!
BTW if you liked today’s post, smash that heart button + share it with somebody? Thanks, ILY!
Thanks for sharing your own fit at the end. It was a much needed palette cleanser.