Hi friends!

I wanted to give a quick update on The Onion’s purchase of InfoWars, which we can’t wait to relaunch as the dumbest site on the internet.

Long and short of it: We won the bid and — you're not going to believe it — the previous InfoWars folks aren't taking it well. On Thursday, the person overseeing the auction told us that The Onion’s bid for InfoWars, along with the Connecticut Sandy Hook families, won.

We haven’t heard anything that changed that — except, of course, from the guys currently running InfoWars, doing InfoWars stuff.

Didn’t see much mainstream credentialed press covering this, so I’m at Grand Central. Definitely still hundreds here at this protest calling for a ceasefire. A lot of people still inside Grand Central Terminal, cops saying the whole terminal is shut down, telling people to head up to 125th St to take the trains headed out of the city. Every entrance blocked off.

This is:

1) An article of my recent Bluesky posts, so be careful out there.

2) Very weird, and seems to shame me for disclosing that I have depression from the work that I do. Actually a profoundly disgusting thing to do, @arielzilber and @nypost. You should be really ashamed of yourselves.

What’s going on with Elon Musk, and why is he doing this to Twitter?

I spent the last few months digging into it.

I found a pretty big clue. New from me:

What was Elon Musk’s strategy for Twitter? A game plan published by a fired Trump White House staffer provides a clue.

nbcnews.com/tech/was-elon-…

How stores work. Yes, this video is about how dumb the Target controversy is, how much the people pushing it are actively lying to people, and how some mainstream outlets are eating it all up.

Thread of new reporting:

For the last couple of weeks, if you searched "cat" on Twitter, the search box would autocomplete to "cat in a blender."

The video you would see when you clicked through appeared to show a kitten being slaughtered.

How did this happen? I found out. Last week, a London mom named Laura Clemons came home to her son asking her if she had Twitter.

When she asked why, her 11-year-old son said, “There’s something about a cat in a blender.” He'd heard about it on the playground.

She went on Twitter and saw... exactly that.

I'm on Bluesky at bencollins.bsky.social. When it fully launches, I'd bet it's going to just usurp this site. It works and it looks and feels like this one, which is all we ever asked.

Comes down to moderation, desktop experience, and reliability, but it feels like the answer. Also, you can't measure vibes, but the Bluesky vibes... the Bluesky vibes are very good.

New from me + @BrandyZadrozny:

White supremacist forums and prominent white nationalist influencers are in shambles after Tucker Carlson’s firing.

“Tucker’s one of the last /ourguys/“ wrote a 4chan user.

“Bad times coming, anons.”
nbcnews.com/tech/internet/… White nationalists have become despondent since Tucker's firing, knowing their lies have no home on TV.

Twice in the last month, Carlson pulled hoaxes straight from 4chan—a forged document made to look Ukraine look bad, and an anti-trans April Fools hoax.
nbcnews.com/tech/internet/…

At the Marjorie Taylor Greene protest. Total circus. Number of reporters still dwarfing protesters but the vibe is… weirder. Marjorie Taylor Greene has arrived.

Ian, that article is about an event at a restaurant at a college. What’s it like having a big ol’ bowl of soup where your brain should be?

https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1642291611261616128

It’s possible “community college” means something else in Malaysia, where Ian lives and has lived the entire time he’s been an American right-wing commentator. If so, apologies!

So, as you may know, I've taken some time off and I've come back with an exclusive story — and a sentence I never thought I'd have to write. She #DiedSuddenly.

Trump Jr. starts his podcast: "Well, guys, I guess I got some news at 10-15 minutes ago...

"Apparently, Soros-backed Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg is indicting my father. Let's be clear folks: This is Communist-level shit. This is stuff that would make Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot blush." Trump Jr. takes a brief intermission to complain about trans people. Back to indictment news: "For those people who said, 'It's not real. Trump's making it up. It's not a real issue for us...' Just wait until they come for you. We're in a battle for our entire existence."

New from @JoYurcaba + @erikjhortiz + me:

Here's what is ACTUALLY known about the Nashville suspect's motive and gender identity.

After days of the far-right seeking—or inventing—ties to a trans rights campaign, the evidence simply isn't there yet.
nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-ou… The Nashville shooting suspect left a manifesto that, unlike typical white supremacist mass shooters in the Terrorgram movement, was not posted online.

Many are understandably trying to get Nashville police to unseal it to reveal a potential motive.

nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-ou…

New and exclusive from me + @jonathan4ny + @ryanjreilly:

We spent the week working with extremism researchers, who warned Alvin Bragg was being targeted with threats to “take him out” on pro-Trump forums.

Bragg just received a letter with white powder.

nbcnews.com/politics/donal… Users on TheDonald, a forum whose users helped plan Jan. 6, threatened to “blow up” the DA’s office and “take out” Alvin Bragg.

Others on TruthSocial called for running enemies "through a tree limb chipper," urging each other to "go in guns blazing."

nbcnews.com/politics/donal…

I’m at the pro-Trump protest put on by the NY Young Republicans Club. Not a joke, there are more reporters here than Trump supporters.

This was supposed to be the big one. It’s just a bunch of cameras taking picture of a guy who is putting on a rat suit next to a guitar with the words Hang Fauci on it. This was supposed to start a half hour ago.

The No. 1 way to permanently and irreparably nuke your chances with the Gen Z electorate is to be the party that takes credit for banning TikTok.

And, remember, they're going to outlive us all. I don't know how to navigate the TikTok situation in practical terms, which is deeply complicated.

A lot of the security issues are overhyped and tied into a much larger geopolitical game, but the hidden keystroke logging being real made is very bad.
nytimes.com/2022/08/19/tec…

Okay, I'm in on ChatGPT now.

On the right-wing internet, SVB collapsed because of DEI and ESG, which is just SBF's version of CRT.

This is the kind of sentence you're gonna start hearing from presidential candidates, and they're going to wonder why nobody cares. It's meaningless acronyms all the way down. I'll try to translate: SVB (a bank that lends to startups) had a page about DEI on their website.

DEI is shorthand for corporate diversity initiatives, which has become a boogeyman on the right-wing internet since CRT was too restrictive and school-focused of a buzzword.

Good website, no problems. FYI: It's not just you. Twitter's broken right now.

Sending Tweets is down. DMs are down. You can still schedule tweets a minute in advance.

For all material purposes, the antivaxxers won. Their decades-long goal to seed their lies into the mainstream and get moderates to bothsides a hate campaign on the backs of people grieving unrelated death has been an unbridled success. This will become apparent in the primaries. Is it worth it debunking antivaxxers lies now? Doesn’t seem like it. They own the pipes. A huge portion of this country now believes the vaccinated will all be dead within five years because of viral posts shared in neighborhood and church group chats and Facebook groups.

Power just went out at LAX, at least Terminal 6. Power’s out at every terminal in LAX, apparently. Worker hurried past me to tell a flight attendant to stop boarding because the tower didn’t have power either. (I was already past the boarding gate at this point.)