Dingus of the Week: The United States of Shit Posters
Marjorie Taylor Greene, Madison Cawthorn, and the world of bad faith takes
This is the Weekly Dingus. The Friday newsletter, where I round up my internet reads, share a drink recipe, and vent about something really dingusy that happened in the news. This week, it’s all of us. But it could be anyone? Maybe it’s Jeff Bezos? Maybe it’s Kyrsten Synema? It’s definitely not Jonathan Franzen.
Last week, North Carolina state Representative Madison Cawthorn said in an interview on a podcast that D.C. was filled with cocaine-fueled sex orgies. He didn’t say it that concisely; it was more awkwardly worded, claiming people in D.C. invited him to “sexual get-togethers” at their homes. Which, look, do people have orgies? Sure. Do people do coke? Yep. Do people say, “Please come to my sexual get-together?” No. No, they do not.
This kicked off a performative storm of pearl-grabbing about how Republicans would never! And the internet quickly spread these comments, saying “lol look at this guy!” And Cawthorn got to play the aggrieved truth-teller in the face of the world of power.
This week, Marjorie Taylor Greene attacked trans people as pedophiles. The internet quickly retweeted her claims, once again, calling out how harmful it was, and in the process, spreading her claims everywhere. And Greene got to be the aggrieved truth-teller in the face of the liberal media’s lies.
Do you see how this works? We are a United States of Shit Posters. A collective country of retweets and Facebook posts that rely on a sense of outrage, which garners likes, shares, pearl-clutching, and cumulative finger-pointing about all those bad guys out there.
There are newsletters and careers created by people whose entire schtick is to tell you that everyone is lying to you and your deepest fears are confirmed—the world is bad and everyone wants to corrupt your children. And then there are people whose entire careers are based on retweeting those claims, while saying, “Can you believe this??!” It’s an entire ecosystem of shit. Those who shit and those who share it. And yes, even I, by the mere fact of calling attention to it, am feeding this beast. But we have to point this out. But even in the pointing out, we lose. Snakes and tails and eating. It’s a whole cycle.
This world isn’t new to us. After an entire Donald Trump presidency, we should know better, but we don’t.
This isn’t a new problem. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were printing their own proto-shit posting tweets in the form of pamphlets to smear one another. And people would pass them around. Can you believe this? Read these outrageous lies and tell others.
And so we shitpost on, creating post after post against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
I have always been fascinated by the story of the pig lady of Dublin. Grizell Steevens was a rich, single woman, who everyone believed had a pig face.
A great philanthropist, Steevens was often seen around town in her carriage, while her servants handed out money to the poor. Because of a problem with her eyes, Steevens often wore a veil over her face. When her carriage passed by, children would oink and men would jump on the footboards to get a look at her, and newspapers published accounts from people who claimed to have seen her terrible porcine face.
Miss Steevens was deeply troubled by the rumors and often sat on her veranda and in front of open windows, so people could see her face. It didn’t help. Even after she died in 1747, visitors to the hospital she built were shown a silver trough, the supposed dining utensil of their benefactress. These stories, like most urban legends, have staying power because they tap into deeply held resentments about women, wealth, and beauty.
But I often think of Steevens, standing on her balcony, showing her face to the entire city. Saying, “Look at me! I’m not a pig! LOOK!” But still the story persisted.
How much we love our outrage more than we love truth.
In a recent essay about Hannah Arendt, the journalist Anne Applebaum, who works in the field of disinformation, wrote, “So much of what we imagine to be new is old; so many of the seemingly novel illnesses that afflict modern society are really just resurgent cancers, diagnosed and described long ago.”
And so we shitpost on, creating post after post against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.