Off Message In 2025

My New Years resolution is to branch out a bit—so that non-political realms of the internet aren't flooded only with ragebait and right-wing sh*t.

Remember Dark Brandon?

Presumably most of you do remember Dark Brandon, and would rather not speak of it again. Heaven forbid you ever mention it on social media, but if you do, brace yourself for an outpouring of mockery. “How’d that age?!” etc etc.

Maybe a better question is: Do you remember the context surrounding the Dark Brandon meme? Why did Joe Biden supporters, outnumbered online, appropriate goofy cartoon imagery and deploy it whenever he notched a meaningful political victory, like the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, or the announcement of his student-loan forgiveness plan?

I remember the context, because Dark Brandon briefly offset the tsunami of viral anti-Biden memes that flooded the internet starting in mid-2021. At the time, the political world mostly understood this as a TikTok phenomenon and puzzled over its implications for the youth vote. Young TikTokers, including young progressives, loved to mock the fossilized president; they even loved mocking him in the same terms that culturally conservative Americans used. What would that mean for his re-election prospects? For U.S. politics in general?

Those were totally valid questions, and I wrote a fair amount about them at the time. But I didn’t appreciate the insidiousness and ubiquity of free-floating Biden hatred until a year or so later. It was clearly ubiquitous within overtly political media. But it slipped the bonds of political media and seeped into every nook and cranny online.

I didn’t use TikTok then, and still don’t. I had a decent grasp of the TikTok caricature of Biden, mostly through second-hand sources. But I did encounter the same style of casual derision in other realms of social media, the kinds of virtual spaces you might expect a man in his late-30s/early-40s to spend a lot of time: Health and exercise, home improvement, cooking—hobbies and interests that are not intrinsically political.

During the first year of the pandemic, I sought out a handful of fitness influencers to help me program home-workout routines. Same with other pandemic-era pursuits. I followed cooking and meat and menswear influencers. I did this all as selectively as I could. After a couple decades as a working journalist, I felt I had a high degree of media literacy and a good radar for bullshitters and charlatans. Almost no influencers or social media celebrities are journalists but some conduct themselves more responsibly and transparently than others. I didn’t want secret tips for effortless six-pack abs or forbidden knowledge suppressed by the dreaded medical establishment. I wanted movement tutorials, sample routines, recipes, and tips, all from people with relevant experience and some kind of track record of professionalism.

So that’s who I followed. From the jump, the algorithm would try to steer me toward snake-oil peddlers, which drove home a dark (but frequently entertaining) side of influencer culture. These were usually sales people who’d disguise their marketing around eccentric personalities and pseudoscience; supplement manufacturers like the Liver King who’d suggest, but never assert, that they owed their steroid-ravaged bodies to eccentric diets and supplements.

But, look, if you can’t stick to the ancestral lifestyle, you can always get the same nutrients from our supplements!

That stuff is not what, in hindsight, seems so freighted with meaning. Grifters gonna grift; scammers gonna scam. And of course grifters and scammers support Trump. (The Liver King once christened Trump with his bespoke honorific, “primal,” a term he normally reserves for the most iron-like men and difficult challenges, though Trump is obese and detests exercise.) The more revealing thing was how many subject-matter experts—the relatively responsible influencers—started slipping casual anti-Biden or anti-Democratic messages into their otherwise on-brand, non-political material.

Even then it was uncanny. These channels and accounts had been studiously apolitical for years. Then, out of nowhere, snarky asides about inflation or Biden’s supposed dementia. I recall one weightlifter, who found a niche exploring the muscle-group benefits and biomechanics of various resistance movements, make a random wisecrack about Biden’s mental acuity during a short explainer on (if memory serves) rear-deltoid exercises. Another would occasionally record news videos by pointing his smartphone at his living room television, and drop clips of Biden garbling words into his feed—one Instagram story about proper pull-up technique, the next Biden saying million instead of billion, then lapsing into a stutter.

Something similar was happening in other social-media subgenres, too.

HAIL FELLOW WELL META

If you’ve been an Off Message subscriber for more than a minute, you know this kind of quasi-subliminal messaging looms large in my thinking about what’s happened to politics in the Trump years and why the 2024 election turned out the way it did. By no means is it the only thing, but it’s a big and under-appreciated one.

And the wider you cast your net the more stuff like this you’ll find, some of it subtle, some more overt. The writer and operative Ari Rabin-Havt noticed the Canadian prank-comedy troupe NELK undergo a similar drift starting back in 2021, until by 2024, NELK was basically campaigning for Donald Trump.

“Young men who watch NELK videos for laughs and to see the group’s outrageous antics have been fed a steady diet of a simple message,” Rabin-Havt wrote. “Trump is cool, Democrats are nerds, and their PC culture is just about trying to stop the party.”

I suspect that if you were to conduct a formal audit, you’d find that a fair amount of Trump and Trump-adjacent money flowing into tons of influencer bank accounts. But you’d probably also find that some of these influencers just picked their extracurricular Biden mockery up from TikTok and other bastions of the newly dominant, tech-driven culture. Kinda like Joe Rogan did. It summed to a vast trove of organic and pseudo-organic pro-Trump messaging, smuggled into just about every online community you can think of.

In the past months I’ve thought a fair amount about what these new dynamics in media and culture mean for or require of me. Most proximately, this stuff is worth tracking at a meta-level, to help my readers get a better handle on which aspects of online culture have been most infiltrated by subliminal right-wing thought. It’s also most congruous with what I already do: write about politics qua politics.

But my New Years resolution for Off Message is to do more than that. To not simply make content about the political content of other content, but to make more of those kinds of media myself. First order. And I’d like it to be of use to both political junkies and non political junkies alike.

There’s nothing inherently right-wing about fitness or health or paddle boarding or standing rib roasts. I’ve learned a lot over the years about a variety of culture and lifestyle realms that are outside my professional ambit, and most of their online communities have become infested with either conservative propaganda or a style of postmodernism that rejects inquisition and expertise. Where everyone is implored to do their own research, which in practice amounts to canvassing other influencers for their takes on things. Again, kinda like Joe Rogan does.

There’s no reason this kind of infiltration has to go uncontested, and I want to be a small increment of the change I’d like to see in the world.

PUTTING THE FLU IN INFLUENCER

Don’t worry! I won’t be cutting down on newsletters to make overproduced workout videos or wow you with my ability to create a perfect Maillard reaction along every square inch of a tomahawk steak.

But I will try every week or two to pull together something that’s primarily about those interests and others, where any politics will be implicit or decorative.

Remember this piece? Kinda like that. Maybe a bit less on the nose. The concept isn’t fully formed at all. I’m not even sure Off Message will be the right or only forum for this new assignment. But you’ll be key to making it possible either way.

Part of the idea is that political expertise is a real thing, something I have that most influencers don’t, and I can perhaps help stem the tide of amateurish and deceptive nonsense that has overwhelmed the nominally non-political internet. The other part is to bring a healthy degree of journalistic inquiry to the topics themselves. I have no wares to hawk, and no undisclosed sponsors, but I do know how to report credibly and with clarity, and can thus offer more than simple recapitulations of my personal experiences or preferences. My friend Jamelle Bouie has built a real audience on TikTok, where he brings journalistic and historical expertise to a community of younger progressives who don’t get their information from national newspapers, and there’s a lot I’d like to emulate in that model.

This will stand in contrast to the vast majority of influencer content. In one of my hobby zones, the influencer “Carnivore MD” stands as something like the antithesis of what I have in mind.

He’s Dr. Paul Saladino, but he’s trained in psychiatry, and uses his credential, not his subspecialty, to promote views about diet that are deeply at odds with expert opinion—basically that red meat contains all the nutrients humans need to thrive, and a diet of red meat (grass-fed, grass-finished!), raw dairy, and fruit will promote longevity, cure inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, improve libido, etc. He also broke his own apolitical streak to become a major booster of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Oh, and he sells supplements, too. Surprise!

You hopefully see why I find that kind of influencing so noxious. You can also hopefully see why it’s appealing to many, many people. Saladino is jacked. The foods he eats are delicious. It’s nice to daydream that humans can indulge their way to wellness. I even suspect that if everyone in the country adopted the diet he recommends, Americans would become healthier than they are on average today. But that isn’t because eschewing vegetables is a good idea. It’s because so many people don’t have the right combination of time, money, and information required to eat anything approximating a healthy diet. Those people might be better off; many others would not be. And that’s without accounting for the increased incidence of H5N1 or raw-milk food poisoning. Make America Diarrhea Again.

I love red meat and dairy and honey and fruit and would be thrilled if eating that stuff at every meal was good idea. But as a rule, it is not—particularly if you’re a normal person who enjoys social drinking, or chocolate cake, or (pick your weakness) and wouldn’t actually stick to such a limited diet. Moreover, anyone who might be bamboozled by the letters MD into believing there’s a cheat code for looking chiseled in middle age would be much better served seeking out health and lifestyle reporters from traditional journalism outlets. They are not doctors, by and large, and some surely phone-in their work. But most of them will endeavor to canvass experts widely, synthesize literature without bias, and provide a rounded sense of legitimate debates within their beats.

I think we should all make and consume less social media, but unless and until that starts to happen at scale, a better equilibrium would bring more journalism methods and fewer credential- or physique-based swindles to the influencer space. And if I can help readers and viewers who are more interested in kettlebells than elections better understand my forbidden knowledge about politics, so much the better.