Whitney Cummings has lost the plot
+ Meet MrsBeast, the Trump HotDog king of Chongqing, robot sex, dating wrapped, and Costco Guys fraud
It’s hard to think of a better metaphor for what we might expect in 2025 than a massive grey Tesla Cybertruck exploding outside Trump's Las Vegas hotel.
The Cybertruck explosion killed one person and injured seven. The truck appeared to be carrying fireworks. Las Vegas Police and Fire Department officials said that one person died inside the truck and they were working to get the body out. The other seven people were taken to a hospital. What a dark start to the year.
Someone take Whitney Cummings X account away
Last night, iconic comedian Whitney Cummings went on CNN’s New Years Eve special to do a roast of the year 2024. She made a bunch of jokes about current events and seemed to bash people for stanning Luigi. She joked that “the Democrats couldn’t hold a primary because they were too busy holding a body upright.” But things started to go off the rails.
She then joked that “Kamala was forced on us so hard you’d think she was patented by Moderna or Pfizer,” referring to Covid vaccine mandates. (According to the CDC only 20.9% of adults reported having received a Covid vaccine in 2024, and only 9.8% of people said that they definitely planned on getting their next booster. Covid continues to cause unprecedented levels of death and disability, there is zero treatment or cure for the long term bodily harm Covid can cause even if you’re vaccinated, and we have FEWER treatments for Covid today than we had in 2021. So wear a mask for god’s sake!).
With Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen standing by, Cummings proceeded to list a bunch of topics that she claimed that "mainstream news media will never cover.” However, her list is a mix of things that were, in fact, heavily covered by the news media and vague allusions to online conspiracies.
For instance, she claimed that Trump’s shooter didn’t have any silverware in his house, a popular claim pushed by some online as evidence of the shooting being fake or staged. (I challenge you to talk to the many young men who only use plastic forks and throwaway plates!)
She also asked why is fluoride still in our water and questioned the deaths of presidents’ former chefs. (Two former president’s chefs have died, but there is zero evidence of foul play, nor is there any evidence that people who work in the White House kitchen have been subject to any sort of heightened danger).
Then, Cummings mentioned that the Crown prince of Saudi Arabia put money into Disney. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, did invest in Disney, and the story was heavily covered in the media. Cummings also said that Monsanto paid Google to skew search results, which is also true, but the only reason we know about that is because of The Guardian and other news media outlets phenomenal reporting.
Cummings, a heavy user of X, previously asked some of these questions on there. Unsurprisingly, the replies are full of conspiracy theories and outrageous misinformation. Cummings appeared to be falling for some of the insane claims in her replies, responding to conspiracy theorists’ false claims about local government, local news media, “immigrant crime” and LGBTQ people, with “woah”, "totally,” and “interesting.”
Cummings is just the latest celebrity who seems to have fallen down the radicalized conspiracy theory pipeline. While she is 100% correct that legacy media is fundamentally broken and untrustworthy in many ways, and billionaire-owned corporate outlets undeniably cater to and frame their coverage around the interests of elites (for lack of a better word), that does not mean that journalism is all false, legitimate reporting can’t be trusted, or that there is some vast censorship conspiracy and you should listen to a bunch of crackpots on Twitter.
The people she has been replying to on X are bad faith actors seeking to leverage a comedian with deep lack of media literacy into boosting their right wing conspiracy theories for political ends. The fact that she would immediately fall for a random post from a blue check X account claiming falsehoods about trans people with “Oh wow” is deeply concerning.
Why is everyone unfollowing Vexbolt?
Vexbolt is a gaming content creator who went viral for the “let him cook” meme. Now, he is losing millions of followers after unfollowing him became a meme. Though the campaign started as a niche joke, it quickly took over TikTok and Twitch. The platforms are overrun with videos encouraging other users to unfollow Vexbolt and Twitch streamers are hosting unfollow events where fans mass unfollow him together during a stream.
As Dexerto reports, “the idea was that if everyone unfollowed the ‘let him cook’ meme creator, Vexbolts would have to quit making content and become less relevant in 2025.”
In the process, Vexbolt has created over a dozen videos about being “left in 2024.” Even MrBeast jumped on the trend by creating a TikTok with Vexbolt. “I’m passing the phone to the guy we’re leaving in 2024,” MrBeast said before passing the phone to Vexbolt. “Bro can you sneak me into 2025 please?” he replied. MrBeast joked: “No, you’re in 2024. You’re gone.” The mass unfollowing started at 11:59 pm EST on December 31.
I think this trend/joke/meme shows how much people love to collectively build figures on the internet and then take their fame away. It reminds me of back in 2018 when millions came together to make a random photo of an egg the most liked piece of content on the platform, in order to beat out Kylie Jenner.
These campaigns are absurdist, fun, and make you feel like you’re part of something. I can’t decide if it’s ultimately bad or good for Vexbolt. Yes, he’s losing millions of followers, but he’s popular and well connected enough that his fame isn’t truly in jeopardy and the unfollow trend has also made him *more* well known to many who didn’t even know who he was before.
Photo dumps > recap videos
Last year I wrote about the viral year end recap trend. I think because there wasn’t a great audio for 2024, and maybe people are just getting lazy, the definitive recap this year was the photo dump instead of the CapCut video.
More fun stuff:
You can stream Apple TV+ for free the first weekend of the year (Jan. 3-5), which is a great time to catch up on Severance before season 2 premiers later this month.
The first members of Generation Beta will be born in 2025.
An anti-woke comedy club in Toronto that's just a room in some guy's house with some folding chairs and a fake brick wall, is one of the top results when you search "Toronto comedy club” due to an SEO campaign.
iPhone users are mortified to discover that their calculator app has a history.
Police killed more people in 2024 than any other year on record.
Gypsy Rose Blanchard gave birth to her first child on the 1-year anniversary of her prison release.
The Andrew Huberman x Jordan Peterson collab nobody asked for is here.
The Sabrina Carpenter x Dunkin Donuts collab is great though.
“We got Donald Trump selling HotDogs in Chongqing before GTA 6.”
The next season of Sesame Street could be its last :(
Tina Fey says SNL’s Bowen Yang is too famous to be giving his real opinions about movies.
A man in Georgia promoted himself as a social media expert, promising moms that he could bring their daughters tens of thousands of followers. The NYT found him in prison, where he is serving 20 years for the sexual exploitation of children.
Joe Budden “tried to lie about why he moved out his apartment, only for the police to release a statement saying he was charged with disorderly lewdness for walking around and standing outside someone else’s apartment naked,” an X user posted.
Meta says the future of social media is endless AI-generated content and AI-generated users.
FTC Chair Lina Khan joined Ed Zitron’s podcast to chat about competition in the tech industry, artificial intelligence, and how to stay hopeful for the future.
The dating wrapped trend, where TikTok users recap their year in dating through a slideshow, went mainstream in 2024. If you’re wondering what it’s like to be single these days, watch a few of these videos.
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Very curious to see how long it will take Whitney Cummings to pivot to explicitly monetizing her content to a right-wing audience 😕
I unfollowed Whitney a few months ago, I think right before the election. I actually don’t remember specifically why now but I think it seemed like she was going down a really weird rabbit hole. I think it was probably the crunchy girl to alt right pipeline that it seems like she thinks she’s joking about but she’s not actually joking. Like I bet she thinks RFK has great ideas and as a comedian she gets to hide behind “it’s just jokes.” But she’s serious and that’s dangerous.