Absolute joy!
Found it here.
Category: Vote / Voting
Clay Jones, Open Windows
HantaPrez
Yes, Donald Trump has experience with a pandemic
One of the many disqualifiers that should have prevented Donald Trump from becoming president again, and this one’s near the top of the list, is the way he handled the coronavirus pandemic.
When the pandemic hit our nation, Donald Trump should have been a leader. He should’ve been on the front lines in the response to the pandemic. He should have been telling the nation to follow the guidelines, even if they were changing as we learned more about the virus, and he should’ve been following them himself as an example. He should have been active in making sure that every state received the medical supplies it needed to save lives. (snip-MORE)
Animated movie titles and credits
A geeky post even non-animators might find interesting
[Click Through To See Her Video-It’s Cool!]
I just love animated film titles and credits. It’s a great way to grab the audience’s attention and give a glimpse of the movie they’re about to see. In the case of end credits, a clever animated sequence keeps the audience in their seats so proper acknowledgement can be given, not only to the stars but to all of the people who have worked on the film.
Here are some of my favorites:
- Of course you can’t talk about animated titles and credits without mentioning the great Saul Bass. Anatomy of a Murder, North by Northwest, Psycho, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, Ocean’s Eleven, I could go on and on. The end credits of Around the World in 80 Days is a masterclass in the use of stylized characters, design, color, music, and movement to tell a story (while managing to list the massive cast of the film.)Bass title sequences have obviously inspired other films, such as Netflix’s Feud: Bette and Joan and the television series Mad Men.
- There are several Pink Panther movies with animated titles but my favorite is the first created by DePatie–Freleng Enterprises because of its simplicity and the interaction between the character and text/graphics.
- Pixar’s Ratatuoille end credits, design lead Teddy Newton.Unlike the 3D computer generated style of the main body of the film, Ratatuoille’s end credits are in 2D. The character and background designs are wonderfully stylized and have the feel of loose sketches one would see in the conceptual stage of an animated feature. The color and music also contribute to this fantastic mini-movie. Love, love, love this.
- Honey, I Shrunk the Kids title sequence/ Kroyer FilmsAnother wonderful title sequence in a 2D style.
- City Slickers title sequence/ Kurtz & FriendsAnother great use of a character interacting with the text (cowboy and lasso).
The video posted above is the end credits to Democracy Under Siege, the documentary some of you might have viewed last week. While I created the hand drawn gifs, all the credit for this marvelous sequence goes to Antoine Vermeesch of Clin d’oiel films. His selection of sound effects and music melded perfectly with the animation.
FB-lie Detector
Kash Patel is forcing FBI agents to take polygraph tests to find out who told a reporter he has a drinking problem
Kash Patel, the worst FBI Director in the history of the bureau, has ordered the polygraphing of more than two dozen former and current members of his security detail, as well as other staff, to find leakers among his team, according to two people briefed on the development.
They described Kash as being in panic mode to save his job after negative publicity about his drinking, partying, and other extracurricular activities had come to Donald Trump’s attention.
Kash demanded the polygraph examinations to determine if any members of the team that travels with him or staff who have access to sensitive details about his decisions have communicated with reporters, according to the people, who asked to speak anonymously due to the threat of retribution.
The FBI has opened a criminal investigation into Sarah Fitzpatrick, the reporter who wrote that “excessive drinking” was causing deep concern in the bureau. Patel is suing The Atlantic for $250 million over the story. Because of the story, more informers from within the FBI are contacting Fitzpatrick and the magazine to provide dirt on Patel.
And because of these informers, we have learned that Patel is handing out personalized, branded bottles of bourbon. (snip-MORE)
This Tracks
I remember when penny candy went to nickel candy under Pres. Nixon, and applied what we learned in our school “Weekly Readers” to figure that out. Of course there were larger problems. A few years later, my dad lost his business due to general economic woe with high inflation, and I’m pretty sure everyone remembers how personal and smaller business econ went in the 80s. I don’t know why we have to repeat history, when certainly more than a few people can remember this stuff. But, here it is in a concise video. Sharing it would be awesome!
Appropriate Behavior
Blue language within.
Justin Jones Burning The Confederate Flag In The TN State Capitol. That’s It, That’s The Post.
White racist Tennessee Republicans think they birthed a nation yesterday. Looks like they birthed something else instead.
Democratic TN state Rep. Justin Jones burns a Confederate flag in the state Capitol, Thursday, May 8, 2026, video screengrab
Yesterday, the Ku Klux Klan, we mean Tennessee state Legislature, rushed through new maps to eliminate the state’s last remaining Democratic congressional seat in Congress, and racist pigfuck Governor Bill Lee signed them, because that’s what white supremacists do when Donald Trump’s partisan hack Supreme Court says it’s unconstitutional for them not to hurt Black people by gutting the last remaining piece of the Voting Rights Act.
The lawsuits are already being filed, and to be sure, Republicans don’t even understand the war they started yesterday. As we wrote, it’s useful to remember that Republicans always, 100 percent of the time, overplay their hands.
We quoted Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson, who until yesterday was running in a primary against long-serving Congressman Steve Cohen to represent what was the Ninth District, in Memphis. We guess how exactly that will end up is undetermined at this exact moment, but Pearson said earlier this week at a rally that “[I]f we keep marching, if we keep pressing, if we keep fighting, the future that our descendants will live into will be a better one than this one. And our message to the Republican Party, our message to that racist, white-supremacist president Donald Trump is that we will fight.”
Pearson, if you remember, is one of the two Black men in the Tennessee Three, back when the grand wizards of the Tennessee Lege first bent over and showed everybody their Klan-hood-shaped buttplugs, expelling the two men from the state House for taking to the House floor to try to defend their constituents against gun violence. Also for being Black men, because they didn’t expel the white woman, Knoxville Rep. Gloria Johnson, for being part of the same protest. (Voters of course sent the two Justins right the fuck back to the Legislature.)
Both Justins were of course present yesterday to witness what white supremacist Tennessee Republicans really think was the Birth of a Nation. And there were many protests in the Tennessee state Capitol yesterday. Justin Jones of Nashville set a Confederate flag on fire, or at least a paper version of it.
And then he stomped that sad loser little bitch of a flag — a flag the greatest losers who ever lived died defending, and their family legacies are less valuable than dried dogshit because of it — right on out.
And what are people saying about that, and about iconic pictures photographers captured of that? “Hang it in the Louvre.”
Oh, it’s gonna be in museums and history books all right.
Rep. Jones, “Brother Jones” as he refers to himself on Instagram, posted videos and images of the already iconic moment.
And he typed:
The South will not rise again, until it’s paid for all its sins of racism and white supremacy.
Today, I left the Capitol Klan Rally, where my white Republican colleagues took off their white hoods and dismantled Black political power in our state. It’s shameful, it’s immoral, and it will go down in the history books alongside the legacy of George Wallace and Bull Connor.
Tennessee has shamefully become the first state to pass a new, racist congressional map following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which dismantled the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
When I walked into the building it was 2026, and when I walked out it was pre-1965. This racial power grab against Black voters is purely rooted in control and elimination of their voices in our democracy. Today’s Jim Crow laws passed in our legislature spit on the graves of our Civil Rights martyrs who bled and died for the right to political power and representation.
They are dragging us backwards in history but we refuse to be moved.
I burned the Confederate flag, because the neo-Confederate caucus that assembled today will be defeated again. Their vision of the South, rooted in plantation politics and racial division will not win. Instead we must use this moment to ignite our rebellion and movement even more towards real justice and multiracial democracy. We must build towards a South that can RISE ANEW.
We will not go back!
“Burn it, young brother,” said Joy-Ann Reid in response. So say we all.
Burn. That. Shit.
The Word Of The Term Is Corruption
I’d run across this article linked somewhere earlier this past week. But, I couldn’t read it or post it, because it was behind a paywall. Well, thanks to Punctuated.Equilibrium over on MPS Friday night, here it is! Well, a goodly snip of it. Give ’em a click to read it all, because they lifted the paywall so that everyone who wants to know can read it.
The everything, everywhere, all at once corruption story.
I’m pleading with you to look at the president’s self-dealing.
1 May 2026 Written by: Isaac Saul
(snip-skipping a bit at the top)
During President Joe Biden’s term, the Department of Justice could say, at least, that it had investigated the president’s son. Republicans in Congress also conducted a yearslong investigation into the Hunter Biden business ties and how they might link back to the president. Here, though, we have nothing; every story I’m about to point to has not produced even a unified statement of concern from, say, a half dozen Republican senators worried about government corruption.
Remember, Hunter’s story was about drawing a $50,000/month salary while his dad was vice president and then allegedly trying to arrange some business ventures he might cut Joe Biden in on once he was out of office. Republicans’ yearslong investigation never turned up any hard evidence of the latter, though there was enough smoke I still think the story was plausible.
Today, we’re talking about the president’s children launching multi-billion dollar business ventures — several of them — while the president is in office, and then explicitly exchanging all manner of domestic policy victories, foreign policy concessions, and literal pardons in the construction of those deals. Trump himself has all but admitted this is happening. He told The New York Times that “nobody cared” when he tried to separate his family business from his administration during his first term, so he isn’t even trying now.
I have tracked these stories with one of my senior editors for the last year and a half. The list of things that have happened is so long and shocking when you see it all together that I’m not entirely sure how to present it. I’ve gone back and forth; maybe I should build a flow chart? What about a spreadsheet? Should this be a YouTube video, instead of a written piece? Will anyone actually read the entire thing? Can anyone actually process this level of self-dealing, corruption, and shadiness at once?
Ultimately, I decided that the best I can do is try to write all these instances down in an engaging way that might grab your attention and wake us all up from whatever stupor we’re in. So… here goes.
Let’s start with the cryptocurrency.
Perhaps the largest vehicle for Trump’s self-dealing has been his foray into cryptocurrency. This is a complicated space that I will try to make as straightforward and simple as possible.
In 2024, the Trump family launched a crypto company called World Liberty Financial. Trump is listed as a “co-founder emeritus.” By December of 2025, they had profited roughly $1 billion from proceeds while holding $3 billion in unsold cryptocurrency tokens, amassing a fortune larger than their entire real estate portfolio. At the same time the president was pushing his family’s new crypto venture, he was cutting crypto regulation, touting the potential of private digital currencies to help the U.S. economy, and promising to unleash the industry he and his family were simultaneously profiting from.
But the president wasn’t only directly making money in an industry he was deregulating; the Trumps benefitted through intermediaries, too. Last summer, World Liberty Financial bought a publicly listed firm and raised $750 million from investors to buy its own cryptocurrency, WLFI. The Wall Street Journal tepidly described this setup as an “unusually circular transaction with the same party as buyer and seller” that could net the Trump family an additional $500 million.
Essentially, the Trump family launched a cryptocurrency firm while deregulating the crypto industry, then bought a separate firm that it used to buy its own cryptocurrency while also raising three quarters of a billion dollars from investors to buy that same cryptocurrency.
Just days before he was inaugurated, Trump also launched a personal “memecoin” called $TRUMP. Memecoins are cryptocurrencies made about internet jokes, pop culture moments, or viral trends. They have no underlying value or technological purpose; the value of the coin is driven entirely by social hype. Trump created hype for his memecoin by launching it months after being elected and just three days before being inaugurated. He promoted $TRUMP on social media and, while president, even held a dinner for the top 220 holders of the coin at one of his golf resorts in Virginia. He held another one at Mar-a-Lago this past weekend. The initial coin offering released 200 million tokens of its billion-token supply to the public on the first day. The price skyrocketed 300% overnight and hit an all-time high of $74.27 on January 19, right before Trump’s inauguration. $TRUMP has since cratered, losing 97% of its value (for context, if you had bought $1,000 at its peak, your $1,000 would now be worth about $30).
Trump, naturally, profited. The exact figures are hard to pin, but The Financial Times estimated that the scheme netted him personally about $350 million, while Trump’s holdings of the coin through a separate partnership could be worth billions more. It wasn’t just the president, either; First Lady Melania Trump launched her own memecoin, which also skyrocketed in value before a massive sell-off that she profited from (what people in the industry call a “rug pull”). Most of the people who bought and held the coin based on the hype the Trumps created ended up losing most of their money, but the coin’s creators got rich (or, in this case, richer).
This cryptocurrency foray hasn’t just been a vehicle for self-enrichment, but also a vehicle for quid pro quos. Perhaps the most obvious and overt involved Justin Sun, a crypto billionaire who was being investigated by the SEC for fraud. Sun, in the midst of his investigation, bought $75 million of WLFI — the World Liberty Financial coin — and then became an adviser at the company. Shortly after that investment, the SEC backed off its investigation and settled with him for $10 million, a small fraction of the expected penalties he was set to pay (on top of potential prison time). Of course, it’s possible that the SEC, an organization now openly being influenced by the president, just happened to back off its investigation in the weeks following Sun’s $75 million investment into Trump’s crypto firm.
It’s also possible that the two events are related.
The crypto story, though, hardly ended there. In late April, CBS reported that Sun was suing the Trump administration’s World Liberty Financial, alleging fraud. That’s right: Sun, whose initial case has since concluded, has now turned around and sued the Trump family, alleging that the president and his sons are illegally blocking him from selling his digital tokens that are worth as much as $1 billion. Sun also claims that World Liberty Financial tried to pressure him into investing in its stable coin, and that the company froze his tokens after he refused to commit more money to the business.
It’s hard to identify the villain.
Sun’s apparent quid pro quo to get out from under government oversight is just one example. Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, was pardoned by President Trump shortly after Zhao helped boost WLFI’s prominence by allowing the currency to be traded on the crypto exchange Binance, which Zhao started. After the pardon, Zhao became one of the Trumps’ business partners, boosting the family’s crypto empire while skating serious charges that he allowed money to flow to terrorists, cyber criminals, and child abusers on his platform.
If that’s not enough, more shocking news broke this week. According to The Wall Street Journal, World Liberty Financial inadvertently partnered with two men the U.S. government had sanctioned a month before for helping run a transnational criminal syndicate that had stolen billions of dollars from Americans through online scams. To repeat: Last fall, the Trump administration announced criminal charges against a transnational criminal syndicate for stealing billions of dollars from Americans in online scams. A month later, two of the men it sanctioned partnered with the Trump family’s crypto company.
The evidence of crypto investments from foreign nationals operating as de facto bribes doesn’t end there. Consider the story of Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) president and one of the most powerful politicians in the Middle East (he’s served as the UAE’s national security advisor since 2016). He stewards an empire of wealth worth roughly $1.5 trillion, and a firm closely tied to him secretly signed a deal for a 49% stake in WLFI worth $500 million — including $187 million paid upfront to Trump family entities just days before Trump’s inauguration. Shortly after Trump took office, the administration undid a national security block that would have prevented the UAE from getting up to 500,000 advanced Nvidia AI chips.
Some right-wing writers, like National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, have been brave enough to take this story head-on — but many have ignored it.
Sometimes, the favors happen en masse. The crypto industry as a whole was a top donor to Trump’s 2025 inauguration fund, and the SEC then dropped or paused over a dozen cases against crypto firms, or simply handed them huge access to government-directed crypto entities. Several of those cases, like Sun’s, were tied directly to donations. Coinbase donated $1 million; its lawsuit was dropped. Ripple ($4.9 million) and Solana ($1 million) had their tokens added to the national Digital Asset Stockpile.
I want to pause here to remind people that we spent all four years of the Biden administration talking about Hunter Biden’s alleged $50,000 a month salary while working at an energy firm in Ukraine, and the possibility that he was setting up some business deals for his father after he left the vice presidency. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced articles of impeachment alleging Biden “abused the power of the Office of the Vice President, enabling bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors, by allowing his son to influence the domestic policy of a foreign nation and accept various benefits—including financial compensation—from foreign nationals in exchange for certain favors.”
Conversely, the final tally of investments from parties with conflicts of interest into crypto assets personally managed by the Trump family safely enters the range of billions of dollars — a scale of thousands of millions, in just one sector and in just over one year, while the president was actually in office.
It’s not just cryptocurrency.
(snip-MORE. It reads just as quickly on the page)
Mehdi CHALLENGES Graham Platner on His Tattoo and More
In this interview Graham Platner responds to his detractors accusations against him. He discusses the tattoo and the Jewish times report that says he had talked about it while working at a bar during the time frame he was not working there. So there is not any credible evidence that he knew what the tattoo was. As he said why would he have danced with it in full display to his extended Jewish family? He makes sense. He understands that people may not like him because he is not polished as a politician. He also says he stumbles verbally and struggles to correct and improve himself. It was a hard hitting interview and Platner came off as very reasonable. Hugs
Now, in this must-watch interview, Mehdi Hasan speaks to Platner not just about his vision for a progressive “political revolution” in Washington DC but also about some of his controversies, including his social media and his tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol.
Clay Jones, Open Windows
So much winning
Trump keeps claiming he’s won the war
And Don’t Call Me, Shirley
Surely Donald Trump should not be allowed around children
Anytime Donald Trump is accused of being a pedophile, his base runs to the rescue as if they were personally slapped in the face. Currently, there are over 80 comments on this cartoon on my Facebook page, with the bulk of them being MAGAts demanding “verifiable” evidence that Trump is a pedophile. Of course, the same people who are demanding “verifiable” evidence are posting memes with fake quotes about Joe Biden and his daughter.
But how is this for verifiable evidence? Donald Trump went on the Howard Stern show in 2005 and bragged about walking into dressing rooms for teenage contestants in his beauty pageants. He bragged about it as if he had just won Michigan.
Here’s a small portion of that conversation: (snip-MORE; go read it!)
Two From Clay Jones
A Spirited Press Briefing
Is Donald Trump the Spirit of presidencies or is Spirit the Trump of airlines?
When Spirit Airlines shut down on Saturday, it left thousands of customers and employees stranded. Customers finding themselves without a flight couldn’t even complain at the ticket counter, as there were no employees there. So basically, the quality of Spirit’s customer service didn’t change because of the bankruptcy.
Spirit, a budget airline whose business model forced other airlines to change the way they did business, had a reputation as the worst airline. If you ever purchased a flight on Spirit and told a friend, their reply was probably, “I’m so sorry.”
I did fly on Spirit once from Washington to Atlanta, which, fortunately, is a very short flight. But yeah, it was cheap. The seats don’t recline, and they feel very cheap, as though they might break underneath you.
Spirit had been in financial trouble since at least the pandemic, and there are several reasons why it went out of business so suddenly. Many blame a court that would not allow them to merge with JetBlue, but Spirit itself cites the “megaspike” in fuel prices caused by Donald Trump’s chosen war with Iran. There was also an attempt by the government to bail Spirit out, but since Donald Trump is not the best negotiator in the world, those talks collapsed. Maybe Trump should have brought in his negotiating dream team of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. (snip-MORE)
Expensive Balls
Mexico still has not paid for Donald Trump’s border wall
For months, anytime Donald Trump’s planned ballroom, which he destroyed the East Wing, was criticized, a MAGAt would come along and point out that it was only being paid for by donors and Donald Trump himself. Now that we know that is no longer true, where are those guys?
Of course, it’s not new that what Trump was telling us was a lie. We always knew it was a lie. Remember the lie that Mexico was going to pay for the border wall? Trump began his 2016 campaign on that lie, along with telling us that Mexico was sending us rapists and murderers.
When a promise by Donald Trump falls apart, and it is undisputed that it is a lie, we’re supposed to forget about it. We’re supposed to forget that Donald Trump promised that he would be “too busy” to play golf if he won the presidency. We are supposed to forget that he would eventually release his taxes. We are supposed to forget that he was going to give us a brand new healthcare plan in two weeks, way back in 2016. We are supposed to forget that Donald Trump was going to lower the price of gasoline. We are supposed to forget that promise about no new wars. We are supposed to forget that Donald Trump was going to make housing more affordable. We are supposed to forget that Donald Trump was going to drain the swamp. We are supposed to forget that Donald Trump was going to lower the price of groceries. We are supposed to forget that he was going to release the Epstein files. We are supposed to forget that he was going to end the Russia/Ukraine war in his first 24 hours back in office. And we are supposed to forget that Mexico was going to pay for his racist border wall. (snip-MORE)
From “The White Pages”
I have appointments throughout today, so I’ve set up a few things to read. This one is interesting in that it ties several things together to show us how not only our government but our companies are selling us into thinking we might actually get some fair treatment. It piqued my interest because of the strike last week; it seems “brands” are trying to work against being seen as part of those needing to understand what we the people don’t like how things are and that we expect change. Resist-
Endless shrimp is a force that gives us meaning
The brands heard that you were lonely and would like to propose a solution
Red Lobster wants your attention. You can tell, because their current ads deploy not one but two separate announcers. There’s the expository guy. He’s a little pushy but at least he sticks to the facts. And then there’s the loud guy. He’s got a deep voice. He sounds like he’s broadcasting live from the submerged city of Atlantis. He says it with feeling, and also reverb.
“Because you’ve been asking… a lot… and we made it happen.”
So claims the not-from-Atlantis announcer. But what’s he talking about? We have been asking for many things. To be able to afford homes, for example, or not to have war crimes committed in our names, or to have our planet still exist twenty years from now.
Oh, this is about shrimp. Endless shrimp. It’s back, or so I’m told, in multiple forms. Every time the less pushy guy shares one of the currently available shrimp offerings, his partner pipes up with a complementary point straight from the bottom of the sea.
“Walt’s favorite shrimp.”
“ ENDLESS!”
“Garlic shrimp scampi”
“ENDLESS”
“Shrimp linguini alfredo”
“ENDLESS?”
“And all new marry me shrimp”
“ALL ENDLESS!”
The duo isn’t wrong. Endless shrimp is back. While the previous iteration didn’t technically bankrupt the chain (the real culprit was private equity and real estate chicanery) it was, by all accounts, an absolute mess. American consumers, who rightfully identified that they were getting ripped off in every facet of their lives, leapt at the opportunity to get one over at least one big business.
Back when Endless Shrimp was a permanent feature, shrimp hoarders would occupy tables for hours at a time, not leaving until they beat the house. The real victim of this behavior was, of course, the chain’s underpaid servers (if you walk into a restaurant with “me against these suckers” mindset, you’re less likely to view your waiter as a fellow victim of capitalism and you’re definitely not going to tip well). For the C-Suite, though, the larger concern wasn’t the dignity of their employees. It was a jumbo-sized hole in their bottom line.
It’s like The Boss once sang. Endless shrimp dies baby, that’s a fact. But maybe the endless shrimp that dies, some days comes back. Put your make-up on, do your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight at the only Red Lobster still open in your city.
I’m not all that interested in the relative success or failure of chain restaurant promotions, but I do care about the various ways corporations try to win our affection (meaningful cultural signifiers, or so I’d argue). And contra the two announcer voices, the most interesting thing about Red Lobster’s promotion isn’t the shellfish, either of the Walt’s Favorite or Marry Me varieties. It’s what’s whispered rather than shouted.
You see, the biggest difference between the current iteration of Endless Shrimp and its unprofitable predecessor is that now Red Lobster wants you to know that you (the shrimp-loving consumer) and they (the company) are in this together.
If you want the full story, I highly recommend this piece by Luke Winkie in Slate, but here’s the truncated version. There are varieties of shrimp on the Red Lobster menu that aren’t officially part of the promotion. They’re on the menu, but excluded from the benevolent blanket of endlessness. But if a customer were to ask for unlimited quantities of a non-official item (for example, Crispy Dragon Shrimp, a food item that I’m assured contains no actual dragon), the server is to welcome them into a cool secret. Their official, handbook-mandated line? “These items aren’t on the menu for this promotion, but I would be happy to make an exception for you.”
It’s like they say, “the exception is the rule.” Except literally, and by mandate. Servers are required by corporate policy to act like you and they are cheating the system, in hopes that when you remember the night you rode the dragon (shrimp), you remember it not as a conspiracy-of-one, but a sneaky secret between you and your best friend (Red Lobster restaurants, a subsidiary of the Thai Union Seafood Company).
This is not a new psychological trick. It’s a classic low stakes confidence game. The most effective way to a mark is to convince them that they are, in fact, in on the con themselves. It’s the same move that car salesmen use when they leave the room to “talk to their manager” before returning with a report that “he didn’t want me to give you this deal, but…”
It’s still striking, though, to see the strategy laid out in grandiose internal strategy documents. A beleaguered but iconic American brand name, flailing for its survival, hedges its survival on two bets. First, that you are tired, angry and aware that you’re on the wrong side of a rigged game (correct). And second, that, by offering you a facsimile of camaraderie and a very real pile of seafood, that they can win your loyalty (huh).
“[This is] about more than just shrimp,” the document proclaims. An absolute work of art, that sentence.
“[It’s] about creating an experience that says, ‘We listen to you.”
“When guests see Endless Shrimp back on the menu, they feel heard and valued.”
I have never addressed a sit-down chain’s internal strategy document, but I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say, tears in my eyes: Red Lobster, thank you. THIS is what democracy looks like.
As Eli Zeger argued in his 2020 essay about companies that talk like snarky teens on social media, this particular iteration of the “brand as friend” canard is the product of the marriage of late stage capitalism (and its reliance on the selling of “ideas” rather than goods and services) and the post-Citizen United codification of corporate personhood. Red Lobster isn’t a restaruant anymore. It’s your rule-breaking, shrimp loving, newly empathetic pal. It sees you. In fact, it is the only one who see you. It gets that you’re broke, but more so that you’re alone. It’s no longer offering you cheap shrimp (the price tag for the promotion has risen markedly since its last iteration). It’s promising you something more important– belonging, connection, a port in the storm of alienation and precarity we’re all weathering.
Red Lobster’s friendship?
“Endless”
Or that’s the idea at least. Apparently, the promotion hasn’t been as lucrative as the company had hoped, at least so far. It’s not 2016 anymore. We’re seeking something more these days. Bread and roses? Perhaps, but definitely not just shrimp.
But Red Lobster isn’t alone, in surveying a landscape of mass alienation (economic, relational, spiritual) and seeing a business opportunity. Advertising agencies are publishing unironic blogs chillingly titled “the loneliness crisis: how brands can step up?” Silicon Valley’s greatest minds heard that you wanted community and responded with sycophantic AI chatbots. Apparently, our tech overlords’ understanding of human relationships is a robot who agrees with you all the time, including when you muse about harming yourself. Even the outright scammers get it. Gone are the days of far flung princes offering you a financial windfall. As you may have experienced personally, the hot new con is… pretending to be an acquaintance and inviting you to a party.
This is a step beyond the classic commodification funnel, as documented in nineties leftist classics like No Logo and The Conquest of Cool. The brands are no longer promising a great deal, or even hipness. What’s on offer now is the dream of a welcoming community, one deep enough to solve for the isolation that the companies themselves helped create.
That’s very depressing, of course, both the reminder that our economy has always been built on the exploitation of vulnerability, and the reality that there’s just so much more vulnerability to be exploited at this particular moment.
But there’s another truth, not a counterpoint, but a complement. How fortunate, for those of us who actually want to connect with other human beings, rather than just make a quick buck off of them. We already have what every corporation in the world wishes they had– the fact that, when we offer a space by our side, to either a stranger or a friend, we actually mean it. We’re not trying to trick you into springing for a Main Deck Margarita Flight to go along with your shrimp. We’re not trying to mine your data or add you to a marketing funnel or load you up with debt and junk. We just think this world would be more navigable together rather than apart.
And as an organizing opportunity? From union drives to neighbor-to-neighbor activism to the precious few political campaigns that care more about building community than personal brand building? My goodness. Why do you keep hearing about neighborism these days, and not just from true believers like me? Because more people are admitting every day how hungry they are for connection, and then taking the risk of making an offering.
The terrible news right now is that the hucksters are going to keep selling us a flim flam simulacra of belonging. Yes, the consultants, but also (I fear) the politicians. I strongly suspect the 2028 Democratic primary to feature a million text messages about “neighbors” and “community” penned by a well-heeled K-Street consultants. But the good news is that we aren’t that dumb. We know the brands aren’t our friends. We’ve lived through the great social media con together. We know what the lie looks like, and now we’d much prefer the deeply imperfect, thoroughly messy alternative.
They’ll offer us endless shrimp. And we’ll say no thank you. We’d prefer each other, please. Even if that’s not on the secret menu. (snip-end notes, the Boss, and general other stuff on the page)
Scottie's Playtime 