Lifestyle
When Posting Becomes Its Own Style of Politics
A growing number of conservative influencers are making content in which they claim to uncover fraud.
In December, the YouTuber Nick Shirley uploaded a video purporting to expose a scheme led by Somali refugees in Minneapolis.
It caught the attention of Vice President JD Vance, who shared the video online. Soon after, ICE was deployed to the city.
The video was inspiring to Amy Reichert, a 58-year-old San Diego resident, who started making her own videos claiming a similar scheme was afoot in her city.
She is one of many creators channeling populist rage and elite resentment into a style of posting.
It’s a mode of practicing politics some are calling “slopulism.”
Ms. Reichert doesn’t like to call herself a right-wing influencer.
She has a sizable following on social media (some 60,000 followers on X, and 80,000 on Instagram), where she posts videos of herself talking about what in her view is corruption in the Democratic-leaning city government of San Diego, usually while wearing rose-tinted aviator sunglasses.
Since the beginning of this year, Ms. Reichert, a licensed private investigator, has been making content that highlights what she thinks is a pattern of taxpayer fraud in her city’s child care centers. It’s a pivot she has made since watching the video by Mr. Shirley, the 23-year-old MAGA YouTuber, in which he claimed to have uncovered widespread fraud by a network of Somali Americans operating child care centers.
“I thought, How can I, as a private investigator and private citizen, do what Nick did in Minnesota?” Ms. Reichert said. “We are drowning in fraud in California.”
After just a few hours of researching state databases in early January, Ms. Reichert began to post screenshots on X of documents she claimed belonged to “ghost” day care centers in San Diego County. The posts spread widely. Soon, she was on television to discuss her work with the Fox News host Jesse Watters, and President Trump was sharing a clip of the segment on his Truth Social platform.
Then Ms. Reichert began making videos, sometimes standing outside the day care centers in question, in which she repeated the allegations while presenting little proof of wrongdoing. But her message — that foul play was taking place — was clear.
One video Ms. Reichert posted was quickly clipped and reshared on X by right-wing news aggregators. It earned close to half a million views — essentially a viral moment for a creator of Ms. Reichert’s stature.
She was also happy to see that Mr. Shirley, whose work Mr. Vance suggested was more consequential than Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism, began to follow Ms. Reichert on X.
“Quite amazing, these past few weeks,” Ms. Reichert said.
Ms. Reichert is one among many conservative content creators who have become the internet’s busiest sleuths in recent weeks. They create videos that are light on evidence and traditional journalistic techniques but are filled with sinister-sounding claims that neatly align with the Trump administration’s priorities.
Armed with digital cameras and publicly available documents, they claim to be documenting patterns of elite corruption, taxpayer fraud, abuse of power and government waste across the country, hoping their posts and videos will cross into the feeds of elected officials, as Mr. Shirley’s did.
Some of the biggest names in MAGA media have fanned out across the country to make this content.
The influencer Cam Higby claimed to have uncovered a nearly identical case of fraud, undertaken once again by Somali migrants, in Washington State.
Benny Johnson, a creator with close ties to the Trump administration, set out looking for fraud within state-run homeless programs and misspent Covid relief funds in California.
On YouTube, Tyler Oliveira, a 26-year-old creator with over eight million subscribers, posted videos claiming to have uncovered a “welfare-addicted” township in upstate New York.
Even Dr. Mehmet Oz, a Trump administration official, has made a video in which he claims a $3.5 billion medical fraud operation is happening in Los Angeles.
What Is ‘Slopulism,’ Exactly?
It’s a novel form of political behavior that has left many political commentators and researchers struggling to articulate what it is. Though many are quick to say what it’s not: investigative journalism. It is also, experts say, more than misinformation or disinformation, terms that fail to capture the nature of these misleading posts and how they are filtering up into the highest echelons of government.
Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative magazine, called it “MAGA-muzak.”
Kate Starbird, a researcher at the University of Washington who studies online spaces and extreme politics, has called it “participatory propaganda.”
“Try ‘entrepreneurial opportunism,’” said A.J. Bauer, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Alabama with a focus on right-wing groups.
“The real novelty here is the synchronization between the movement, the party and the state — but there isn’t a buzzword yet,” Mr. Bauer added.
The sameness of this politicized content, created overwhelmingly by figures orbiting the conservative cultural ecosystem, is, to many on the right and the left, not unlike digital “slop.” The term, which refers to low-quality, low-information, A.I.-generated content, has gradually expanded to more generally describe the gruel-like mixture of online ideas, images and memes flooding our feeds.
That’s how you get another term, “slopulism,” which has of late become a buzzword with X users and Substackers, many associated with the right, during the course of Trump’s second term.
Slopulism, as described by these commentators, is a kind of political post that elides concrete political concerns in favor of the fast-acting satisfactions of social media rage and culture-war jargon. It’s a political tendency that offers followers emotional gratification through mindless, performative gestures online.
Many of the content creators, like Ms. Reichert, were unfamiliar with the terms slop or slopulism.
These days, on platforms like X, slopulism is a pejorative label often applied to posts by politicians and pundits alike, anyone who shares out lowest-common-denominator ideas designed to appeal to loyal political bases.
On the right, this can look like gleeful cruelty, sadistic memes, posts that “own the libs” or sensationalized claims about fraud and conspiracy. On the left, it could be social justice messaging, online identity politics or populist economic proposals to, say, tax the rich.
The new wave of fraud-themed content, made by creators like Mr. Shirley, invokes familiar themes of populist rage and elite resentment. It seems to be the latest evolution in a culture where posting is a primary method of practicing politics — except these posts appear to be made not only to get in on a trending wave, but also to provoke policy action.
“Slopulism works by harnessing the excitement and vibe of a moment,” said Neema Parvini, a senior fellow at the University of Buckingham in England who is considered to have popularized the term. He believes it’s a way for populist leaders, like Mr. Trump, to keep their bases content.
“It convinces supporters to invest their emotions in story lines rather than the substantive politics or structure behind it,” he said. “It doesn’t lead anywhere, it’s just entertainment.”
‘Building for Years’
Renaming the Gulf of Mexico. The annexation of Greenland. A proposal to turn Gaza into a glittering resort town. All of these ideas found their potency in the form of viral content, circulated by those on the right, before they were fully embraced by the Trump administration. The online right podcaster Alex Kaschuta called this “the vibes-based international order.”
“This dynamic has been building for years,” said Dr. Starbird, the extremism researcher. “But in the second Trump administration, this relationship is more direct, with policies clearly being motivated, shaped and justified by and through digital content creation.”
As with most viral content, the ideas emerging from these online environs can be fleeting. Mr. Mills, of The American Conservative, described the administration’s recent policy priorities as having a “flavor of the month” feel.
Some on the right pushed back against the idea that slopulism, or any dynamic like it, is driving the administration’s actions.
“It’s a misread of the situation,” said Jesse Arm, vice president of external affairs at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. He pointed out that something like the Greenland annexation, which is often described as meme policy, could be traced to “far more serious conversations” between the president and his advisers as far back as 2019.
“I don’t think President Trump is hyper-invested in what’s happening online,” he said. “His administration is paying attention to what happens online, sure, but only in the sense that this is the main arena to gauge policy discourse.”
In a statement, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said Mr. Trump “always receives feedback and input from a variety of sources before making a decision that is in the best interest of the American people.”
Some see this as a positive style of governance, Mr. Mills said, adding, “It’s hyper-democratic in some ways: ‘Let’s look online and see what’s popular.’”
The content can have political consequences, but Mr. Bauer, the University of Alabama journalism professor, said he did not view its creation as a sincere political effort. Many of the creators he has observed making these videos aren’t highly ideological figures or even MAGA die-hards.
“They see an opportunity,” he said. “These are people that aspire to be famous online. They see that there’s a lot of desire and demand for right-wing content. And they are motivated by things like money and attention.”
Ms. Reichert said that the amount of money generated from her posts was “pathetically low,” but declined to offer further details.
Most of the fraud videos published in recent weeks resemble Mr. Shirley’s in both form and content. Almost always, the person suspected of wrongdoing is an immigrant or a member of a minority group, the most common ethnic category being that of Somali refugees, as in Mr. Shirley’s video about Minnesota.
While some, like Ms. Reichert, say they are inspired by Mr. Shirley, others deny any influence.
Until this January, David Khait, a conservative content creator with over 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, posted mostly man-on-the-street debates and interviews, a confrontational content style popularized by the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated in September. But recently, he has begun making videos about what he says is voter fraud in Fulton County, Georgia.
“There’s been no pivot here,” Mr. Khait, 26, wrote in a text message. “Call my content what it is: confronting institutional failure head-on because that’s what’s staring Americans in the face.”
The slopulist impulse may be most acute on the right at the moment — owing to the Republican control of the federal government — but some have argued this mode of online political engagement has its origins across the aisle.
Sean Monahan, the founder of the trend forecasting group K-Hole, has traced it back to the rise of the so-called “dirtbag left,” an online set of leftists who came to prominence during Bernie Sanders’s presidential run in 2016.
“It was a style of politics presented to younger, left-wing consumers, things like raising taxes on billionaires or modern monetary theory or controls on rent,” Mr. Monahan said. “There was a presumption that you could lay out a policy goal with no political trade-offs, no constituencies to navigate and no downsides.”
One recent example of slopulism on the left, he said, might be the mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani, whose platform included a promise to freeze the rent.
“He’s a little bit slopulist,” Mr. Monahan said of Mr. Mamdani, adding, “This is the feel-good model of politics where the mechanics are less important than taking credit and celebrating.”
For some, it is likely to be one of the more rewarding ways to practice politics in modern-day America.
“I don’t want to live a life of quiet desperation,” Ms. Reichert said.
Mr. Shirley, in recent days, has been staying the course, too. While he has moved on from Minnesota, he’s still making videos about fraud aimed at immigrant-operated day care centers. But this time he’s in California and has a new collaborator by his side: Ms. Reichert.
Last month, she posted a photograph of herself and Mr. Shirley on X that has been viewed 1.4 million times. Using a flame emoji, she wrote: “California, here we come!”
RuPaul and Matt Rogers in Stop! That! Train!
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When I tell you, reader, that the new film Stop! That! Train! plays exactly like an extended, slightly better-than-average Acting Challenge on a slightly better-than-average season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, some among you will nod sagely, and hie your butts to the theater in boisterous gaggles of girls, gays and theys. (A not-insignificant subset of you may also stop along the way to buy a box of cheap-ass blush wine so you can remove the bag and smuggle it into the theater, and I can’t stop you, that’s your own business.) Some among you will take that same report under advisement, secure in the knowledge that you’ll be fine waiting to stream it in the comfort of your own homes, where you’ve stashed enough champagne … to fill da Nile! Some among you — let’s face it, the younger, hotter, more evolved crowd that prefers your humor to grow organically out of things like characterization, cultural insight and dry wit — will grimace, and resolve to avoid it at all costs.
But the vast majority of you haven’t watched enough Drag Race to internalize its every formulaic tic, and thus won’t be able to glean any useful information from the comparison, so let me break it down for you.
Stop! That! Train! parodies ’70s disaster movies in exactly the way the 1980 film Airplane! did, which is to say: By submitting it to a ceaseless fusillade of broad, sweaty and very dumb jokes, by busting out a parade of game celebrity cameos and by deploying a just-shy-of-legally-actionable number of precisely the same gags.
The only salient difference turns out to be one of sensibility. Where Airplane!‘s humor chiefly arose from encasing its jokes in a thick layer of deadpan solemnity (think Leslie Nielsen’s Dr. “And don’t call me Shirley” Rumack), Stop! That! Train!‘s entire schtick is one of arch, winking camp (think Stephen Stucker’s Johnny, the hilariously queeny control-room worker who served as resident court jester/chaos gremlin).
So think of it as Airplane! with nothing but the Johnny jokes. In a word: drag.
Which only makes sense, as the film’s key roles are filled with queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race and those who love them. There’s Jujubee and Ginger Minj as DeeDee and Tess, two not-so-fresh-faced “train hostesses” whose low-rent rail service folds, causing them to bluff their way into jobs on a Glamazonian Express luxury bullet train.
They receive a frosty reception from the train’s trio of first-class hostesses, Amber (Brooke Lynn Hytes), Allie (Marcia Marcia Marcia, credited here as Marty Lauter) and the ridiculously spelled Ayshleiygh (Symone). Keep an eye out for Latrice Royale, Monét X Change and Angeria Paris VanMicheals while you’re at it.
If you’re finding yourself concerned that you’re eight paragraphs into this review and still don’t know what the movie’s actually about, just know that you, cookie, are not the target demographic for this particular project. But here goes: A high-speed train malfunctions on a cross-country journey and barrels into a series of mishaps involving an escaped scorpion, a haunted tunnel and a climatological event known as a “Stormaganza” while a lot of very funny people stand around making stupid, usually pun-adjacent jokes. Also: RuPaul sports a Deborah Vance wig to play U.S. President Judy Gagwell (see above, in re: pun-adjacency) and does some really stellar face-acting.
Ginger Minj and Jujubee.
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Also also: the great Rachel Bloom plays Donna, the only government official to understand the peril facing the train’s passengers and crew, whose dire warnings fall on the cartoonishly boorish, misogynist ears of her co-workers. (Her boss, played by Evan Mulrooney, delivers a masterclass in the kind of prideful, bullying willfulness currently stalking the halls of power; it’s the closest thing this defiantly silly little flick comes to a political statement.)
The whole thing’s over and done with in a brisk 90-minute trot, and you’ll have a very good time. Oh sure, you might find yourself squinting at the special effects, such as they are. Not because they evince the now-familiar muddiness of bad CGI, but because they instead bear the disquietingly bright, clean, sharp lines of AI slop. (Director Adam Shankman felt compelled to release a statement attempting to clarify the film’s status, which reads in part: “There are a sum total of ZERO shots conceived by AI in the movie.” [Emphasis mine, because he’d apparently already told Xtra Magazine that some AI was used, in combination with CGI.]) But in the end, the jankiness of the film’s effects only feed into the hey-queens-let’s-put-on-a-show vibe, not distract from it.
You may also find yourself wishing, as you watch drag queens trading barbs, flaring their nostrils and mime-slapping the bejeezus out of one another, that the barbs in question were better, meaner, fiercer. They’re mildly cutting when they could and should be lacerating, and they feel like place-holders. But the script’s downright neutronic joke-density ensures that you won’t be able to linger over such quibbles; so many more jokes are barrelling toward you that by the time the credits roll (do I need to tell you there’s a gag reel? Of course there’s a gag reel) the comedic signal to noise ratio will prove satisfying.
And hey, it’s Pride. You’re already out and about; why not top off your brief interlude with these cinematic queens by taking in a real drag show where IRL performers are waiting, tucked and plucked and working hard, sweating through their foundation to entertain you? Between numbers you can nip off to the bar and debate with your friends which one of the film’s dumb jokes was the absolute dumbest.
Trust me, you’ll be there a while.
I’m doing yoga at Palisades Park in Santa Monica with a friend, when a tall, thin guy with long hair and carrying a guitar approaches. He has that aging rock-star look, which I find … hot.
He says, “Hey, y’all, can anyone join your yoga class?”
Southern drawl? Also, hot. “Oh, it’s not a class,” I say. “Can anyone get a song on your guitar?”
He hoists the guitar and launches into a beautiful ballade. I feel the late afternoon sun on my arms, smell the ocean breeze. I’m reminded why I love Santa Monica, where I moved to from New York after my divorce, looking for a fresh start, and where I’ve remained single ever since.
After the song, the stranger, Clayton, tells us that he moved to L.A. from Georgia in his 20s. He says he got “the biggest signin’ deal of any first-time recording artist.” Now he’s working on the score for a movie with the “biggest producer attached.”
Is this true? I want it to be true. It’s hard to meet a straight guy over the age of 45 who’s successful, single … and has hair. We exchange numbers, but I can’t tell if he’s interested in me romantically. I’ve been single for so long, it’s hard to feel appealing. As a child, I knew I was special, and I knew why: because my mother told me.
But I don’t live with a praiseful parent or a supportive spouse, no. And I work at home; no office mates say, “Cute shoes!” Or “What healthy lunch choices.” I live with a praise deficit, in a vast compliment desert.
The next day Clayton calls and asks me out on a date. Over coffee, he says, “I can write an entire movie script in one week. My agent has never read such good scripts.” Later that week, over drinks, he says, “I got into the Atlanta Boys Choir on my first try.” As if it took everyone else multiple tries.
He picks me up from Los Angeles International Airport — an act of chivalry that deserves knighthood. He has his guitar in the car. Inching home on Lincoln Boulevard, he plays a song he’s composing while steering with one knee. “This song is gonna to be a huge hit,” he says.
Clayton is cool and kind and a big braggart. When I mention that my stomach is bothering me, he says, “I’m gonna cook you the best dinner you’ve ever eaten!”
This brag worries me. I worked as a food critic in New York City. There’s no way Clayton’s very seared salmon with watermelon radish can top a Jean-Georges chocolate mousse.
I finally snap: “Clayton! No one talks this way. You don’t hear me saying, I don’t know, ‘I scored so high on those standardized tests in high school, my score went right off the chart. They couldn’t even keep my score on the chart, that’s how high I scored.’ ”
And then I stop. I had totally forgotten about my excellent test scores. They used to give me a lot of confidence, but I never talk about standardized test scores now because I’m an adult. But since I don’t, they have disappeared from my story of myself. I am more versed in my deficits than my strengths these days.
Clayton is on to something. That night, I call my yoga friend. “We need to start bragging like Clayton,” I say. “But also, keep our friends.”
We hatch a plan: We will start a weekly bragging practice. It will be like a meditation practice but more aggressive. Bragging is not like some tepid self-affirmation; it’s competitive. It’s like my mother.
We decide to begin that Saturday. We have plans to work in the morning, walk to the Korean spa for a scrub, then go to a friend’s improv show where Clayton will join us. As we’re walking to the spa, my bragging buddy is supposed to start. I see her struggling. “Uh. I am really good at … uh, walking down the street?” she says.
“You do have a nice walk,” I say. “And me? I’m really good at, um … It’s so cool how I’m always carrying a cup of coffee around everywhere I go. Like I’m just so comfortable here … in the crosswalk … drinking coffee?”
Bragging is not easy. After a lifetime of being pleasant, polite and self-effacing, trying to brag is like taking a final you haven’t studied for, given in a foreign language.
We arrive at the spa late, but they charge us for the whole hour anyway. After the scrub, I realize I left my phone at home and can’t call Clayton with the improv’s address. I feel bad about all this, but I have made a commitment to brag, so I have to see how these snafus reflect positively on me.
Then I do see it. “You know, I pack a lot in one day,” I say. This is true, but without the bragging practice, I would not have seen it.
My friend and I stick with our bragging practice for six months, longer than the relationship with Clayton lasts. But the experience left a positive impact.
Later, I have plans to travel back to New York City, and my lodging falls through. A friend says, “You have nowhere to stay. You should probably cancel your trip.”
This seems like reasonable advice, but after all that bragging, it sounds off. Is he suggesting that even though I lived in New York for 20 years, I don’t have any friends there I can crash with? I say, “A lot of people want me to stay with them.”
This brag becomes true. I wind up splitting my time between my friend Ben’s on the Lower East Side and Katie’s on the Upper West. As I’m dragging my suitcase down the subway stairs at midnight to switch apartments, I think, “This was a stupid plan.”
But then I hear a Southern drawl in my head. I look around the empty station and say, “I am good at dating, because I learn something valuable from everyone I meet.”
I track down Clayton this spring to make sure he’s OK with being written about. He’s back in Georgia, with “a great new band,” he tells me. About the story, he says, “Go ahead. If you got it, flaunt it.”
“Thanks,” I say. “But my story is about you, um, kind of being a big braggart.”
He pauses and then tells me that when he was young, he had a chance to play guitar with an older, impressive musician. He denigrated his own skills. The older man stopped him, saying that how you talk about yourself becomes your reality. Clayton has been making an effort to speak positively about himself ever since.
It’s easy to think guys in L.A. are egotistical or narcissistic. But this was a reminder that men struggle with these issues too. We’re all out here doing our best, trying to find someone to love.
The author is an author, journalist and budding stand-up comedian in Santa Monica. She shared a version of this essay at the L.A. Affairs Live storytelling event in April. Find her on Instagram at @wendypariscomedy.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
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