The Weekly Discourse: Views From The High Horse

Last week was a relatively tame one in terms of The Discourse, perhaps a sign of people spending less time online and more time with family for the holidays. While posters of 2020 got some well-deserved rest as we put that horrible year to bed, they came out guns-a-blazin' in the first week of 2021.

The most incredible posting debacle of the young year was undoubtedly Bean Dad, a man who told a silly story about challenging his daughter to figure out how to use a can opener that somehow led to the resurfacing his past anti-Semitic and white nationalist tweets (which he later claimed were ironic) and the nuking of his podcasting career. While Bean Dad is truly an all-time great character in the history of Twitter, several posters have made runs at being the site's Main Character in the early days of 2021.

This week, we examine a poster deeply in love with the smell of their own farts, a blazing hot take on height differentials in relationships, and the evolution of Harry Potter politics.

Julia Ioffe's "No Fun Allowed" View On Bean Dad

If you were on Twitter January 3rd, you likely bore witness to the Bean Dad brouhaha. Nary a tweet went by without an inscrutable joke over John Roderick's thread, making it both a legendary day for Twitter and a sign that people really need this pandemic to be over. Still, while everyone seemed happy to lose their minds over Roderick's harrowing tale of a man, his daughter, and a can opener, one lady was staunchly unamused by the gaiety of the fracas: writer Julia Ioffe.

Ioffe is a somewhat infamous character in political Twitter circles both for her takes and a chummy photo she once took with alt-right movement founder Richard Spencer. With regards to Bean Dad, Ioffe poo-pooed the festivies by noting that there was hardly that sort of attention paid to the closing of the Tamir Rice case, which happened a few days prior with no charges brought against the officers involved.

There are a few elements that make Ioffe's tweet silly. First, of course, is that it's tired to the point of cliché: whenever a large group of people are having fun, it seems that someone always jumps in to remind them of a Bad Thing that's also going on at the moment to ruin the good time. Second, invoking "some white girl" is never a good look when you're white yourself. And finally, what sends Ioffe's tweet from irritating to truly Bad is the fact that her attempt to rain on the Bean Dad parade is literally the first time she has talked about Tamir Rice on Twitter.

For onlookers, it looked like Ioffe had simply invoked Tamir Rice's name to score some woke points, as she's demonstrated little interest in the case, at least on Twitter, in the past. Overall, her attempt to dunk on the Bean Dad discourse proved unsuccessful, making the tweet a perfect representation of this GIF:

FeministaJones' Short Women Theory

Before Bean Dad took off, it seemed that January 3rd's Main Character was going to be Feminista Jones, a controversial poster who asserted a piping hot take that men like short women because of "perceived controllability." And to top it off, the tweet seems to imply that this is short women's fault.

Takes like this happen periodically on Twitter: someone will imply some hot button issue is actually a sexual fetish that is at least implied to be pedophilic. Recently, we saw this happen with the "Himbo Is Abelist" tweet, and while Jones doesn't go so far as to say liking short women is rooted in pedophilia, the argument has certainly been made on Twitter before. What followed was a wonderful montage of jokes about Jones' harebrained "gotcha" tweet.

Jones ultimately deleted the tweet and the take was swept under the rug by Bean Dad discourse, making it the Llama Chase to Bean Dad's The Dress, but rest assured: this take will come back in some new form, and the dunks will come just as hard as ever.

Wakanda Is The New Harry Potter

Now that Harry Potter Politics Comparisons are passé (thanks in no small part to the efforts of J.K. Rowling), the "Trump Is Voldemort" crowd have pivoted to another blockbuster franchise to draw their political parallels: Marvel movies. There have been several cringeworthy comparisons between The Avengers and politics in the run up and aftermath of the 2020 United States Presidential Election, but last night, as Georgia's two run-off Senatorial elections looked poise to give Democrats control of the Senate heading into the Biden administration, we got an all-timer from author and podcaster Mike McHargue.

McHargue's brain-melting response to the victory of Reverend Raphael Warnock and presumed victory of Jon Ossoff leaves an icky aftertaste for several reasons. First, obviously, is the childish comparison between real-life politics and a multi-gazillion dollar franchise of superhero movies made for children. Second, the comparison between Wakanda, the setting for Black Panther and The MCU's only predominantly black location, and Georgia, a state whose black population and the organization efforts of political leaders like Stacey Abrams helped bring the Senate to the Democrats, is infantalizing to the point where it toes the line of benevolent racism.

White liberals on Twitter have long had a bizarre relationship with the black electorate, championing slogans like "black women will save us" and idolizing Stacey Abrams as some sort of Democratic Party Mother Teresa. McHargue's tweet is the latest in a long line of liberal posters who seem to view black people as mythological heroes of political elections while taking for granted the work that goes into getting out the vote.

But regardless of the sociological implications, McHargue's (now-deleted) tweet comparing Georgia to Wakanda is particularly hilarious because of his proud declaration that he'd worked himself to the point of tears thinking of Georgia as a fictional superhero location. Damn right, we're crying.

The Weekly Discourse is a look at some of the spiciest hot takes on Twitter from the past week that may not have generated memes but were definitely bonkers.