Many Such Takes: CHH Hacked, Elon Comedy Hour, Dr. Smell Attempted Cancellation, Melania the Hat Man, and More
The most unhinged discourse of the week, always free
Welcome to Many Such Takes! For those unfamiliar, this is a free weekly segment (I also do lots of other stuff!) For Many Such Takes, I stay up to date with the latest and most chaotic Twitter (and now BlueSky) discourse so you don’t have to. If you see yourself featured here and you don’t like it, simply send me a Substack message and I will happily remove, no matter who you are or what you said.
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CHH was Hacked
First, the most important topic of this week, and frankly, every week: me. My Twitter account was hacked by crypto scammers trying to hawk a fake Trump token, which I wrote about here. Just my luck that of all the big Twitter accounts to get hacked, mine would be done in by far the funniest way.
My article gets into the details of how this hack happened, but my strategy to boot the hackers was to make a huge deal about it on my alt account, contact every other Twitter user who had been hacked in the same way (a phony “X legal team” copyright infringement phishing scam) for advice, repeatedly email the robot manning Twitter customer support to no avail, DM Twitter engineer Yacine as a Hail Mary (no response), DM any vaguely tech-oriented person I knew, and threaten publicly to brigade my Twitter account with reply guy reports until it was automatically suspended unless the hackers were booted from my account within 48 hours. As my ancestors might say: just a lot of kvetching.
I’m not sure if any of that helped—what likely got my account back was a friend of my brother’s, who used to work at Twitter and still knows people there. So my advice to anyone else in this predicament is to, unfortunately, rely on your own personal network because nothing else will work.
Elon Musk Comedy Hour
If there’s one thing to know about Elon Musk, it’s that he’s hilarious. Of course, most of the time, it’s not intentional. Actually, it is intentional, but his jokes are somehow funnier than intended, but in a completely different way. We saw a great example of this when he tweeted this joke that’s actually pure perfection:
I’m sorry, but finishing a joke with an emoji of yourself laughing at your subject is a level of comedic genius of which I wasn’t aware. It’s giving Tony Zaret, parody meme king:
Other users chimed in to do their own versions of the joke:
Melania, Hat Man
To many people who were not CHH dealing with X customer support over the hacking of her account, the most important thing this week was the inauguration of Trump’s second term (perhaps the second of many, per the wishes of Rep Andy Ogles, who is taking the dickriding to a whole new level by introducing a doomed bill to give Trump a third term, with an exception carved out for Obama.)
The inauguration gave us many meme-worthy moments: the Episcopal priest who looked suspiciously like an older Kate McKinnon confronting Trump for his treatment of immigrants and LGBTQ youth, Lauren Sanchez’s visible bra and cleavage, Zuck’s very obvious ogling of said cleavage, but perhaps most memorable was Melania Trump’s bizarre fedora-adjacent and eye-obscuring hat. It’s giving The Mask meets sleep paralysis demon.
The Hat Man, in case you’re wondering, is a reference to the hallucinations that some people experience when abusing Benadryl recreationally, popularized on a Reddit sub for Benadryl abuse (there’s a sub for everything.)
Politics and sinister attire aside, I will say that Melania Trump is a beautiful woman. But unfortunately, Trump has to have sex with Doug Emhoff instead:
Dr. Smell Attempted Cancellation
I almost didn’t write about this at first, and you will soon understand why.
If you’re active on Twitter, you’re likely familiar with Dr. Ally Louks, aka Dr. Smell, whose debut as a Main Character was featured in this previous issue of Many Such Takes. TLDR: Literature PhD woman who got harassed by (mostly) right-wing men for having a seemingly pretentious/frivolous dissertation on the “ethics of smell in contemporary prose.” As it turns out, her PhD wasn’t so silly after all, because she’s become a menswear-guy type character, popping into Twitter discourse whenever smell-related discourse comes up. And it comes up more often than you’d expect, from discourse about homeless people on the subway to the reveal that famed Twitter user Aella takes one shower every two weeks.
Anyway, there was an attempted cancellation on Dr. Smell this week, and it started where many famed Twitter discourses start: Richard Hanania.
Hanania posted a video that a young Indian woman made, highlighting the superior beauty of Indian women in response to anti-Indian racism. The woman mentioned their “real hair, real nails, and real lashes.” A few Twitter users (primarily Black women) noted that they felt the video read as an anti-Black microaggression, especially with the emphasis on “real hair.” But then someone else took it to another level by defaulting to the racist insult, “Y’all stink.”
Naturally, this was perfect for Dr. Smell, who jumped on the discourse to condemn racist stereotypes of malodor:
Now, you might be thinking that she did nothing wrong because accusing someone of smelling bad over their race is, in fact, a bad and racist thing to do. And for the most part, you’d be right. But another Twitter user believed that she shouldn’t have commented at all. Her logic was that as a white woman, this type of discourse wasn’t Dr. Smell’s business:
Her elaboration of the offense by Dr. Smell:
Overall, most of Twitter (including other Black women) didn’t agree that Dr. Smell had stepped out of bounds. After all, if anything is in her wheelhouse, it’s racial smell stereotypes.
Dr. Smell, however, took down her tweets and formally apologized, despite the masses cheering her on and affirming she did nothing wrong. Part of the reason for her apology is that some people used the drama as a jumping off point for anti-Black racism, which obviously wasn’t what she wanted. (And by the way, don’t take this discourse as permission to be racist in the comments section, for any reason.)
Things continued when another Twitter user preemptively voiced concern that Dr. Smell was “collecting information and sourcing free labor” and that she didn’t know what indigenous people were.
This is a whole new Twitter phenomenon. I’ve heard of “This never happens, but when it happens, it’s good.” Somehow this is even better! “I don’t want this person to comment on issues out of their lane, but if they don’t, I’m going to assume they ignorantly don’t know these topics exist.”
The responses proved entertaining:
That Twitter username might sound familiar to you. It should! This is the same individual who wrote this tweet about Joyce Carol Oates not being fuckable enough to write about Marilyn Monroe:
Of course, I worried that it wasn’t my place to even cover this topic. But much the way smell stereotypes are the wheelhouse of Dr. Ally Louks, reporting on bizarre Internet discourse is within my wheelhouse. Can’t we all just get along?
Anti-Vaxx Doctor Canceled for Real
While we’re on the topic of attempted cancellations, we got a real cancellation. Does anyone remember this lady who went viral for vaguely threatening a baby with sudden death in 2022?
Anyway, apparently she was sued by a random hospital for speaking out against vaccine mandates. Surely, she isn’t the only person who had an opinion on vaccine mandates! Why would they go after her specifically?
As it turns out, there was more to the story. She joined that hospital’s staff, lied about her own vaccination status and also refused to treat vaccinated patients (I’m wondering how she did this while claiming to be vaccinated herself. Did she have a random rule that only one vaccinated person could be in a room at any given time?) She also sued the hospital for defamation, while continuing to defame said hospital. Admittedly, I’m not a legal expert and I don’t fully understand why this would result in an individual paying precisely $166K to a hospital, so you can read the full thread here.
(Also, I’m not sure why this lawyer’s Twitter account is labeled Parody—it’s literally just him.)
Other Happenings/Funny Tweets
One of my founding members on the CHH Discord (which takes submissions for Many Such Takes!) submitted this gem from the Pornhub comments section”
Let’s head on over to Bluesky, where we are calling out microaggressions against *checks notes* Pete Hegseth
This makeshift koi pond at a restaurant:
This tweet about kids whose parents subscribe to NYT Cooking:
The lone guy still doing 2020-style prison abolition, with 2017 Reddit-tier insults:
The stunning realization that Sam Altman is gay (You’re telling me that now for the first time.)
Local vampire Bryan Johnson is tracking his son’s erections:
Let’s check in on RedNote:
Kennedy heir Jack Schlossberg publicly voiced that he finds Usha Vance hotter than his grandmother:
Republicans looking to jeer over “liberal tears” can’t find any actual liberal tears and have resorted to creating AI-generated resist libs to mock:
Andrew said he put Parody sticker on his tweets to decrease the chance he can be sued and suggested everyone should do it too.
Ever since the unfortunate end of the Reply All podcast I’ve been missing the way they were able to capture the total insanity of online discourse in their “Yes, Yes, No” feature (IYKYK). Many Such Takes is the first thing I’ve found since then that fills that gap, love reading this stuff lol