Many Such Takes: Neoliberal Shill Bracket, White Mirror, Art of the Deal, France

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.

For previous issues of Many Such Takes, see this tab on my main page.

CHH Wins the Annual Neoliberal Shill Bracket!

Finally—something I can brag about to my parents. I won the Neoliberal Shill Bracket, hosted by Center for New Liberalism. This was emotionally grueling, given that almost every single person in that bracket was either a Twitter friend of mine, or an idol of mine. I wound up facing the person I was most afraid of having to beat, Basil, aka LinkofSunshine, who is famous for this tweet, among other things:

Another thing that makes Basil especially challenging to beat is that their mom was a 9/11 survivor who was pregnant with them during 9/11. That is YA fantasy novel tier origin lore with which I simply cannot compete. So in order to beat them, I had to resort to desperate measures: accusing the entire bracket of being rigged by ballot harvesters, crowning my opponent the nickname “Bad News Basil,” and hosting a press conference in my Trump voice to address the obvious problems with the STOLEN ELECTION.

Ultimately, the final winner was chosen by whoever could raise more money for the Against Malaria foundation, and Basil and I both managed to raise a lot more than I ever expected, so stolen election aside (I won, so it actually wasn’t stolen- very legal and very cool!) it was all for a great cause.

White Mirror

Finally—we got a ridiculous viral tweet completely unrelated to right-wing politics. Mark Kretschmann, a tech enthusiast who I’m pretty sure is using an AI image as a profile photo designed to look like some regular guy, posted that the dystopian show Black Mirror, which I am watching as I write this, is simply too pessimistic. Instead, we should watch a show about all the nice ways that technology could improve our lives.

We got some great ideas for shows in the replies—such as a show set in 1985 where technology has solved everyone’s problems:

Eventually, the official Black Mirror account responded:

We come full circle:

Art of the Deal

Writers who cover politics and economics are struggling this week because of Trump’s flip-flopping on tariffs. Luckily, I cover crazy people online, so this has given me tremendous material. Last week, I wrote You Will Own Nothing, Except the Libs, about how MAGA seems to have adopted a bizarre new anti-money stance by cheering on a manufactured recession as a result of Trump’s absurd tariffs. But as it turns out, all the people claiming they either wanted the economy to collapse or that the tariffs were actually great for prices and job growth were all secretly in on a ruse, because you see, you fools, it’s the art of the deal! Obviously, Trump was never going to impose those tariffs. Masterful gambit, good sir!

(Update: I’m being informed this first tweet is a joke. Who’s the idiot now?)

Before Trump paused the tariffs:

After Trump paused the tariffs (she retweeted this:)

This was basically a reversed version of “Nobody is saying that, but also, the people saying it are correct.” First, tariffs were going to revolutionize US manufacturing and/or rightfully destroy the fake girlboss HR economy, and then tariffs were obviously never going to happen because Art of the Deal (although to be fair to Bill Ackman he didn’t seem terribly pro-tariff initially.)

In any case, this tweet took me out:

France: Shithole Country?

A while ago, I discovered Lord Miles on Twitter, who at the time seemed like a charming British man who got himself into funny little hijinks while traveling abroad. For example, he was apparently detained by the Taliban for 8 months and tweeted through it:

I think I may have started following him at this point because I didn’t know if any of this was real, but it was kind of funny. But somewhere along the line (perhaps he was always like this and I missed it) I realized he was a little uhh…anyway, his recent thread on his trip to Paris should illuminate it for you:

In case you’re wondering what happened to him in Paris that made it less pleasant than being captured by the Taliban, some things he mentioned included: rap music, black people, fat women, “them” who “add no value” (presumably some minority group or immigrants,) the absence of “French people” and of course, overpriced McFlurries:

Having just been in Paris, I’m not really sure what he’s talking about. I’m notoriously anxious and I rode the subway with my kids! I only saw one person who I was like, ehhh this guy is kinda freaking me out, and he was a drunk French guy. Not that I was keeping score, but it seemed to be mostly full of thin white people (sidebar, but I did notice one thing he failed to see—every French person over age 50 wears Harry Potter style glasses for some reason.)

Other Tweets/Funny Happenings

• Hope all my Jewish followers are enjoying their Cedar!

• CHH-coded Guardian headline (found by abs_sweetmarie)

MAGA is now getting nostalgic for random living rooms:

Another great attempt from the iconic troll account who repeatedly fools people into getting mad:

In case you missed it…