Please enjoy scouring the internet archives for Republican skeletons and sharing them here, or any other schadenfreude.

Also, this is a list of crazy things Trump said in the past seven days, and it's goddamn wild. I'd heard about maybe half of them? (two votes for Kill and Eat You, etc, sigh.)

Mossy Character sends along this link: Inside the deepfake porn crisis engulfing Korean schools:

Two days earlier, South Korean journalist Ko Narin had published what would turn into the biggest scoop of her career. It had recently emerged that police were investigating deepfake porn rings at two of the country's major universities, and Ms Ko was convinced there must be more.

She started searching social media and uncovered dozens of chat groups on the messaging app Telegram where users were sharing photos of women they knew and using AI software to convert them into fake pornographic images within seconds.

Ms Ko discovered these groups were not just targeting university students. There were rooms dedicated to specific high schools and even middle schools. If a lot of content was created using images of a particular student, she might even be given her own room. Broadly labelled "humiliation rooms" or "friend of friend rooms", they often come with strict entry terms.

"I was shocked at how systematic and organised the process was," said Ms Ko. "The most horrific thing I discovered was a group for underage pupils at one school that had more than 2,000 members."

By the end of that week, more than 500 schools and universities had been identified as targets. The actual number impacted is still to be established, but many are believed to be aged under 16, which is South Korea's age of consent. A large proportion of the suspected perpetrators are teenagers themselves.

JFC. Imagining myself as one of those girls, at age 15 or something, makes me want to curl up in a closet and disappear. Your capacity for deep shame at that age is so excruciating. It makes me so angry at both the boys are creating the porn and the adults who allowed it to flourish.

NickS writes: A good piece about how a decline in advertising dollars is changing the media landscape, most likely for the worse:

[I]t might surprise many of you to learn that, in my weaker moments, I yearn for the return of the days of relentless, ubiquitous advertising.

I had a lot of trouble researching this piece for the exact reasons that this piece is actually about. Research and fact checking media sources was part of my primary job for several years but that job went away when the website I worked for died in a two-punch knockout--when ad revenue dried up for all the media sources they all went behind paywalls, which we couldn't afford to bypass because our own ad revenue dried up.

That website, instead of publishing fascinating essays full of rigorously sourced pop culture and history facts, now just reposts jokes and screenshots from Twitter and Reddit because that's the only free content left.

Tech companies keep attempting to shake off the advertising model completely and solve the difficult puzzle of creating services that deliver ad-free entertainment to the consumer that the consumer pays for directly. I'm using one of those services right now to deliver this column to you, it's called Substack. Others you would have heard of are Netflix and Spotify.

Heebie's take: I'm skeptical of his version of the history of how advertising wrecked the golden age. I remember the golden age he refers to, of course - the golden blogging era - but I also remember the drowning-in-pop-ups era of the late 90s, when I literally stopped using my computer altogether because I couldn't figure out what to do about pop-ups, and just went back to using the computer lab instead. The battle of revenue streams wrecking the internet is quite old.

I also question his version of old-fashioned TV advertising - I believe there was quite a lot of content moderation to placate the advertisers over the past half-century.

I also question this:

Still, there was a golden age of stability in the model. The model was, in fact, so stable that nobody predicted anything going wrong with it. More good quality media than ever before in history, online and on television and the radio and other places, more in fact than anyone could plausibly ever consume, was now freely available to everyone.*

What I remember is a wild amount of hand-wringing in the blogging era, about how free content was going to be the death of news industries - more or less the "Napster Killed the Music Industry" style fears, for reporters. (Which came true to varying degrees.)

His basic point though is about the current landscape is true though, especially how the subscription model further silos people into their epistemic bubbles.

*Something about his framing makes me suspect it's an artifact of his age - he pegs the golden era to the time before he was fully cognizant of people's fears and worries. Then he matures and starts noticing the fears and problems, and doesn't realize they were there all along**.

**This is a phenomenon I'm noticing a lot in millenial podcasters, when they're wistful for an era where I was already old enough to know it wasn't all roses. Which means older generations were probably noticing it about me whenever I was wistful about I'm not sure when.

Minivet writes: The following guest post risks nausea both physical and intellectual, the former via intimate aspects of Donald Trump, the latter since true or false, it may be gossipmongering that centers horrible fascists as people even while pointing and laughing at them. So maybe let's have a cut below this.

Is Laura Loomer schtupping Donald Trump? People are asking questions.

I think the first article was on Semafor: Republicans fear Laura Loomer is influencing Donald Trump. Another as it went more mainstream: Trump allies worry his ties to far-right activist Laura Loomer could cost him Georgia and North Carolina.

Loomer is far enough right that she was ahead of the curve of being banned by platforms - and not just microblogging platforms. In November 2017, she went on a long Twitter rant that included "Someone needs to create a non Islamic form of Uber or Lyft because I never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver," and she was banned by both companies soon after. A year later, Ilhan Omar was her target of tweetstorm abuse and Loomer was banned by Twitter - after which she chained herself to their NYC office's front door wearing a gold star and yelling at everyone. She's called herself a white nationalist and is also a 9/11 truther. So, unhinged even for them.

Banned by Twitter, restored by Elon of course. More recently, she said the White House would "smell like curry" and "White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center" under Harris, was called out for racism by MTG of all people, and started feuding with her.

Her having any access to Trump seems worrisome on purely public grounds: an implication is she may have egged him on to use the cat-eating slur in the debate, since she was with him in the 24 hours before. According to NYT, he tried to give her a campaign position last year & got enough internal backlash to stop trying.

The Semafor article, in my view, tried to convey the idea of a sexual affair without directly saying it, as journalists sometimes do with things they hear but don't have an on-the-record source for. The very first paragraph:

She was on the plane with him the day of the debate and on the ground with him the morning after. Some Republicans are worried she had something to do with what happened in between.

Then Bluesky dug up a post from about 12 months ago where she's belly to belly with him at a rally or something, and they're looking into each other's eyes. The post text besides the photo in its entirety: "😍".

Rumors of it being sexual seem to be going around DC political/journalistic circles, not just Bluesky - those elites are high schoolers, after all. Last week (at Rancho Palos Verdes, funnily enough!) Trump took the question:

"Your Republican colleagues, your allies, are concerned about your close relationship with Laura Loomer."

"Well, I don't know what they would say-Laura has been a supporter of mine, just like a lot of people are supporters... she speaks very positively of the campaign, I'm not sure why you asked the question... I don't control Laura. Laura has to say what she wants, she's a free spirit. Look, I can't tell Laura what to do... So I don't know what exactly you're referring to." (Ellipses for repetitions)

I can't pinpoint it, but just holistically, doesn't that sound like every clueless guy thinking he's throwing suspicion off his affair partner? It's almost strange how conventionally he phrases it versus his strange, off-putting normal style. At minimum the "what are you implying?" set phrase certainly sounds like he knows the nature of the rumor going around.

Equally possible she's playing up this connection, making these posts of closeness to him (in any sense) to gain power in her RW sphere.

Is this truly newsworthy? I don't know. Is it sexist to jump to & linger on this conclusion? Probably at least a little. But I have a morbid fascination about how weird it could get. In the past one gets the impression Trump's sex life and political life have been pretty separate; it could be irresistible for him to have a true believer who goes that far with him. Especially with her telling him he's right to want to call for anti-immigrant pogroms to set the country on fire.

The level of internal Republican backlash on the matter so far suggests it could turn more of them off than the Stormy Daniels matter did, although that kind of baffles me. And if there's more hard evidence to it... it could be quite the October Surprise.

Heebie's take: I for one am not as hardened and cynical as Minivet, and I celebrate love wherever it flourishes. Let these lovebirds fly their freak flag!

Lean into sloppy kisses, even mid-interview with mainstream news sources. Hump away, you turd buckets, hump away, all over the stage.

I wouldn't have thought I could ever relate to JD Vance, but it turns out he was also blogging in the 2005-2010 era. To be honest, that tracks.

(Amazingly, they're still up, although there's not much there. The second, the first. I don't understand how those can have the same url and look so different.)

From the Guardian link, you can easily hop around to a bunch of other places he wrote stuff back in the day, but I didn't really feel like linking to the Bulwark, etc.