The Most Least Remarkable Person on the Internet

Reflections on Jeff Tiedrich.

If you were ever on Twitter between November 8, 2016, and January 8, 2021, and you interacted with such fringe accounts as “@POTUS” and “@realDonaldTrump,” there’s a decent chance that you’ve encountered this guy.

Not Eric Clapton.

His name is Jeff Tiedrich, and he’s one of the most fascinating people on the internet.

Tiedrich made it big during the Trump years as a #resistance reply guy: One of those people who would watch their feeds 24/7 and reply to Trump as soon as he posted, usually with some hackneyed “comeback” peppered with essentially Boomerific portmanteaus like “chumpfuckery” and “fuckcrustable.” Tiedrich’s preferred reply was “sir, this is a Wendy’s drive-thru,” the kind of bastardization of a years-old internet meme that you would either expect from a primitive generative AI or the mind of a 60-year-old man who considers himself “the cool uncle.” (Alas, Tiedrich began posting in the dark ages before we had consumer-facing LLMs, so we can rest assured that he came up with this gem all by himself.)

Most of the Trump reply guys were just grifters. The two biggest #resistance influencers, Brian and Ed Krassenstein, have been involved in almost every sort of tech bro investment scam you can think of, from an (alleged) Ponzi scheme for which they were raided by the feds to a 3D printing company, crypto, and NFTs. Another prominent account, “BrooklynDad_Defiant!”—who looks and sounds exactly like what you think he looks and sounds like—was paid almost $60,000 by a liberal PAC to tweet about Joe Biden during the 2020 election.

Tiedrich was never like those guys. Until recently, his only apparent source of online income was a Patreon that netted him $226.40 a month. He never started a podcast or begged for money. He just kept posting absolute gold in Trump’s mentions—“holy fucking fuck folks, Cheeto McFuckface made a fucktastic fuck-up. must be a day that ends in y”—and didn’t even acknowledge that he was accumulating hundreds of thousands of followers.

You see, Tiedrich has only ever been in it for the love of the post—and he’s been posting almost as long as posting has been a thing, since those heady halcyon days of the early George W. Bush administration when only a small percentage of each side was as hyperpartisan and terminally online as the median voter is today. Tiedrich was described by The Nation in 2004 as founder of the liberal news aggregator and internet forum The Smirking Chimp, whose 2000 launch date precedes almost every other netroots site by a matter of years. (The Chimp is still active, by the way, and it still clings to its early 2000s aesthetic.) From the article:

The Smirking Chimp is a website with 25,000-plus registered members, founded after the 2000 election as a gathering place for liberals, progressives and leftists who felt the newly selected President reminded them most of, well, a smirking chimp. Each day they devour and critique the handful of critical articles selected by its webmaster, Jeff Tiedrich, a New York-based programmer who started the site on a lark and is amazed by its growth. “The community of the Chimp is the angry, angry, engaged left,” Tiedrich says. When it was offered a direct connection to [presidential candidate Howard] Dean, who was then the only candidate attacking Bush and the war in stark terms, lightning struck.

SmirkingChimp.com

I bring all this up only because I learned earlier this week that Jeff Tiedrich has a Substack. He posts every day, and most of his articles are just screenshots of Tweets with Tweet-length commentary appended above and below. Here’s a representative sample from a recent post about the second assassination attempt against Donald Trump. It’s elegantly titled “elderly golfer is fucking losing it” (capitalization in the original).

here’s what we know so far: some rando with an assault weapon was spotted hanging around Donny’s Palm Beach golf course. Secret Service agents fired at this moron, causing him to drop his weapon and his backpack, and run like hell — straight into the path of the Palm Beach Sheriff, who arrested the shit out of him.

of course Donny’s toadies are milking this for all it’s worth.

“President Trump is safe following gunshots in his vicinity,” Steven Cheung, Trump campaign communications director, said in a brief initial statement. 

oh, please. Donny was never in danger. the “gunshots in his vicinity” were being fired away from him, and towards the gun-toting fuckface.

Real insightful commentary here. I’m glad the sheriff arrested “the shit out of him” instead of just doing a normal arrest. (“Him” being “the gun-toting fuckface.”)

I was curious about Tiedrich’s take on the Trump-Biden debate, and of course he was a Biden dead-ender. Here’s what he wrote on June 30, three days after the debate:

the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled media are relentless in their wicked fuckery.

Read that again. The “worthless scribblers.” Their “wicked fuckery.” Tiedrich, you bastard, you’ve done it again.

the days-long Biden is decrepit feeding frenzy has been fun for these feckless fuckfaces,

Feckless fuckfaces.

but they know that the public’s interest in even the juiciest blather eventually grows cold. it’s not enough for the press to keep rehashing the same old he coughed, he looks old bullshit — so to keep the rabble from moving on to the next shiny object, the media’s crossed the border into making shit up territory.

And here’s what Tiedrich wrote after Biden dropped out:

Joe Biden remains a master at doing politics. Dark Brandon dark-brandoned the shit out of his passing of the torch.

Joe had to have worked behind the scenes to shore up this much immediate support for Kamala. he made sure not one word of any this leaked. he timed the announcement of his decision so that Donny and the Republicans spent the entire convention running against the wrong candidate.

When you’ve decided far in advance what you want to have happened, you’re motivated to do some very creative things with the facts. Only the fake news wanted Biden to drop out. Yet, Biden was planning on dropping out the whole time, and he was only pretending to get shamed into doing it by the likes of such brain geniuses as Thomas Friedman and Brian Stelter. Biden is a master at doing politics, and that’s why he made everyone think he had a stroke and his brains fell out on the debate stage, but also only an idiot would have thought that there was anything wrong with him on debate night.

If you’re wondering where BlueAnon gets its talking points, Tiedrich is your guy. At least, he’s one particularly important node in a large network of guys¹ who whip up contrived narratives and disseminate them to millions of people at lightning speed. Tiedrich’s newsletter has 127,000 subscribers. An average post gets between 2,500 and 5,000 likes. Around 400 people are so captivated by the man’s incisive wit and wisdom that they actually find his articles comment-worthy. He has thousands of paid subscribers, even though, as far as I can tell, none of his articles are paywalled. The guy probably makes six figures for emailing people an annotated list of Tweets every day.

This is what’s so fascinating about Tiedrich. Every day, he farts out some slop with precisely zero intellectual value, and then hundreds of thousands of people lap it up and some of them give him money for it. He has exactly the same amount of intellectual curiosity about the world as every other unremarkable low-information voter, but they’ve made him their king. Out of all the least remarkable people on the internet, he’s the most remarkable.

If you think Jeff Tiedrich is just an idiot or an NPC or something, you’re missing the point. He’s so much more than that. The stuff he does is special. It’s a craft, and he’s mastered it. Legend has it he’s posted more words on Daily Kos and Democratic Underground than H.L. Mencken wrote in his entire career. He’s watched MSNBC for, like, 14 hours a day ever since he retired at age 40 from being the first guy to have a fake email job. He’s stayed glued to Twitter 24/7 so he can be the first person to call “tRump” a “fuckity fuckface” whenever he says Sissy Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair Oscars party is no longer “hot.” Tiedrich has a very special type of brainrot which was forged in the fires of Bush v. Gore and honed over 24 uninterrupted years of Using The Internet.

This is why, dear reader, you will never be Jeff Tiedrich, and neither will I. If you’re subscribed to this blog, it’s probably because you take ideas seriously. You’re interested in unconventional things, nuanced opinions, and whether it’s ethical for fish to have sex. You might be a tribal thinker, but only weakly. And you might just be (booming, echoing voice, as if coming from a loudspeaker) ELITE HUMAN CAPITAL.

Tiedrich is none of those things, and neither are most people. Most people don’t care much about intellectual matters. Their political preferences are largely vibes-based. (If you’ve read Tiedrich for as long as I have, you know that he writes almost exclusively about day-to-day political theater, and never in any depth about the merits and demerits of different political philosophies and policies.) If you want a sobering reminder of the average person’s capacity for intellectualism, remember that Young Sheldon has been a top 10 rated U.S. television program for six of the past seven years.

The upside is that Young Sheldon viewers and Tiedrich followers exercise basically zero political power, especially on Tiedrich’s side of the aisle where there are just fewer rubes than there are among the Republicans, and they haven’t taken over the party infrastructure like Trump has. The man may be fascinating, if only for the deeply morbid reason that he’s so far gone down a spiral of impotent rage and negative partisanship that you just can’t help but sneak a glance—like a homeless guy on the subway who keeps muttering to himself—but he doesn’t have any real influence. Unlike the homeless guy, Tiedrich isn’t going to stab anyone.

1. In the gender-neutral sense.