Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re talking Woke 2 growing pains, AI music’s big ugly moment, a great bouillon commercial, and the weird appeal of doll moms and fuckable wicker.
These items are all connected, aren’t they?
AOC talking about (and referencing) Chi Ossé’s “Woke 1 was crazy.” during an interview has become a lightning rod, as people are misunderstanding the joke as progressives trying to walk back police abolition, going on to finger point about what worked and didn’t from that period (which is perhaps one of the first tells of AOC wandering into a culture/slang space that she doesn’t have a full grasp of). The discussion oversimplifies action and evolution, but also — sadly — shows why the statement is flawed: saying “Woke 1 was crazy.” isn’t an indictment of any of the beliefs but showing that the mindset was correct even if the execution was wrong. It is and isn’t that deep, hence incoming hate from the right and left, when this should have been a slam dunk for her to talk about motherhood.
Creator Jools Lebron made a (now deleted) TikTok asking for help to get some dental care, which tied to a GoFundMe. This inspired a flurry of discourse, much of which ties to how she should get a job and that working people following her shouldn’t have to subsidize her medical care. I can get the frustrations of working class followers being asked to pay for something else, but it has brought out a lot of ugliness (Transphobia, for example.) and highlights how a basic healthcare need is being misconstrued as laziness on someone’s behalf. Jools has deleted the GoFundMe and is seemingly taking a break from TikTok, while also clearing her name.
Drew Afualo is getting attention for calling some followers TERFs for trying to dismiss the trans experience over the experiences of women. This has created a backlash, inspiring a lot of transphobia around what constitutes womanhood and why trans women are and are not included in conversations about womanhood. (Context too: this debate all comes from an older podcast conversation resurfacing.) People are also talking about how this ties to how creators like Drew speak to their fans. Drew has released a statement.
Trailing and loosely connected: Everyone’s favorite performative makeup creator, Mikayla Nogueira, is getting heat for her for a botched Sephora product launch where people are unhappy about her work lately, which has inspired a lot of conversation and bitterness on the creator’s behalf. This is crashing into an older video of her talking about how drag queens are clowns, which is kinda bad but also is kinda taken out of context, but ultimately adds salt to the situation.
As has been pointed out — and as all four of these things get at — this seems to all be a problem based in selective listening multiplied by rising hate of creators multiplied by anti-trans sentiment, reflecting a state of people hearing what they want to hear as an excuse to fight people who they should be in solidarity with. Do I think all of AOC or Jools Lebron or Drew Afualo’s followers are anti-woke, anti-healthcare, anti-transgender people? Not at all. (Mikayla’s? Different story.) All of these conversations dog whistled a unique form of very “now” victimhood that feels like an evolution of bean souping, that someone not only hears what they want to hear but uses a small crack to insert the grievances they have with a system and places it upon a group of public people who are increasingly seen as inauthentic and anti-of-the-people (politicians, influencers). It’s very concerning as they all — to borrow what Kay Poyer said on the matter — uses transphobia and “wokeness” as a means to sell all women out, to further restrict rights by offering “wins” to “real women.” This is a clear example of how the path toward freedom later this year and or in 2028 isn’t exactly clear, that Democratic Socialist nirvana will be easy; instead, we need to have meaningful conversations now to prevent a mass meltdown that gives right wingers discourse gifts to court people to their cause — because they’ve already brainrotted so many without their knowing. It’s very easy to see how all of this is a breath away from the trans women in sports items, showing how the energy around a misunderstanding online can enable backwards political action. See also: the bi men and “skinnylicious” discourses. “Half of the people on the internet sound like Ronald Reagan…it’s getting spooky,” Shahem said of the situation. Or, as someone else Tweeted, “let’s get really frustrated and misunderstand each other.“ Oof.
To take you along on the move, I’m sharing updates on arriving back to the states every Tuesday for the foreseeable future. Consider these mini-blogs!
The closest I came to “living” in New York City was when I worked at MTV in 2007. I was at 1515 Broadway, the building where TRL was filmed on Times Square, where I was an intern in production and development. The job went so well that my bosses tried to get me to drop out of school to work for them, but I turned them down because I had just transferred to a dream school and it was a huge deal in my family to move out of state given financial and health circumstances. I had to finish what I started there, plus it was a school of my dreams: I couldn’t leave. I ended up working for them on and off after the internship, always staying with my aunt in Newark and commuting into the city every day. 19 years later, this context has been on-the-mind as people keep asking if I’ve lived in the city before. Technically I haven’t, technically “I have.” I was always drawn to LA as my father is from Queens and that very Trump macho dude energy of NYC always turned me off. I never saw myself there, or I only saw my opposites. It wasn’t until this past trip in January where I saw myself, seeing a path illuminated in ways I hadn’t expected. It was strange, particularly as a I have been a dedicated deinfluencer of the city who went so far to run an arts site about LA creativity to show the east other coast that, yes, the west coast does have culture. As I pack up my life in Spain this week, I’ve been reflecting on this time as astrology has forced me to: tomorrow is a total solar eclipse which passes almost fully over Barcelona, which is around themes of restarting something in your life, something to do with “exactly those subjects we assumed we never liked.” Similarly, a bit over a week ago, the North Node moved through Aquarius in Leo, where new opportunities form depending where Aquarius is in your chart, rhyming with whatever happened in your life in 2007. My chart? Aquarius is in my tenth house, which could be “a new chapter in your career.” And 19 years ago? I had recently transferred to my dream school where I went on to come out as gay, I decided I would move to LA after graducating, I had a firm pathway to a Hollywood job, and I was wrapping up my internship at MTV. This is all whatever, as I barely know what most astrological things mean, but I do know to notice signs and signals and to pay attention to them. Here’s a big one: one of my bosses at MTV, the one who wanted to hire me out of school, gifted me a copy of The Sun Also Rises as a going away present. I’d been meaning to reread the copy she gave me all year since I know part of the book is set in Spain and I thought it would be cute to read it as it had been almost twenty years and I remember it having a big impact, even pushing me to consider fiction. This past Friday, I started reading it again, and I was curious when it was published: 1926. Hmm. Then I reread the inscription from my former boss. “Kyle,” she wrote, “You have a tremendous spirit and will for certain be doing great things in the future. Don’t forget to go explore the world, and to keep being you.” At the top of the inscription was the date: August 7, 2007. There I was, on a beach in Spain, reading The Sun Also Rises on August 7, 2026, 19 years later — which could mean anything. Now I have to send her an email, to tell her about this coincidence and that I’ll be in NYC all these years later.
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