slopulism
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Noun
[edit]slopulism (uncountable)
- (politics, neologism, derogatory) Populism characterized by low-quality (often gen AI) memes and conspiracy theories.
- 2025 May 2, Endeavour, “Against Slopulism”, in Counter-Currents[1], archived from the original on 21 June 2025:
- Excessive contrarianism against the liberal establishment has also resulted in slopulism spiralling off into the most moronic of conspiracy theories.
- 2025 May 19, Russell Walter, “The Spectre of Slopulism”, in The Russell Walter Substack[2], archived from the original on 30 July 2025:
- A spectre is haunting the online right—the spectre of slopulism. Musk now pays X users for impressions. This financially incentivizes people to produce slop (they're putting PRONOUNS in the drinking water!).
- 2025 July 10, Nathan Taylor Pemberton, “Trolling Democracy”, in The New York Times[3], New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 22 July 2025:
- The key ingredient to this online soup is extremism: from nativism to racial science to casual neo-Nazism and textbook misogyny. Presented to followers via livestreams, memes and X posts, this deluge of far-right content has been called "slopulism" — a vibes-based politics designed for social media and born from social media.
- 2026 May 22, Justin Briley, “We Owe Each Other Better: Reject Slopulism, Embrace Building the Republic”, in Liberal Currents[4]:
- In light of this anti-tax slopulism, it bears repeating that taxes per se are not bad. They are not a punishment, they are not theft. They may be misused, but that depends on how frequently we choose to elect Republicans.
- (This is a hot sense, kept provisionally) (politics, neologism, derogatory) Populism characterized by vague, disingenuous, or excessively idealistic claims.
- 2026 February 13, Nathan Taylor Pemberton, “Is 'Slopulism' Shaping Our Politics?”, in The New York Times[5]:
- Slopulism, as described by these commentators, is a kind of political post that elides concrete political concerns in favor of the fast-acting satisfactions of social media rage and culture-war jargon.
- 2026 March 18, Ben Ritz, “Democrats Learned the Wrong Lesson From 2024”, in The Atlantic[6]:
- But Democratic lawmakers are failing just as badly to articulate an alternative vision. Instead, some of them seem to be trying to out-Trump the president with their own brand of “slopulism”—half-baked policy proposals that sound good only if you don’t think too hard about them, and that would, if enacted, hurt the people they’re supposed to help.
- 2026 March 18, David Wallace-Wells, “Can the Democrats Become the Party of the People Again?”, in The New York Times[7]:
- Already, skeptics joke about slopulism — a term for populist appeals that seem unserious or superficial, the equivalent of clickbait. Some of the budget math looks, even to progressives, a bit questionable, and it’s not clear, for all the talk of economic injustice, whether the party really means it.