Beyoncé, Gus Walz and the Proliferation of Misinformation
An analysis of two of the biggest headlines from the DNC, whether you’re still coconut-pilled or disillusioned by the circus.
The Liz Lemon “What a week, huh?” / Jack Donaghy “Lemon, it’s Wednesday” exchange has never felt more prescient. We could talk about Gwyneth Paltrow ordaining herself “so brat” or Chloë Sevigny unknowingly exposing the bonkers state of New York real estate or Sabrina Carpenter and Jenna Ortega’s hollow evocation of Death Becomes Her (has pop culture referencing pop culture become so ubiquitous that it’s not the serve it once was?) or Quentin Tarantino saying the Toy Story trilogy is so perfect that he’ll never watch Toy Story 4 or Katy Perry tweeting, “They say I do it for the male gaze but the truth is I do it for the MALE GAYSSSS,” but we have more important matters to attend to. I thought about making this week’s piece “Meme-ing the DNC,” talking about my experience making something that’s often clinical and stuffy and giving it the same lens as, say, the Oscars. But something about centering myself (once again!) felt more indulgent than interesting, so I thought it a better use of our time to post-mortem on what I feel are the two biggest takeaways from the DNC: Beyoncé (or the lack thereof) and Gus Walz.
Let’s start with the Beyoncé of it all, as I think there’s a large implication to her non-appearance. Misinformation as a concept is sadly nothing new. But lately, I’ve noticed an uptick in misinformation going unchecked. After “empty bean bag slew-footed swayed back shell-less turtle of a woman,” Ann Coulter tweeted something so disgusting even she felt compelled to delete it — a fake tweet of Tim Walz’s:
This blew up, getting hundreds of thousands of “likes,” with few being able to discern that it was not real. That’s an example of something I see happening more and more — and something I expect will uptick as time goes on, fakery becomes more accessible and people become less discerning in their media vetting.
But back to Beyoncé. It began mid-day on Thursday, in the hours leading up to the final evening of the DNC. 12:07pm: An account called @gayguycandleco (sounds reputable enough, I jest) tweets:
“DNC News: According to CNN’s Jamie Gangel, there is a block in the schedule tonight and what will occupy that block is only known by a very small group of planners.”
(The mystery programming gap was “likely just a brief break to rearrange the stage,” it was later revealed.)
A half hour later, another blue check account tweeted:
Within an hour, CNN anchor Brianna Keilar was on air announcing that folks were “buzzing” about Beyoncé as they “pregame” for the convention.
But this isn’t the story of an ordinary rumor. It’s, according to the Washington Post, “an extraordinary one that managed to break free from the social media fever swamps and piggyback on the national news cycles for hours.” How? It began at 3:37pm, with White House Political Director Emmy Ruiz tweeting a bee emoji (she later recanted, saying her 6-year-old had mistakenly sent out the tweet). Many were quick to link the earlier announcements, which by this point had proliferated and ricocheted through Twitter and infiltrated other social media platforms, to this mysterious bee tweet, and all but confirmed for many that Beyoncé was set to take the stage… It wasn’t an entirely crazy thought pattern, seeing as Beyoncé had permitted the Harris campaign to use her song “Freedom” during public appearances and within ads. Also, the DNC had been rife with performers throughout, so the promise of a big finish wasn’t asinine. The moment went from back burner to high heat at 7:49pm, when TMZ, a trusted source despite its bar for what qualifies as news being quite low, confirmed the earlier reports.
Of course, everyone was wrong. “I don’t think anyone really knew what was happening,” Phil Lewis, my former Mic.com co-worker and now a deputy editor at HuffPost, told The Washington Post.
“It more so felt like just hope. Hope and vibes.”
It’s a sad state of affairs when a rumor, conjured from thin air (Beyoncé’s team stated that not only was she not coming, she was never scheduled to be there), can permeate the fiending hyenas of stan Twitter and make its way to reputable news outlets like CNN. It certainly put a damper on the final act of the DNC, which had built momentum each night and then failed to launch entirely on Night 4 without any rousing speeches (Leon Panetta, former Secretary of Defense, was a notable low) or meme-able moments. Any hopes that Pink would fly through the United Center in Chicago were left as that; hope and vibes.
Now, there was another moment, one that’s been overtaken by the news cycle around the reaction to it, when really we ought to focus more on the moment itself, and that of course is the star-is-born moment for Tim Walz’s son, Gus. If a pervasive talking point has been “nobody really knows Kamala,” an even more commonly shared one was “nobody really knows Tim Walz.” The latter proclamation has some more heft considering that it was only weeks ago that Walz went from being the governor of the 22nd-most populated state in the United States to the Democratic nominee for Vice President. With his meteoric rise to the public consciousness has also been his wife’s, poised to be the nation’s next Second Lady, who delivered one of my top 10 DNC moments when she leaned forward, then leaned back and raised her hands in the air after Barack Obama joked about her husband’s flannel shirts. It evoked one of my favorite GIFs: Meryl Streep pointing in admiration and agreement during Patricia Arquette’s 2015 Oscar speech.
And then there are his kids. I first became aware of Hope Walz because of the now-viral video from the 2023 Minnesota State Fair in which Tim asks his daughter if she’ll be having a corn dog. “I’m vegetarian,” she reminds him. “Turkey then,” he suggests. “Turkey’s meat,” she counters. “Not in Minnesota,” he fires back. “Turkey’s special.” Rather than disagree, she mouths the words “right” and lets out a soft chuckle, giving the impression that this is classic “Dad just being Dad.” She’s not embarrassed or combative, nor does she think it’s hilarious. Instead, it gives the sense of a father and a daughter who have spent a lot of time together and know each other’s rhythms.
Walz’s 17-year-old son, Gus, was someone I had never seen, much less heard of, until the DNC. (It wasn’t until after the fact that I read the People Mag exclusive that Tim and Gwen had given earlier that week, opening up about Gus’s non-verbal learning disorder, ADHD and anxiety — all of which they called his "secret power.”) When the camera first cut to the Walz family after Tim took the stage on Night 3, we all watched as the family appeared visibly emotional at the sight of their husband/father. Makes sense, given that it’s an emotional moment. About six minutes into the speech, Walz gave his now-signature “mind your own damn business” to the roaring crowd. His family stood up and applauded.
Then he detoured from the now-familiar.
“And that includes IVF treatments. And this is personal for Gwen and I. If you’ve never experienced the hell that is infertility, I guarantee you, you know somebody who has. I can remember praying each night for a phone call. The pit in your stomach when the phone would ring, and the absolute agony when we heard the treatments hadn’t worked. It took Gwen and I years, but we had access to fertility treatments. And when our daughter was born, we named her Hope.”
The camera switched over to Hope who gave the “heart hands” symbol. Tim buttoned the moment by adding:
“Hope, Gus and Gwen, you are my entire world, and I love you.”
At that point, the camera switched over to Gus. Overcome with emotion, he rose out of his seat, tears streaming down his face. He clapped along with the crowd, before placing his right hand over his heart and pointing his left hand up at his dad. He nodded some more, emphatically. Then began clapping again. Then, he pointed back up at him and let out three words that, for me, usurped the dazzling spectacle of every moment that preceded it:
“That’s my dad.”
He looked down at Gwen and back at the crowd behind him as though to reaffirm it.
“That is the clip-and-save moment that everyone is going to be seeing,” CNN’s Dana Bash remarked.
“If you didn’t get moved by that moment, I don’t even know. What a remarkable moment, just in American life.”
Kate Bedingfield, a former White House communications director, tweeted:
“I love Gus Walz,” Jen Psaki, a former White House press secretary said on MSNBC.
“I’m going to start ugly crying just talking about him.”
Even Fox News hosts Martha MacCallum and Dana Perino couldn’t deny the power of the moment.
We were quick to move on, as has become the now-accepted norm, but I can’t help but still be thinking about this moment. It will, of course, be the center image for my fifth-annual “Burned In The Brain” images list. It’s that immediately indelible. And that’s part of it, for me. Both the image and the words are so separately earth-shakingly powerful that, when combined, the force feels almost debilitating in its purity and rawness. There’s a quote I think of often. It’s from Joss Whedon’s Serenity. “Have you looked at this scan carefully? At his face?” an operative asks the doctor. The doctor stares at the scan of two siblings. “It's love, in point of fact.” In other words, from a gaze alone, the love was visible, palpable, understood.
We can argue about the theatrics of the DNC: smokeshow, political propaganda, dystopian distraction, effective storytelling or remarkable pep rally. We can talk about the speeches that lit the room on fire and which amongst those will go down in the history books. We can talk about the effectiveness of celebrities in political spaces. We can talk about the deployment of social media creators, and the content they put out in tandem with the typical punditry. We can talk about the memes, and whether they’re effective messaging surrogates or if they oversimplify the message. Sure, yes, we can do all of this. But before all that, I’m simply not ready to move on from Gus. I don’t have some brilliant insight to share that wasn’t evident from the clip. Because it’s all there. A father’s love for his son — and that son’s love for his father. There’s also pride, admiration and awe. And it feels shared. And it feels like it’s theirs. It’s at once precious, but also contagious. It’s a powerful thing.
The world is better with men like Tim and boys like Gus in it. And perhaps the world can be better, with examples of men like Tim and boys like Gus in the White House.
I think that Gus and his dad are especially heartwarming for those of us who had *that Dad* and they are no longer here. The waterworks started (and are starting as I write this) when I immediately thought of my Dad and how I would have been crying and telling the world he was mine.
It became very clear who never had *that Dad* and I really feel sorry for them.