Category: Viral

For the last few years, Greta Thunberg has been the face of teenagers begging the world to save them from climate change. In her speeches, she’s righteously angry. But it’s not as though she doesn’t have a sense of humor. During the chill week between Christmas and New Year’s, she found herself targeted by prominent misogynistic moron Andrew Tate. Her witty response was so powerful that it didn’t just humiliate him — it might have led to him getting thrown in the clink.

As per The Daily Beast, Romania’s Directorate for the Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) confirmed in a statement that authorities had raided five homes tied to four suspects part of an investigation involving organized crime, human trafficking, and rape. Several local outlets identified two of those suspects as Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan. Their alleged crimes aren’t pretty:

DIICOT said at least six victims had come forward to allege they were trafficked by the two British citizens, and kept captive in houses surrounding Bucharest, where they were sexually assaulted and forced to produce pornography for social media under threats of physical violence.

Was it a coincidence that Tate was arrested a day after his Twitter scrape with Thunberg? In the inciting post, Tate, a former professional kickboxer, taunted Thunberg by asking for her email so he could brag about his 33 cars and all the carbon emissions they pumped into the atmosphere. Thunberg responded with what has already become one of the most popular tweets in Twitter history, sarcastically asking him to “enlighten” her, telling him to “email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.”

The exchange made Tate instantly go from semi-obscure MAGA clown to humiliated household name. He couldn’t let it lie, though, providing a response that managed to be both lame and, possibly, accidentally self-incriminating.

In a two-minute video, Tate, gleefully puffing on a cigar, tried to one-up her. He failed. Towards the end of the video, though, someone hands him two pizza boxes, which he jokingly said not to recycle. The boxes were from a place called Jerry’s Pizza, which eagle eyed sleuths could note is a Romanian chain. Back in April, Tate was arrested by Romanian authorities as part of a human trafficking investigation but were later released.

Details about the current investigation are still up in the air, but reports pointed out that the video, revealing that Tate was back in Romania, may have tipped authorities off to him being back in the country.

To sum up: Andrew Tate picked a fight with a teenage girl, said teenage girl torched him beyond recognition, and he responded in a way that may have gotten him busted.

As news of Tate’s arrest spread, many pointed out that one shouldn’t mess with Greta Thunberg, or today’s teenagers in general.

Others wondered if it was really the fault of Elon Musk, who included Tate among the many previously banned users whose accounts were recently restored.

Some gave credit to Jerry’s Pizza.

Or maybe, some argued, it’s Tate’s own damn fault.

There were jokes.

Anyway, the whole strange affair seems like an ideal way to end the surprisingly not terrible 2022.

(Via The Daily Beast)

In the age of social media, it’s easy for moms to feel bad about themselves. Given the “positivity bias” of social media, parents are much more likely to share idealized pictures of their families that make everyone else feel like they’re the only ones who don’t have it together.

A study published in “Computers in Human Behavior” found that being confronted with “idealized motherhood” can increase anxiety and put unnecessary pressure on your mental health.

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“And interestingly, it didn’t matter if the idealized portrayal was from a social media influencer [a “mommy influencer”] or an average Instagram user [an “everyday mom”],” the study’s author Dr. Ciera E. Kirkpatrick writes.

“Idealized content from either of these sources had the same negative effect—indicating that anyone putting out idealized motherhood content like this can have harmful effects on new moms. It’s not just a problem with influencers,” Dr. Kirkpatrick continues.

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One stay-at-home mom is doing her best to make everyone feel better about the chaos that comes with having children. TikTokker Emily Feret has earned over 1 million followers on the platform because of her videos that aim to “normalize being normal.”

In one of her posts, she shows you what a “normal” person’s fridge looks like. “You guys love these, I like to normalize being normal, life without the filter. So I’m gonna show you my fridge so you can feel better about yours,” Feret says in the video.

@emilyjeanne333

THE FRIDGE #WorthTheWait #normalizechaos #normalizenormal #messyhouse #fridgetour #normal #nofilter #pinterestmom #hotmessmom

In another video, she takes a walk through her house, “so you can feel better about yours.” On her journey, she encounters a washing machine that doesn’t work quite right, a bed that isn’t made properly and a massive stack of toilet paper she keeps in her hallway.

@emilyjeanne333

Reply to @magickaldust normalizing normalcy #normalizechaos #normalizenormal #normalizenormalcy #messyhouse #hotmessmom #nofilter #fyp

Feret also provides support for mothers who feel overwhelmed.

“The mess isn’t going to go anywhere. You have young kids. You’re at home all the time. You’re living in your home. It’s going to look lived-in, and that’s okay,” she said. “Your kids are little. Enjoy them. Love them.”

“I want you to know that you’re doing enough by doing exactly what you’re doing right now,” she added.

@emilyjeanne333

#stitch with @marandaarbo I don’t know you but I see you and I love you. Breathe mama #breatheinbreatheout #nornalizechaos #nornalizemess

Feret told Parents what inspired her to share her home life on TikTok.

“I was watching all these videos and seeing all these pictures on social media of these picture-perfect houses and ‘filtered lives,’ and it was making me feel bad about my life,” Feret told Parents. “I was not seeing any houses or moms that looked like me and my life. I wanted to show how my life is not at all like that and that you can be ‘normal’ and be doing a wonderful job even if your house is a mess and your kids are driving you crazy.”

Feret’s videos are clearly resonating with parents because she’s had over 38 million likes on TikTok. She can’t believe the success that she’s had being “normal” but is happy she can help mothers like herself.

“All I have ever wanted to do is to help other people. The response has been overwhelming. I have people sending me gifts and celebrities commenting on my posts. It’s incredibly surreal,” she told Motherly. “I wanted other moms, and really anyone out there, that if their life does not look like an Instagram post it doesn’t mean you aren’t doing well.”

Working remotely usually isn’t this hands on but two doulas in Buffalo had to get creative when a patient went into labor while trapped inside the house due to the historic blizzard. Davon and Erica Thompson found themselves in a peculiar situation when Erica went into labor on Christmas Eve.

Davon called 911 multiple times in an attempt to get assistance but the operator couldn’t send anyone out according to NBC News. But the baby was not going to wait until EMS was free. Erica’s contractions quickly jumped to just three minutes apart and Davon knew he was about to become a midwife.

Davon told the Buffalo News, “At that point, I was like: ‘This is going to be me. I’m going to have to put my big boy pants on and figure this out,’” so he reached out to a friend.

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With his friend’s help, Davon found a Facebook group that led them to Raymonda Reynolds, a doula – who then called Iva Michelle Blackburn, a doula and licensed practical nurse. Typically doulas don’t deliver babies, but are there to help the mother through the birthing process through coaching, massages and advocacy. But since they see a lot of birth, it’s not a surprise that if there’s no other option, one may be able to walk terrified parents through the process – like in a storm…a blizzard where the baby is coming regardless.

While doulas aren’t trained to deliver babies, most LPNs complete a rotation in labor and delivery and Blackburn told NBC that she has helped deliver more than 50 babies in a hospital. But needless to say, this was the first time she’d helped deliver a baby in the Metaverse.

By the time Blackburn began video chatting with the nervous dad, Reynolds already had him collect the supplies, boil water and get mom in the shower to take the edge off of her pain. Once Blackburn saw the soon-to-be-mom, she knew a baby was about to make their entrance. With a loud moan – it was go time.

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Davon was ready with towels to catch his daughter as Erica squatted to help the baby enter the world. Blackburn told NBC, “At first mom and dad looked like they were both in shock and the baby looked like she was in shock, too, because she was alert but not crying. But as soon as they picked her up, she started crying and we all started cheering.”

Devynn Brielle Thomas was caught by her dad and she weighed 6 pounds, 9 ounces and was 20 inches long. The family couldn’t make it to the hospital until the following day but everyone is healthy. And the person that drove them to the hospital in his truck, a real angel – Angel Lugo. Once the snow melts the Thompsons plan to meet the doulas in person but something tells me, they’ll be connected for life.

This just goes to show that while social media can have its downfalls – it truly is a connector of people when they need it most.

SZA got candid about some of the influences on her album in a recent interview with Rolling Stone’s Music Now podcast. The “Kill Bill” songstress revealed that she looked to pop-punk artists like Blink 182, Avril Lavigne, and more. To help her cultivate the sound she was looking for, the TDE singer says she turned to her friend and pop star Lizzo after a run-in while she recorded her latest album, S.O.S.

SZA revealed that she and the “About Damn Time” singer recorded at least “five or six songs” during the session. The long-time friends took turns freestyling over the beat that became “F2F,” which was initially titled “Charlatan,” said songwriter/producer Carter Lang who joined the singer during the interview.

“They were putting some energy into it,” he said. “That was the thing that I feel sparked SZA really taking it into her own world and figuring out how it can be part of her story in an authentic way and not like, ‘Hey, I just did a rock joint.’”

For SZA, the pairing made sense because she feels Lizzo “gets her,” and they “have so much together.”

“She’s another person who has hella [wide] music tastes and doesn’t fit in anybody’s box of anything,” the singer said. “She makes it seem like she doesn’t even care, like she just does whatever she wants. And I just love being with her, just as a friend and hanging out. So whenever she comes to a studio, I just feel like, ‘Let’s drop into some bullshi*t.’”

Lizzo is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Warning: This post contains some mild spoilers for a scene in Glass Onion that happens very early on and has already been widely reported.

On top of its copious twists and semi-accidental topicality, Glass Onion (we’ll leave off that subtitle that’s not even in the film itself) also boasts some genuinely decent cameos (plus one that’s not exactly a cameo). Some of them happen very early on, before most of the cast is sequestered to a far flung Mediterranean island. One of them is no less than Angela Lansbury, who appears as herself as part of a group Zoom call with Daniel Craig’s bathtub-bound Benoit Blanc. It’s a great, bittersweet get, especially considering the stage and screen legend passed away mere months before its release. But if you think the moment captured the real Lansbury, turns out she was just acting.

In a new piece by The New York Times, writer-director Rian Johnson revealed how he nabbed Lansbury and what it was like working with her on what would turn out to be her final (albeit very brief) screen performance. In the scene, she and a group — which also features the august trio of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Natasha Lyonne, and Stephen Sondheim — whiling away the quarantine era of the pandemic by playing the online mystery game Among Us.

“She couldn’t have been lovelier and more generous,” Johnson recalled, before adding, for posterity, “Not a gamer.” Johnson said she was “very patient” as he laboriously described how the game worked, at least “up to a point.” When she reached that point, Johnson remembered, “she just said, ‘You know what? Just tell me what the lines are. I’ll trust you.’”

The fact that Lansbury can be seen on a Zoom call with Sondheim is no accident: Lansbury played the conspirator Mrs. Lovett in the original Broadway production of Sondheim’s grisly Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Like Lansbury, Sondheim also made his final screen appearance in Glass Onion, and getting him was no easy feat, until it proved incredibly simple.

“I wasn’t really sure how to get to him,” Johnson’s producing partner Ram Bergman told NYT. “But then I was on a call with Bryan Lourd, our agent, and it somehow came up. I said, we really would love Stephen to do this. And I swear, five minutes later, he emailed me: he’s going to do it.” In fact, once they got Sondheim, he hooked them up with Lansbury.

The call itself was, alas, not real. For Lansbury, Johnson recorded it himself, at her home in Los Angeles, using his personal computer. But movies are magic, and so you can imagine that Daniel Craig really did Zoom chat with four legends at the same time, while in the bath tub.

Glass Onion can now be streamed on Netflix.

(Via NYT)

At a time when it can feel like America’s most pressing problems aren’t being addressed, there’s some very good news on the healthcare front that everyone should know. The percentage of Americans who are uninsured has hit the lowest point in American history.

A report from the Office of Health Policy earlier this year announced that the uninsured rate hit an all-time low of 8% in the first quarter of 2022. To give some perspective, in 2010, before the Affordable Care Act (ACAalso known as Obamacare) had been fully implemented, the uninsured rate was twice as high at 16%.

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To add to the drop in the number of uninsured, more Americans have purchased health insurance during the recent Open Enrollment Period through HealthCare.gov and state-based marketplaces than ever before.

“The historic 13.6 million people who have enrolled in a health insurance plan so far this period shows that the demand and need for affordable health care remains high,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement.

A major reason for the increase in healthcare coverage has been the American Rescue Plan’s enhanced marketplace subsidies, state Medicaid expansions and an increase in enrollment outreach by the current administration.

Approximately 5.2 million Americans have gained health coverage since 2020. The new numbers were cause for celebration at the White House.

“From November 1st to December 15th, nearly 11.5 million Americans signed up for insurance on HealthCare.gov—about 1.8 million more people, an 18 percent increase, over the same period last year,” President Biden said in a statement. “That’s an all-time record, with enrollment still open and not counting people who have signed up for coverage through their state marketplaces. Gains like these helped us drive down the uninsured rate to eight percent earlier this year, its lowest level in history.”

The drop in the uninsured rate is a great example of the benefits of smart policy-making in Washington. The ACA wasn’t the most popular piece of legislation when it was passed in 2010. Critics on the right demonized it as a state takeover of healthcare that would result in death panels, sky-high premiums and socialized medicine. Many on the far left thought that the ACA was bad policy because it stopped short of offering full coverage for everyone like Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All proposal.

But over time, the ACA has become a cornerstone in American healthcare policy that has changed the lives of millions. Former President Barack Obama knew it wasn’t perfect when it was passed, but he saw it as a strong foundation to build on. Now his Democratic predecessor has done just that and we’re seeing the results.

The American public has developed a much more favorable view of the ACA since the GOP’s 2017 crusade to “repeal and replace” the bill that failed in Congress. Now, 55% of Americans have a favorable opinion of the bill versus 42% who disapprove.

“I think it’s probably here to stay,” Republican senator John Cornyn recently told NBC News, referring to the ACA.

The numbers for healthcare sign-ups during this Open Enrollment Period are definitely encouraging but things may get even better. This year’s HealthCare.gov Open Enrollment Period has been extended until January 15, 2022

Donald Trump has shared more and wackier conspiracy theories than almost anyone alive. Sometimes they even get others in trouble. Where does he get his kooky ideas? For instance, what cynical doofus told him to exhume some long debunked nonsense about how Joe Scarborough may have murdered an aide? According to one of his turncoat former employees, he got that one from one of the biggest dorks in MAGA land.

As per Mediaite, Alyssa Farah Griffin — the Trump press secretary-turned-cast member of The View — told some wild tales in her deposition to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot. She spoke about the pure chaos of the former president’s administration. To illustrate this, she spoke about a time in 2020 when she spotted Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz hanging out in the West Wing. The latter was wielding a folder, and Griffin went up to him to ask what was inside.

And he pulls it out. It’s conspiracy theories about Joe Scarborough murdering his intern. And I said, “Please do not bring that into the West Wing — or to the Oval Office.” We were literally outside of the Outer Oval. And just — as I’m saying that — I said, You cannot put that in front of the President, he — he gets ushered in. And sure enough, within — by the next morning, the former President is tweeting wild conspiracy theories about a cable news host, you know, allegedly murdering his intern.

Said theory had already been torn apart back in 2017 by The Washington Post. It involved an incident that occurred all the way back in 2001 when a 28-year-old aide died in Scarborough’s office, back when he was a Florida representative, while he was far north in D.C. A coroner found no proof of foul play and everyone moved on.

After Trump and others revived this debunked silliness, the late aide’s widower begged then-Twitter honcho Jack Dorsey to delete them, saying they’d “perverted” the memory of his late wife for their own political gain.

Meanwhile, Gaetz, who’s still under investigation over alleged connections to a sex trafficking ring, has spent most of his energy lately being part of an inner MAGA circle beef between former besties Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, as well as accusing Democrats of being “Grinches” over Christmas — despite looking a bit like the Grinch himself.

(Via Mediaite)

Offset recently shared photos from a family vacation with his wife, Cardi B, and their children. In the pictures, the family can be seen “hitting the slopes” at Big SNOW American Dream, an indoor ski and snowboard center located inside New Jersey’s American Dream mall.

“The reason I gotta go hard,” the “Clout” rapper posted to Instagram on Wednesday, pictured with his 13-year-old son, Jordan, and his 15-month-old, Wave Set, his second, whom he shares with Cardi B.

Cardi B shared her own experience of the trip in an Instagram story, saying, “It’s bigger than I thought it was gonna be, oh my God. ”

The family has been vacationing all over recently. Last week, Offset posted photos from a trip to Jamaica for his 31st birthday, writing, “Happy birthday to me” in the caption. The rapper’s recent travels are presumably a nice escape from the grief he has been dealing with since the death of his Migos group mate and cousin, Takeoff.

“Dear Take, [it] doesn’t feel real posting you like this….This still doesn’t feel like reality,” he captioned an Instagram post this past November. “I’ve been searching for the right words to say, but there aren’t any that will suffice. Until we meet again, Rest In Power. I love you.”

Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Lil Wayne‘s love of skateboarding has finally come full circle — the New Orleans rapper is officially a professional skateboarder. The rapper has been skating for decades at a private skatepark but recently, Wayne received his first “pro model” board. Pro skaters Torey Pudwill, Keelan Dadd, and Yosef Ratleff joined him for the special occasion. The gift comes from Wayne’s videographer for Young Money Skate, Phil Lopez.

The board features a childhood photo of a rapper and some of Weezy’s favorite rap lyrics.

In a clip posted to YouTube, Wayne looked very surprised in the video, with a massive smile plastered across his face as he examined the custom skateboard. The rapper then took to Instagram to thank everyone for his gift, writing in the caption, “THANK YOU, GANG!”

“This was a Christmas gift, but I decided to turn it into a surprise because it would be more meaningful that way,” Lopez said in a video. “As Wayne’s videographer, I wanted to do something special for him that he’d remember. I approached Torey, owner of Thank You Skate Co., with the board design, and he was able to help execute the production process.”

But that’s not the only gift that Wayne has received this year. Earlier this year, Wayne received his first diamond plaque earlier this year in December after his 2008 hit “Lollipop” surpassed 10 million sales in the U.S.

Check out the full video of Wanye going pro above.

Victor Wembanyama might be the most tank-worthy prospect to enter the NBA since LeBron James. But in a recent interview with Le Parisien, Wembanyama, the 7’4 French prodigy who plies his trade for Metropolitans 92, spoke out against the act of tanking, calling the practice “weird.”

“Tanking? It’s a weird strategy,” Wembanyama said, per Basketnews. “I find it unreasonable, and I try not to think about it. I also heard that the NBA considered changing a few rules for me, but that doesn’t concern me.”

The sound you just heard is Adam Silver crying tears of joy. While he will not join the NBA until after next summer’s Draft, some of the biggest names in the league have started to praise Wembanyama’s upside, with Giannis Antetokounmpo saying he’s going to be a “big problem” and James calling him a “generational talent.” This was on display earlier this year, when Wembanyama got to showcase his skillset during a pair of games against the G League Ignite team which confirmed that we haven’t seen anyone quite like him.

Since those games in Las Vegas, Wembanyama has returned to France and dominated in the country’s top basketball league, LNB Pro A. Wembanyama, who turns 19 in January, is averaging 22.9 points, 9.6 rebounds, three blocks, and 2.3 assists in 32.1 minutes per game.