I Calculated the Speed of This Year’s Twitter Milkshake Ducks so You Don’t Have To
By now, you’re probably aware of (and maybe tired of) the term “milkshake duck.” The premise is simple: somebody becomes Twitter’s “main character” after a viral tweet thrusts them into the spotlight, then as quick as they’ve risen, they fall. Why? Because every single time, pretty much without fail, a name search of the person plus whatever slur you can think of lights up with all the racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, and any other kind of bigotry you could imagine. Put simply, milkshake ducking is the art of fifteen minutes of fame becoming one Twitter news cycle’s worth of infamy. Fifteen minutes of fame is barely an exaggeration either: every “main character” this year had less than 48 hours before being milkshake ducked. Seriously, I did math for this. Here are my calculations.
January’s main character hit a grand slam of slurs. In case you’ve forgotten because Twitter memes move so damn fast, let’s all take a fond look back at Bean Dad, aka John Roderick, a musician who posted an incredibly long thread about denying his 9-year-old daughter lunch until she could figure out how to open a can of beans. The infamous thread was originally posted on January 2nd at 1:32 pm; though it was pretty swiftly deleted, Twitter user @ManiacalV captured it all in screenshots. Did leaving his daughter make Roderick a bad parent? Well, sure, but less because of the bean thing and more because of the antisemitism, racism, homophobia, and ableism thing. Seriously, all of them. The original thread was originally posted on January 2nd at 1:32 pm; though it has since been deleted, Twitter user @ManiacalV captured it all in screenshots. It’s hard to trace the exact time at which people discovered Roderick’s atrocious past bigotry, but the oldest tweet I could find referencing Roderick’s antisemitism was this tweet posted by user @Kaiju_Stew on January 3rd at 1:57 pm.
Bean Dad approximate time til milkshake ducked: 22 hours and 15 minutes.
For the next month or so, Twitter’s main character was everyone at the capitol insurrection, who were beyond milkshake ducking on account of the whole “openly Nazis” thing. Then, February’s main character arrived: Texas attorney Rod Ponton was unable to remove a cat filter from his Zoom while in court and swore that, no, he was not really a cat. It was originally posted on February 9th to the 394th District Court of Texas’s YouTube account, earning over 10 million views. It then entered the Twitterverse via Judge Roy Ferguson re-posting the video on February 9th at 1:06 pm. Then, before “I am not a cat” could become some sort of Etsy t-shirt or something, it came out that he led a “yearslong effort to level bogus drug charges against [Ilana Lipsen],” a woman he had allegedly once been sexually involved with. He even went so far as to have her mother arrested. Speaking to Insider.com, Lipsen said, “I literally had to reinvent myself… he did stalk me.” She also says that the incident gave her severe PTSD. It’s hard to pin how fast this information came to light since its source is an article that certainly took more time to write than it would have taken someone to out his alleged abuse in a quick tweet. Assuming the article is officially the time of Lawyer Cat’s milkshake ducking, the article was published on February 10th at 9:54 am.
Lawyer Cat approximate time til milkshake ducked: 20 hours and 48 minutes.
Last but not least (until the next main character shows up): Shrimp Toast Crunch Guy, real name Jensen Karp. The people who knew his name mostly knew it from him being married to Danielle Fishel, forever known as Topanga from Boy Meets World. When trying to figure out what he actually does, Wikipedia told me he’s “a producer, writer, actor, podcaster, gallerist, and former rapper [named Hot Karl.]” So basically, rich guy in television afforded any opportunity he wants. We don’t even have time to get into the Hot Karl thing. Anyway, on March 22nd at 1:32 pm, Karp took to Twitter to ask the brand account for Cinnamon Toast Crunch why there were shrimp tails in his cereal. Lucky for Cinnamon Toast Crunch, they really only had to do a day’s worth of damage control before Karp himself became the damage: he was outed as an alleged abuser in a tweet by writer Melissa Stetten. After posting, Stetten also said that other women had contacted her privately with their own allegations of abuse against Karp. Her tweet, posted March 24th at 11:18 am, immediately halted his Twitter saga.
Shrimp Toast Crunch Guy approximate time til milkshake ducked: 45 hours and 26 minutes.
May G-d have mercy on Twitter’s next main character. Enjoy your less-than-two-days of fame! Just watch out for the infamy.
