This piece appeared in the Summer 2026 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!
Launched in April 2022 against the backdrop of Jair Bolsonaro’s reelection bid in Brazil and the improbable rise of Javier Milei in Argentina, Crazy Ass Moments in LatAm Politics (@AssLatAm) is an account on X that offers “a catalogue of eccentric political moments of the world’s wackiest yet peaceful region.” Rather than circulating inflammatory memes from third-party trolls, the account harvests and recirculates zany videos posted by politicians themselves—social media clapbacks, cringe memes, campaign stump speeches, kitschy political paraphernalia—turning official political performance into a compendium of contemporary politics in Latin America. In doing so, the account transforms viral absurdity into a vernacular historical record.
In a region where the line between statecraft and surrealist theater has always been thin, I situate the tactics of @AssLatAm within the traditions of the compilation or appropriation film, a longstanding documentary genre that repurposes preexisting footage. Documentary film scholar Jaimie Baron argues that appropriation film produces an “archive effect,” a sense of textual difference that offers the possibility of critique and allows the viewer to recognize that political contexts are neither permanent nor universal. By applying these documentary devices to social media fragments, @AssLatAm turns viral “crazy moments” into archival documents and performs a kind of digital historiography.
The power of this archive lies in its simplicity. Consider a recent entry featuring María Corina Machado, a leading figure in the Venezuelan opposition. In the thread, Machado appears in January 2026 presenting her Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump. On mainstream news, these images were presented as an earnest diplomatic gesture or standard propaganda; when placed within @AssLatAm’s catalogue, however, their valence shifts. The account doesn’t need to remix the image or add a snarky caption to make it a meme. Instead, by simply saving the moment for posterity alongside other eccentric events, it strips the images of their original intent. The result is a form of political detournement: the act of archiving itself reconfigures the meaning of the event, turning a calculated photo-op into an indictment within a vernacular record.
The @AssLatAm account therefore addresses an urgent question: how do we document the far right in an age of misinformation? And how can a digital catalogue provide a “sense of history” in Web 2.0, the current iteration of the internet characterized by user-generated content and participatory platforms? In an attention economy where engagement is often prioritized over veracity—essential for the rise of the far right—the stakes are nothing less than the survival of a public record against platform-engineered amnesia that threatens to dissolve political accountability. In this light, the account acts as a model of counter-archiving. It stands in opposition to the social network as an (an)archive, a space where platforms like X increasingly assume the role of the new archon of public memory while remaining unarchivable by design. Drawing on Situationist experiments in audiovisual appropriation that undermine the power of mass culture, @AssLatAm offers a ludic reflection on the archive as a site of administrative display. By using the irreverent humor that marks regional political performance, the account transforms viral trash into a standing ledger of political “receipts.”
A Shared Sense of History
The practice of treating viral trash as historical evidence becomes even more significant in the age of misinformation when the politics themselves are faked. A prime example from the catalogue is a Truth Social post shared by Donald Trump, featuring a clumsily altered Wikipedia page listing him as the “Acting President of Venezuela.” While the president’s post was real, the Wikipedia image was a fake that never actually existed on the site. This intersection of a “real” post and a “fake” image yields a series of key insights about the function of the digital catalogue in our networked age. First, the catalogue acts as a tool for satire not through digital alteration, but through appropriation. The use of appropriation marks a significant departure from the “remix” logic of contemporary meme culture. While memes typically rely on the digital tools of Web 2.0—mimicry, alteration, and transformation—to guide viewer interpretation, the audiovisual appropriations of the @AssLatAm account depend on irony and an awareness of a double meaning—and double timing—born from the misuse of an artifact.
The concept of double timing emerges from the tension between what literary scholar Alan Liu calls “timing” and “time” within the digital network. The first “timing” is the native logic of the Twitter feed, a “just-in-time” delivery system characterized by “swarm-timed” phenomena like trending topics and viral rage-bait; the second “timing” is the duration reintroduced by the catalogue. Double timing occurs when the scrolling user experiences a wrinkle in their timeline. This dual temporality prevents these crazy ass moments from vanishing in the refreshed feed and allows the account to function as a ledger of the “receipts” of politicians’ digital ephemera. The account also operates as a device to make sense of the epistemic instability of modern media, where the line between real events and AI slop or hoaxes is increasingly blurred.
The account operates as a device to make sense of the epistemic instability of modern media, where the line between real events and AI slop or hoaxes is increasingly blurred.
Most importantly, the account creates what Liu calls “a sense of history,” a sociality within Web 2.0 that is neither atomized nor individuated. The account does more than just curate a gallery of the absurd; it invites the public to help build it. Through the affordances of the platform, @AssLatAm turns the passive act of scrolling into a collective exercise in record-keeping, and transforms the audience from mere spectators into a community of historians for the digital age. The account’s followers shape the collective identity of the catalog in multiple ways: they like and retweet its transgressive scraps, vote in polls, and even contribute to the catalog by providing examples gleaned from their own timelines. By asking its more than 120,000 users to weigh in, the account creates a shared sense of history, where the people get to decide which moments are worth remembering and become a more self-conscious public assembled through collective participation.
@AssLatAm represents a project of digital historiography that moves beyond mere satire to propose a new methodology of deep play—a counter-archival practice for preserving the present. It does so by remediating the catalogue form through montage, transforming digital fragments into political “receipts,” and mobilizing networked participation to build a counter-archive that resists the engineered amnesia of the digital age.
Web 2.0 Documentary: Thread as Topos
“Crazy Ass Moments in Latin American Politics” revives the old media genre of the catalogue to solve a distinctly modern problem: the amnesic nature of the digital timeline. The account’s power comes from the modern Twitter thread (or its TikTok analog, the stitch), a communicative form native to Web 2.0 platforms. Following Liu, who argues that digital conventions such as hashtags, retweets, trackbacks, and blogrolls function as metaphorical commonplaces, or topoi, where people gather for “micro-moments of common-network community,” I suggest that the Twitter thread as topos is both a technical function and a site of sociality. In a digital ecosystem where news vanishes into a black hole the moment you refresh your screen, the thread in @AssLatAm acts as a montage device of interruption that forces a chaotic feed into a coherent, durational narrative.
@AssLatAm represents a project of digital historiography that moves beyond mere satire to propose a new methodology of deep play—a counter-archival practice for preserving the present.
A prime example is the account’s 2025 Year-in-Review survey, which compiled a list of the year’s “eight craziest politicians.” The photographs in the thread are drawn from a variety of contexts, highlighting how different media forms are used to construct regional political theater. Some images, like those of Corina Machado gifting her Nobel Prize to Trump, are culled from television and regional press. Whether it’s Maduro dancing on state television or Peru’s former President Dina Boluarte showing off her luxury watches, the inclusion of legacy media content in a satirical catalogue places ostensibly value-neutral artifacts alongside one another to reconfigure their meaning. These broadcast moments are stripped of their original institutional gravity and allowed to indict themselves simply by being archived. Other images are appropriated directly from social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter, including a morbid photo of Bolsonaro with tubes, drains, and abdominal scars following surgery, posted while in the ICU, as well as meme-derived content like Perú’s now-former President José Jerí recast as the horndog Glenn Quagmire from Family Guy after being caught following pornographic accounts on Twitter. In doing so, the account turns politicians’ own social media performances into documented specimens of regional absurdity.
By rerouting existing meanings to turn artifacts against themselves, this “catalogue of eccentric political moments” both recalls the practices of détournement associated with the Situationist International and extends the logic of the 19th-century catalogue into the digital present. The catalogue emerged as a print technology designed to help readers manage the confusing surfeit of texts. Media historian Lisa Gitelman explains that these blank books—such as ledgers, bank-books, and registers—were fundamentally preservative forms that structured writing through the repetition of certain kinds of inscriptions. @AssLatAm acts as a digital version of this architecture, repurposing the devices of this older mode to transform ephemeral digital media into a searchable historical record. Just as 19th-century readers struggled to manage a rising tide of cheap and disposable print, @AssLatAm acts as a digital gleaner within the constantly refreshed landscape of the Twitter timeline. In doing so, it molds and directs the users’ perception of regional politics by defining what counts as a moment worth saving for posterity. The tension between the old-media catalogue and the new-media thread reveals the account’s true function: a technique of “deep play” that hacks the social. @AssLatAm uses the thread as both a montage device and a topos of Web 2.0 documentary.
Documentary Audit: History as Receipts
In an era marked by the foundational evidentiary “rule of the Internet”—pics or it didn’t happen—@AssLatAm captures the informal ways that everyday people establish what is true. In this contemporary remediation of “seeing is believing,” the demand for visual proof or “receipts” has transitioned from a niche meme to a requirement for the very existence of a historical record. The refrain “show me the receipts” entered popular consciousness following a 2002 interview of Whitney Houston by Diane Sawyer, in which the singer responded to allegations of an expensive drug habit by famously retorting, “I want to see the receipts.” If our digital sense of history is increasingly made up of such receipts, then historiography itself begins to shift from a narrative of progress toward a continuous audit.
Rather than a top-down inspection, this cataloging of regional “crazy moments” functions as a process of gaining collective literacy and accountability.
As film and media scholar Pooja Rangan notes, documentary forms have long been harnessed in neocolonial projects that involve auditing—vetting, surveying, appraising, and analyzing—the “chaos and unruliness” of non-Western modes of organization. As Rangan notes in her book The Documentary Audit: Listening and the Limits of Accountability, the audit functions as a device of biopolitical control in a range of institutional domains, “from linguistic profiling to retrofitted accommodations and juridical listening” that make contents perceptible and manipulable. Historically, the audit served as a state mechanism for extracting revenue and profit from land and labor under circumstances of mutual mistrust. The power of @AssLatAm, however, lies in its potential to perform an audit otherwise. Rather than a top-down inspection, this cataloging of regional “crazy moments” functions as a process of gaining collective literacy and accountability. By turning the fleeting “shitpost” into a permanent political “receipt,” @AssLatAm operates as a digital ledger, a mnemonic and preservative apparatus that allows the public to know and make itself legible to itself.
This practice is particularly meaningful in Latin America, where official state narratives have historically been used to paper over political repression. When the account archives a leader’s contradictory tweet or a bizarre, televised outburst, it is performing a digital version of “show me the receipts.” For instance, in November 2025, the account posted an itemized receipt revealing that during a diplomatic trip to Portugal, Colombian President Gustavo Petro allegedly visited a strip club. Such a post provides an example of how the account uses literal receipts to anchor political reality. Instead of the epistemic instability often blamed on social media, this archive fosters a new kind of networked memory. By treating digital ephemera as historical artifacts, @AssLatAm empowers its audience to act as grassroots historians. It shifts the focus from the speed of the news to the weight of the record. These receipts ensure that the surreal theater of the present remains available for a more sober, collective reckoning.
One of @AssLatAm’s primary tactics for reclaiming the record is the recirculation of old footage, such as the 2015 video of former Peruvian Interior Minister Daniel Urresti performing a rap against then-President Alan García. In the clip, Urresti offers a wooden interpretation of a clumsy diss track: “no le gusta que le digan que es un gran tramposo / pero todos se dan cuenta que es un feo mentiroso” (“He hates being called a big-time cheat / but everyone can see he’s a lying creep”). The video is a chaotic mess of jump cuts and jerky movements, featuring the politician green-screened into urban spaces alongside a sometimes-shirtless male go-go dancer in military gear. While this could be dismissed as simple social media poaching, the account transforms this cringeworthy campaign relic into a permanent political receipt within a vernacular historical record, one organized around the logic of the collective audit rather than the imperatives of grand narratives.
The archive does more than return to the blunders of the past. It captures the “smoking gun” evidence of present-day gaffes. An amusing example is the February 2026 video of Ecuadorian Congressman Jorge Chamba, who attempted to use a hand-drawn picture of himself as an avatar during a virtual session of the National Assembly. By pinning this moment, @AssLatAm exposes the congressman’s clumsy attempt at identity deception. In doing so, the account denounces, satirizes, and audits the integrity of the state. It deflates the powerful by highlighting the absurdity of their digital maneuvers and ensures that this evidence of a real presence being verified by a fake image isn’t forgotten once the news cycle refreshes.
The mission of @AssLatAm takes on a new urgency with the rise of “slopulism,” the recently coined portmanteau that merges the concepts of slop (low-effort or junk digital content) and populism to describe the flood of political content produced by YouTubers and influencers. Argentina’s Milei is an emblematic user of this technology, frequently deploying AI-generated imagery to construct a superhero persona that transcends traditional political reality. In one archived tweet, Milei appears in an AI-generated comic strip battling a Godzilla-like “inflation kaiju” in a boxing ring, landing an uppercut on a monster made of greenbacks. Shortly after, Milei produced a video featuring General Ancap, an anarcho-capitalist superhero alter ego he cosplayed in 2019. In this recent video, Milei’s cartoon fantasy flies over crowds in Buenos Aires, juxtaposed with real footage of Milei announcing massive federal cuts. To combat this slop, @AssLatAm serves as an anchor, fixing these moments where the line between a leader’s real actions and their AI-generated fantasies is blurred. @AssLatAm offers a bottom-up tool for producing a collective historical record that makes sense of political madness by refusing to let the receipts of incompetence and absurdity go unchallenged.
Networked Solidarity in the Age of Amnesia
As Liu suggests, a true “sense of history” is rooted in human sociality. History is always for some-one; it is a felt relation between individuals and the public. For a historical record to mean anything, it must be bonded to a collective identity where “attachment through social bonds becomes distributed in time.” @AssLatAm facilitates this by building a com- munity that refuses to let political absurdity vanish into the digital ether.
This requisite sociality is frequently manifested through meme culture. Memes are fundamentally about circulation, imitation, and transformation, creating a shared cultural experience that allows strangers to cohere into a social entity through the catalogue. In these ways, the platform’s architecture facilitates collective sense-making.
The @AssLatAm catalogue offers a critical audit of how contemporary power communicates in a digital age defined by reflexive interaction with a common text. By archiving these official posts, the catalogue demonstrates how governing entities attempt to hijack the currency of digital culture to bridge the gap with participatory online collectives. A recent example is a tweet from the Mexican National Action Party (PAN), which utilized a meme from the global hit anime Jujutsu Kaisen (JJK). The image features a PAN figure rendered with the silvery hair of the iconic character Satoru Gojo, pitted against former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). The PAN figure is otherwise non- descript, so that the meme is less an endorsement of a party leader than a play for the attention of a participatory online collective. Rather than advocating for a platform, this memetic gesture represents a grab for digital currency that weaponizes popular culture to harvest engagement without the burden of a policy position.
The account moves beyond mere circulation to leverage the specific affordances of the platform to build its historical sense. Simple actions like liking, reposting, or “friending” are not just technical inter- actions; they are acts of collective sense-making. This collective sense-making is most visible in the account’s end-of-year survey discussed earlier. In early 2026, @AssLatAm produced a bracket to organize matchups between the year’s most “eccentric” moments, subjecting each to a user poll. These match- ups transform passive viewers into active participants, creating a shared identity through debate. When users choose between Petro’s alleged strip club visit and Milei’s promotion of a memecoin scam, they are participating in a collective historical performance. By operationalizing sociality through the poll, the account reimagines history as networked connectivity and allows the audience to shape the mission of unarchivability. While the politicians featured in these clips—frequently right-wing figures deploying trollish, adversarial rhetoric—depend on the just-in-time timeline to generate fleeting rage-bait, the archive performs a strategic détournement. @AssLatAm transforms ephemeral “media fuckery” into a ludic documentary archive by remediating this chaotic data and stitching together transgressive scraps into curated threads. Ultimately, the stakes of this practice reach far beyond internet satire. By preserving these fragments as political “receipts,” the account builds a shared record of the present that resists disappearance into the feed. In an era of epistemic instability and manufactured slopulism, @AssLatAm fosters a collective historical sociality, suggesting that even when the line between statecraft and surrealist theater vanishes, we can still build a vernacular record that makes sense of the madness.
Nilo Couret is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. His book Mock Classicism: Latin American Film Comedy, 1930-1960 (University of California Press, 2018) traces the popularity and cultural significance of film comedies from the transition to sound through the industrial studio period. His research contends that comedy registers the experience and crisis of valuation through sensory and narrative forms.