The War on Christmas looks a little different this year. It’s not holiday-themed Starbucks cups, or Judaism – no, this year it’s the supply chain, baby.
As part of my little #girlswhocode journey, I wanted to take a look at what people are saying about 1. THE SUPPLY CHAIN, 2. Christmas in general, and 3. How Joe Biden is ruining Christmas.
To do so, I pulled a few batches of tweets to get an idea of what people are saying. I pulled tweets from October 10 to October 15 concerning “supply chain AND christmas”, “supply chain AND biden”, “christmas AND biden”, and then “supply chain”, “christmas”, and “biden” just to get a feeling. I put them all in separate CSVs to look at granularly.
In total, there were over 129,829 tweets I was able to analyze from the 6 day period. Here is how they break down by search term:
- Supply chain AND Biden: 20835
- Christmas AND Biden: 10345
- Supply chain AND Christmas: 142
- Biden: 32925
- Christmas: 32676
- Supply chain: 32906
Based on that, I get the idea that the Christmas-supply chain problem being a problem at all is, well, is extraordinarily dependent on Biden being president. Below, we can take a look at the topic models all our little spreadsheets rendered us, and try to suss out what people are talking about.
Supply chain x Biden: Ah, yes, #EmptyShelvesJoe, the most evil man to ever take to the economy. The global pandemic? Never heard of her. It’s Joe Biden and his dastardly sidekick Pete Buttigieg single handedly doing a “crisis”-”inflation”-“disruption”-“crash” combo. I think it’s safe to say no one talking about Joe Biden and the supply chain problems are doing it in good faith.
Christmas x Biden: Looking up Christmas and Joe Biden together gives away the whole game: look at how often “supply chain”, “inflation”, “shortage”, and “expensive” show up. People talking about Christmas and Biden together are gabbing away about the supply chain. Of course, we expected that, but it’s interesting to see what larger trends are emerging. Is Biden making Halloween candy more expensive? Is he closing the ports so children can’t get their prezzies? Biden is “hurting_families” and “destroying” Christmas. Sad!
Supply chain x Christmas: Not too much going on here, though “problem” and “crisis” are a really nice touch.
Biden: “COVID”, “inflation”, and of course “crisis”, really let us know who is talking about Biden a lot. I mean, he’s the president, so he’s always a newsmaker, but crisis is a very specific word, and inflation is, well, usually used in a negative context.
Christmas: of course, we would expect mentions of “gifts” and cute sweaters, but we’re seeing a lot of discussion of “shortages” and “vaccines” as well. Incontrovertible proof that #EmptyShelvesJoe is the grinch, who also wants to jab you.
Supply chain: the word “meanwhile” makes an interesting appearance in our topic model; meanwhile, so does “paternity_leave” and “buttigieg_stay”. I’m thinking people are thinking the whole supply chain business would really sort itself out if Pete Buttigieg gave his baby back to the baby store and got back to business as *checks notes* Secretary of Transportation.
So that’s the general gist of what people are talking about. But who is talking about it? For funsies, I ran a network analysis of #EmptyShelvesJoe and #EmptyShelvesBiden to see what kind of people were posting about the Worst Christmas Ever. Here’s what that network looks like, and would you believe me if I told you it was just a bunch of total weirdos. Jack Posobiec, Punisher icon freaks, and Venezuela-understanderers.
Anyway, the nice thing about being stupid and broke is that I don’t need to know anything about a “supply chain.” And the nice thing about being Jewish is Christmas don’t mean much either.
Tata from me for now, I’ll let you know if I find anything else dumb on social media, but for now these will have to suffice.
Underwire 