The FIFA World Cup has come back to America, and with it have come stars such as Arriaga, Arriaga 2, Barriaga, Aruglia, and Pizzoza. One unexpected star to emerge from the games didn’t gain acclaim by setting foot on the pitch, but by documenting his journey around the country and into Canada on X. Now FreddyLA7, as he was known, has been bullied off the platform, leaving fans yearning for his wholesome content.
He went to Bucc-ee’s. He visited Taco Bell. He was invited to the White House. He toured the NASA Space Center in Houston and enjoyed treats in his room at the Post Oak Hotel supplied by J.J. Watt. He attended an Ella Langley concert and was invited backstage to meet the musician. He did all this anonymously, using a picture of soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo to obscure his own face in photos.
Naturally, this resulted in him being labeled a CIA plant being used to drum up patriotic fervor. Seriously. This is why we can’t have nice things. A young German man comes to America, tours the South, and shares his wonder at the splendor the region has to offer, and the response is to label him a psy-op.
Ethan Strauss, writing on his Substack “House of Strauss,” gets to the most plausible reason for Freddy’s anonymity: Germans are famously private when it comes to the internet. From an article on “Deutsche Welle” that Strauss also highlighted, we learn:
“For me it’s not so much about Facebook finding information about me, because I’m already signed up with a dummy email address,” 34-year-old “Isa Belle,” a German teacher from Cologne, tells me over Telegram, asking that her full name not be used, as she is currently teaching a course of several dozen participants.
“It’s because I don’t want my students to find me on these platforms, stalk me in any way, or even for future employers,” she explains. “I just want to make it a bit more difficult for people to trace me and get a window into my personal life.”
Given that Freddy was doing a whole lot of documenting, it stands to reason that he would hide his identity rather than be CIA. To disparage the government, we couldn’t even pull off an America250 concert with Milli Vanilli and Bret Michaels, but, sure, we created a social media star to make people feel patriotic about Bucc-ee’s. Which is not to disparage Bucc-ee’s. If the government were run as efficiently as those gas station mini malls, we’d be sitting pretty instead of electing communists.
Now, though, we have no more Freddy on X. No longer shall we be treated to his delight and joy at the things he discovered along the way. No longer can we see people in positions of power work to aid him and his compatriots in their quests to see the various matches, a quest that continues even with Germany’s defeat.
It’s not that he was anonymous or a psy-op, it’s that the internet hates positivity. We, users, can claim that we want less vitriol, less ragebait, less doomscrolling, but the attention economy rewards what gets attention, and people like Freddy, if that is his real name!, don’t normally get that much attention.
And now he’s gone back into the ether from which he emerged. Except, he’s actually not gone. Though he hasn’t done much with the account yet, you can find him on Instagram as Freddyla77. Hopefully, there he will return to sharing his wanderlust, a word originating from German, incidentally, and avoid the slings and arrows of morons who want to accuse him of being a plant. As we approach the 250th birthday of this beautiful country, we need a fresh set of eyes reminding us that this is the greatest, most hospitable, most prosperous, and most air-conditioned country on the planet. God bless Freddy, and God bless the United States.
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Rich Cromwell is a writer living in Northwest Arkansas. He produces the Cookin’ Up a Story podcast, which you can listen to here. You can also follow him on X: @rcromwell4
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