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@spitfirenews.com
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A newsletter from @kattenbarge.bsky.social about internet culture, politics, and media. Subscribe today for free!
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 11d
J.K. Rowling's anti-trans bigotry and the alt-right pipeline she's personified require her to undermine and perpetuate real misogyny, so she's browbeating a woman almost half her age who has already been subjected to plenty of sexual violence for playing Hermione
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J.K. Rowling is wrong about Emma Watson
Anti-trans activism covers up the reality of gender-based violence.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 18d
State-sanctioned abuse and control of pregnant people is never acceptable, and Trump lying about pain relief and autism is another step toward eugenics as national policy. This is not, contrary to what Ezra Klein thinks, the time to capitulate
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Restricting women's healthcare isn't a game
Trump's Tylenol announcement, like anti-abortion policy, is a matter of life and death.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 22d
Not enough people are paying attention to a major target for Brendan Carr and the Trump admin’s crackdown on free speech: social media. It’s under bipartisan attack, even though it’s a crucial forum for reaching the public and fighting back.
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Is anyone going to defend free speech online?
Government censorship on social media is already here. But it can get so much worse.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 26d
Mainstream institutions, including some of the biggest news outlets, have rushed to sacrifice their journalists and the meaning of words like "debate" to placate the people behind clickbait YouTube videos with titles about woke libs and Karens
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Mainstream media surrenders to conservative influencers
Charlie Kirk didn't fight for unity. He fought to silence the truth.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 29d
Since Charlie Kirk was fatally shot, people on the left have been censored, punished, and targeted with more violence for telling the truth about Kirk's legacy. The cycle continues: mainstream whitewashing of violence begets more violence and the victims are blamed.
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The national gaslighting about Charlie Kirk
Another pattern of censorship that only hurts the left—and emboldens political violence.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · Sep 2
For @spitfirenews.com, I wrote about how the social media trend of hoping that Trump is dead or dying is linked to both his administration's deadly unraveling of rights and institutions and how hard it is for actual news about it to reach people over memes and vibes.
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The push alert everyone is dying to get
This administration wants Americans to die. The feeling is mutual.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · Aug 19
I wrote about how Harry Potter slop is inescapable and fueling JK Rowling’s anti-trans bigotry—but pushback seems to be growing, too. Case in point: I just opened Reddit and saw another reboot cast announcement, but most of the comments were about boycotting it spitfirenews.com/p/harry-pott...
Harry Potter and the Oversaturated Offensive Franchise
There's a growing fight against J.K. Rowling's anti-trans power source.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · Aug 8
I wrote about stunt influencer “Lil Tay” joining OnlyFans days after she turned 18, sparking calls to ban the platform. It’s a typical internet outrage cycle, fueled in part by the manosphere, that deflects from the real villains of misogyny and child exploitation.
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When a child star joins OnlyFans
The Lil Tay saga is intentionally hard to follow, making it perfect outrage fodder.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · Aug 1
I went to a ChatGPT press event and it was just as dystopian and manipulative as I had expected—but it showed me that a lot of media executives have fallen for OpenAI's ruse that this will help the industry when it's making everything (for everyone) worse
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An Afternoon of ChatGPT Propaganda for Journalists
A lot of mainstream media executives have taken OpenAI's bait.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · Jul 29
Pedro Pascal spoke up for trans rights and has been targeted with a smear campaign as a result. False allegations lobbed by TERFs have since become a meme and entered the YouTube podcast sphere—not unlike the previous anti-MeToo smear campaigns I’ve covered.
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The Pedro Pascal smear campaign
And sexual harassment allegations against a leftist influencer.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · Jul 22
The Nelk Boys are fratty podcast bros who helped get Trump elected with slobbering podcast interviews. Now they’re doing the same thing to Netanyahu. Their fans are furious, but this is the exact pseudo-journalistic podcast style they’ve helped grow into a monster.
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Podcast bros are doing war propaganda now
Netanyahu on the Nelk Boys is the logical conclusion of the right's podcast culture.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · Jul 14
The conservative obsession with Jeffrey Epstein isn’t about justice for his victims—it does the opposite, deflecting from their testimony and perpetuating conspiracies and myths about sex trafficking. One “Epstein Files” influencer even undermined one of his victims.
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Conservatives don't care about Epstein's victims
The QAnon-inspired panic is untethered from reality and justice.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · Jul 10
Here's an excerpt about the kind of hate comments I get from women for writing about misogynistic smear campaigns and where it's coming from.
Some of the women told me they are survivors and that they believe Lively is lying. “Jessica” wrote “It is such a joke that MeToo couldn’t get justice for the women assaulted by Trump or Diddy or actual horrifying male predators, but the NYT is ok with it being used to take down a nobody director like Baldoni even though he is innocent until being proven guilty. […] We have to believe all women before the trial even fucking starts?” This commentary, to me, illustrates the crux of the issue these women have with my coverage. They blame the injustices women experience on other women. Their misogyny is internalized, and they externalize it by joining smear campaigns against women like Lively and journalists like me who see their misogyny for what it is. They choose not to see the irony in blaming victims for victim-blaming. I first encountered this pattern of women victim-blaming other women when I covered Depp v. Heard. Even before I publicly said I believed Heard, back when I was still trying to make sense of the global pile-on, some of the women who had previously applauded my work denounced me just for pointing out that Heard had some evidence for her claims. As the trial went on and I identified more of the smears against Heard, I noticed that some of my most aggressive detractors were women and self-identified survivors. I believed they were abused, but it took me a while to understand why they were using their victimhood as a sword to cut down other victims.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · Jul 10
Today’s piece for @spitfirenews.com members is about MeToo backlash. I’ve heard from women and survivors who spread hate toward other women like Blake Lively and say she’s hurting their cause, because they don’t believe her. I try to unpack the cognitive dissonance.
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The hate mail I get about Blake Lively
It's mainly from other women.
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Spitfire News @spitfirenews.com · Jul 7
In today’s newsletter: When progressive media undermines the importance of high-profile sexual violence cases like the one against Sean “Diddy” Combs, it creates an opportunity for conservative media to ideologically capture the audience of these trials instead.
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Now Grok is lying about its own posts
Also, why covering the Diddy trial does matter—a lot.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · Jul 7
Yesterday Elon Musk’s Grok tried to rewrite history, falsely claiming that real screenshots of a deleted Grok post were fake. It was a high-profile, easily verifiable example of how AI chatbots can be weaponized to distort reality in favor of the people behind them.
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Now Grok is lying about its own posts
Also, why covering the Diddy trial does matter—a lot.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · Jul 4
In Florida, censorship efforts have scrubbed reports that detail the history of racist violence in the state, including alligator rhetoric and incarceration.
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An excerpt from the Spitfire News article "AI alligators and rebranding Jim Crow:" "'This is really what Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump want, a historical ignorance which allows them to kind of laugh it up,' Ortiz continued. 'It took me back to Florida in the 1940s and the 1890s, where you have these affluent white people laughing and profiting from the extreme oppression of incarcerated people of color.'" Just five years ago, after the police murdered George Floyd, the president of the University of Florida discontinued the “gator bait” chant at school sporting events. His announcement was part of a larger undertaking at the school and around the country to examine and make amends for anti-Black racism in the U.S. We are now experiencing a violent, state-sanctioned backlash against that movement. It seeks to cover up our racist history and double down on present-day racist oppression. Some of the work Ortiz took part in at the University of Florida to examine Jim Crow has since been censored by the state government.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · Jul 4
"I think that the population that they imagine housing in this detention, you know, we all look alike to them. These are brown people. I think the same impulse is very much at work,” Dr. Patricia Turner, who studied anti-Black folklore, told me. spitfirenews.com/p/alligator-...
AI alligators and rebranding Jim Crow
Fantasies of Florida alligators eating people of color are nothing new.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · Jul 4
There's very little to celebrate about America today. Right now, immigrants are trapped in concentration camp cages. The threat of alligators eating them stems from over a century of racist rhetoric. With AI, racists can repurpose the imagery of the Jim Crow south.
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AI alligators and rebranding Jim Crow
Fantasies of Florida alligators eating people of color are nothing new.
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Pluto Press @plutopress.bsky.social · Jun 29
🌟BOOK LAUNCH🌟

Join us for the launch of Coercion with author @kylietcheung.bsky.social‬ @jessicavalenti.bsky.social‬ and @kattenbarge.bsky.social‬

🗓️Tues, July 29
⏰6:30 pm
📍Lofty Pigeon Books
www.eventbrite.com/e/kylie-cheu...
Kylie Cheung launches "Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans"
"Clear-eyed and cutting … calls into question the very notion that America is an advanced society, let alone a just one." —Publishers Weekly
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · Jun 29
One of the biggest podcasters on YouTube tried to force me to apologize for writing about misogyny. But he and his fans don’t get to dictate what I do or my worth as a journalist. My response to Ethan Klein:
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Ethan Klein Doesn’t Deserve My Apology
This YouTuber wants me to feel bad for calling out misogyny. I don't.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · Jun 25
For @spitfirenews.com, I wrote about Zohran Mamdani's win as further evidence that a pro-Palestinian, socialist platform is actually popular online and off.
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Why Zohran Mamdani Won
True progressive policies succeed on social media and in the ballot booth.
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Spitfire News @spitfirenews.com · Jun 19
“Right-wing conservative values thrive when women are distracted. Obsessing over calories. Shrinking our bodies. Policing our hunger. Believing our worth is measured in discipline, control, and how little space we take up.”
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Why my phone wants me to stop eating
Skinny influencers serve a political purpose.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · Jun 19
I wrote about the inescapable skinny propaganda and pro-eating disorder content on mainstream social media platforms and how it's part of the reigning conservative culture that pushes health disinformation, control, and obedience. For @spitfirenews.com
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Why my phone wants me to stop eating
Skinny influencers serve a political purpose.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · Jun 14
Today was the first day of early voting for New York City’s mayoral primary. New Yorkers have the chance to prove that the left won’t tolerate sexual predators as elected leaders. @spitfirenews.com’s first anti-endorsement: don’t rank Andrew Cuomo.
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We Have to Stop Voting for Predators
Also, Justin Baldoni's supporters have come up with a new QAnon.
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