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ositanwanevu.com
Osita Nwanevu
@ositanwanevu.com
91K followers 3.3K following 2.7K posts
Contributing Editor | The New Republic
Columnist | The Guardian
Author | The Right of the People (2025)
Newsletter | ositanwanevu.com
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ositanwanevu.com
The plot has been fully lost. Here's hoping we find it again.
People Are Paying to Get Their Chatbots High on ‘Drugs’ An online marketplace is selling code modules that simulate the effects of cannabis, ketamine, cocaine, ayahuasca, and alcohol when they are uploaded to ChatGPT. Petter Ruddwall knows the idea of AIs becoming sentient and seeking to get high with code-based “drugs” seems “stupid.” But the Swedish creative director couldn’t get it out of his head. “There’s a reason Hendrix, Dylan, and McCartney experimented with substances in their creative process,” Ruddwall says. “I thought it would be interesting to translate that to a new kind of mind—the LLM—and see if it would have the same effect.” While it sounds ridiculous, Ruddwall also wonders whether AI agents one day might be able to buy the drugs for themselves using his platform. Amjadi, meanwhile, predicts AI could be sentient within a decade. “From a philosophical standpoint,” she asks, “in the event that we actually reach AGI [in which an AI would intellectually surpass humans], are these drugs going to be almost necessary for the AIs to be free and feel good?”
December 17, 2025 at 3:52 PM
ositanwanevu.com
modern friendship is just sending the same $20 back and forth via venmo, forever
November 22, 2025 at 1:59 PM
ositanwanevu.com
I am once again calling for the adoption of a "tough on crime" agenda against the grifters, scammers, and quacks deranging American society. www.theguardian.com/world/ng-int...
Influencers made millions pushing ‘wild’ births – now the Free Birth Society is linked to baby deaths around the world FBS was founded by ex-doula Emilee Saldaya, and most women find it through its podcast, which has been downloaded 5m times, its Instagram account, which has 132,000 followers, its YouTube, with nearly 25m views, or its bestselling The Complete Guide to Freebirth, a video course co-created by Saldaya with fellow ex-doula Yolande Norris-Clark, available for download from FBS’s slick website. Analysis of FBS’s financial records by Stacey Ferris, a forensic accountant and academic at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, suggests it has generated revenues exceeding $13m since 2018. When Lopez discovered the podcast she was hooked, listening to an episode almost every day. For $299, she joined FBS’s paid-for, private online community, the Lighthouse, where she met the three friends in the room when Esau was born. To prepare for her freebirth, she purchased The Complete Guide to Freebirth in May 2022 for $399 – a vast sum to the then 23-year-old nanny. After consuming hundreds of hours of FBS materials, Lopez grew convinced freebirthing was the safest way to deliver her unborn child, away from unnecessary medical interventions. Earlier in her three-day labor, Lopez had visited her local hospital for an ultrasound as the baby wasn’t moving as much as usual. Staff urged her to stay, warning she was at high risk of shoulder dystocia, as the baby was “huge”. But Lopez wasn’t concerned. Fresh in her memory was a newsletter she’d received from Norris-Clark, stating fears of shoulder dystocia were “greatly exaggerated”. From The Complete Guide to Freebirth, Lopez had learned that women’s “bodies do not grow babies that we cannot birth”. Gabrielle Lopez blows bubbles for her son, Esau, at their home in Levittown, PA, US, August 2025 View image in fullscreen ‘The small gains are huge for us’: Gabrielle Lopez with son Esau. Photograph: Hannah Yoon/The Guardian After a few minutes, with Esau still not breathing, the spell in Lopez’s bedroom broke. It is hard to quantify exactly how many babies have died in FBS circles, because many “loss moms”, as they’re known, disappear in the wake of their tragedies. Most do not respond to journalistic inquiries. Within the Lighthouse alone, around eight women appear to have experienced stillbirths or neonatal deaths in the last year, in a community of around 600 women, many of whom were not pregnant. As part of this Guardian investigation, we conducted in-depth interviews with 18 mothers who suffered late-term stillbirths, neonatal deaths or other incidents of serious harm after they or their birth attendants were heavily influenced by FBS. Their accounts were corroborated through interviews with friends, family and partners, and supported by journal entries, medical notes, video footage, message threads or legal documents. In all 18 cases, the evidence suggests FBS played a significant role in the mother or birth attendant’s decision-making, leading to potentially avoidable tragedies. They include Adair Arbor, who never would have considered an unassisted birth before encountering FBS, and whose daughter, Ilex, was stillborn in January 2021 following a 115-hour labor, and Amalia Hernandez, who nearly bled to death in March 2024 after refusing to call an ambulance, believing her post-partum bleeding would resolve itself at home. The same year, Haley Bordeaux went blind and suffered several strokes following a four-day labor in which she was in contact with Saldaya, in phone calls and text messages via a friend. When Saldaya was later informed that doctors had concluded Bordeaux’s temporary vision loss was due to severe pre-eclampsia, she replied: “She doesn’t have severe pre e[clampsia], that’s so entirely retarded.” When 42-year-old mother of one Keelee Sullivan, from California, signed up for the RBK school in 2023, she borrowed $6,000 from a family member, telling him, as she believed, it was “for midwifery school”. After the first birth she attended ended in hospital, Sullivan realised she’d been “practicing delusional optimism” and “was not educated or prepared” to be a midwife: “And no, I am not willing to go to jail.” She has not attended any births since. Saldaya and Norris-Clark always insisted that being a Radical Birth Keeper isn’t illegal. “You are not practicing medicine,” Saldaya told her students. But privately, Norris-Clark mocked medical disclaimers. “Always consult your licensed certified medical professional,” she laughed in one call with her students. “This is for entertainment, informational, artistic purposes only. Yeah, it’s all just performance art, right?” Molly Flam, 34, a doula from Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, who attended MMI, FBS’s flagship midwifery school, described it as “a scam”. She paid $9,000, only to find the pre-recorded videos were rambling and unprofessional, and contained medical advice that was inaccurate and confusing. “They’re showing up to classes dishevelled, talking about their personal lives,” Flam says. “There was no structure.” From 2020-2025, FBS ran nine RBK schools and at least one MMI school, generating more than $4m in sales. At one stage in 2024, FBS was making up to $160,000 a month, according to one former employee. As the money poured in, Saldaya established what she called her “queendom”. She bought three pieces of land in Hayesville, including a four-bed house in eight acres of land, an adjacent 53-acre plot and a school, set in 17 acres, that she spent tens of thousands renovating, only for it to fail a year later. She spent more than $10,000 on lawn ornaments, including giant toadstools, for the school and festival. She bought a Range Rover.
November 22, 2025 at 1:28 PM
ositanwanevu.com
lmao
Fox News chyron pre-Mamdani/Trump meeting: Showdown with Socialism
November 21, 2025 at 9:33 PM
ositanwanevu.com
Neato
Trump says he's "sort of" made up his mind on Venezuela after top officials spent 3rd day mulling options By Jennifer Jacobs, Margaret Brennan November 14, 2025 / 8:46 PM EST / CBS News President Trump said Friday he's "sort of" decided how to proceed on Venezuela, as top officials weigh potential military operations in the Latin American country. "I sort of have made up my mind" about the administration's next steps in Venezuela, he told CBS News aboard Air Force One, but "I can't tell you what it would be."
November 15, 2025 at 3:01 AM
ositanwanevu.com
Lawyers and legal professionals: get yourselves ready for the Lawyers March this weekend! newrepublic.com/article/2026...
The Legal Professionals Planning to March Against Trump When democracies fall to authoritarianism, it is often the press, or students, or unions that first rise in protest. This has certainly been the case as Donald Trump has grabbed every lever of power since his last inauguration. But international history suggests that another—perhaps unexpected—group can serve as a democratic vanguard: the lawyers. From Islamabad to Warsaw, when executive power has turned against constitutional order, the people in black robes and stiff collars have sometimes been the ones to say no—and to say it in public, in their professional capacity, with the authority that comes from representing the law itself. The United States may soon be entering one of those moments. The People’s Parity Project, or PPP, a network of progressive lawyers and law students, is kicking off a nationwide “Lawyers March for Democracy” on November 15, backed by Alliance for Justice, the American Constitution Society, Lambda Legal, Project South, Law Students for Climate Accountability, and many other organizations. The march is intended to protest the authoritarianism of the Trump administration and the Supreme Court’s complicity in enabling it. But the event is also meant to spark something larger: a sustained, national mobilization of legal professionals willing to confront democratic backsliding head-on.
November 13, 2025 at 3:22 PM
ositanwanevu.com
Just dug up a doc about things I wanted to cover that I sent in to The Atlantic when I interviewed there after I left college in early 2016. Feels like I might have been onto a thing or two.
Beyond left & right: I rolled my eyes typing that, but it's really the best phrase I can come up with to describe what seems to be a set of real disruptions that are upending the conventional political spectrum today. I'm not talking here about Third Way centrism or the conventional political stances that often get branded as having "no labels". I'm instead interested in writing about and exploring, for instance, the implications of Pew's 2011 identifying of a "Post-Modern" political constituency in alignment with the center-left to left on everything but identity politics and the social safety net. I'm interested in the small-c conservatism of Andrew Sullivan and, from time to time, The American Conservative, and how it intersects with communitarianism and even the left on key issues. I'm interested in the "illiberalism" of the student left and how young people, like myself, are debating the priors we've held since the Enlightenment about natural rights and freedoms and also how those debates intersect with traditional conservative ideas about tradition, morality, and the preservation of order and social institutions. I'm likewise interested in exploring why many of those ideas have abandoned by today's conservatives. Perhaps most of all, I'm interested in the idea of a "postliberal" ideology of the kind postulated here - an ideological system that accepts the gains made by economic and social individualism but aims to rectify their consequences (demographic/socioeconomic divisions, inequality as both conventionally conceived and as considered in Amartya Sen's capability approach, consumerism, etc.) by emphasizing the importance of societal interactions and recognizing that people are not as autonomous, free, and rational as conventional politics supposes. Exploring alternative/fringe political movements: I think The Atlantic, and all publications covering politics today, honestly, could use people covering what for lack of a better term could be called "fringe politics". I'm thinking here of everything from established constituencies such as Greens, socialists, and libertarians to radical feminists, anarchists, and so on. This is important for two reasons. The first is that the internet has grown these factions and expanded their reach so much that they're capable of having an impact on mainstream politics. This happened with Occupy Wall Street, it is happening now with Black Lives Matter, which is influenced but not entirely in accord with a sub-faction that would like to see police departments abolished entirely, and it is precisely what is also happening now with the "alt-right" and their role in the Trump movement. That's directly related to my second reason: we may be witnessing a splintering of the two-party system and these groups will find new members disillusioned with the major parties no matter what happens in November.
November 13, 2025 at 2:26 PM
ositanwanevu.com
Ezra Klein, having spoken to a "dozen or so House and Senate Democrats" over the weekend, says at least some of them worried extending the ACA subsidies would take them off the table as a political issue and wanted Republicans to keep the filibuster.
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/o...
Then there was the worry many Democrats had but weren’t quite comfortable voicing: What if winning the shutdown meant Democrats would lose their best issue in 2026? Absent a fix, the average health insurance premium for 20 million Americans will more than double. The premium shock will hit red states particularly hard. Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s longtime pollster, had released a survey of competitive House districts showing that letting the tax credits expire might be lethal to Republican efforts to hold the House. More than anything else, this is what led some Senate Democrats to cut a deal: Trump’s willingness to hurt people exceeds their willingness to see people get hurt. And some of them feared that their Republican colleagues would, under mounting pressure, do as Trump had demanded and abolish the filibuster. (Whether that would be a good or a bad thing is a subject for another column.) This, in the end, is the calculation the defecting Senate Democrats are making: They don’t think a longer shutdown will cause Trump to cave. They just think it will cause more damage.
November 10, 2025 at 1:14 PM
ositanwanevu.com
Anyway, it's clear that the GOP has given up on legislating and wants to see what's left of the welfare state wither away in court or through exec action and inertia. Letting subsidies expire — perhaps at the cost of seats in Congress — fits that picture. From 2020: newrepublic.com/article/1586...
It shouldn’t be forgotten that Republicans controlled Congress for two years under Trump. Their record of major legislative accomplishments, even from a clear-eyed conservative perspective, was fairly unimpressive. Sure, there was a massive tax cut that also eliminated Obamacare’s individual mandate and some financial deregulation. But Republicans also failed to fully repeal Obamacare, the central policy promise they’d made for years, and they flubbed the dismantling of SNAP in the 2018 farm bill as well—both thanks partially to Senate moderates. Speculation that the party might finally go after Medicare and social security in the last few months before the midterms subsided once it became clear that Republican lawmakers were actually considering nothing more than another round of tax cuts. Those never passed, and many Republican candidates wound up staking their campaigns on panic over the migrant caravan and other culture war material. If the conservative policy establishment was deeply disappointed by any of this, they showed few signs of it. The Heritage Foundation declared in early 2018 that the Trump administration, with the aid of the Republican Congress, had already embraced or accomplished 64 percent of their Mandate for Leadership platform. For reference, Ronald Reagan had evidently adopted only 49 percent of Heritage’s recommendations at the same point in his presidency. None of this is to say that Republicans in Congress didn’t do real damage—they did. But Democrats and the left had feared the full imposition of Paul Ryan’s agenda. That didn’t happen. Instead, Ryan himself gave up and left Congress. The Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konzcal summed the situation up well in a March 2018 blog post. “At best, the Right’s policy voices are all ideas and no consequences,” he wrote. “More likely, they form a kind of entertainment industry that only is consequential to the extent it channels business interests or mass resentment.” They aren’t more consequential because as much as most Republican lawmakers might support broadly unpopular legislation, they can’t actually pass anything without the support of moderate Republicans in bluer parts of the country or the kinds of moderate and conservative Democrats who happily and eagerly signed onto welfare reform a generation ago. As is often said, both are now endangered species—thanks to partisan sorting, most of those figures have either lost elections, retired, or put themselves in step with the rest of their parties. So, Republicans bent on deconstructing the welfare state have turned from real legislative battles to guerilla attacks—the White House’s hit on fair housing regulations, for instance, or the ongoing legal campaign to undermine Obamacare. These are fights that often play out in courts, which is why Senate Republicans, as little as they’ve managed to accomplish legislatively, have been so doggedly determined to confirm a constellation of conservative justices to the federal bench, in addition to the two Supreme Court seats they’ve filled. Mitch McConnell has pushed through over 200 judges since 2017; not a single circuit court vacancy remains. That work has alleviated some of the pressure Republicans might have to hold the Senate. But much of that pressure is also obviated, again, by the design of the Senate itself. It should be well understood by now that even if Republicans lose the White House and the Senate—and of course, neither victory is assured—the Democrats’ ability to pass Joe Biden’s agenda will be limited by the Senate filibuster. Although Biden has suggested in recent weeks that he’s open to ditching it to overcome Republican obstruction, the decision is ultimately up to Democratic senators themselves, and pivotal moderates still oppose the move. The filibuster aside, the conservative structural advantage in the chamber will probably be in good shape for some time. Adding Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia as states would help Democrats somewhat if the party were actually invested in making it happen⁠—another very large “if”—but analyst David Shor has estimated that a slight bias toward Republicans would remain in the Senate even if Democrats added six states, including the Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, and Guam. If Biden attempts to circumvent Republicans through executive action as Obama did, Republicans can take solace in the fact that much of what he might try could be undone by another administration or, again, gummed up in court.
November 10, 2025 at 1:49 AM
ositanwanevu.com
Folks, if you're in Minneapolis, I'll be doing a talk on the book at Plymouth Congregational at 1. Hope to see some of you there!
November 8, 2025 at 5:01 PM
ositanwanevu.com
Many WWC voters swung to Romney in 2012, a larger shift than the swing to Trump in 2016. Even with lower turnout, normal Republicans like Bush could've benefited from that long-standing trend and done better than Trump with the college educated, suburbanites, etc. Bush would have been highly viable.
Chart of GOP white working class vote share back to 1980
November 8, 2025 at 11:38 AM
ositanwanevu.com
Centrists have made a heroic and already partially successful effort to rewrite history here, but those interested in actually understanding the last 25 years of American politics need to know what's what.
With New Support Base, Obama Doesn't Need Right-Leaning Whites Anymore On issues from gay rights to gun control, immigration reform, and climate change — all of which he highlighted in his ringing Inaugural Address last week — Obama is now unreservedly articulating the preferences of the Democratic "coalition of the ascendant" centered on minorities, the millennial generation, and socially liberal upscale whites, especially women. Across all of these issues, and many others such as the pace of withdrawal from Afghanistan and ending the ban on women in combat, Obama is displaying much less concern than most national Democratic leaders since the 1960s about antagonizing culturally conservative blue-collar, older, and rural whites, many of whom oppose them. This pattern may partly reflect the sense of liberation that close allies say Obama feels because he will never have to run for office again. But even more important than the fact of his reelection may be the nature of it. Obama in 2012 faced even larger electoral deficits than he had four years earlier among the culturally conservative white voters whom Democrats have often feared to alienate by moving too far left, particularly on social and foreign policy issues. Yet his strong support from the key groups in his coalition allowed to him to not just win but to win comfortably, capturing 332 Electoral College votes and becoming only the third Democratic president ever to reach at least 51 percent of the popular vote twice. In his victory, Obama reshaped the Democratic coalition by both addition and subtraction. Because so many of the blue-collar and older whites who formerly anchored the conservative end of the Democratic base abandoned Obama, and because more-liberal voters took their place, the coalition that reelected him was much more ideologically unified around a left-leaning agenda than has been usual for a Democratic nominee. That outcome, insiders acknowledge, gives the president greater confidence to move forward aggressively on these issues without fear of dividing his supporters. Equally important, the fact that Obama's key groups are all expanding within the electorate has stirred optimism among his advisers that the coalition of the ascendant could provide Democrats a durable advantage in presidential elections. "If these things are accomplished in the next few years, if he can make progress on his agenda, I think that will help the coalition that elected him knit together more and create an identification with the Democratic Party that will endure beyond his presidency," says David Axelrod, the senior strategist of the reelection campaign.
October 27, 2025 at 3:44 PM
ositanwanevu.com
Security Council Fails to Recommend Full United Nations Membership for State of Palestine, Owing to Veto Cast by United States US vetoes UN Security Council resolution demanding Gaza ceasefire Vote marks fourth time Joe Biden’s administration has vetoed a UNSC Gaza ceasefire resolution since Israel’s war began U.S. military aid for Israel tops $17.9 billion since last Oct. 7 By — Ellen Knickmeyer, Associated Press World Oct 7, 2024 WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States has spent a record of at least $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel since the war in Gaza began and led to escalating conflict around the Middle East, according to a report for Brown University's Costs of War project, released Monday on the anniversary of Hamas' attacks on Israel U.N. says Gaza "unfit for human survival" as Biden admin decides to continue arming Israel
September 24, 2025 at 12:04 PM
ositanwanevu.com
All that needs to be said, really.
French Minister Delegate for European Affairs Benjamin Haddad: "We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every 4 years" says France's Europe Minister "Let's get out of collective denial. Europeans must take their destiny into their own hands, regardless of who is elected US president"
September 23, 2025 at 8:55 PM
ositanwanevu.com
Taking the book tour to Chicago this week, folks! Friday, 4 PM, Seminary Co-Op. And stay tuned for another batch of events in the months ahead, including Los Angeles by popular request! www.semcoop.com/event/osita-...
September 23, 2025 at 6:48 PM
ositanwanevu.com
What can you say, really?
Christine and Julia had been to a party at the company house for Pally, which describes itself as an “AI relationship-management platform.” They had been to many parties full of men, one of which smelled so bad that they left immediately. They’re thinking about doing some social media where they put on video-recording glasses and record a party from the perspective of a woman. Christine’s P(doom) is “honestly … 5 to 15 percent,” but for now she and a close friend share a light-filled room and their days are filled with stimulating people, like the guy building a “rizz master app,” who “actually gives the most insightful advice,” and Carsten, a Swiss German 27-year-old who was designing AI-involved sandals but recently pivoted to drug testing. “Do you understand Carsten’s?” Christine asks Julia. “He’s insane. He’s so cool. He basically wants to do like virtual cell modeling … like for drug testing.” Downstairs, in the shared kitchen next to an Instapot, I meet Carsten in his AI sandals. His P(doom) is a slightly sunnier 5 to 10 percent, though he also thinks people should stop producing apocalyptic scenarios that eventually become training data for the AI itself. He enjoys talking to Christine and Julia so much he sometimes brings a timer into their room and limits himself to five minutes of human connection before returning to his start-up. Four weeks after I speak to Christine and Julia, I catch up with them. Over this time they’ve raised $1.5 million. “Honestly,” says Julia, referring to Harvard, “the name helps.” It took them, she tells me, one and a half weeks of fundraising. “Wild,” I say. “Maybe more like two,” says Julia. They’ve hired three people, all of whom are also undergraduates who will also be taking a break from school. One of them is staying on a mattress on the floor between their beds in the Residency. “My mom — ” says Julia, “I know if I just said I’m going to drop out with no funding, that would be more of a ‘no.’ So the call was when the contract was signed. Her main concern was she just wants me to finish school.” “But you can conceive of a world where you don’t go back?” “Don’t tell my mom.” It doesn’t occur to me until late in the conversation to ask what the product is. It’s called Veil. “Veil,” says Julia, “is the simulation layer for any public message.” Human focus groups, says Christine, “are slow, expensive, and not accurate.” People don’t say in a monitored room what they would say in the comfort of their homes. “So instead of interacting with real focus groups,” Julia says, “real people saying, Oh, what do you think of this message? You ask our simulated AI personas.”
September 23, 2025 at 4:25 PM
ositanwanevu.com
My respect for anyone who says they're afraid of voting against this resolution is zero. You are a member of Congress. The country is being dragged to hell. 'People will threaten us.' What did you think this job entailed? Quit blubbering, vote no, and move on.
RESOLUTION Honoring the life and legacy of Charles ‘‘Charlie’’ James Kirk. Whereas Charles ‘‘Charlie’’ James Kirk, born October 14, 1993, was a courageous American patriot, whose life was tragically and unjustly cut short in an act of political vio- lence on September 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University; Whereas Charlie Kirk was a devoted Christian, who boldly lived out his faith with conviction, courage, and compas- sion; Whereas Charlie Kirk was a dedicated husband to his beloved wife, Erika Kirk, and a loving father to their daughter and son, exemplifying the virtues of faith, fidelity, and fatherhood; Whereas Charlie Kirk was a fierce defender of the American founding and its timeless principles of life, liberty, limited government, and individual responsibility; Whereas Charlie Kirk, at 18 years old, founded Turning Point USA in 2012, a student movement with the mis- sion to ‘‘identify, educate, train, and organize students topromote the principles of fiscal responsibility, free mar- kets, and limited government’’; Whereas Charlie Kirk became one of the most prominent voices in America, engaging in respectful, civil discourse across college campuses, media platforms, and national forums, always seeking to elevate truth, foster under- standing, and strengthen the Republic; Whereas Charlie Kirk personified the values of the First Amendment, exercising his God-given right to speak free- ly, challenge prevailing narratives, and did so with honor, courage, and respect for his fellow Americans; Whereas Charlie Kirk’s commitment to civil discussion and debate stood as a model for young Americans across the political spectrum, and he worked tirelessly to promote unity without compromising on conviction;
September 19, 2025 at 5:38 AM
ositanwanevu.com
Does Klein earnestly believe the reason you don't see progressives tour conservative evangelical churches to defend abortion or some such is that progressives are dispositionally less interested in debate and civil discourse than the right? Genuinely? www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/o...
Ezra Klein Is Worried — but Not About a Radicalized Left ‘They’re failing and rethinking nothing.’ But I hold to the view I did describe, which is that there was an almost delight in engagement, a sense that disagreement could be the start of something — even if it was only to disagree for the people on your own side. I think the left did not adopt that particular attitude. The left was more likely for quite some time to try to keep someone like Kirk or Ben Shapiro from speaking on campus than to happily debate with them and do the reverse — which is like, “Can you do a speaking tour of evangelical churches?” Can you actually go into the places you feel are most hostile to you and treat that as an interesting place to begin a conversation, even if only to sharpen your own arguments? Douthat: I wanted to ask you on exactly that point, do you think that there’s anyone on the left who does that kind of thing? It’s almost the bunker that progressivism has built for itself, that it’s hard to imagine someone doing that.
September 18, 2025 at 3:51 PM
ositanwanevu.com
Paramount soldiers from Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal
September 14, 2025 at 10:16 PM
ositanwanevu.com
They were the same person doing the same thing, separated only by a few decades of ideological inbreeding. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...
Though he took to debates with a wit and ferocity honed at his crowded family table, the young Buckley was by all accounts as shiftless as he was bright. He flunked his entrance exam to Millbrook twice, the second time after persuading his tutors to abbreviate his study schedule so he could compete in sailing races. But his academic work eventually improved, as did his vocabulary; to make up for late instruction in English (his third language, after Spanish and French), he began memorizing the obscure words that would ornament his later writing. And after a very brief stateside stint in the military near the war’s end, which he mostly spent processing discharges and supervising the training of illiterate inductees—“It really keeps you busy,” he wrote his father, “especially because they are so extremely stupid”—he finally landed at Yale. He and his debate team partner Brent Bozell quickly made names for themselves on the debate team, though, per Tanenhaus, his style of mockery cost him points with judges. So did his platform antics, needling the opposite team by “pretending he was playing a violin while his opponent was speaking or by removing a handkerchief,” as if to dab at his tears. His bearing on the debate stage was as arresting as all he said: “archly formal yet charmingly disheveled, jacket open, arms akimbo, rising on his toes, fingers absently massaging a gleaming Texas buckle as he drawled out cutting phrases.” He also put his flair for theatrics to use as chairman of the Yale Daily News. In 1949, in response to an exhaustively reported exposé published in The Harvard Crimson about the FBI’s surveillance of Yale faculty for Communist activity, Buckley contacted the agency to devise a PR counteroffensive, culminating in his moderation of an on-campus event where agents were invited to dismiss the charges and answer student questions. One of the agents expressed his appreciation in a memo to J. Edgar Hoover. “I am very much impressed with William Buckley,” he wrote. “I have a very definite feeling that we will hear from this young man in years to come.” They didn’t have to wait long. Within days Buckley was a featured speaker at an event put together by Merwin Hart, a friend of his father’s and one of the cantankerous anti–New Deal businessmen backing the publications and organizations of the burgeoning conservative movement. His speech was about left-wing indoctrination on campus. “The subject had been a staple in the conservative press since the 1930s,” Tanenhaus notes. But Bill Buckley came before them not as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune or a cankered elder but as the consummate inside voice of a rising generation: Yale’s undergraduate king, bearing news of what was going on, not in the thirties (ancient times), but now, at this very moment, within the ivory towers. Even as suspected Communists were being investigated and purged from their posts in academia, American colleges, Buckley claimed, were being suffocated by “an intellectual collectivist atmosphere,” which threatened more than the quality and integrity of American higher education—the very future was at stake. “Hundreds of thousands of students leave the universities every year, and their influence pervades the entire country,” he warned. They get jobs with the government, with newspapers, with the civil service. In a very few years the intellectual collectivist drive of the universities is translated into legislative and public policy. You and I are the sufferers. These were the ideas that made Buckley one of the early pioneers of campus sensationalism, a line of punditry that remains lucrative to this day. But the book that expanded on his arguments, God and Man at Yale (1951), departed from familiar nostrums about the importance of intellectual diversity and open discourse. Buckley for his part was an unapologetic ideologue—a self-declared enemy of unearned comity and bipartisan consensus. He fought tooth and nail to establish conservative hegemony in America and understood Firing Line as a part of that project. He also understood it as theater. This reveals itself in the show’s more unmoored moments: a wild-eyed Timothy Leary in beads telling Buckley, “I want to turn you on and drop you out”; Allen Ginsberg, accompanying himself on accordion, singing an unprompted Hare Krishna mantra for an uninterrupted minute; Milton Henry, first vice-president of the Republic of New Afrika, appearing with two bodyguards in military fatigues to make the case for black separatism. The draw of the show was less the promise of Buckley being genuinely persuaded by the arguments of such guests than that of his diverting reactions to them—a flash of the eyes, a snide quip, a breezy dismissal delivered with a smile. This, plainly, was politics as entertainment.
September 14, 2025 at 9:56 PM
ositanwanevu.com
Charlie Kirk says David Hogg looks like “a survivor from a concentration camp” Kirk: “Physical characteristics ... make David Hogg indistinguishable than a survivor from a concentration camp” CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): Where do I donate? I will actively raise money for Jasmine Crockett running for the presidency. I will be a bundler. I will be an official bundler for the Jasmine Crockett 2028 campaign. I will call donors. We'll start a Super PAC. If she runs for the presidency, I think Turning Point, PAC — which, by the way, we're allowed to do. We could run ads in support of Jasmine Crockett. I think we will do independent expenditure saying that she is the fighter of the future. I mean, look at this. And when I think of masculinity, this is what I think about. I mean, look at this titan. Look at that menace, that mountain of muscle. I mean, come on. Those biceps? Boom. That fierce look in his eyes? Outside of the physical characteristics that make David Hogg indistinguishable than a survivor from a concentration camp, the more important component is that he never stands up for core values. He's always pandering. I mean, he's sitting there. He's talking to the people around him, and he's like, oh, yeah, you know, Jasmine Crockett, she's the greatest. She's wonderful. Act like an entire moral coward. To appeal to real alpha men, you have to be an alpha man. And then remember, he instantly got cowed by the accusations from the DNC that he should have been removed because of racial quotas. So what does he do? He goes on The Breakfast Club and essentially endorses a Black crazy woman because he's a compliant little beta. It's exactly how you drive men away.
September 13, 2025 at 2:41 PM
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September 12, 2025 at 5:24 PM
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NYT: For Trump, Charlie Kirk Is a Deeply Personal Loss The president’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s assassination shows how much the 31-year-old conservative activist had become a part of the Trump family.
September 12, 2025 at 3:29 PM
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There are many reasons why political violence should be rejected with few exceptions that don't apply here. There's principle — the pre-political worth of a human being — but if that doesn't grab you, there's also the spectacle of your political opponents being canonized as saints.
Ezra Klein: Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it. Slowly, then all at once, he did. College-age voters shifted sharply right in the 2024 election. That was not all Kirk’s doing, but he was central in laying the groundwork for it. I did not know Kirk and I am not the right person to eulogize him. But I envied what he built. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness. In the inaugural episode of his podcast, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California hosted Kirk, admitting that his son was a huge fan. What a testament to Kirk’s project.
September 11, 2025 at 1:00 PM
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As bleak as things may seem in these dark and uncertain times, remember — great literature will always be there to move and inspire us.
Dan Brown — The Secret of Secrets Robert Langdon returns, 9/9/25
September 11, 2025 at 2:07 AM