Top recent posts by Online Political Thinkers on Bluesky

There is a tremendous opportunity for a brand new generation of media outlets to rise up right now because many news outlets that spent decades painstakingly building their credibility are seeing it torched by bootlickers with incredible speed.

In the summer of 1950 most US newspapers ran an AP story about how race had become the main issue in the upcoming Georgia governor's race. Segregationist Herman Tallmadge, governor from '47 to '55 and then a Senator until 1981 made a name for himself by refusing to "apologize for being a white man."

Bari Weiss spiked the CECOT story because she wanted to have Stephen Miller included and demanded to control the language 60 Minutes used to describe the men who were brutally tortured after being sent to El Salvador without due process.

UPDATE: in point of fact there is not an innocent explanation for this.

Perhaps the vice president should have considered utilizing the services of the vast law-enforcement apparatus at his disposal, rather than googling conspiracy theories on the Internet.

Here’s a gift link to this stunner Washpost story, quoting the 60 Minutes correspondent on the CECOT story, who accuses Bari Weiss of spiking the piece all because the Trump Administration wouldn’t comment. “Government silence is a statement, not a VETO.” wapo.st/3YL4T3D

the broad inability to leave a social media platform owned by a white supremacist and prolific manipulator of public perception really is one of the most discouraging data points right now

Oh, look there: an editorial-interference canary.

Not to be too conspiratorial, but this story would undoubtedly portray the Trump admin in a bad light (they sent innocent people to be tortured through a process the Supreme Court unanimously held lacked due process) and now CBS isn't airing it on time.

A since-deleted tweet by former KKK grand wizard David Duke is nearly identical to the statement today made by Vice President JD Vance

Trying to imagine what it’d be like for an experienced 60 Minutes producer or reporter, who’d spent many weeks preparing a detailed investigation of a notorious El Salvador prison, to be getting input from Bari Weiss or one of acolytes, just hours before airtime.

JD Vance cozying up to the sort of white supremacists who would consider his wife and children insufficiently white (and hence American) is pretty bleak, and says a lot about his character.

Bari gets a heavily promoted 60 Minutes story that would be bad for the Trump administration killed:

Perhaps we should film a debate between a concentration camp guard and an abandoned toilet over whether CECOT is good. Brought to you by Bank of America.

[Just to painfully spell it out for those not paying attention...What they're "sometimes disagreeing" on that Jew-controlled drones have no tolerance for is e.g. whether the Holocaust happened]

You should, however, apologize for being JD Vance

I promise you with absolute 100% certainty that we are not going to lose the House because Dan Goldman gets primaried from the left

I suspect that what's gonna happen is Bari Weiss will be quietly sidelined (if not fired) but the descent of CBS News into conservative propaganda will continue under whoever runs it next all the same because that's what the owner of the network wants.

Yes, it’s entirely true that many of the migrants who came under the Biden admin did not have housing arranged for them when they arrived and so ended up in homeless shelters at first, at times for months, while they got on their feet. This is 100% true, not an anti-immigrant gotcha, just the facts.

This must be the van they send to your location when you do a good post

Incompetent courtiers being put in charge of key technical positions and then totally botching them was a recurring feature and major weakness of historical absolute monarchies and authoritarian regimes. Anyway, Bari Weiss,

Reporter: We have 3 videos, 2 breathalyzers, 4 bartenders, and a minivan full of nuns attesting to how the driver was drunk and reckless when he hit the school bus. Weiss; What did the driver say. Reporter: He and his lawyer won’t talk. We asked them 5 times. Weiss: I’m killing your story.

Squint real hard, and you might just see the “WTAF?!” word balloon that pops above Rep. Massie’s head right after Margaret Brennan finishes her question.

Andrew Johnson illegally fired Edwin Stanton on Feb 21, 1868. The House voted, in a one-sentence resolution, to impeach him on Feb 24. The actual articles were adopted March 2-3. The Senate trial began on March 4. Twelve days from the offense itself to facing trial for it.

A hateful appeal to intolerance, all the more loathsome because he knows exactly what he's doing

This is why the Ellisons paid $150 million to acquire a mediocre Substack blog www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/12/bari...

The entire american "free speech" panic was about elites being criticized, which is why anyone who ever took it seriously should be ignored forever

We can only assume this delay is for a good and normal reason

Too late.

She is stupid and has no idea how to do her job,even the evil version of her job where she ruins the network from within.

Tulsi Gabbard was an open Putin sympathizer (Assad sympathizer too) for years before Trump and the GOP Senate put her in charge of the US intel community. Her apparent eagerness to push Russian govt propaganda, including some that’s transparently absurd, is not incidental. It’s why she got the job.

“Camp East Montana” is the tent camp on Fort Bliss in El Paso. It was supposed to be where people would be held for max 14 days. She was held there three months.

Landry rushed to clarify he isn't resigning as governor of Louisiana and this will be, like, his side gig I guess. The state constitution explicitly bans state officeholders from simultaneously holding any federal office.

Trump says he’s appointing Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry as “special envoy” to Greenland. Landry has previously expressed support for Trump’s plan to invade Greenland.

while i can tolerate Dispatch writers, this is why the Bulwark is anyday preferable to the Dispatch: to see what is in front of your eyes is a constant struggle, and Jonah doesn't seem capable of it

Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise. Happy winter solstice! Never give up.

I was initially shocked by this quote ... and then I remember that he recently announced -- at another Turning Point event!! -- that he wanted his Hindu wife to convert to Catholicism.

Al Qaeda’s high point came with a cult of personality around Osama bin Laden. His successor, Ayman al Zawahiri, was once described as “a black hole of charisma,” and couldn’t replicate bin Laden’s (relative) success. Not a perfect analogy, but I’ve been thinking about it a bunch lately.

The ways JD Vance could become president: 1) Trump dies in office 2) 2028-29 coup attempt succeeds That’s it

hey, just want to circle back on this, you utter joke of a pundit

This is a great follow up question for once

Sad death of CBS News as actual journalism And a reminder that CECOT is a human rights travesty, and everyone up and down the Trump admin involved in illegally sending people there belong in The Hague.

What Bari is saying is true of course, but it's horseshit in this case. You don't spike a story after it's been signed off on by legal and standards and screened that many times unless you're covering for someone you work for or with. You're already past the point in the process she's bringing up.

This is either going to be about war with Venezuela or that the McRib is back at the Guantanamo Bay McDonald’s…

the one thing that i don't think Bari Weiss (the fucking moron) recognizes is the fact that if there's one the press loves, it's about reporting on internal reporter drama

This to me is the biggest issue. These men spoke at grave risks to their own safety about being beaten, raped, and tortured at the order of the President of the United States. All of Weiss's odes to free speech and "dangerous ideas" is and has always been horseshit

If you think beef prices are high now, wait until this gets to the US

This is funny, but it’s also illustrative of the split between actual reporters, and people like Weiss and Goldberg who are pure commentators. They really don’t understand what journalists do.

Trump could win because he gave supporters plausible deniability (to themselves, if not to outsiders). He's putting on a show, messing with the media, trolling the left, that's just the way he talks, seriously but not literally, etc. Vance's unabashed, creepy white nationalism doesn't have that.

funny how much "lived experience" has become "I want to ignore your facts in favor of my vibes"

The vice president, singling out for overtly racist abuse a natural-born US citizen whose only non-racial political relevance is he recently lost a primary for mayor of the country's 46th largest municipality.

If you are in a D+32 seat you never ever get to complain about how a primary challenger to you is endangering the Dems' chances. There is exactly one way that you can lose your seat and it's not to a Republican!

BTW you can let a Paramount+ agent that you'll cancel your sub unless they air an unedited CECOT segement on 60 Minutes here help.paramountplus.com/s/contact-us

Something which isn't always acknowledged is that "contrarian thinkers" are just regurgitating conventional wisdom with a little extra racism, and these forbidden views are generally expressed by the most platformed mainstream figures, like Pinker.

So the sources “risked their lives” to speak with 60 Minutes about this concentration camp we’re sending random people to, and Bari killed the story because the Trump administration refused an interview. Am I missing something??

not to excuse Weiss who owns this but I’ll be pretty surprised if there wasn’t a nasty call to an Ellison making clear that if this ran they could kiss WB goodbye

That’s a funny note to end the episode on

This is some Mengele shit

I hope ghosts are real so Charlie Kirk can see all this shit lol

When Google search launched, people didn’t need to be berated into it. There was no “you better figure out some way to use this.” People just tried it, quickly saw it directed them to information they sought and helped them navigate the internet, and kept going back to use it more. Just sayin’.

Senators like Kaine should resign mid-term, but insofar as they won’t, they ought to serve as archetypes for candidates who need to lose their primary elections. This kind of irresolute wimpiness ~entirely explains Democrats’ historically consequential failures in the Trump era.

yeah I think influencer culture *inherently* is just poisonous, even more so than the regular cult of celebrity was because it's so purely self-centered and pervasive.

This is right, but it was also starting to be obvious in July and August — which is why Ezra's efforts to kowtow to MAGA with the Charlie Kirk praise and anti-abortion nonsense was not only morally wrong, but silly. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/o...

“We are trading 50 years of ‘gold standard’ reputation for a single week of political quiet.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/b...

We really need more town halls with marginalized voices, like the Vice President of the United States and the richest men in the world.

a power outage is unusual, but not so unusual it can be waved away as an "edge case"... these vehicles should be pulling over and parking if they can't operate safely, not piling up in intersections and clogging roads

All I'm saying is the Michigan haters have been right all along. This entire program is rotten to the core. Harbaugh established this culture and then peaced out when he was about to get busted. Dude is a menace.

So CBS News paid President Trump millions to settle a baseless lawsuit over 60 Minutes editing a Kamala Harris interview the way they edit every interview, then a self-styled free speech champion took over CBS News and censored a 60 Minutes report exposing Trump admin actions, do I have that right?

It would be so crazy if one of the many many many people who worked on this piece and have a cut of it just uploaded it to YouTube or whatever

A dangerous pattern of denying federal dollars to blue states (which contribute more than they receive)

Recall that Byers is the reporter who, according to Ryan Lizza, was the only one out of a dozen who was willing to print a negative story Nuzzi was trying to plant about him

Following up on that last repost, the reason why "ffi" is sometimes a single character in typefaces is that it's what's called a ligature, in which characters are merged to make them look better on the page, as seen here:

There is nothing people like Bari Weiss hold in contempt more than regular people putting their lives and safety on the line to defend truth and justice.

Congress covering for a horrific pedophile ring populated by our President and so many powerful people and rich people in this country who sexually assaulted girls for decades and CBS News covering for those same people who sent innocent men to be tortured at CECOT, just a disgusting time here

No media org has ever set its credibility on fire so quickly.

Congratulations again to every major media editor who tried to sell Peter Thiel’s fake Appalachian messenger boy as a Reasonable Empathetic Conservative www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/12/jd-v...

Agreed. This is why I suggested that European NATO members send a small multinational tripwire force to Greenland.

a simple lesson in press coverage: every journalist has lindsey graham's cell # and there are never any investigative stories about lindsey graham

"Former Vice President Mike Pence’s political group is poaching top officials from the conservative Heritage Foundation amid growing ideological fights within the conservative movement and backlash at the prominent foundation." www.wsj.com/politics/ele...

Gotta name this Weisswashing, I think. Because I seriously doubt this is the last time she’s going to censor stuff to protect Trump.

You see this with every “EdTech” product so it makes sense we’d see it again with AI. “Imagine the ideal, highly motivated, diligent, curious, self-directed student, here’s how they could do great things with this” Wow, amazing, ok how will the other 99% of students use it.

Donovan Metayer, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland school shooting in Florida, died by suicide at age 26 on Dec. 15. Even after a mental health hold, he was allowed to purchase the gun with which he ended his life.

By trying to grease an interview with Stephen Miller, she sends the White House the message that they should work through her rather than CBS journalists. It’s a terrible way to run a newsroom, and it is exactly what you’d expect from an insecure editor who knows she’s over her head.

It would be hilarious if the first use of Congress's inherent contempt powers in half a century is by an R Congress against an R DOJ

Hmmm

kind of wild that both her husband and her brother are convicted serious sex offenders, and she's advocated for both.

Given CBS’s ownership and the Trump regime’s censorious nature, that segment must have been rigorously reported, carefully written and edited and reviewed at a dozen different levels. Then it was heavily promoted before being killed a couple of hours before it aired. These people are so clumsy.

Cuomo's allies in the TWU leadership understood much better than the actual Cuomo campaign that the wedge that can split the Mamdani coalition is "real New Yorkers vs gentrifiers" - by contrast attacking Mamdani and allies as Muslims or Socialists (as Cuomo did) strengthens the left coalition.

Dylan Byers finding a Bari Weiss fuckup so big he can't write an apologia for:

New: Congress leaves town until 2026 with no health care deal 4 House Rs + 214 Ds teamed up to force a vote in January on a 3-year ACA funding extension. But Senate Republicans tell me that bill is DOA in the Senate. Premiums will rise for ~22 million. www.nbcnews.com/politics/con...

Running for office on dismantling ICE would be a good example of touch-the-stove politics. Public opposition probably wasn’t enough when it was mostly warnings. I wish it had been. But now that ICE’s brutality and repression is widespread, undeniable, and in so many social media feeds, it might be.

Kanye and Nicki Minaj going full MAGA/anti-trans while Taylor Swift, a white woman from Pennsylvania, is a firm Democrat further reflects racial depolarization among voters. In this essay I will...

Precarity is the key. The economy always seems bad and everything will forever seem unaffordable if you don’t know in six days or six weeks or six months if you’re going to be employed, let alone six years.

Wrote up my predictions for 2026. -I think 2025 will have been rock bottom. -The Trump coalition is going to panic and fall to infighting as election day draws closer. -The AI bubble will get even more obviously bubbly. -We'll begin the long road to repair. 🤞 open.substack.com/pub/davekarp...

the kind of boring and banal truth about AI tools is that they are basically like every other tool in that they work best to complement your existing areas of expertise, have limitations, and do require an investment of time to learn their capabilities and limitations.

Look, there could be a perfectly innocent explanation for this. The problem is that given who is minding the CBS News store there is every reason to suspect something more nefarious.

When you ask your kids who painted the cat

Speaker Mike Johnson Campaigns for Democrats in Upcoming Midterms

The whole notion that you can’t air an investigative segment on immigration without going to Stephen Miller for comment is absurd.

Alright this guy is calling it for the weekend. Busy few days of unioning and hummingbird photography before loading up the sleigh. In the meantime, may I offer two mandarin ducks? 🪶