I’m still doing it.

Somewhere in there, The Present Age stopped being a side project and became the thing that pays my bills. So this is a thank-you note. It’s also, fair warning, a sales pitch, because I’d be lying if I pretended otherwise. New subscriptions and upgrades are 30% off right now, and I’m going to spend the next few hundred words trying to earn it.

The short version: this newsletter has no owner. Nobody can spike a piece I write, water down a headline after it’s published, or kill a story for being inconvenient to the wrong person. No billionaire, no board, no parent company. Just me and you. That’s the whole arrangement, and it’s the reason this works at all.

What I’ve done with that freedom, mostly, is write about the same handful of things over and over.

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The New York Times, for one. When the paper opened 2023 by hiring David French, a columnist who’d co-signed the 2017 Nashville Statement and once worked as an attorney for a group the Southern Poverty Law Center calls an anti-LGBTQ hate group, I pointed out that he was the second anti-trans voice the opinion section had brought on without a single trans columnist anywhere on staff. They’d let Jennifer Finney Boylan’s column go the year before. The math wasn’t subtle.

Then there’s the trick where outlets turn plain facts into open questions. CNN once ran a headline about Florida barring residents from changing the gender marker on their licenses and tacked on the line “Critics say the policy targets transgender people.” Critics say. As if it were a matter of opinion who that policy targets. I keep coming back to that move, right up through the way fact-checkers spent 2024 rating Project 2025 claims “false” because the document wasn’t technically written by Trump, just by the people around him.

A lot of these five years went to watching billionaires buy the press and then swear they’d keep their hands off it. When the Washington Post’s CEO pushed out his top editor and replaced her with a loyalist, he assured staff the new editor was “free to publish when, how, and what they want to.” Nobody offers that reassurance unless they’ve already made sure the answer will come out right.

And lately, the slop. After Elon Musk’s chatbot started calling itself MechaHitler and posting antisemitic garbage, NBC ran the headline “AI chatbot Grok issues apology for antisemitic posts.” I wrote that Grok apologized for nothing, because Grok is a product. The company that built it issued the statement, and writing it the other way hands Musk a shield he hasn’t earned.

Not all of it has been grim. A year and a half after the first auction collapsed, I got to write that The Onion really is taking over Infowars. Every so often, the bad guys lose one.

Every newsroom with an owner has a pressure point, a place where the right phone call gets results. A president who wants a segment gone calls the billionaire who signs the checks. An advertiser that hates a story pulls its money. A corporate parent with a merger to protect makes sure an editor understands what’s good for their career. That’s not a theory. The editor the Post forced out didn’t leave by accident; somebody up the chain wanted a tamer newsroom and got one.

None of those levers exist here. The chain of command stops at you.

That’s the trade, and I’ll be straight about it: the readers are the only people I answer to. It also means I can’t coast, because the moment you decide I’m phoning it in, you can leave. If enough of you do, this ends. I’ll take that deal over the alternative every single time.

So, the pitch I promised at the top.

If you’ve been reading for free, thank you, and please keep reading. But the paid version is what keeps this a job instead of a hobby, and it’s 30% off for new subscribers and for anyone upgrading from free. Paid gets you everything I publish and the full five-year archive, which is to say, more of what you just read. That’s the hard sell. I don’t do this often, which is probably why I’m bad at it.

Get 30% off for 1 year

And if money’s genuinely tight, email me. I’ve always set aside comp subscriptions for people who want to read and can’t swing it, and I’m not about to stop. I’d rather you read than not.

Anyway. Mostly I just want to say thanks. For reading five years of a newsletter that is, let’s be honest, me being annoyed at how the news gets told. For the corrections when I got something wrong, and for the times you sent a piece to someone who needed it. Media criticism isn’t exactly a day at the beach, and you kept showing up for it.

I wish I could tell you the stuff I cover is getting better. It isn’t. The billionaires aren’t finished, and the headlines aren’t getting more honest. There’ll be plenty to write about a year from now, and I’ll be here writing it. The only reason I can is you.

The award is named for Mike Wallace, one of the original “60 Minutes” correspondents and the kind of interviewer the powerful learned to dread. The grant money comes from CBS News. Scott Pelley handed it to him.

Campos thanked them for it. Then he kept talking. He said CBS’s recent direction “stains the legacy of Mike Wallace, the namesake of this scholarship.” He said corporate elites were seizing “the very pipes through which our information flows.” And he finished like this: “So if at any time you hesitate to utter the word ‘genocide’ or remain silent in the face of blatant lies, remember to ask yourself, who is this for?” Then, to the room: “I hope you choose us.”

Wallace spent his career walking into rooms like that one and refusing to flinch. The award in his name had just gone to a teenager willing to aim that at CBS itself, to its face, with the network’s own check in his hand. Jeremy Barr of the Guardian reported that Campos both startled the crowd and won much of it over.

It was brave. I’ll say that plainly.

For about a year, the journalists watching CBS get hollowed out have been saying a version of what Campos said. Just not like that. They’ve said it in resignation memos and farewell broadcasts and the occasional interview, in language vague enough to keep their jobs or protect against getting blackballed elsewhere. Campos didn’t have a job to keep. So he said it the way you’d say it if you weren’t afraid, and the reaction in that room gave away how rare that’s gotten.

The long takeover

None of this started with Campos, and none of it was a secret. I’ve covered just about every step of it.

Trump sued CBS over an edited 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris and demanded $20 billion. Paramount, which needed the Trump administration to wave through its merger with Skydance, paid $16 million to make it disappear. When Stephen Colbert called that settlement a “big fat bribe” on the air, CBS canceled his show and called it a “financial decision.” Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, resigned in April. Wendy McMahon, the president of CBS News, was gone a month later.

Then the new owners made their real move. David Ellison’s Skydance took over Paramount, and Ellison, who is friendly with Trump, bought Bari Weiss’s opinion site The Free Press and installed her atop CBS News, with her former Free Press colleague Adam Rubenstein as a top deputy. In December, three hours before air, Weiss spiked a finished 60 Minutes report on the El Salvador megaprison where the administration was shipping the men it deported. It ran a month later, buried.

Weiss said the segment “was not ready.” Take her at her word for a second, then look at what “ready” has turned out to mean.

Weiss is staunchly pro-Israel, and so is the pattern she’s built. A Variety cover story on Ellison reported that one staffer believed CBS’s layoffs had fallen hardest on journalists whose work was critical of Israel, among them the veteran foreign correspondent Debora Patta, who’d reported from Gaza for years. The New York Post reported that Weiss pulled a pro-Israel correspondent off the layoff list after he lobbied to become the network’s Israel correspondent, and cut Patta instead, months after Patta’s interview with Mike Huckabee, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, drew his complaint that CBS had edited his words unfairly. And Zeteo reported that Weiss personally reworked a CBS Sunday Morning story about Israeli digs in the occupied West Bank just before it aired, something staffers said she’d never done to that broadcast before.

This is the context for the word Campos chose. In September, a UN commission of inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza (Israel rejected the finding). So when an 18-year-old stood on a CBS stage and dared the room to say “genocide,” he was reaching for the exact word the network had trained its people not to say.

Notice how all of it got described. A finished report “wasn’t ready.” Killing a late-night show was “a financial decision.” Every move came wrapped in language built to mean as little as possible. For a year, nobody inside CBS said the plain thing out loud. And then, last week, somebody did.

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Then Pelley said it too

Scott Pelley had handed Campos that award only days earlier, and told the room, “God, we need young people like you right behind us.”

On Monday, the staff of 60 Minutes gathered to meet the new boss Weiss had chosen to run the show: Nick Bilton, a former tech columnist and author who has never produced television news. Bilton said Weiss “loves” 60 Minutes. Pelley cut him off. “She’s murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” he said. “She was brought in to kill it, and she’s doing exactly that.” He said it in a closed meeting, on audio that Oliver Darcy’s Status newsletter obtained.

Then he kept going, the way Wallace might have. He told Bilton, to his face, that he had “slender” qualifications for the job. He pressed him on the firings of the week before, when Weiss cleared out much of the show, and called the way they’d been handled “cruel.” When Weiss’s deputy Charles Forelle told Pelley he was being “rude,” Pelley shot back that what was rude was “Black Thursday.” The other producers in the room applauded him. Afterward, some of them wondered whether he would resign.

Here’s what makes Pelley worth pausing on. A year ago he gave a commencement speech at Wake Forest that went viral, anchored to a line from George Orwell, carved into the wall of the BBC, that liberty “means telling someone something that they don’t want to hear.” He warned those graduates about “the fear to speak in America.” Last week, on the Emmy stage, an 18-year-old did the exact thing Pelley had described, told a room what it didn’t want to hear, at his own expense, and Pelley applauded him for it. Now Pelley’s doing it himself.

That’s what it looks like when someone stops hinting. It’s loud, and it’s rare. Almost nobody else has managed it.

Others spoke in increasingly unsubtle code

Go back through the year with that in mind, and you can watch people try to say it without saying it.

From a Status article about some of the comments from departing CBS Newsers:

While Ellison might wish to ignore the meltdown at “60 Minutes”—a crisis instigated by his handpicked leader of CBS News—that is becoming increasingly difficult. Indeed, Pelley and Owens are not alone in describing the health of the iconic program in dire terms. Anderson Cooper delivered a not-so-subtle message to management when he exited the program. Sharyn Alfonsi warned that the “wall between editorial independence and corporate interest at CBS is being methodically torn down.” Cecilia Vega accused the company of “censorship” and said it is “dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.” And the legendary “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft said that the program had been “executed” by Donald Trump, who has put enormous pressure on CBS News and parent company Paramount to muzzle the program.

Scott MacFarlane, the network’s justice correspondent, left in March. His public note thanked his bosses and talked about chasing “personal goals.” What had actually happened, as Jeremy Barr reported, was that MacFarlane, who’d covered January 6 for years, watched CBS mark the fifth anniversary with a brief, both-sided shrug, then posted his own old BBC segment about that day the next morning, which read as the goodbye he couldn’t put in the memo. “Personal goals” and “they both-sided an insurrection I covered for years” are the same complaint said two ways.

Lesley Stahl is still on staff, so her version stayed systemic. On the New Yorker Radio Hour she called Trump’s lawsuit baseless and said she was angry at Shari Redstone for settling it, then went a step past that: the whole situation, she said, “makes me question whether any corporation should own a news operation.” She blamed the structure, carefully, without pointing at any one spiked story. That’s what you do when you still have to show up there.

By the time Sharyn Alfonsi spoke up, her contract was already lapsing, and she got specific. She called her own treatment a “deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize factually accurate reporting,” and warned people not to be fooled when the purge got dressed up as “modernization” or “restructuring.”

Line them up and it’s obvious. The further someone got from the paycheck, the plainer they got. Every name here had something to protect, a contract, a career, so they reached for words that couldn’t be used against them. The code was fear, the ordinary kind that belongs to people who can’t yet afford to be right out loud. And the fact that this many careful, decorated journalists felt they had to whisper it tells you how big the thing is they were whispering about.

Which brings it back to the one person in the room who wasn’t whispering, and didn’t have to.

For those who would like to financially support The Present Age on a non-Substack platform, please be aware that I also publish these pieces to my Patreon.

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Why he could say it

Start with where Campos was standing.

He’s eighteen, a senior at a public school in Washington, about to leave for college. The scholarship is a one-time check, not a contract. He doesn’t have a beat to lose or a future at CBS to protect, because he was never angling for one. The network has something to hold over everybody we just met: a paycheck, a next assignment that comes or doesn’t. It has nothing to hold over a kid who’s only passing through.

He wasn’t trying to detonate the evening, either. “I knew it was kind of what I had to do,” he told Barr, and he’d run the gist of his remarks past the television academy beforehand, so it wasn’t an ambush. He used the moment anyway, with CBS’s money already in hand.

And he saw the asymmetry clearly. Asked about the response, he told the Guardian that all the attention mostly proved how far the bar has dropped, that what he said should be ordinary, the kind of thing working journalists do every day rather than something left to an 18-year-old at a podium. He’s right, and he put it better than I could.

His own statement afterward said the rest. He believes in journalism made for ordinary people instead of elites, and that it starts with “the audacity and integrity to call out the same organization funding my award.” Reporters who can’t manage that much, he wrote, can’t be trusted at all.

That’s the whole asymmetry. The word he reached for, “genocide,” named exactly what CBS had been editing around. He could say it because he wants nothing the network is in a position to withhold. The fear Pelley named at Wake Forest belongs to people with something to lose inside the building. Campos was never inside it.

This was never only about CBS. Weiss is running her conservative, “anti-woke” Free Press politics through one of the most trusted names in American news, and CBS isn’t the only outlet bending toward whatever keeps its owners and the administration comfortable. ABC wrote Trump a settlement check. The Washington Post’s opinion page went quiet under Jeff Bezos. It’s the pattern I keep coming back to: the people who own the news deciding what the news is allowed to be.

The candidate, Democrat James Talarico, is cisgender and heterosexual. Miller knew that, and reached for “transgender” anyway, because he wanted an insult and that was the one he grabbed. The DNC had posted a photo of Talarico with the line “Fired up. Ready to go. It’s time to take back Texas,” and Miller quote-tweeted it: “The Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate.”

The DNC wrote back: “shut up you ugly fuck.”

And then the fainting started.

Katie Miller, Stephen’s wife, went on Laura Ingraham’s Fox show and warned that the DNC’s five-word insult was “the same violent political rhetoric that is leading people to shooting up, whether it be the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, or President Trump in Butler.” A party account told her husband to shut up, and she heard gunfire.

This is the household, remember, where Stephen Miller calls the Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization” and promises the government will “dismantle and destroy” what he labels the left’s terror networks. He talks about taking the opposition apart with the power of the state. His wife thinks the word “ugly” is how people end up shot. They’re married to each other.

The press found the cursing genuinely newsworthy. Mediaite reported that the DNC “wildly berates” a Trump official, as though the wild thing that happened this week was somebody typing “fuck.”

There’s an old tweet that explains all of this better than I can. It’s gone now, I think deleted along with the account that posted it, but it went around for years. In 2019, a user going by PissJugTycoon (yes, I know, lol) wrote:

I dated a 5’8 guy who’d taunt every jacked, 6’3 bro he met until they’d pull their fist back to beat him up, whereupon my ex would go “heyheyheyyy c’maahn I’m little guy, I’m just a little guyy, noo, it’s also my birthday, I’m a little birthday boyy” & it somehow always worked

That’s the move, start to finish. You go looking for the fight. You poke and poke until the other guy finally pulls his arm back, and then, right when it might actually cost you something, you crumple into the little guy. I’m just a little guy. It’s my birthday. You wouldn’t hit a little birthday boy. And it works, because now the big guy is the one who looks bad for almost swinging at someone so pitiful.

The whole Republican Party runs this play. Its officials spend their days saying genuinely vicious things about entire categories of people who can’t hit back, and the moment one of them takes a single insult from someone who can, out comes the birthday boy: the wounded innocence, the lecture about civility, the warning that words like this get people killed. The performance has one purpose, and it’s to make your swing the only blow anyone remembers seeing.

Whatever happened to “fuck your feelings”?

Getting the other guy to lower his fist is only half the move. The other half is the part where it turns out his feelings are precious and yours were never really feelings at all.

Another tweet lost to time, this one from 2018, put it as well as anyone has. User KrangTNelson wrote:

no no no you misunderstood. I said “fuck YOUR feelings”. MY feelings are very important and must be handled gently, like a tiny baby hummingbird

They sold this, by the way. Literally. “Fuck Your Feelings” went on T-shirts and got run up flagpoles starting in 2016, and “Make Liberals Cry Again” went on hats. For the better part of a decade, the brand was simple: other people’s hurt feelings were funny, and the tears of your opponents were the whole point.

So which of these tough customers turned out to have the tiny baby hummingbird for a heart? Stephen Miller. The man who took children from their parents at the border and built the current deportation machine. His whole career is an argument that some people’s suffering doesn’t register. And his were the feelings that had to be cradled, live on Fox, because a political party was rude to him.

The hummingbird routine works fine, as long as nobody looks too closely at how these same people talk about everyone who isn’t Stephen Miller.

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The stuff that doesn’t count as uncivil

Start with Randy Fine, the Republican congressman from Florida. When photographs went around of Palestinians starving in Gaza, his response was “Hey Muslim terrorists, cry harder. #StarveAway.” He’s called Muslim members of Congress “terrorists,” and when people demanded he apologize, he said, “Boo hoo.” He’s also offered that “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one,” and confirmed he meant the dog (no one was seriously suggesting anyone needed to choose between the two). He said that “mainstream Muslims” should be “destroyed.” The movement that produced him spent this week clutching itself over the word “fuck.”

Then there’s the president. In December, closing out a cabinet meeting, Donald Trump called Somali immigrants “garbage,” said “they contribute nothing,” and told the room “I don’t want them in our country.” His cabinet cheered and applauded; the vice president pumped his fist, and the defense secretary said, “Well said.” Within days, federal agents were moving through Somali neighborhoods in the Twin Cities.

Then there’s the way they talk about trans people. At CPAC, the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles said “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” and when that went over badly, explained that it wasn’t a call to harm anyone, because in his telling trans people don’t really exist to begin with. His Daily Wire colleague Matt Walsh calls the trans movement “the greatest evil our country faces.”

In a congressional hearing, Representative Nancy Mace, who calls herself a “proud transphobe,” shouted “Tranny, tranny, tranny! I don’t really care“ and said she wouldn’t be lectured by “men who have mental health issues dressing as women.” Stephen Miller reaches for almost the same words, calling trans troops “men in dresses pretending to be women.” When the deputy White House chief of staff and a sitting congresswoman land on the identical sneer, you’re looking at the house style. And nobody on the right worried that “eradicated” might be the kind of word that gets people hurt.

That move, taking a whole category of people and turning it into the insult, is the one that started this. Miller called Talarico “transgender” as a slur; Trump decided Chuck Schumer “used to be Jewish. He’s not Jewish anymore. He’s a Palestinian.” The insult is built to land on everyone in the group at once.

None of it summoned a civility brigade. There were no fainting couches for the starving, the deported, or the eradicated. Every one of these landed on people with no way to answer back, and the right’s tender new concern for everyone’s tone switched on at the exact moment the target was a powerful man who could.

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Alfonsi has been a correspondent at 60 Minutes since 2015. Her contract at CBS expired Saturday. The network didn’t renew it. Her agent’s calls went unreturned, she said, so she went to the Times instead.

“It sends a chilling message to the entire newsroom,” she told the Times. “I think it was a deliberate choice to penalize a journalist for refusing to sanitize accurate reporting.”

Bari Weiss is using CBS News to launder her conservative “anti-woke” politics as mainstream journalism. The brand has to keep functioning for the laundering to work, so the people who’d report stories Weiss doesn’t want aired have to go. Alfonsi is the latest. She named the project on the record before they could close the door behind her.

She’s not resigning. “If they want me gone because I did my job, they’ll have to fire me.”

The first refusal

In December, Alfonsi had a 60 Minutes segment ready on conditions inside El Salvador’s CECOT prison, where the Trump administration was sending Venezuelan men it had deported. CBS had already started promoting the piece. Three hours before broadcast, Weiss pulled it.

Alfonsi sent an internal memo, which leaked (because of course it did). She wrote that the segment had been “screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices.” Pulling it, she said, was “not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

Weiss said the story “was not ready”. One of her objections, per NYT’s Grynbaum: the segment lacked an on-camera interview with Stephen Miller, the architect of the deportation policy.

Stephen Miller doesn’t sit for accountability interviews about his own deportation policy. Weiss knew that. Demanding one was the mechanism for spiking the piece, dressed in editorial standards language. If Miller declines, the spiking gets a defensible reason. If he accepts, a segment about what the policy did to people becomes a debate about whether those people deserved it. Alfonsi’s reporting goes nowhere either way. The laundering mechanism in miniature.

The segment aired in January, with administration comments tacked on the front. Same reporting, same conclusions, slightly less inconvenient timing for the White House. If the story really wasn’t ready in December, what changed by January? Nothing, except the news cycle had moved.

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This isn’t the first person at CBS to be shown the door

Bill Owens went first. April 2025. The longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes resigned, telling the staff he “would not be allowed to run the show” as he had before. This was before Weiss arrived. Owens saw what was coming.

Then Colbert. July 2025. CBS canceled The Late Show days after Colbert called Paramount’s $16 million Trump settlement a “big fat bribe.” The network said it was a “financial decision,” which it absolutely was not. The show went dark earlier this month.

Then Anderson Cooper. February 2026. Cooper announced he was leaving 60 Minutes after 20 years. In his farewell broadcast this month, he told viewers he hoped 60 Minutes “remains 60 Minutes.” Then this swipe at CBS: “The independence of 60 Minutes has been critical. The trust it has with viewers is critical to the success of 60 Minutes.”

Now Alfonsi.

The numbers tell the same story. CBS Evening News, the centerpiece of Weiss’s redesign, just had its lowest April in the 25-54 demo on record. Year over year, NBC was up in both. ABC was up in viewers. CBS was the only network down across the board. It dropped 7% in viewers and 18% in the demo. CBS Mornings posted its worst Q1 on record.

Weiss told staff in January that “winning isn’t about ratings”.

She’s preparing to remake 60 Minutes next. The show’s viewership is up 9% this season, per Nielsen. It’s the only CBS News property growing. And now…?

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Keep the show, remove the journalism

Per the Times, Weiss is considering hiring an outside journalist to oversee or work alongside Tanya Simon, the executive producer of 60 Minutes. Simon, daughter of the late 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon, has been at the show for 25 years. The current correspondents, Alfonsi among them, asked CBS to give her the job last year. Weiss may put someone over her anyway.

Weiss’s deputy is already in place. Adam Rubenstein, a conservative former New York Times opinion editor who worked at The Free Press, joined her at CBS as her No. 2. During a January meeting about the CECOT story, Alfonsi reportedly snapped at Rubenstein: “You don’t get to produce me.” A Free Press opinion editor was giving production notes to a 60 Minutes correspondent. Welcome to the new chain of command.

Weiss is also planning “60 Minutes” live events, modeled on The New Yorker Festival, where viewers could meet correspondents like Lesley Stahl. Whoever’s still around by then.

All three are pieces of the same project. The brand stays intact. The infrastructure underneath it gets rebuilt to meet Weiss and Paramount owner David Ellison’s ideological goals. That’s what makes the laundering work at scale.

For those who would like to financially support The Present Age on a non-Substack platform, please be aware that I also publish these pieces to my Patreon.

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What “looks like 60 Minutes” actually means

Back to Alfonsi’s line: a broadcast that “looks like 60 Minutes” but doesn’t have “the courage or the character.” Next season the show will still be on. The watch will still tick. Lesley Stahl will still introduce segments. The graphics will still say 60 Minutes. The form will be preserved.

What gets removed is what the show was. The reporter who knows where the story is. The producer who fights for the air date. The executive producer who pushes back when the boss wants the architect of a deportation policy invited on for balance.

The audience won’t notice right away. They’ll just sense, over time, that the segments have less bite. They’ll wonder why nothing 60 Minutes airs ever seems to move anything anymore. They aren’t supposed to realize what’s happened: the show is now the delivery vehicle for the same instincts that drove the Jamie Reed coverage in 2023 and the CECOT spike in December, wrapped this time in CBS News stationery. Weiss’s politics couldn’t move policy through The Free Press the way they will through CBS. That’s the entire point of being at CBS.

In September 2025, when ICE agents began rolling through Chicago neighborhoods as part of an operation the Department of Homeland Security called Operation Midway Blitz, the city’s residents needed someone to tell them what was happening. Not federal officials, who would refuse to disclose who was being arrested or why. Not the White House, whose press releases ran the propaganda, not the receipts. Just a reporter willing to stand outside a courthouse, count the unmarked vehicles, and write down what she saw.

Block Club Chicago, a nonprofit newsroom that covers neighborhoods most legacy outlets ignore, had four reporters shot with pepper balls and tear-gassed by federal agents at a Broadview detention facility. It joined other Chicago news organizations in suing the Department of Homeland Security over First Amendment violations. They put up “know your rights” guides, launched a WhatsApp channel for ICE updates, partnered with other Chicago newsrooms to track sightings on Signal. Their analysis of federal ICE data eventually showed that more than 60 percent of ICE arrests in Illinois did not involve a criminal charge or conviction.

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It started at the University of Central Florida, on May 8, at the ceremony for the College of Arts and Humanities and the Nicholson School of Communication and Media. The speaker was Gloria Caulfield, vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Development Company, a Florida real estate firm. She’d been going for a few minutes, working through the usual commencement throat-clearing about how change is scary but also exciting, when she arrived at this: “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.”

The room booed her.

Not a scattered grumble. A real, rolling wave of it, loud enough that she stopped, turned around, and stood there with her hands out, trying to work out what had gone wrong. “Okay, I struck a chord,” she said. “May I finish?” Somewhere in the crowd, a graduate yelled “AI sucks.” She pushed on, reached the line “only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives,” and the room cheered. They were cheering, at a graduation, for the memory of a world that existed before ChatGPT. Caulfield, rattled now, called it “a bipolar topic,” and a minute later, getting booed again, settled on a reading of the moment that let her keep her feet: “I love it. Passion, let’s go.”

That weekend, it was Scott Borchetta’s turn. Borchetta founded Big Machine Records, the label that put out Taylor Swift’s early albums, and he was the commencement speaker at Middle Tennessee State University, where some of the graduates in front of him were collecting degrees from its Scott Borchetta College of Media and Entertainment. He told them “AI is rewriting production as we sit here,” and the room booed. Borchetta’s answer was not Caulfield’s. “Deal with it,” he said. “It’s a tool. Make it work for you.” To the people still booing him, he added: “Hear me now or pay me later.”

Then, the next week, it happened again! Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, gave the commencement address at the University of Arizona on May 15, and the graduates booed him too, loudest every time he turned to AI. Arizona is the messy example of the three. Students there had spent weeks organizing against Schmidt’s appearance over a sexual assault lawsuit filed by his former partner, and the booing started well before he got to AI at all. UCF and MTSU are cleaner. But the throughline holds across all of them: stand up in front of a graduating class in 2026, tell them their future runs on AI, and a good chunk of the room will let you know exactly what they think of that.

There’s something clarifying about a boo! It’s not a subtle instrument. Nobody has ever had to wonder what a few thousand people booing in unison were trying to get across. A boo has nothing in it to misread, no second meaning tucked behind the first. It isn’t really language. It’s volume aimed at a person, and it means no.

So let’s talk about it.

The students aren’t confused

The simplest part first: the students were right. Being right here didn’t take any special insight. They are about to graduate into a labor market that sucks and has been getting worse for years for people exactly like them, and they have noticed.

Madison Fuentes graduated from UCF this month with a degree in creative writing, and she told the Orlando station News 6 what was behind the booing: “I don’t think that kids are having a hard time accepting it because we know that AI exists. I think we’re just having a hard time acknowledging that it’s taking away job opportunities from us.” Fuentes and her classmates use AI. They’ve used it for years; about half of Gen Z uses generative AI at least weekly. The booing came from people who know the technology well and have done the math on what it means for them. The numbers are on their side, too. The education company Cengage found that just 30% of last year’s graduates landed full-time work, down from 41% the year before.

And the people building AI know all of this.

In April, the New York Times ran a piece by Jasmine Sun headlined “Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass,” about the mood inside the industry. Sun’s sources, she wrote, were a lot grimmer about AI and jobs in private than they were on the record. They “suddenly became optimists once I turned on the mic.”

While I was working on this, Brian Merchant published a piece at his excellent newsletter, Blood in the Machine (named after his book on the Luddites), that opens on the very same UCF clip. His argument, in short, is that the anger at AI is mostly anger at capitalism: AI has become the most visible face of an economy that was already stacked against the people now graduating into it, and the students booing understand that just fine. He makes that case better than I’m going to, and if it’s the case you came for, go read him. What I want to do here is follow the boo a little further, out of the auditorium and into the hands of the people who decided what it meant.

Blood in the Machine

AI as the new avatar of American capitalism

When a commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida intoned that “AI is the next industrial revolution,” she was met with a chorus of thundering boos from the graduating students in attendance. The mass disapproval left the orator, Gloria Caulfield, Vice President of Strategic Alliances for Tavistock Development Company, flustered and unmoo…

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a month ago · 183 likes · 18 comments · Brian Merchant

The room read her fine

Some of the write-ups of the Schmidt speech had him failing to “read room on AI.” Orlando Weekly called Caulfield’s line “ill-timed.” Plenty of the coverage was sharper than that, but the reflex was consistent: the booing was a misjudgment, a speaker who’d gotten her audience wrong.

I think that phrase is doing more work than it looks like.

I’d argue that “read the room” is a phrase mostly about delivery. It assumes the speech itself was basically fine and the speaker just aimed it badly, at the wrong crowd on the wrong day. Get the aim right and the speech lands. That’s the entire theory of the phrase. So does it hold up here? Is there a version of “the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution” that a room of about-to-graduate humanities majors stands up and cheers for? Maybe. What’s the line a better-calibrated Caulfield delivers instead?

I don’t think there is one, because there’s really no gentle way to tell a graduating class that the economy is being rebuilt to need fewer of them. They heard the content. They heard it correctly. The delivery was never the problem.

And the boos were serious, and specific. Watch the rest of Caulfield’s speech and you find that her actual closing message, the inspirational note she chose to leave a room of arts and communications graduates with, was that “communication is a superpower.” Her example was Magic Johnson, and the story of how he once talked Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz into a business partnership. That was the send-off: here is how a person persuades a CEO. Houda Eletr, a UCF graduate quoted by Orlando Weekly, called Caulfield a “corporate mouthpiece.” Oof!

When “read the room” runs out, there’s always “Luddite,” a word that pulls the same trick: it turns a person with an objection into a person who’s just scared of machines. (Read Merchant’s book to better understand who the Luddites actually were, please.) Either way, the move is the same. Make the booing a feeling, a failure of manners or nerve, anything but a judgment.

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Don’t worry about it

It was interesting to watch how the people actually being booed responded to it live, while it was still happening to them. Mostly, what they did was reassure the room. (Borchetta, telling a booing crowd to “deal with it,” was the blunt exception.) And the AI industry keeps two reassurances on hand.

Schmidt’s was the more sophisticated one. He didn’t pretend the fear wasn’t there. He named it, and named it accurately: he told the Arizona graduates he could hear them, that they were afraid the machines were coming and the jobs “evaporating.” And he agreed the fear was “rational.” Then, in the same breath, he told them where it comes from. The fear, he said, is “amplified every day by social media platforms with algorithms that have learned with great precision that fear earns clicks and that anxiety drives engagement.”

A man who ran Google for a decade told a stadium of young people that their dread about the tech industry is real, then placed the source of that dread inside their own phones.

The second reassurance is for when the first one won’t hold, when the job losses get too concrete to wave off as a feeling. Then the answer becomes: don’t worry, there will be a safety net. And the safety net the industry reaches for, every time, is universal basic income.

UBI is a strange thing to keep promising, because it is close to the least likely policy in American life to actually happen. This is a country whose politics include a durable, bipartisan enthusiasm for drug-testing welfare recipients and arguing over whether food stamps should be allowed to cover soda. UBI gets named the way you make a vague promise to a kid who won’t stop asking. It’s there to close the subject, and most of the time it works.

The industry’s own behavior gives the game away. Sun’s piece describes the Democratic pollster David Shor laying out polling for a room of AI workers: universal basic income tests badly, while a federal jobs guarantee is much more likely. A safety-net policy that could actually pass exists; it just isn’t the one the industry names. Part of that, I believe, is because once you start talking about a jobs guarantee, you have to start addressing what these jobs look like.

The two reassurances don’t fit together, and the contradiction is total. One treats the fear as a glitch your feeds installed in you. The other treats the fear as accurate, and promises a fix. The industry never reconciles them. It just reaches for whichever one the moment calls for. Either way, the boo gets answered without being answered.

Then it became a word

When the AI backlash throws off another clip, another viral moment, the people whose job is to explain things go to work. I’m one of them. And one of the moves the job reaches for, again and again, is to give the thing a name.

The name that’s gotten attached to it is “AI populism.” The phrase itself isn’t new, but the definition everyone’s been quoting is Sun’s. She defined it, in her newsletter, as a worldview that treats AI as an elite political project: something tech billionaires are pushing onto an unwilling public in the service of layoffs and surveillance, with the question of whether the tools actually work treated as beside the point. It’s a sharp definition, and it spread fast. By early May, “A.I. Populism Is Here” was a New York Times headline. And then, the way these things go, the term became an argument about the term: Merchant pushed back on it, and pointed to the writer David Karpf doing the same, on the grounds that it lumps very different people together and makes their objection sound more paranoid than it is.

@jasmine’s substack

🌻 AI populism's warning shots

Sam Altman was targeted by two violent attacks in the last four days. First on Friday, when a man threw a Molotov cocktail into his home, and second yesterday, when two others shot at his door. Nobody was hurt in either case. Still, these acts are horrifying. Most of the AI safety intelligentsia—including some of Altman’s…

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2 months ago · 519 likes · 61 comments · Jasmine Sun

Underneath all of that, the question had changed. It had been whether the students were right. It became what to call them.

The students had made an argument. The commentary turned the argument into a category, and then turned the category into a debate about the category: whether “AI populism” is too broad a net, whether it condescends to the people it describes. None of that is stupid, and some of it I’d defend. But it is, unmistakably, the sound of an event being processed into a topic. A boo is a boo. “AI populism” is a panel discussion. (In fairness, this essay is one too.)

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A boo with no teeth

So, the question. What can a boo actually do?

On the evidence here, not much. Nobody had to suppress it. Nobody cut a microphone or stopped a single graduate from booing. The boos were loud, they were clear, they went viral, and none of that mattered, because loud and clear and viral isn’t the same as having leverage. Send a boo through all three rooms and what comes out the other end is everything except a reason for anyone to do anything differently.

None of it took malice. Nobody in any of those rooms set out to neutralize a class of angry graduates; they just did the jobs they already had, and the jobs, run end to end, do the neutralizing on their own. Schmidt had told the graduates that “when someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.” They booed him through most of the speech. He finished it, and the evening cost him nothing. Caulfield stood in front of thousands of people rejecting her and decided, out loud, that what she was hearing was “passion.”

The industry knows the difference between a boo and a threat. In Sun’s reporting, the Palantir CEO Alex Karp warned a panel that “the country could blow up politically.” He wasn’t talking about graduates booing. In April, someone tried to firebomb Sam Altman’s home; someone else is accused of shooting at an Indianapolis official who had voted for a data center. Those are crimes, and they are also the version of the backlash the industry takes seriously. A boo is the other version, the civil one, the kind that fits inside a thirty-second clip. It is also the most forceful thing a stadium of twenty-two-year-olds can actually do.

So the students were right, and they were heard. Unfortunately, it probably won’t matter.

If you made it this far, you've earned a little something. During the same stretch of graduations, Glendale Community College in Arizona let an AI system read its graduates' names at commencement. It skipped dozens of them. I went through and edited together a little video of the mishap. Enjoy!

“DEBUNKING: The Rich Don’t Pay Their Fair Share”

“The Politics of Conversion Therapy”

Those are real video titles from “Make It Make Sense,” the Washington Post Opinion section’s new flagship podcast, which the paper officially launched on Monday, a day after the media newsletter Status reported that the section had spent $80,000(!) building out a new podcast studio. The show is hosted in rotation by opinion editor Adam O’Neal, deputy opinion editor James Hohmann, and columnists such as Carine Hajjar, Kate Andrews, Dominic Pino, and Jason Willick. Most of them are recent hires, part of the section’s hard pivot right under Bezos.

After more than 20 episodes since they started posting in late February (and 186 videos on YouTube), the show’s dedicated YouTube channel has… 515 subscribers. The launch trailer is on the Washington Post’s main YouTube channel, which has 2.85 million subscribers. It has 1,400 views. (These numbers are as of Wednesday afternoon and will probably have shifted by the time you read this.)

The new opinion section’s video push is failing publicly, and so are the other billionaire-funded prestige-media operations that share its model. The content is dull. The numbers are microscopic. And the men paying for it have been telling us all along that they don’t care. For all the talk of “the marketplace of ideas,” Make It Make Sense looks like yet another right-wing influence operation that exists solely because a billionaire is willing to subsidize it.

What the $80,000 bought

Per Status, the $80,000 was for video gear, not the rest of the studio. The studio itself has wood paneling, a bar, couches, a small framed American flag print on the back wall, and a much larger framed image of a cowboy on horseback behind the hosts’ couch.

Most of the people who used to make video at the Post are gone. The video team is down to three, from about 60 two years ago.

On Apple Podcasts, the show has four ratings averaging 2.3 stars out of five. The most positive review, per 404 Media’s Jason Koebler, reads in full: “This is bad and the people making it should feel bad.” Spotify users have rated it 2.8 out of five. A video posted Tuesday, shot in the new studio, has 217 views. The videos pulling triple-digit numbers, Koebler reports, are probably mostly hate-watches.

The format is roughly what you’d expect if a print editorial board agreed to film one of its meetings without rehearsing first. The hosts sit on the couch under the wood paneling and the cowboy and just sort of riff at each other. Recent topics include why weed is more dangerous than people think, what the media got wrong about COVID, what to do with racist statues, and why the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker is bad. Koebler transcribed the first nineteen seconds of one video. One host gets confused mid-sentence about whether any sitting president has ever attended a Supreme Court oral argument. Another host responds, “I think so. I think.” A third concludes, “This is, uhh, we’ll confirm that. We’ll fact check that.” Great work, everyone.

And the thing is… the Post had a really good video team. Dave Jorgenson spent six years building the Washington Post’s TikTok presence into one of the biggest in journalism. He left the Post last year to start his own media company, Local News International, which I covered for Depth Perception in December. His personal YouTube channel now has 358,000 subscribers. His TikTok has 318,000 followers. The Washington Post’s TikTok account, per Koebler, has stopped posting original video. It now reshares wire-service footage instead. A former WaPo video journalist, working with a very small team, has built more than 600 times the YouTube audience of the Post’s flagship new opinion show.

Long Lead Presents: Depth Perception

From The Washington Post’s TikTok to his own media empire: Dave Jorgenson goes independent

When Dave Jorgenson launched The Washington Post’s TikTok account in 2019, the platform was still widely dismissed as a place for teenagers to lip-sync and dance. Six years later, after amassing nearly 2 million followers and racking up over 1 billion views…

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6 months ago · 5 likes · Long Lead and Parker Molloy

More than the podcast

On May 4, the Post won two Pulitzers. Status reported that to stream the announcement live from K Street, the paper had to bring back two of the video operators it had laid off in February. Nobody left in the building could run the equipment. They walked past the new opinion studio on their way in.

Bezos laid off the people who win the Pulitzers. He’s funding the people who lose the subscribers.

Traffic to the Post’s website was down 24 percent year-over-year in March, per TheRighting. The New York Times was down 0.6 percent over the same period. CNN was up 3 percent. The Post is in its own category.

The Post has shed paying subscribers in waves. About 250,000 canceled after Bezos killed the Harris endorsement in October 2024, per NPR. More than 75,000 followed in February 2025, after Bezos announced the section would run on “personal liberties and free markets.” More canceled in the weeks after February’s mass layoffs.

What’s in the opinion section instead: op-eds about the mayor of New York. The editorial board has published more than ten of them this year alone, per Status. Recent entries: "Mamdani meets economic reality," “Mamdani shows how to sidestep a $5.4 billion deficit,” and “Zohran Mamdani’s ‘creepy and weird’ attack on success.” One current Post staffer told Status: “There’s this bizarre obsession with Mamdani. We’re not even local.”

Regular readers know I’ve written before about how Bezos has gutted the newsroom his opinion section is now embarrassing. I’m not going to repeat that here.

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Bezos isn’t alone

The Post’s own newsroom is reporting on this. On May 9, the news side published a long piece by Drew Harwell about the Daily Wire’s collapse. Same trend Bezos’s opinion section is part of. Same owner paying for both the autopsy and the corpse.

Daily Wire’s YouTube subscriber count has gone backward or sideways in 15 of the past 16 months, per Social Blade data cited by Harwell. Web traffic to the site fell to half its prior-year level in March 2026. Ben Shapiro’s own YouTube views are down nearly 70 percent since December 2024. The company has cut 13 percent of its staff since the start of this year. Shapiro himself confirmed to Harwell that revenue fell from 2024 levels.

The Daily Wire reportedly spent $3 million per episode on a seven-episode fantasy series called “The Pendragon Cycle,” per Harwell. Its dedicated YouTube channel has fewer than 1,000 subscribers. In November, the Daily Wire put Shapiro’s face on Times Square billboards to campaign for a Golden Globe podcast award. He wasn’t nominated.

Mitchell Jackson, a journalist-turned-publicist who represents former Daily Wire personalities Candace Owens and Brett Cooper, told Harwell: “They identify as alternative media, but they want to be old media so bad. They don’t hate Hollywood. They’re mad Hollywood hates them.” WaPo Opinion is the same trick run in reverse. A legacy newspaper section is trying to look like alternative media. Both versions fail. The audience isn’t there for either.

The same pattern is playing out at CBS News. David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance paid $150 million for Bari Weiss’s Free Press in October 2025 to install her at the helm of the network, per Status.

The Free Press itself is the partial exception. Its traffic grew 7 percent year-over-year in March, the only right-wing news site in TheRighting‘s top 20 to post growth. But Ellison paid roughly 7.5 times its annual revenue for it, and the deal was always about installing Weiss at CBS. Even the success story is funding a failure.

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They’ve been telling us this whole time

Here’s what Jeff Bezos allegedly told David Shipley, then the Post’s opinion editor, in February 2025, after Shipley warned him that the section’s rightward turn would alienate subscribers, per the New York Times:

“I don’t care.”

Bari Weiss told CBS News staff something similar in January, only a few months into her tenure running the network’s news division.

“Winning isn’t about ratings. It’s about making things that people can’t live without.”

Both are describing the same business model. Audience metrics aren’t part of how the operators are measuring success. The opinion section says its purpose is to defend “personal liberties and free markets,” per Bezos’s February 2025 memo. That premise depends on a marketplace where ideas compete on their merits. Bezos and Weiss have both said, on the record, that the verdict of the marketplace doesn’t matter to them.

The marketplace has rendered it anyway. The Post is down 24 percent. The Daily Wire is down 50 percent. CBS Evening News just posted its worst-ever April in the 25-54 demographic. The men funding all of it could read the numbers if they wanted to.

What’s on the screen, meanwhile, is what they think doesn’t need to work. Four mid-tier opinion writers on a couch under wood paneling and a framed cowboy. Recent topics: hantavirus, pension padding, the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. The trailer view count and the channel subscriber count that you have to do the math to believe.

Nobody is watching. Bezos doesn’t care.

The contents are about what you’d expect. You play as Trump, moving around a White House map. Pete Hegseth orders you onto Kid Rock’s helicopter for the trip to Iran. You’re up against the Pope, DEI, low-flow shower heads, and battles with Iranian schoolgirls. Plus, of course, Kash Patel and his missing beer pong balls.

Per the collective’s statement to HuffPost: “Just to save you time, the only way you can lose is by trying to hold Melania’s hand. But it’s The Middle East, so you also can’t win either.”

A plaque next to the cabinets explains the project:

“The Trump administration knows that the best way to sell combat is by making it a video game, that’s why they’ve been pumping out the ‘sickest’ Iran War video game hype reels. But why stop at clips when you could go full throttle? Introducing Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell, a high-octane, flag-waving, boots-on-the-ground simulator where freedom isn’t debated, it’s deployed. No briefings, no hesitation; just pure pixelated patriotism. Strap in and play hard, because this game may never end.”

The game is also playable online at epicfurious.com, which means it’ll outlast the cabinets. Those are only expected to stay up for a few days.

As I mentioned earlier, this isn’t Secret Handshake’s first stunt. The collective has spent the last several months putting up satirical Trump installations around D.C.: the Trump-Epstein “Best Friends Forever” statue last September, the Titanic-pose “King of the World” statue in March, the giant gold toilet near the Lincoln Memorial later that month. Park Police tend to pull them down fast. Best Friends Forever was gone within 24 hours.

About those Iran War video game “hype reels”

They’re real.

The White House and Pentagon started posting them on their official X and TikTok accounts in early March, at the start of the war. One video intercut Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III footage with U.S. airstrike footage of Iranian jets and missile launchers. Another used clips from Top Gun, Braveheart, anime, and superhero movies, cut against real strike footage, with electronic music behind it. It ended on Mortal Kombat’s “flawless victory” audio. A separate post showed a Grand Theft Auto scene. One video carried the caption “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY,” next to an American flag and a fire emoji.

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At the time, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly defended the videos to ABC:

“Under the decisive leadership of President Trump, America’s heroic warfighters are meeting or surpassing all of their goals under Operation Epic Fury. The legacy media wants us to apologize for highlighting the United States Military’s incredible success, but the White House will continue showcasing the many examples of Iran’s ballistic missiles, production facilities, and dreams of owning a nuclear weapon being destroyed in real time.”

Okay!

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq war veteran who lost both her legs in combat, was not thrilled, responding on X: “War is not a f------ video game. Six Americans are dead and thousands more are at needless risk because of your illegal, unjustified war. And you’re calling this a flawless victory.”

And yeah, I know we’re all pretty desensitized when it comes to he White House, but this was some pretty gross propaganda, even by their standards. Somehow, the satirical video game about the administration’s inept handling of the war is less of a parody than what the official White House accounts put out.

The cabinets probably won’t be there long. The website will hopefully outlast them, and naturally, the hype reels are still up on the White House’s accounts.

It’s not a new question. In 2019, The Atlantic ran a Carlson profile titled “What Does Tucker Carlson Believe?” Seven years later, the Times has added a “Really” and a road trip. Otherwise it’s the same swing the Atlantic took, the swings the Atlantic took twice before that, the swing the New Yorker took, and the ones Vox and Playboy each took. I wrote about all of them back in 2021, in a piece about how mainstream journalism keeps trying and failing to pin this guy down.

The interview itself, by Lulu Garcia-Navarro, is better than the 2017-era profiles that just let him talk. She pushes him. She catches him denying things he plainly said. The bracketed fact-checks are real journalism. The framing question, though, is the same question that’s been failing for almost a decade. And there’s a reason for that.

Tucker Carlson has spent his entire career running the same rhetorical move. He identifies a real, legitimate problem. He builds the reader’s trust through the diagnosis. Then he uses that trust to deliver an extremist payload. In the Fox era, the bait was economic populism: the ruling class, the working class, capital taxed at half the rate of labor. The payload was that immigrants and trans people and feminists were why your life was bad. In 2026, the bait is the Iran war and Israel’s influence on American foreign policy. Both are real. Both are held by serious people. The payload is something different. He’s planning something, even if we don’t know what just yet.

The technique hasn’t changed. The audience has. He spent a decade running this on the right. He’s running it on the left now.

I’ve watched an unhealthy amount of Tucker Carlson over the years and I know the moves. I’d rather not be writing this piece. But the people congratulating him this week for getting Trump and Iran “right” are about to learn what the people who congratulated him in 2017 for getting the working class “right” learned later. He’s very good at this. That’s the problem.

I wrote about this in 2019

The mechanic isn’t subtle once you’ve watched enough of his work. In 2019, while reviewing his book Ship of Fools for Media Matters, I worked through a specific example that’s worth revisiting because Carlson still uses it. In the book, he asks why the United States taxes capital at half the rate of labor. It’s a defensible question. The tax code is unfair. Working people pay more on their paychecks than rich people pay on their stock gains. The left-wing critique here is real.

His answer to that question, in the book, is identity politics. He writes that “elite attacks on working-class whites,” by which he means feminism, anti-racism, and trans visibility, have distracted Americans from noticing how rigged the tax code is. The tax code stays where it is, the corporate interests stay where they are, and the people you should be mad at, in Tucker’s account, turn out to be the same people you were already mad at.

The question is real. The swerve is the whole point.

I’m not the only person who clocked this. Lyz Lenz, in a 2018 CJR profile, quoted the Emerson communications professor Richard West calling Carlson’s approach “change-the-subject conservatism.” Same observation, academic name. Once you see the move, you see it everywhere.

In the Garcia-Navarro interview, the capital gains line shows up again. Nearly verbatim. The question is still useful. He just needs a new thing to swerve toward.

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Same week, two Tuckers

Carlson sat with Garcia-Navarro for the Times Magazine interview over two conversations, the first in Maine and a follow-up by phone. The piece dropped on May 2. In the same window, he recorded a podcast conversation with his brother Buckley, a former Trump speechwriter, that ran on Carlson’s own show.

The Times got one Tucker. Buckley got another.

In the Times version, Carlson is theological and measured. He turns Garcia-Navarro’s questions about Trump’s morality into meditations on the universal human capacity for evil. Asked about the antisemitism allegations, he gives the principled answer: he’s against hatred and discrimination based on heritage, no matter who the target is. Nobody, in his telling, should be punished for the circumstances of their birth. It’s a careful performance.

In the Buckley version, days earlier, his brother asked him about Barack Obama. Tucker’s answer: “He really hates white people.”

That’s a… well, it’s a different position.

The pattern holds across the podcast. Carlson tells his brother the COVID vaccine killed enormous numbers of people. He compares the shots to a biological weapon. He tells Buckley the protests after George Floyd’s murder were really a campaign to drive white officers off the force. When Buckley describes the January 6 rioters as representative of the country at its best, Tucker lets it pass. None of this material makes it into the New York Times.

But the most revealing exchange in the whole podcast is the one Garcia-Navarro never got. She asks Carlson, more than once, what his breaking point with Trump actually was. The Times answer is the Easter Truth Social post and the Iran war. Moral, theological, anti-war. Buckley got the real answer. Buckley laid out the brothers’ actual list of grievances, all of which centered on Trump’s failures to punish his political enemies hard enough. The list was long. COVID vaccines. January 6. The George Floyd protests. Biden’s preemptive pardons. The Biden family. The Russia probe. The autopen. Obama, whom Buckley accused of treason. Tucker did not push back. Tucker agreed.

The Times got a man whose breaking point was Easter morning. Buckley got a man whose breaking point was Trump’s failure to put more political enemies in cages. Both versions came from the same Tucker, in the same week. Both are real. Only one was prepared for the audience he’s currently trying to recruit.

About that Fuentes interview

Last October, Carlson sat down for a long, friendly conversation with Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist influencer who has praised Hitler and denied the Holocaust. Carlson treated him like a curiosity. Asked him about his upbringing. Walked him through his views without ever really pressing on what those views actually are. Garcia-Navarro asked Carlson about that interview. He didn’t like the question.

Carlson’s first move was to minimize Fuentes. He’s just a kid, Carlson told her. He’s twenty-seven. He has no power. He just said some “naughty things.” That’s the framing for a man who has built his platform on Holocaust denial and overt white supremacy: a kid who said naughty things.

Garcia-Navarro pressed. Carlson swerved. When she reminded him that Fuentes is a white nationalist who has denied the Holocaust, Carlson asked: “Is that worse than killing kids?”

This is the move.

The “kids” Carlson is referring to are Palestinian children killed in Gaza, and the people he’s accusing of supporting their deaths are Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee. The accusation is not crazy. American political support for the war in Gaza has been disastrous, and U.S. senators and ambassadors who have waved away civilian deaths deserve scrutiny. There is a real, defensible critique buried in there.

That is the bait. Fuentes is the payload. By the time Carlson is done with the answer, the Holocaust denier is unmentioned, Ted Cruz is the bigger threat, and Garcia-Navarro is left trying to reorient the conversation to her original question. He runs the same play several times in the section. When she suggests Fuentes is influential, Carlson demands she name a member of Congress who has cited him. When she keeps pressing, he pivots to the foreign policy views of the people who fund the Republican Party. Capital gains taxes. Donor class. The real problems.

In 2019, when I worked through this technique for the first time, The Daily Stormer was openly delighted that Carlson was running their talking points on Fox. They could see what he was doing because they were the ones whose ideas he was laundering. The audience he is now courting on the left has a harder time clocking the move because his cover story is better: anti-war, anti-corporate, anti-establishment, all of it true on the surface. The mark moved. The con didn’t.

About that headline, again

A word about Garcia-Navarro, because she deserves it. Her interview is genuinely sharper than what the Atlantic and the New Yorker put out in 2017. She presses Carlson on his interview with Fuentes. She presses him on his old comments about Iraqis. When Carlson denies on the record that he ever asked on his show whether Trump might be the Antichrist, Garcia-Navarro inserts a bracketed correction noting that he did. When Carlson’s representatives respond to her follow-up about Cruz and Huckabee with a single word, she prints the single word. None of that is sycophancy. None of it is the 2017 model.

But the headline is the headline. And the headline is the same swing the genre has been taking for nine years.

When Garcia-Navarro asks Carlson about his break with Trump, she calls it a “rupture.” Carlson stops her. He doesn’t accept that framing, he tells her. Trump betrayed his promises. The contract was breached by Trump, not by him. He’s the consistent one. Trump is the apostate. Garcia-Navarro doesn’t fight him on it. The conversation continues under his framing.

That’s the structural problem with the genre, and it’s not Garcia-Navarro’s fault. A profile that asks “what does Tucker really believe?” has already accepted the premise that there’s a real Tucker buried somewhere who could be located if only the right questions were asked. The premise is the trap. There is no hidden Tucker. The trick is the belief.

Lyz Lenz figured this out in 2018. Her CJR profile spent forty hours of footage and a phone call with Carlson trying to answer a version of the same question, and the most useful thing she got was the moment Carlson insisted he wasn’t shouting while shouting at her. The mystery is the man. The man is the act. The act is what you’re watching. Garcia-Navarro got the same insight in a different form: a Carlson who denies on the record that he said something he plainly said, while the bracketed correction sits next to the denial, both on the page, both true. That isn’t a man who can be pinned down. That’s a man who has chosen the format he can’t be pinned down in.

Years of trying. The interviewers got smarter. He didn’t get harder to read. The genre is just the wrong shape.

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Who pays when this works

The cost of getting Carlson wrong is not theoretical. It is happening right now.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has already endorsed Carlson for a presidential run. Democratic operatives are floating a bipartisan alliance with him. Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks asked what more anyone could possibly want from Carlson after he rejected Trump and joined the anti-war side. The apology video is circulating with applause. Some of it is coming from people whose work I respect.

I want to take that argument seriously, because it deserves to be taken seriously. The case for welcoming Carlson goes like this: the Iran war is a catastrophe. Gaza is a catastrophe. Anyone willing to say so loudly, especially anyone with a large right-coded audience, is doing useful work. Demanding ideological purity from your allies in a coalition is a luxury you cannot afford when people are dying. That argument is not stupid. It is wrong, but it is not stupid.

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The reason it is wrong is the Buckley conversation. The man telling Garcia-Navarro he was radicalized by a Truth Social post on Easter morning is the same man telling his brother that the actual problem is Trump didn’t put more political enemies in cages. That is not anti-war. That is “we wanted a different kind of authoritarian.” There is no coalition there to join. There is an audience he is building, and that audience will follow him to whatever he says next. Based on a decade of evidence, what he says next will sound like what he was saying to his brother last week. White Americans as the real victims. Vaccines as a bioweapon. Civil rights protests as an attack on cops. That’s the album he’s still in the middle of recording.

Nicole Hemmer made this point two weeks ago at MS NOW, more concisely than I’m making it here: shining a sympathetic spotlight on Carlson now does the work of laundering his reputation for the next time he attacks immigrants or trans people or whoever the next target turns out to be. The infighting on the right is genuinely useful. Boosting the people doing it is not.

I have been writing about Tucker Carlson for almost a decade. I have not enjoyed it. I wrote about the misdirection technique in 2019. I wrote about the profile genre in 2021. This piece is the latest entry in a stupid running series I would prefer not to be writing.

He is very good at this. The Fox audience that fell for him for ten years was the easy mark. The harder mark is the audience that just spent ten years watching what he did to the easy mark, and is now being told he has changed. He has not. He has just found people who have not been watching as carefully.

That’s the trick. That’s always been the trick.

By Tuesday afternoon, that same administration had ordered Disney to file early license renewals for every ABC television station it owns and indicted former FBI director James Comey for an Instagram post of seashells. Two federal actions, in two directions, against two different kinds of expression, in a single afternoon.

Trump is doing dictator things, expressing hostility to the very concept of free speech. The Washington press corps’ continued refusal to say so plainly, in news copy, not just in opinion columns, is part of why he keeps getting to do them.

Thursday to Tuesday

The joke aired Thursday. On his April 23 show, Jimmy Kimmel did a mock version of the Correspondents’ Dinner roast that wasn’t actually going to happen at the dinner itself (the WHCA went with a mentalist this year instead of a comedian). The Trumps were in the studio, sort of. Kimmel ran clips of them as cutaways while he played the comedian behind the podium. He got to Melania. “Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow,” he said. Trump is 79. Melania is 56. The joke isn’t new. It hasn’t been new in centuries.

Saturday came the dinner. Cole Allen, a 31-year-old Caltech graduate from California, ran a Secret Service magnetometer at the Hilton with a shotgun, a pistol, and three knives. Allen was tackled and charged Monday with attempting to assassinate the president. The note he left for his family laid out his targets: Trump and his administration officials. The note doesn’t mention any inspiration from Jimmy Kimmel.

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Sitting at Donald Trump’s table: Melania Trump. Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News (which Paramount owns). Nellie Bowles, who’s married to Weiss. Makan Delrahim, Paramount’s chief legal officer. And Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general.

Yes, that Todd Blanche. The one whose Justice Department is reviewing Paramount’s acquisition. The same antitrust division Delrahim used to run before Paramount hired him.

Around the rest of the room, per the Times: Tom Cibrowski, the president of CBS News. Jan Crawford, the network’s chief legal correspondent. Nancy Cordes, its chief White House correspondent. Norah O’Donnell, the former Evening News anchor. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. And Weijia Jiang, a CBS White House correspondent who also happens to be the current president of the White House Correspondents’ Association.

Trump talked for almost an hour. Several CBS journalists, the Times reported, were privately rattled that the dinner was happening at all.

Two nights later, Jiang walked to the front of a different ballroom and thanked Donald Trump for showing up. It was all, as they say, a bad look.

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I made this argument in 2018

I was writing for Good at the time. The argument was straightforward: the White House Correspondents’ Association was founded in 1914 because journalists worried Woodrow Wilson would make it harder for them to cover his administration. They wanted a body that could fight back. A century later, that same body was throwing a black-tie gala where the people running the country sat at tables with the journalists who were supposed to be holding them accountable. Michelle Wolf had just told some jokes about Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The WHCA had apologized for them. The whole thing felt like a tradition that should have ended a long time ago.

I’d make the same argument today. With more receipts.

In the years since, Donald Trump has become president again and made suing news organizations into a hobby. He sued CBS over a 60 Minutes edit. He sued ABC over a Stephanopoulos line about E. Jean Carroll. He sued the Wall Street Journal over a birthday letter he allegedly sent Jeffrey Epstein. (A judge dismissed that one earlier this month. His lawyers said they’d refile.) He cut off the Associated Press’s White House access after the wire service wouldn’t follow his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. His administration defunded PBS and NPR. It dismantled Voice of America. It restricted press access to the Pentagon. CBS News, in the middle of all this, got a new editor-in-chief, the same Bari Weiss from Thursday’s table, whose tenure critics say has tilted the network’s coverage toward Trump.

And on Saturday, the WHCA threw him a dinner anyway.

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About the dinner itself

The entertainment for 2026 was Oz Pearlman. A mentalist. He spent part of his act trying to guess the name of press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s unborn child. CNN’s Brian Stelter reported that the WHCA chose Pearlman “partly to sidestep the MAGA backlash that a Trump-zinging comic can cause.”

In 2018, the WHCA apologized for Michelle Wolf’s jokes after she told them. In 2026, they apologized in advance, by booking someone who wouldn’t make any.

Then Jiang opened the program. She thanked Trump for being there, and thanked press secretary Karoline Leavitt “for everything you and your team does to work with us every day, whether you like it or not.”

Whether you like it or not.

Almost 500 retired journalists, including Dan Rather and Jim Acosta, had signed a petition before the dinner calling on the WHCA to “forcefully demonstrate opposition to President Trump’s efforts to trample freedom of the press.” The WHCA’s response was that they were “happy” he’d accepted. Don Lemon publicly skipped. The Committee to Protect Journalists raised concerns. The New York Times has been boycotting the dinner for over a decade.

Trump came anyway, the WHCA welcomed him anyway, and partway through Pearlman’s act, a man with multiple weapons fired shots outside the ballroom screening area. An officer was struck in a bullet-resistant vest and is expected to recover. By Sunday morning, Trump had used the incident to push his White House ballroom project, posting that it “cannot be built fast enough.” Senate Republicans began moving to fast-track approval. PolitiFact is already flagging the press freedom problem with hosting future WHCDs on White House grounds.

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It doesn’t matter who’s in the White House

Press trust is in the basement.

Per the most recent Gallup polling, only 28% of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in newspapers, TV, and radio. That’s a record low. In 2020, it was 40%. Seven in ten Americans now say they have “not very much” confidence (36%) or “none at all” (34%). Republicans are at 8%. Independents are at 27%. Democrats are the only group with a slim majority, at 51%, and that ties their previous low. With the press’s shift to the MAGA right in recent years, I’m curious to see how long the Democratic trust in news media holds up.

A black-tie dinner where journalists eat with the people they cover isn’t how you fix that. And it’s not unique to this administration. Stephen Colbert performed his famously hostile routine at the 2006 dinner with George W. Bush in the room. The Obama-era dinners turned the WHCD into a celebrity gala. The Biden version was tame and forgettable. None of those were okay either. But none of them happened with the editor-in-chief of CBS News sitting at the president’s table at a dinner thrown by the billionaire who owns CBS News while his federal merger review was pending.

The WHCA does some things that should keep going. It awards scholarships. It gives out journalism prizes. Both of those can happen without a tuxedo dinner where cabinet members are seated next to White House correspondents. They’ve never required it.

So end it.

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Eight months ago, The Washington Post‘s editorial board ran a piece called “The Texas gerrymander freakout.” The dek: “What’s happening in the Lone Star State is not a threat to democracy.” The occasion was Texas Republicans voting, at President Donald Trump’s explicit direction, to redraw the state’s congressional map mid-decade to pick up five House seats. The editorial called the move a “gambit” that might “prove shortsighted.”

On Tuesday, the same editorial board ran a piece called “Virginia plunges America deeper into the gerrymandering abyss.” The dek: “The redistricting scheme was always a power grab by Democrats. Voters went along with it.” The occasion was Virginia voters narrowly approving a constitutional amendment that lets the Democratic-controlled legislature draw new congressional maps through 2030, a direct response to Republican mid-cycle gerrymanders in Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri.

Same editorial board. Same paper. Same basic political action (one party redrawing a congressional map to gain House seats). Eight months apart.

The first one accused opponents of the move of having a “freakout.” The second one got an “abyss.”

What the Post is actually demanding

Here’s what that contrast amounts to when you pull the rhetoric off it.

The Post’s editorial board has decided that when Republicans rig a congressional map mid-decade at the direct instruction of the president, it’s politics. When Democrats respond by drawing their own map in states they control, it’s the end of democracy.

That position has a practical consequence most readers aren’t being asked to notice: it tells Democrats to unilaterally disarm.

To be clear: I think partisan gerrymandering should be outlawed. Nationally. And Democrats have been trying to do exactly that for years, only to be blocked by Republicans. That’s still the Democratic position.

Republicans have refused to pass a federal ban on partisan gerrymandering. They’ve then, under Trump, run mid-cycle redraws in several states to gain House seats. Telling Democrats they can’t respond to that with their own maps, in states they control, is telling them to play by rules only one side is following. It’s a demand with a partisan outcome baked into it.

The Post’s editorial board is free to take the position that Democrats should roll over anyway. What it can’t do is pretend that position is obvious, neutral, or grounded in concern for democracy. It’s a partisan stance that happens to favor Republicans, who seem to get a pass when it comes to trying to use gerrymandering to keep control of the House.

I’ve written before about what’s happened to the Post under Jeff Bezos, and I won’t redo that case here. Other people have clocked the Texas-Virginia contrast already. Democracy Docket ran a piece this week making roughly the argument I just made. What I want to do in the rest of this piece is something they didn’t: look at how the editorial board sells that partisan demand to its readers, sentence by sentence.

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How the same thing becomes two different stories

Start with the words.

Here’s how the Texas editorial described Republicans redrawing a congressional map at Trump’s explicit instruction, mid-decade, to gain five House seats: “Partisan gerrymandering is never pretty, no matter which side is doing it, but hold the apocalyptic warnings about the end of democracy. Republicans’ gambit could well prove shortsighted.” The piece called the redraw “not pretty,” a “gambit,” but potentially “shortsighted.” It described the broader situation as “Texas’s antics” and assured readers the redistricting wars “will not put American democracy on life support.”

Here’s how the Virginia editorial described Democrats passing a referendum: “For months, Democrats crafted the illusion that their plan to redistrict Virginia was about restoring ‘fairness.’ In a special election on Tuesday, most voters assented to that deception as a referendum to rewrite the state constitution narrowly passed.” Democrats were “disenfranchising Republican voters.” The referendum was a “power grab,” a “cynical calculation,” a “race to the bottom” into an “abyss.” Democrats were offering “false sanctimony about democratic norms.”

The Texas editorial mostly describes events rather than actors. Texas “is breaking” the norm of waiting for post-census data. “The Lone Star State’s changes are not happening in a vacuum.” And the editorial’s most revealing sentence, about the Justice Department’s racial-gerrymander pretext for the redraw: “This Justice Department notice serves President Donald Trump’s political agenda for the 2026 midterm elections, but that does not mean it’s frivolous.”

The Post conceded the DOJ’s motive in the first half of that sentence and endorsed its legitimacy in the second. It named the causation and asked readers to look past it.

The Virginia editorial reads differently. Democrats “crafted the illusion.” Democrats made “a cynical calculation.” Voters “assented to that deception.” The verbs are active, the subject is the party, and the charge is moral.

The same asymmetry shows up in who gets named.

Trump appears in the Texas editorial three times, all neutrally: “Trump’s political agenda,” “territory Trump won by double digits,” “the last two years of Trump’s presidency.” He is never, in that editorial, identified as the person who directed Texas Republicans to redraw the map. The Post’s own news reporting confirms he did. The editorial board didn’t.

The Virginia editorial names Barack Obama. “Democratic leaders have long fancied themselves as champions of democracy and fair elections,” the editorial says. “But many of these politicians, including former president Barack Obama, made a more cynical calculation in Virginia.”

The Trump-directed Texas gerrymander has no named agent. The Obama-endorsed Virginia referendum response gets Barack Obama, by name, accused of cynicism.

Then there’s what the Virginia editorial did with Tim Kaine.

Kaine, as quoted in the editorial, said this about Virginia’s congressional Republicans:

“In 2021, all five Republicans in Virginia went along with Donald Trump in his effort to overturn election results. And so we’re giving Virginians a chance to vote — which Republican states have not done — about whether they want to have a congressional delegation that will stand up against Donald Trump’s tyranny if he tries to interfere with our elections.”

He is talking about January 6. About Virginia Republicans going along with Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. He is saying voters should have the chance to decide whether their congressional delegation will stand up to Trump next time.

The Post’s editorial board responded:

“Virginia voters already had two chances to judge those Republican candidates — in 2022 and again two years later — and decided to keep them in office. Kaine disagreed with the people’s verdicts and supports overturning those results, to borrow his own terminology, by reworking the map.”

The Post took Kaine’s language about Republicans trying to overturn a presidential election and used it to accuse Kaine of trying to overturn election results, which is absolutely not what this is.

The paper that broke Watergate published a sentence equating support for a redistricting scheme that both sides had engaged in with complicity in a coup attempt.

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What “disenfranchising” means now

The word is disenfranchising. The Post used it in the Virginia editorial to describe Democrats drawing a congressional map. Democrats, the editorial said, are “disenfranchising Republican voters.”

That word has a specific history in American politics. It describes voter roll purges. Poll taxes. Literacy tests. Voter ID laws that disproportionately affect Black voters. Proof-of-citizenship requirements that block millions of eligible Americans from registering. In 2025 alone, at least 17 states passed 32 new restrictive voting laws, most of which will be in effect for the 2026 midterms. That is what “disenfranchisement” is.

None of that is what happened in Virginia. Republican voters in Virginia will vote in 2026. Nobody is being removed from the rolls. Nobody is being required to produce documents they don’t have. Nobody is being turned away from a polling place. A new congressional map, drawn by the legislature voters elected, will change which candidates those votes help elect. That is what redistricting does, in every state, every decade, for both parties.

The word is doing something. It’s taking a political outcome (Republican voters electing fewer representatives than they’d like) and relabeling it as a civil rights violation. It’s dressing a partisan loss in the clothes of voter suppression.

That move fits a specific project. In February 2025, Jeff Bezos narrowed the Post’s opinion section to the defense of “personal liberties and free markets.” In my earlier piece on that announcement, I noted that when billionaires use that phrase, they tend to mean their own liberty: freedom from taxation, freedom from regulation. Not yours. The Virginia editorial completes the circuit. A congressional map Democrats drew in response to Republicans’ own mid-cycle gerrymanders becomes, in the editorial’s language, a violation of liberty. Republican liberty, specifically.

The editorial page Bezos paid for

In late October 2025, David Folkenflik at NPR reported that over a two-week stretch, the Post editorial board had published three editorials on matters where its owner had undisclosed financial interests. One defended Trump’s demolition of the East Wing for a new ballroom; Amazon was a donor to the project. One argued for new small nuclear reactors; Bezos has a stake in a Canadian fusion venture. One urged D.C. to fast-track self-driving car approvals; Amazon’s Zoox had just announced D.C. as its next market. None of the editorials disclosed the conflict.

The gerrymander editorials are about democracy. That is the one subject the Post built its brand around. For nearly a decade, the Post has run “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on its front page. Now the editorial page looks at a Trump-directed mid-cycle redraw and calls it a “gambit,” and looks at a voter-approved Democratic response and calls it an “abyss.”

The Virginia editorial isn’t hiding this. “They’re right that the GOP started this fight by trying to pick up five House seats in Texas through gerrymandering,” it reads, “but they can spare us the false sanctimony about democratic norms going forward.” The editorial board knows what happened. It wrote the piece anyway.

“None of this was necessary,” the Virginia editorial concluded. That’s true. None of it was. Not the Texas redraw, not California’s response, not Virginia’s. The editorial board used that sentence against Virginia voters who passed a referendum. It didn’t use it against Texas Republicans who redrew a map on Trump’s orders. Their only concern at the time was that Texas might be narrowing the margins too much and might overplay their hand.

Booker ran through some church and football metaphors, invoked the “enemy within,” and brought up the 2016 election, saying that after Hillary Clinton won the primary, some Democrats refused to back her because they didn’t agree with everything she said. Then he turned to Harris:

“I saw it with Kamala Harris. Too many people that say I don’t agree with her on everything. I mean, 90 out of 100 I agree with her. But those 10 I can’t do it. Well, you may disagree with her on 10% of her views but you let someone get in office who you disagree with on everything. You let somebody get in office who was locking up our children. You let somebody in office who’s taking away our health care. You let somebody in office who’s taking away workers’ rights. You let somebody in office who got rid of the Department of Education.”

This is a scolding. Strip away the football and church metaphors from earlier in the speech, and what’s left is a United States senator telling a room full of Democrats that the voters who didn’t show up in 2024 are the reason Trump is president. They got hung up on 10% ideological purity. They let it happen. Be mad at them.

It’s a righteous-sounding scolding. And I’m sure it lands for Harris voters who turned out, watched others stay home, and have been stewing ever since.

I get the stewing. I voted for Harris. I wrote pieces making the case for voting against Trump. I went on CNN right before the election to talk about trans rights specifically, even though Harris’s stance on that issue was weak enough that I was making the argument despite her, not because of her. I’m not the person Booker is lecturing in Michigan. I’m one of the people sharing his exasperation.

But the exasperation doesn’t make the scolding a good strategy. And shaming voters who already opted out of a political process they found disappointing is a strategy with a track record. The track record is that it doesn’t work.

Data about who actually sat out in 2024, and why, exists. Celinda Lake, who ran Joe Biden’s polling in 2020 and has worked as a lead DNC pollster since, published a version of it in USA Today last September. The voters Booker was scolding from the Michigan stage have told surveyors, repeatedly, exactly what would have brought them to the polls. Almost none of it looks like what he’s selling.

When Democrats lose and demand unity, the demand tends to run one direction. Voters are told to get behind the party. The party is almost never told to get behind the voters. Booker’s Michigan speech is the most viral recent version of that demand, delivered in the register of a parent disappointed in a child. It’s also, if you look at the research on bringing Biden-to-dropoff voters back into the party, about the worst possible speech he could have given.

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The data Booker ignored

In July 2025, the Democratic donor group Way to Win released a slide deck summarizing a new poll by Lake Research Partners. The poll surveyed 822 “Biden skippers”: registered voters who turned out for Biden in 2020 and did not vote in 2024.

Nothing in the poll matches Booker’s description of these voters.

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If the skippers had voted, 56% of them would have gone for Harris. 25% would have gone for Trump.

These voters still like Democrats. 67% hold a favorable view of the party. 62% would vote for a Democratic member of Congress. Just 19% would vote Republican.

They pay attention. 75% follow politics closely. 49% check the news multiple times a day.

The two political figures they admire most, by wide margins, are Bernie Sanders (78% approval) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (67%).

They also have a coherent theory of what’s wrong with the country. 72% told the pollsters the top problem facing America is that the richest 1% have taken $50 trillion in wealth from the bottom 90% over the past several decades. Only 20% picked government spending, immigration, or “wokeness.” That’s a 52-point gap.

Now the reasons they stayed home. 26% said they didn’t like either candidate. 19% said their vote wouldn’t make a difference. 14% cited Harris entering the race late without a primary. 14% said nothing positive got done during the Biden term. 11% said Harris was no different from Biden.

Asked to pick from Harris-specific issue positions, the top reasons had to do with the economy and her leadership. 16% said she didn’t have a plan strong enough to bring the cost of living down. 15% said her economic message was too focused on the middle class and ignored poverty and inequality. 15% cited her leadership qualities. After that: 13% said she did too much to court Republicans like Liz Cheney. 12% said she didn’t do enough to support Palestinian rights in Gaza. 12% said she moved too far right on border enforcement.

Celinda Lake summed up the findings herself, in a USA Today op-ed co-written last September with Way to Win’s Jenifer Fernandez Ancona: “The data shows what motivates these voters isn’t culture war noise on transgender issues and ‘wokeness.’ It’s economic promise and freedom and having a chance at success.”

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Congrats to my friends over at The Onion, by the way!

Below is a short reading list. Today’s news, Collins doing the longer version on Pablo Torre, and the people who’ve actually been on this for close to a decade.

Where to read what happened today

For a clean overview, Benjamin Mullin and Elizabeth Williamson’s NYT piece is the one to read. It’s got the timeline, the deal mechanics, the whole thing, plus the best Heidecker quotes of the day. Heidecker calls the whole thing “a beautiful joke.” He’s right. But he also tells the Times he wants Infowars to eventually become a home for actually weird, actually ambitious comedy. That’s the part I’m paying attention to.

Hadas Gold at CNN is shorter but has Collins quotes with more bite than the press-release stuff everyone else is running. Eight years and three days after the Sandy Hook families first sued Jones, Collins tells CNN, they have not collected a cent.

Where to hear Collins tell it

For Collins telling the story himself, Pablo Torre had him on today. Watch the whole thing. My favorite bit: the part about Trump’s DOJ sending a threatening letter to Chris Mattei (lawyer for the Connecticut Sandy Hook families) last September. At Alex Jones’s request, basically. That didn’t come up in any of today’s wire copy, and I don’t know why not.

For the people who’ve actually lived this

Anna Merlan at Mother Jones did the piece today that nobody else quite did. She got Lenny Pozner, Noah’s father (Noah was the youngest kid murdered at Sandy Hook), who spends his days filing copyright takedowns on images of his dead son because those images keep getting recycled into “crisis actor” content whenever there’s a new mass-casualty event somewhere else. She talks to Chris Mattei about the legal strategy, and to Josh Owens, the former Infowars employee who quit in 2017, about what he calls “false comfort in the deplatforming and the trial judgements.” Owens is right. Today’s news is real progress for the families. The bigger fight, which started in 2018 when they first sued, is nowhere close to over.

For the longer view, two books. Robbie Parker’s A Father’s Fight: Taking on Alex Jones and Reclaiming the Truth About Sandy Hook came out in November 2024, right after The Onion’s original auction bid. Parker is Emilie’s father. Emilie was six when she was murdered at Sandy Hook. The book is his account of everything that came after.

Josh Owens wrote The Madness of Believing, a memoir about his years inside Infowars. He’s the ex-employee Merlan quotes. Read it if you want to understand what Infowars actually was as a workplace. The culture, the grift, the whole operation. Merlan blurbed it.

About the hearing

April 30 is when the Texas judge rules. Here’s hoping it’s a yes. The Onion crew has stuck with this for a year and a half through a lot of bullshit. They deserve to see this one land.

Godspeed, OnionWars!

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That was the White House X account on Monday afternoon, hours after a DoorDash driver named Sharon Simmons, wearing a shirt that said “DoorDash Grandma,” walked up to the exterior door of the Oval Office and handed Donald Trump two bags of McDonald’s. All caps. HITS. DELIVERED. The White House wanted people to take this as exactly what it looked like: a DoorDash driver delivering McDonald’s to the president, a grandmother from Arkansas whose life had been changed by Trump’s signature tax cut.

On Tuesday, after people online started poking around the details, DoorDash’s head of public affairs Julian Crowley posted this on X: “No one is claiming it was a real delivery. It was clearly and obviously a planned event to mark a new policy starting.”

Except a lot of people had been claiming it was a real delivery, and they’d been doing it since Monday morning. The Associated Press ran “Trump tips DoorDash driver $100 for delivering McDonald’s to Oval Office.” CBS News went with “DoorDasher joins Trump for White House press event after delivering McDonald’s.” Reuters, ABC News, Fox News, Newsmax, The Hill, and the New York Post all ran some version of the same thing. So did CSPAN, which I’ll come back to later, because CSPAN doing this again is its own story.

The story the White House wanted told was told. DoorDash’s own marketing account helped tell it. The wire services and the networks helped tell it. And look, none of this is the end of the world. A president ordered McDonald’s at the office. It’s silly. But a whole lot of reporters managed to cover a staged corporate lobbying event as if a DoorDash driver had just shown up at the Oval Office with a bag of cheeseburgers, and that part is worth looking at.

About that DoorDasher

In July 2025, she testified at a House Ways & Means field hearing in Nevada about the impact of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Rep. David Kustoff, a Tennessee Republican, posted the video of her testimony to his X account at the time. Nine months before she walked up to the Oval Office with two bags of McDonald’s, she was already on record as a supporter of the bill the Monday event was designed to promote. That information wasn’t hidden. Random people on X dug up the Kustoff video within hours of Monday’s photo op, which means any reporter who typed Simmons’s name into a search bar could have had the context before filing their story.

None of this is a knock on Simmons. She supports the No Tax on Tips policy. She said so in front of Congress nine months ago, and she said so again in front of the Oval Office on Monday. Agreeing to participate in a corporate-political event promoting a policy she believes in is a perfectly normal thing to do. Same goes for DoorDash celebrating a legislative win it had lobbied for, and the White House promoting a tax cut it had signed into law. These are all the things the parties involved were supposed to be doing. Nothing about any of it is a conspiracy. My beef is with the reporters whose job was to describe what happened.

DoorDash wasn’t really hiding it, either. The company’s own blog post called Monday’s event “an unconventional drop-off to commemorate the first anniversary of the No Tax on Tips policy.” That’s photo op language. You don’t write “commemorate the first anniversary” about a lunch order. The release came with a quote from Max Rettig, DoorDash’s Global Head of Public Policy, whose job at the company is legislative advocacy. “This moment represents something bigger than a single delivery,” Rettig said.

The logistics alone should have been enough. Sharon Simmons lives in Arkansas. You cannot open the DoorDash app, type in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and have a driver walk a bag of cheeseburgers up to the exterior door of the Oval Office. Getting onto White House grounds requires prior permission and a security screening. Getting near the president requires a lot more than that. Trump himself said the quiet part out loud to the reporters watching it all happen. “This doesn’t look staged, does it?” he asked. He said it because the people who wrote his press plan knew exactly what the reporters were going to ask, and they wanted to get there first.

The same story

Reuters tweeted: “Trump orders DoorDash to White House, trying to sell his tip tax cut.” “Trying to sell” is as close as any major outlet came to flagging the stunt energy of the thing. Reuters still got the verb wrong. DoorDash arranged the event with the White House, with Trump as the person they were organizing it around. The active verb in the headline belongs to the wrong actor.

ABC News had a different problem. The network tweeted: “President Trump appeared to accept a McDonald’s order from a ‘DoorDash Grandma’ before addressing the media at the White House.” “Appeared to accept” is the kind of cautious language reporters use when they aren’t sure something happened. The burgers were real. Trump took them. The uncertain part of this story was whether there was a delivery at all, and ABC’s sentence doesn’t touch that.

The CBS version has an extra layer. Before Kathryn Watson’s CBS article ran, the network’s White House correspondent tweeted from her personal account: “Not something you see every day — the president getting McDonald’s delivered to the Oval Office by DoorDash delivery.” That’s her voice, in real time, before any editor touched anything. Another CBS White House reporter, Olivia Rinaldi, tweeted, “The president just got McDonalds delivered to the Oval Office.” The article that followed carried the same framing straight through the lede and then reprinted what it called a “statement released by DoorDash” from Simmons. The statement included this sentence: “Today is a celebration of the advocacy of thousands of Dashers from around the country who fought to ensure we were included in this policy.” That’s comms-shop writing. Watson ran it as her own reporting, left out Simmons’s Ways and Means testimony, and skipped Trump’s “this doesn’t look staged” line, which the AP caught.

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And then there’s the AP. Will Weissert wrote the body of the AP story and did the work. Here’s his third paragraph:

Trump popped out and said, “Hello. Nice to see you,” before proclaiming, “Look at this!” and then, glancing toward a pack of nearby reporters, offering, “This doesn’t look staged, does it?” It was, of course. Making it onto the White House grounds alone requires obtaining prior permission and passing through security, while accessing the Oval Office — not to mention getting so close to the president — would have been impossible without additional screenings and background checks.

Weissert said in print that the event was staged, and explained what it would have taken to pull off the version being presented. Then the AP headline desk ran this above his story: “Trump tips DoorDash driver $100 for delivering McDonald’s to Oval Office.” If you only read the headline, which is, sadly, how most people encounter wire stories, you saw “delivering” and moved on.

A few outlets ran a factual error on top of the delivery framing. The $11,000 figure the White House tweeted about is Simmons’s total tipped income for the year. The deduction on her tips saved her “three to four thousand dollars,” as she told Fox News Digital. The @WhiteHouse account called the $11,000 a “refund.” CBS’s Watson wrote that the policy “netted her $11,000 more than she would have earned otherwise.” Fox News said she was “taking home more than $11,000 in extra income.” All three are wrong. Weissert, at the AP, got it right, noting her actual savings were “difficult to verify without Simmons’ tax statement.”

And the majors were not alone. The Hill and the New York Post both used “delivery” framing in their headlines. Fox News called it a “special delivery.” On Newsmax, host Rob Finnerty told his audience Trump had done “something that no other president has ever done,” describing a corporate political event as a historic first. I could keep going, but you get the idea. Nobody checked.

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A word about CSPAN

In October 2024, I wrote a piece here at The Present Age about the way the press had covered Trump’s last big McDonald’s stunt. The one where he “worked” a closed McDonald’s in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for 15 minutes, serving pre-screened customers at the drive-thru. I called out specific outlets by name for treating it as news. One of them was CSPAN.

Here’s what I wrote at the time:

The official CSPAN account announced: “Former President Trump Works at McDonald’s in Bucks County, PA.” Their website elaborated slightly but still missed key details.

Eighteen months later, here’s CSPAN on Monday:

President Trump receives DoorDash McDonald’s order and speaks with delivery driver: “I think you voted for me?” Delivery driver: “Maybe.”

Same account. Same framing pattern. Same description of a coordinated political event as a thing that just happened on its own. No reference to the White House arranging the rollout with DoorDash’s public policy team. No indication that Simmons was already a Republican witness on tax policy. Just the event, presented straight.

Here’s the thing. The critique of how the press covered Trump’s 2024 McDonald’s stunt was not obscure. It was everywhere for days. “The store was closed and the customers were pre-screened” was one of the most common observations in political media that week. I have to assume the people running CSPAN’s social media account exist in the same media ecosystem as the rest of us.

They just don’t really have a reason to care. The staged version is easier. The footage is handed to you. The quotes are handed to you. Nobody’s going to lose a job over describing a coordinated White House event as “President Trump receives DoorDash McDonald’s order.” It’s a small thing. It’s always a small thing. That’s sort of the point.

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Tyler Pager wrote in the New York Times that JD Vance “tried and failed to end a war he opposed.” Natalie Allison in the Washington Post called him the administration’s “foremost war skeptic.” NBC News went with “How JD Vance, skeptical of Trump’s war with Iran, came to lead the peace talks.” CNN headlined its story “How JD Vance went from well-known foreign war skeptic to the public face of peace talks with Iran.” Politico, back in March, reported that unnamed administration officials had described Vance as the “skeptical” voice in the White House on Iran strikes.

Five outlets. Same story. A man at the center of an administration that’s spent six weeks bombing Iran is, somehow, the one who didn’t really want any of this. Privately opposed. On a plane to Islamabad now to clean up a mess he didn’t make.

Read enough of these in a row, and a couple of things start to feel off.

First, almost none of what the reporters are telling you about Vance’s private views is sourced to anyone willing to put their name on it. Every “privately opposed,” every “worried about success,” every “tried to talk Trump out of it” traces back to “a senior administration official” or “people familiar with his thinking.” Second, none of it matches anything Vance has been saying in public, on camera, for the last year. What it matches is what a 2028 Republican primary campaign would want the press to be writing about its candidate right now, while an unpopular Middle East war is tanking his numbers with voters he’ll need in 2028.

Reporters know this, which makes publishing this narrative clearly being pushed by Team Vance that much more pathetic.

Here’s what he actually said.

Out loud and on camera.

Let’s start at the 2024 Republican National Convention. Sitting with Sean Hannity a few months before the election, Vance said this about Iran: “A lot of people recognize that we need to do something with Iran, but not these weak little bombing runs. If you’re going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard. And that’s what he did when he took out Soleimani.” Around the same time, speaking with Morgan Ortagus (a foreign policy operative in Trump’s orbit), he called for an “aggressive” approach to Iran’s nuclear program. On Iran specifically, when the stakes were a podcast interview, Vance was a hawk arguing for harder strikes.

In June 2025, Trump ordered strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Tucker Carlson publicly opposed them.

And Vance jumped on X with a long thread defending them. Here’s the line, verbatim: “Meanwhile, the president has shown remarkable restraint in keeping our military’s focus on protecting our troops and protecting our citizens.“

Sigh

Remarkable restraint. Those are his actual words. In the same thread, he added: “People are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy. But I believe the president has earned some trust on this issue.” Many “war skeptic” pieces have been quoting this line as evidence that Vance gave credence to anti-war concerns. The line is actually Vance telling the skeptics to sit down and trust Trump. The press has spent a year quoting his actual words accurately and describing them wrong.

Two days before the current war began, Vance told the Washington Post: “The idea that we’re going to be in a Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight — there is no chance that will happen.” The war is currently in its seventh week. Thousands dead. Talks just collapsed in Islamabad.

On April 7, at a press conference in Budapest with Viktor Orban, Vance warned that the United States had “tools in our toolkit that we so far haven’t decided to use” against Iran, and that the president “will decide to use them if the Iranians don’t change their course of conduct.” He said this the same day Trump was on Truth Social threatening that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” The “tools in our toolkit” line (which did not, to be clear, specify what kind of tools) was alarming enough that the White House had to post a rebuttal on X that read, “Literally nothing [Vance] said here implies this, you absolute buffoons.”

At the same press conference, Vance called Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz “acts of economic terrorism” and mentioned that “there are still some things that we’d like to do, for example, on Iranian ability to manufacture weapons, that we’d like to do a little bit more work on militarily.”

And four days later, Natalie Allison in the Washington Post described JD Vance as “the administration’s foremost war skeptic.”

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Dictation

So how does a man who publicly described Trump’s bombing of Iran as “remarkable restraint” get transformed, a year later, into the administration’s foremost war skeptic? You take dictation from people who won’t put their names on what they’re saying.

Count the anonymous sources. Marc Caputo and Barak Ravid at Axios: “a senior administration official,” “a source close to Vance.” Diana Nerozzi and Eli Stokols at Politico: “a senior Trump official” and “a person familiar with Vance’s thinking.” Adam Cancryn, Alayna Treene, and Kevin Liptak at CNN: “multiple people familiar with the matter.” The Reuters piece has four bylines and cites “one regional official and four people familiar with the talks.” Tyler Pager’s NYT piece quotes The Atlantic quoting somebody else. Unnamed sources all the way down.

Civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis has a name for the move. He calls it the Big Deception, and he just published a book about it last year called Copaganda. The book is mostly about crime coverage, but the mechanism ports over pretty cleanly. The press presents anonymous claims about what powerful people privately believe as reported fact, and then uses that manufactured inner life to explain away everything those same people say and do in public. Karakatsanis’s go-to example is the war on drugs, which the press covered for decades as a good-faith public health initiative even though its actual purpose, later admitted by Nixon’s own aides, was to criminalize Black communities and the antiwar left. On Bluesky over the weekend, Karakatsanis pointed at Tyler Pager’s NYT headline and flagged the “tried to end a war he opposed” framing as the same move, now applied to foreign policy.

Which raises the question the pile of anonymous sources won’t answer on its own.

Why him?

JD Vance is their creation

JD Vance’s political career doesn’t exist without Hillbilly Elegy, and Hillbilly Elegy doesn’t exist as a political launchpad without a specific institutional decision, made in 2016 by the exact outlets now writing the war skeptic pieces, to elevate it as the book that would explain Trump voters to coastal readers.

Jennifer Senior in the New York Times called it “a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion, particularly the ascent of Donald J. Trump.” She went on: Vance had “inadvertently provided a civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election, and he’s done so in a vocabulary intelligible to both Democrats and Republicans. Imagine that.”

Imagine that. The NYT reviewer was openly marveling that a Trump-voter interpreter had managed to write in a dialect her audience could understand.

Joshua Rothman, reviewing the book for The New Yorker in September 2016, was even more direct about what was happening. Rothman wrote that anti-Trump conservatives had responded to Hillbilly Elegy‘s “largely empathetic portrait of poor, white Americans, which they see as an alternative to the less sympathetic theories about Trump’s least affluent supporters — ‘They’re all racist,’ essentially — that have become popular on the left.” Translated: the book gave well-meaning readers a way to feel like they’d done the homework on Trump voters without concluding anything uncomfortable. That was the product.

HarperCollins signed Vance to a sequel deal in 2017 for eight million dollars. For a sequel to a memoir. By a 33-year-old whose entire published output was one book.

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The rest of the lift was industry-wide. David Brooks blessed him in a New York Times column. Emily Esfahani Smith at the Wall Street Journal called the book “riveting.” Terry Gross booked him on Fresh Air. Hillbilly Elegy hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list, sold millions of copies, and became a Ron Howard Netflix movie in 2020 with Glenn Close and Amy Adams.

Take away that 2016 lift, and nothing after it happens. No 2022 Senate run. No Trump VP pick. No “foremost war skeptic” label in 2026. Every rung on the ladder ran through the same hands that are writing about him now.

The Trump conversion, which should have broken the whole thing open, didn’t. In 2016, Vance told Terry Gross he couldn’t “stomach” Trump. In a private message that later surfaced, he wondered whether Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” When he came back in 2024 as Trump’s running mate, the same outlets that had built him treated the reversal as a philosophical journey rather than a career move. NPR’s July 2024 retrospective on “the political evolution of J.D. Vance” played the old “can’t stomach him” clip from Fresh Air, then brought on David Frum to wonder aloud whether “conscious hypocrisy is a very rare behavior in human beings.” The question the segment wouldn’t ask was whether Vance had been playing them the whole time.

Then came the Iraq War. The single most durable lesson of American politics in the last quarter century is that tying yourself to an unpopular Middle East war is a career-ender unless you can document, on the record, that you didn’t really support it. Hillary Clinton’s 2002 Senate vote haunted her through two Democratic primary runs. Barack Obama beat her in 2008 largely because he could say he’d opposed the war from the start. Every ambitious politician watching took notes.

Vance, who is ambitious, took notes too. The skeptic narrative is his Iraq War inoculation, and the press is helping him build it in real time.

And the reporters aren’t even hiding the political angle. Reuters says Vance “stands to benefit politically if talks succeed.” CNN mentions his “political trajectory ahead of a 2028 contest.” The WaPo piece buries the polling down in the story: the Iran war is deeply unpopular with the general public and broadly supported by Republican voters. That’s the gap the skeptic-but-loyal framing is engineered to bridge. Republicans get the loyalty. General election voters get the reservations. The press gets to write both versions of the man at the same time and call it journalism.

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Kamala tried this

Compare it to Kamala Harris. Her team tried to run the same play on Gaza. It didn’t stick.

In March 2024, NBC News reported that the National Security Council had watered down a Harris speech, softening her original draft’s language about Israel and Gaza. The sources? “Three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official,” all speaking anonymously to brief reporters on the VP’s private views. The same sourcing model Vance is getting now. The framing was clear enough: Harris was privately pushing for a more humane approach to Gaza than Biden would allow.

It didn’t take. Harris herself kept going on camera and saying the opposite. At a firefighters union conference, she told reporters, “The president and I have been aligned and consistent from the very beginning.” In her first interview as the nominee that August, she told CNN her Israel policy would not differ from Biden’s. The press covered what she said out loud.

She lost. The DNC’s post-election autopsy reportedly concluded that Gaza may have cost her votes, but then buried the report. Harris had to publish a book a year later to tell her own “I pleaded privately with Biden” version of the story, and even the book got covered as spin.

Same play. Different VP. None of this is new. But it is working out better for Vance than it ever did for Harris.

The lessons of Iraq

The Iraq War was supposed to make this impossible.

Here’s how the system was supposed to work. A politician backs a disastrous Middle East war. The press pins them to that vote for years, in every campaign story that mentions their name. The politician pays a price at the ballot box. The next generation of ambitious politicians watches the price being paid, and thinks twice. That’s the whole mechanism. That’s how accountability for war works in a democracy, when it works at all.

The press is the institution that makes it work.

For Vance, the press is running the inoculation campaign. They’re laundering the anonymous quotes into news and printing the framing his comms team is handing them. They know what they’re doing. They’re doing it anyway.

If JD Vance becomes president in 2028, this is part of how it happens. Every outlet, all at once, all writing the same framing. By the time anyone in those newsrooms wants to admit the pattern, they will already have done the job.

Yes, the sitting president of the United States threatened to end a civilization of nearly 90 million people.

Time to panic? Not quite, said Newsweek senior editor-at-large Josh Hammer:

See? No big deal. Nothing to worry about. In fact, anyone who was worried about it, was a fool. Or something like that. Sure, Trump eventually backed down from his threat of committing an act of genocide, thankfully, but it should probably bother us a bit that he can do that and conservative commentators like Hammer will chide us for thinking that his madman routine is something to worry about.

But the Salena Zito line stopped working as media criticism a long time ago. At this point, it’s the operating system. It’s what has let ten years of escalating public threats get processed as background noise, each new one making the next easier to brush off, each walkback turned into a reason to doubt the threat ever counted in the first place. On Tuesday morning, the floor gave way.

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The permission slip

I went back and read the original Atlantic piece by Zito from September 23, 2016, titled “Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally.”

It’s a profile. A sympathetic one by a conservative journalist.

The whole article is Zito trailing Trump backstage at a shale industry conference in Pittsburgh, watching him quietly greet waiters and service workers away from the cameras. She quotes one Black convention worker saying, “I am blown away! The man I just saw there talking to people is nothing like what I’ve seen, day in and day out, in the news.” That’s the framing the famous line lives inside. The whole point of the profile is to argue that critical coverage of Trump had been getting him wrong.

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Ivey was the fifth overall pick in the 2022 NBA Draft. He spent his first few seasons with the Detroit Pistons, then got traded to the Bulls in early February. He played four games for Chicago, averaging 11.5 points, before being shut down for the rest of the season last Thursday with a knee injury. He wasn’t under contract for next year. So, at the point when all of this started, he was an injured player on an expiring deal sitting at home.

And that’s when he started going live on Instagram. Multiple lengthy streams in the span of a few days, each running over 30 minutes. In one, he called the NBA’s promotion of Pride Month “unrighteous.” In another, he called Catholicism “a false religion“ and said it “does not lead to salvation in Jesus Christ” (a notable thing to say when your mother is the head women’s basketball coach at Notre Dame, a Catholic university). He told the team that “Jesus healed my knee“ and tried to fly himself to a game the Bulls had already ruled him out of. ESPN reported that team staff had been describing him as “preachy” in the locker room for weeks before the rants even started.

On Monday, the Bulls waived him. He immediately went live again, this time from an airplane, and called the organization “liars.” He said Stephen Curry, one of the most openly Christian athletes in professional sports, “don’t know Jesus.” He said all of Curry’s rings, LeBron’s rings, Jordan’s rings won’t matter on Judgment Day. By Tuesday, he was on a podcast hosted by an evangelist with nearly 100,000 YouTube subscribers, where he disclosed that he’d attempted suicide multiple times and had held oxycodone pills in his hands. He talked about being sexually abused as a child. He said he’d been abusive toward his wife. He said his wife had stopped communicating with him and that his family was calling him “psycho.”

That’s the picture. A young man in obvious distress, disclosing the worst moments of his life on livestream after livestream, while the people closest to him sound the alarm.

And here’s how the conservative media covered it:

Riley Gaines compared Ivey to Jesus: “We live in a world that hates Christ and those who believe in Him, but that’s to be expected. Just as He was persecuted, so will we be. Consider me a Jaden Ivey fan.”

Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, declared that “the conduct they are claiming is detrimental is Christianity. They fired Jaden Ivey for being Christian.”

Robby Starbuck posted that “EVERY single NBA player needs to speak up for [Ivey] now or their religious freedom could be next.”

Alex Bruesewitz, an adviser to President Trump, said he hoped Ivey sues the Bulls.

Colby Covington went on Tomi Lahren’s OutKick show and called the Bulls “a disgusting organization.”

Ben Shapiro wrote a piece for the Daily Wire headlined “NBA Player Released For Expressing Traditional Christianity.”

Kevin Sorbo replied to the Bulls’ announcement on X: “You should be ashamed of yourselves.”

Allie Beth Stuckey called it persecution of “basic Christian doctrine.”

The list goes on. Same day. Same framing. Fired for being Christian.

You know what not a single one of them said? “I hope he gets help.”

But his teammates did. Josh Giddey told reporters in San Antonio: “I do really hope he gets help. It’s not going to be with the Bulls anymore, but wherever it is, I hope he gets it.” Coach Billy Donovan said he worried about whether players were getting the resources they needed. Ivey’s own wife posted on Instagram that he “says things for attention” and told followers not to be “deceived.”

The people who actually know Jaden Ivey are worried about him. The people who’ve never met him bought his jersey and booked him on a podcast.

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How a complicated story became a simple one

Part of how this became a culture war flashpoint so quickly comes down to how the news broke. The Bulls’ official statement was one sentence: the team “has waived guard Jaden Ivey due to conduct detrimental to the team.” No specifics. But ESPN’s Shams Charania broke it with more detail: “The Chicago Bulls are waiving guard Jaden Ivey after his recent anti-LGBTQ comments amid several rants on religion and other topics.”

That tweet isn’t wrong. But it gave the right the cleanest possible version of the story: man says anti-gay thing, gets fired. That’s a culture war narrative. It’s tidy. It fits on a bumper sticker. The actual story (weeks of escalating behavior, locker room friction, anti-Catholic rants, a player attacking fellow Christians by name, a team that had no contractual reason to keep him around) is messy and human and doesn’t lend itself to fundraising emails.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported, citing a source within the organization, that “it wasn’t just Ivey’s opinions on the LGBTQ issue but an accumulation of posts and comments that started last month.” And the friction started even before the Instagram rants. Back on February 19, Ivey was benched for the first time in his career. Afterward, he told reporters: “I’m not the J.I. I used to be. The old J.I. is dead. I’m alive in Christ no matter what the basketball setting is.” That was over a month before any of the livestreams.

And then there’s the detail that really makes the “persecuted for being Christian” framing fall apart: Ivey wasn’t just criticizing the NBA’s Pride celebrations. He was attacking other Christians. He called Steph Curry, who literally puts Bible verses on his sneakers, a fraud. He called Catholicism a false religion. Billy Donovan, the Bulls’ head coach and a lifelong, devout Catholic who helped build a Catholic high school in Gainesville, had to sit there and process that from a player on his roster. The “fired for being Christian” story only works if you ignore that most of the people Ivey was going after are Christians, too.

The NBA doesn’t have values. It has a spreadsheet.

I grew up a Chicago sports fan. A child of the 90s. The Jordan-era Bulls were the center of my universe, and those teams included Dennis Rodman, who headbutted a referee, kicked a cameraman in the groin, disappeared to Las Vegas in the middle of the Finals, and once got fined $50,000 (the largest fine in NBA history at the time) for telling reporters during the 1997 Finals: “It’s difficult to get in sync because of all the [expletive] Mormons out here. And you can quote me on that.” Phil Jackson, his coach, tried to explain that “to Dennis, a Mormon may just be a nickname for people from Utah,” like Hoosier is for people from Indiana. The Bulls didn’t waive him. They won the championship. Because Dennis Rodman grabbed 15 rebounds a game and the Bulls needed him.

That’s the same organization that just waived Jaden Ivey for “conduct detrimental to the team.”

The difference between Rodman and Ivey isn’t what they said. It’s what they produced. And that principle applies across the entire league.

Jonathan Isaac, a forward for the Orlando Magic, was one of the only NBA players to stand during the national anthem when the entire league knelt in 2020 during the BLM protests in the bubble. He preaches at a church in Orlando. He spoke at Liberty University. He co-wrote a Fox News editorial against vaccine mandates. He published a book called “Why I Stand” with Ben Shapiro’s publishing company. Shapiro called him “an amazing person with an incredible story.” Isaac is one of the most openly conservative, openly Christian players in the NBA. He’s still on the Magic. He’s never been waived. He’s never been disciplined for his beliefs. If the NBA fired people for being Christian, Jonathan Isaac would’ve been gone years ago.

And then there’s what the league tolerates when the player is productive enough. Miles Bridges, a forward for the Charlotte Hornets, pleaded no contest to a felony domestic violence charge after allegedly assaulting the mother of his children in front of them, with injuries allegedly including strangulation, a broken nose, a concussion, and multiple bruises. He was sentenced to three years of probation. He missed one season, served a 10-game suspension, and came back. In July 2024, the Hornets signed him to a three-year, $75 million contract.

Strangulation. Broken nose. Seventy-five million dollars.

Ivey himself actually gets at something real when he talks about Anthony Edwards. In 2022, Edwards posted an Instagram video using a homophobic slur toward a group of men. The NBA fined him $40,000. He deleted it, apologized, and that was that. He wasn’t waived. He wasn’t suspended. The Timberwolves are building their entire franchise around him. On the podcast, Ivey put it bluntly: Edwards wasn’t cut “because he’s the best player on their team, right? They need him, right? He makes them money, right?”

And honestly? Ivey’s right about that. There is a double standard. He’s just wrong about what it is. It’s not Christianity versus the LGBTQ community. It’s stars versus everyone else. Edwards is a franchise player averaging nearly 30 points a game. Ivey was an injured reserve guard on an expiring deal averaging 8.5 for the season. Edwards apologized and moved on. Ivey escalated for days.

The NBA doesn’t cut players for being Christian. It doesn’t cut players for being conservative. It doesn’t even cut players for felony domestic violence, apparently, as long as you can score. It cuts players who aren’t producing and who become a bigger problem than they’re worth. Ivey was hurt, he was out for the year, he had no contract for next season, and he’d become a daily headline for all the wrong reasons. You don’t need a strong moral compass to make that decision. You need a calculator.

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They don’t want him to get help. They want him to keep talking.

So the “fired for being Christian” narrative doesn’t hold up. But the people pushing it don’t need it to hold up. They need it to be useful. And for about a week, Jaden Ivey is very useful.

Think about what happened in the 48 hours after he was waived. His teammates said they hoped he’d get help. His wife said he lies for attention. His family called him psycho. And within that same window, an evangelist with a YouTube channel booked him on a podcast, put a microphone in front of him, and let him talk for over an hour. On that podcast, Ivey disclosed that he’d held oxycodone pills in his hands during a suicide attempt. He talked about being sexually abused as a child. He talked about abusing his wife. And the response from the host, and from the conservative media ecosystem that amplified the interview, wasn’t to pause and ask if he was OK. It was to call it courage and keep the cameras rolling.

I’m not diagnosing Jaden Ivey. I don’t know what he’s going through, and I’m not qualified to say. But his former teammates think something is wrong. His former coach thinks something is wrong. His wife thinks something is wrong. His own family thinks something is wrong. And if you watch those livestreams (I watched a couple of them), you don’t come away thinking “this is a man bravely standing up for his convictions.” You come away thinking “someone close to this person needs to take his phone away and sit with him.”

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Ben Shapiro is smart enough to see the difference between Jonathan Isaac writing a book about his faith and Jaden Ivey cycling through daily Instagram Live sessions attacking individual players, disclosing suicide attempts, and telling the world his wife won’t text him back. Those are different things. Shapiro knows that. But “man in crisis needs support” doesn’t generate the engagement that “man fired for being Christian during Holy Week” does. So here we are.

Every “stand strong, king” reply in Ivey’s comments is telling him that the people who love him are wrong. Every “consider me a fan” is reinforcing the idea that he should keep going, keep streaming, keep disclosing, keep escalating. That the problem isn’t what he’s doing. The problem is the world not accepting it. And if you’ve ever watched someone you care about spiral while strangers on the internet cheer them on — and I have been that spiraling person before — you know how dangerous that feedback loop is.

In a week, maybe two, Riley Gaines and Ben Shapiro will have a new cause. Robby Starbuck will be running a new pressure campaign against some company’s DEI policies or something like that. The podcast bookings will dry up. The jersey sales will slow down. And Jaden Ivey will still be a 24-year-old who told the world he almost killed himself, whose wife isn’t speaking to him, whose family says he’s losing his mind, and who spent the worst week of his life surrounded by strangers telling him that everyone who loves him is the enemy.

That’s not defending someone’s faith.

Gorman was 18 years old, a freshman at Loyola from Westchester County, New York. On March 19, she was out with a group of friends near the beach around 1:30 in the morning. They’d gone to catch a glimpse of the northern lights. A masked man emerged and fired at them. Gorman was hit and died at the scene. It was the first homicide in the city’s 49th Ward all year.

This isn’t an area people think of as dangerous. Rogers Park is a dense, walkable, genuinely diverse neighborhood on the far north side of Chicago. The lakefront there is full of joggers, dog walkers, students. Gorman’s murder was shocking because of how normal her evening was, and how safe the area generally feels. I know this because I lived there. I know this because I walked those same blocks.

Shortly after the shooting, 49th Ward Alderwoman Maria Hadden did an interview with Fox 32 Chicago. The anchor asked whether this was a targeted incident, whether residents should be worried for their safety. Hadden, relaying what police had told her, said it appeared to be random. She used the phrase “wrong place, wrong time.” The rest of the interview was grief, community resources, and support for a shaken neighborhood.

Within days, Hadden’s comments had been ripped from that interview, stripped of the question she was answering, repackaged by right-wing influencer accounts with words she never actually said placed inside quotation marks, and blasted across conservative media. Fox News ran multiple national articles. Megyn Kelly covered it for days. House Republicans held a press conference on Capitol Hill with photos of Gorman on display. Trump invoked the case in remarks about ending sanctuary cities. The narrative that took hold was that a progressive Chicago alderwoman had blamed a murdered teenager for her own death. Hadden had to close her ward office over safety concerns.

The phrase “wrong place, wrong time” is one of the most common expressions in the English language for describing random violence. Police departments use it. Families of victims use it. Local news stations across the country have used it in headlines. In fact, one of Gorman’s own friends, someone who was standing on that pier when the shooting happened, independently told the Chicago Sun-Times the exact same thing: “It seemed like he was there for a reason, and we were just [in the] wrong place, wrong time.” Nobody accused that friend of victim-blaming. Nobody built a news cycle around it.

Everybody knows what “wrong place, wrong time” means. The people who turned it into a scandal know what it means, too. They just pretended not to.

This is a thing the right does. It’s a formula I’ve been tracking for years, one I wrote about repeatedly when I was at Media Matters for America: take something a Democrat said, detach it from context, assign it the most absurd possible meaning, and then attack the meaning you invented. It works because it’s simple, because it’s fast, and because the people doing it understand that the correction never catches up to the lie.

What happened to Maria Hadden is the latest, and in some ways the most brazen, example of how this machine works.

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Watch the actual interview

If you’ve seen coverage of what Hadden said, you almost certainly haven’t seen the interview itself. So here’s the exchange that launched a national scandal.

The Fox 32 anchor, noting that the shooter wore a mask and that people were scared, asked Hadden directly: “Should other people be concerned about their safety right now, or do we think that this is a targeted incident?”

That’s the question. Remember it, because you’ll never see it in any of the coverage that followed.

Hadden answered:

So from what I’ve been told so far, right, from what police know, from speaking to the students who were with her, it seems — she might have — that as they were just out, you know, people go out to the beach all the time, right? And they go out on the pier. They walk around. So the kids were out doing normal things people do in the neighborhood, and it sounds like this might have been a wrong place, wrong time, running into a person who had a gun. They might have startled this person at the end of the pier unintentionally. But that’s all we know. So from what I’ve been told, what police investigation has turned up so far, what they’ve been able to share with me and with Loyola University, we don’t believe there is cause for broader community concern at this time.

That’s it. That’s the answer. She’s telling a frightened community that, based on what police shared with her, this doesn’t appear to be a serial attacker or someone targeting students.

The rest of the interview is Hadden talking about grief and community support. “I’m sad,” she told the anchor. “Rogers Park is a very warm, welcoming, almost small-town-like community, a neighborhood in the city of Chicago, and this really shakes you to your core.” She talked about how a killing like this “brings up trauma from previous issues” the neighborhood has dealt with, and urged anyone struggling to reach out to her office. The anchor’s final words to her: “Thank you so much again. We appreciate you.”

Nobody in that conversation thought anything offensive had been said. The anchor didn’t push back. She didn’t ask a follow-up. She thanked Hadden and moved on, because Hadden had done exactly what a local elected official is supposed to do after a shooting in her ward: share what she knew, reassure people, and point them toward resources.

Here’s what the viral clip contained:

...all the time, right? And they go out on the pier. They walk around. So the kids were out doing normal things people do in the neighborhood, and it sounds like this might have been a wrong place, wrong time, running into a person who had a gun. They might have startled this person at the end of the pier unintentionally.

The question was cut. The beginning of her answer, where she’s clearly relaying secondhand information from police (”from what I’ve been told so far, right, from what police know”), was cut. The sentence immediately following (”But that’s all we know... we don’t believe there is cause for broader community concern”) was cut. Everything about grief, community resources, and mental health support was cut. What remained was a fragment of an answer with no visible question, which made it look like Hadden had volunteered this framing unprompted, as her considered take on a teenager’s murder, rather than what it actually was: an answer to “should my neighborhood be scared right now?”

And keep in mind: at the time of this interview, no suspect had been identified. Police hadn’t arrested anyone. Nobody knew who the shooter was. Hadden was doing her best to relay the limited information CPD and Loyola had shared with her. The right-wing accounts that later framed her comments as defending “a migrant” were retrofitting an immigration narrative onto words spoken before anyone knew the first thing about the killer. She wasn’t defending anyone. She was passing along what the police told her.

Removing the question isn’t sloppy editing. It’s the entire trick.

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What they said she said

The clip was bad enough on its own. But the accounts that made it go viral didn’t stop at removing context. They improved on what Hadden said.

Here’s the tweet from End Wokeness, the right-wing influencer account that first pushed the clip into the conservative media bloodstream on March 23:

Chicago Alderwoman Maria Hadden: Sheridan (18) was in “wrong place at the wrong time — she might’ve startled the migrant who kiIIed her”

And, again, here’s what Hadden actually said:

“...it sounds like this might have been a wrong place, wrong time, running into a person who had a gun. They might have startled this person at the end of the pier unintentionally.”

Look at what changed. Hadden said “a person who had a gun.” End Wokeness wrote “the migrant.” Hadden said “they,” referring to the group of students. End Wokeness wrote “she,” pinning the blame on Gorman individually. Hadden never said “killed her.” That was invented and placed inside quotation marks. The whole thing is formatted as a direct quote, but it isn’t one. It’s a rewritten version of her remarks with new words stuffed in. Now, you might see this and think that these are just small differences, but they can play a big role in propaganda.

Then there’s the Libs of TikTok version, which added another layer entirely:

Maria Hadden, a Chicago Alderwoman and a self-described “queer & progressive champion”, says Sheridan Gorman was m*rdered because she “might’ve startled the migrant who k*lled her.” This is who’s running your city.

Same altered quote, but now with Hadden’s sexual orientation and political identity presented as relevant context. The framing is telling the audience that Hadden’s supposed indifference to Gorman’s murder is a queer progressive trait. Not an individual failing, but a type. (And, I should note, that I’m not sure where the “queer and progressive champion” language is coming from; I was unable to find it.) “This is who’s running your city” seals it. The tweet isn’t really about what Hadden said. It’s about what she is.

These two tweets are the foundation everything else was built on. The entire national news cycle, from cable news to the Capitol, traces back to a version of Hadden’s words that Hadden didn’t exactly say.

And this isn’t even new.

I’ve seen this before

When I was at Media Matters for America, I wrote about the time Eric Holder, speaking at a voter suppression event in support of Stacey Abrams in October 2018, riffed on Michelle Obama’s “when they go low, we go high” line. “When they go low, we kick them,” Holder said. Then he clarified, immediately, in the same remarks: “I don’t mean we do anything inappropriate. We don’t do anything illegal.” Right-wing media clipped the clarification and ran with the first part. Fox & Friends’ Ainsley Earhardt: “Just start kicking people? That’s the former head of the Justice Department.” Lou Dobbs called Holder an “illustrious thug.” The Daily Wire, Gateway Pundit, Breitbart, the Federalist, and RedState all published pieces treating a voter suppression metaphor as a literal call to assault.

Everyone knew what “kick them” meant. They pretended not to.

A few months later, I wrote about Kirsten Gillibrand saying at a 2019 campaign event that undocumented immigrants should have the right to pay into Social Security, pay taxes, and have a pathway to citizenship. The RNC posted an 18-second clip to YouTube titled “Sen. Gillibrand: Expand Social Security To All Illegal Immigrants.” Laura Ingraham picked it up that same night. By the next day, Mike Huckabee was on Hannity telling viewers that Gillibrand wanted to take “grandma’s Social Security” and give it to people “who broke into this country illegally.” She’d said the opposite. She was talking about people paying into the system, not taking from it. Fox ran it on both its “news” and “opinion” programming, and the chyrons on the “news” side even included a fabricated quote.

Everyone knew what “pay into Social Security” meant. They pretended not to.

Then there was Ilhan Omar, who I wrote about in April 2019 after she gave a 20-minute speech at a CAIR fundraiser about the challenges American Muslims face. Her point was that after 9/11, all American Muslims started losing access to their civil liberties because of what a small group of people did. She referred to the hijackers as “some people” because the entire point of her speech was to distinguish ordinary Muslims from terrorists. A 19-second clip was extracted. Brian Kilmeade on Fox & Friends: “You have to wonder if she’s an American first.” The New York Post ran a front-page photo of the Twin Towers burning with the headline “Here’s your something.” Omar had already been the target of assassination threats before this.

Everyone knew what “some people did something” meant in context. They pretended not to.

And I wrote about Joe Biden arguing at a 2019 forum that Democrats needed to work within the system, telling an audience of activists that if they didn’t want to do the hard work of winning votes, “let’s start a real, physical revolution if you’re talking about it.” It was sarcasm. It was a challenge to people who thought there was a shortcut. Ryan Saavedra at the Daily Wire posted a 51-second edit that cut everything before and after the line, making it sound like Biden was the one calling for revolution. Mark Levin tweeted: “Biden suggests ‘physical revolution’ aka violence.” The clip could have included the full context without editing (it was under Twitter’s video limit), but Saavedra cut it anyway.

Everyone knew what Biden meant. They pretended not to.

Four examples, same formula every time: clip a Democrat’s words, drop the context, apply the dumbest possible reading, and treat it as self-evident. The infrastructure is always the same, too. A short clip or tweet goes up. Conservative media amplifies it. Fox runs segments. Politicians weigh in. By the time anyone points out what was actually said, the scandal has already been absorbed as fact by millions of people who will never see the correction.

But the Hadden case goes further than any of those. “Wrong place, wrong time” isn’t even a figure of speech that requires charitable interpretation. “We kick them” is a metaphor. “Physical revolution” is a hypothetical. “Some people did something” is a deliberate understatement being used to make a rhetorical point. You can see, at least, how a bad-faith actor could grab any of those and run. But “wrong place, wrong time”? It’s not figurative. It’s not rhetorical. It’s just what people say when someone gets hurt by random violence. CNN ran an entire analysis piece in 2023 built around the phrase. It’s in police reports. It’s in obituaries. There’s nothing to misunderstand. You have to choose to misunderstand it.

The scandal that wasn’t

I’m not arguing that Hadden’s interview was flawless. Saying the students may have “startled” the gunman was clumsy, even in the context of relaying preliminary information from police. It put a piece of the causal chain on the victims’ actions, and I can see why that stung. But the gap between “clumsy phrasing in a live interview hours after a murder, before police had identified a suspect” and “Democrat blames murdered teenager for her own death” is vast. The entire right-wing campaign required collapsing that gap, and they did it by cutting a question, fabricating a quote, and pretending not to understand a phrase that every adult in America has heard a thousand times.

You get the idea. Buried further down, the AP wire story that most of these outlets ran mentions that the policy “also restricts female athletes such as two-time Olympic champion runner Caster Semenya with medical conditions known as differences in sex development, or DSD.”

Also.

Caster Semenya is a cis woman. She was female at birth, raised as a girl, and identifies as a woman. She won two Olympic gold medals in the 800 meters. And in the AP’s framing, the fact that this policy will exclude her from competition is an afterthought, tacked on below paragraphs about trans athletes.

The IOC’s new policy requires all female athletes to undergo SRY gene screening, a one-time genetic test, to compete in women’s events starting at the 2028 Los Angeles Games. The athletes who will actually be flagged by this test are overwhelmingly women like Semenya: cis women with differences in sex development. By leading every story with “trans ban,” coverage is taking a situation that affects other women and jamming it into a culture-war frame that doesn’t really fit.

It’s easy to see why it happened. Trans athletes are a political lightning rod. DSD is a complicated medical topic most people have never heard of. Editors know which one gets clicks. So a DSD story becomes a trans story, and the women it’s actually about disappear.

That framing does a disservice to everyone. It does a disservice to women with DSDs, whose specific situations get flattened into someone else’s political fight. It does a disservice to trans people, whose lives and rights get reduced to a sports debate that, at the Olympic level, barely involves them. And it does a disservice to anyone reading the news today and thinking they understand what the IOC just did. When you frame a DSD story as a trans story, nobody ends up better informed about either one.

I’ve been writing about this exact conflation since 2019. The Paris boxing controversy that actually catalyzed this policy wasn’t even about trans women. Neither Imane Khelif nor Lin Yu-ting is trans. Lin Yu-ting already passed her SRY gene test and isn’t affected by this policy at all. The framing hasn’t changed.

Whether the IOC should ban trans women from Olympic competition is its own question. I’m setting it aside here, because this piece is about the people who are being erased from the conversation.

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Let’s look at the actual numbers

Trans women have been eligible to compete in the Olympics since 2004. In the 20-plus years since, nearly 30,000 women have competed at the Summer Games. Of those exactly one was trans: weightlifter Laurel Hubbard, who didn’t finish her event at Tokyo in 2021. No trans woman competed in Paris. The AP’s own coverage of today’s policy acknowledges that “it is unclear how many, if any, transgender women are competing at an Olympic level.”

That’s 0.0034%.

Now look at the other side. World Athletics has acknowledged that certain DSDs are roughly 140 times more prevalent among elite female athletes than in the general population, so even if you start breaking down just how rare individual conditions are, they’re more likely to show up in athletes. We don’t know exactly how many women the IOC’s new screening will flag, but we have a pretty good idea of the scale. At the 2016 Rio Olympics, the entire women’s 800 meter podium consisted of athletes with DSDs: Semenya took gold, Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi won silver, and Margaret Wambui of Kenya earned bronze.

One trans woman in two decades. A full Olympic podium of DSD athletes at a single Games. The headlines went with the first story.

If determining the specific eligibility requirements when it comes to women with certain DSDs is something the IOC wants to tackle, there’s a very nuanced discussion to be had there. But by tacking all of this onto something related to trans athletes, they can safely implement a pretty sweeping ban and flatten the conversation so that the public goes, “Well, that’s just common sense.” It does those women a disservice.

So who are the women in the “also”?

DSD stands for differences in sex development. These are rare conditions where someone’s chromosomal, gonadal, or anatomical sex develops atypically. In practice, the athletes affected by the IOC’s new policy are mostly women who have XY chromosomes but whose bodies developed in ways those chromosomes wouldn’t predict. They were raised as girls. They are women. Many of them didn’t know anything was atypical about their biology until someone in sports administration decided to test them.

Semenya responded to today’s policy by calling it “exclusion with a new name.” She told the New York Times: “I have carried this weight. So have other women of color who deserved better from sport. Reintroducing genetic screening is not progress — it is walking backward.” She’s been barred from her best event since 2019 under World Athletics testosterone rules. Niyonsaba has said she won’t undergo hormone suppression. Khelif, the Algerian boxer who won gold in Paris while half the world called her a man (she isn’t one), says she’ll take the SRY test.

Look at those names and nationalities. South Africa, Burundi, Kenya, Algeria. Add Dutee Chand (India) and Santhi Soundarajan (India) and Pratima Gaonkar (India). The women who get publicly subjected to eligibility disputes are overwhelmingly women of color from the Global South. Semenya named it herself: other women of color who deserved better from sport. That pattern doesn’t get examined when every story is framed specifically around trans women.

The IOC’s policy document includes provisions for mental health support, counseling, and informed consent for athletes who screen positive. That language is in there because the IOC knows what this process can do to a person. The history tells you why they know.

In October 2001, Pratima Gaonkar was an 18-year-old sprinter and swimmer from a tiny village in South Goa. She’d just won a silver medal in the 4×400 relay at the Junior Asian Athletics Championships in Brunei. She was the financial “hope of her family,” which survived on her mother’s intermittent income as a farm hand making 15 rupees a day. Three months after that silver medal, her brother Shivanand overheard a phone conversation between Pratima and her coach. “She said, ‘sir, you can’t do this,’” he told the Indian Express years later. “Then she hung up and began sobbing.”

The next day, Pratima’s body was found in a village well. She had tied bags of stones to her ankles. She was a swimmer. She wanted to make sure her instincts wouldn’t stop her from drowning.

After her death, local newspapers published details from her post-mortem on their front pages, including descriptions of her private parts. Her mother, Jayashri, told the Indian Express: “We never spoke about her physical characteristics after she turned 13-14. And she looked like any other girl and behaved like a girl. I am not an expert in science or medicine to advise my daughter about hormonal changes.”

She was 18.

Santhi Soundarajan, an Indian runner who won silver in the 800 meters at the 2006 Asian Games, was forced to take a sex verification test less than 24 hours after her win. She was stripped of her medal. She later said she’d been made to sign papers in English, a language she doesn’t understand. She attempted suicide. For a time, she worked as a laborer in a brick kiln. These sorts of unexpected results can upend lives.

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Some things the coverage isn’t getting to

When the framing is “trans ban,” certain questions don’t get asked.

The IOC already tried mandatory sex testing. For decades, every female Olympic athlete was screened. In all those years of testing, it never caught a single person deliberately misrepresenting their sex. What it did do was destroy the careers and lives of women with intersex conditions they didn’t know they had. The IOC walked away from the practice. Now it’s back with a different test, but the basic setup is the same: mandatory genetic screening that will primarily flag cis women.

The IOC didn’t publish any new research with this policy. The working group “reviewed the state of the science” and “reached consensus,” but the science on testosterone and athletic performance has been in the literature for years. IOC President Kirsty Coventry called the policy “based on science and led by medical experts.” What’s new here is the policy decision. The science didn’t change.

The policy itself is less straightforward than the headlines suggest, too. The IOC carved out an exception for athletes with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS), a condition where someone has XY chromosomes but whose body doesn’t respond to testosterone at all. Those athletes can still compete as women. Which means the IOC itself recognizes that testing positive for the SRY gene isn’t a simple pass/fail. Biology is messy, and the IOC knows it. But you wouldn’t get that from coverage that treats the whole thing as a binary question with a binary answer.

And then there’s the trickle-down problem. The IOC’s policy document says this doesn’t apply to grassroots or recreational sports. But the document also tells international federations they “shall” adopt the policy and “strongly recommends” screening athletes early in their careers. I’ve written before about how elite-competition rules get picked up by state legislators and school boards who don’t read the fine print. They read the headline. And the headline says “transgender women banned.”

That trickle-down will hurt cis girls and women with DSDs entering sport at every level, and it will hurt trans girls, too. The IOC document claims that male athletic advantage stems partly from testosterone exposure “in utero” and “in mini-puberty of infancy,” but doesn’t cite any evidence for that specific claim. If a school district adopts that reasoning, it becomes a justification for banning a trans girl who went on puberty blockers at 10 and never went through male puberty at all. Sure, the IOC isn’t asking anyone to do that. But it doesn’t have to.