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.

“If your work is used, should you be attributed? Yes, I think you should,” Mehrotra said. “That would be the nice contract.”

But Patel wasn’t asking about attribution. Grammarly had launched a feature called “Expert Review” that generated AI editing suggestions and attached them to real people’s names. Patel’s name. Kara Swisher’s name. Julia Angwin’s name. Stephen King’s name. Hundreds of others. Nobody was asked. Nobody was paid. Grammarly charged $12 a month for the privilege.

So Patel kept pushing. “How much do you think you should pay me?” he asked again. And again. Mehrotra kept talking about attribution, about linking to sources, about how the feature was “clearly indicated” as being “inspired” by experts’ published work.

“This wasn’t an attribution,” Patel finally said. “You just made something up and put my name on it.”

He’s right. I want to be specific about what “made something up” looks like in practice. The AI-generated edit that Grammarly attributed to Patel suggested that he, in his role as editor-in-chief of The Verge, emphasizes “the importance of crafting compelling headlines that convey urgency” and recommends “adding emotional or stakes-based words.” As Patel put it: “I’ve been an editor for over 15 years. I’ve literally never said anything like that.”

Nobody talks like that. It’s AI slop, the kind of vague, interchangeable advice you’d get from any chatbot on any topic. The only thing specific about it was Patel’s name attached to it.

If you haven’t been following this story: Last August, Grammarly (which rebranded its parent company as “Superhuman” in October 2025) launched Expert Review as part of its paid Pro tier. The feature promised writing feedback from “leading professionals, authors, and subject-matter experts.” What it actually did was use AI to generate editing suggestions and attribute them to real people, none of whom had any involvement. Wired‘s Miles Klee broke the story in early March. The Verge‘s Stevie Bonifield then discovered that the “experts” included their own boss, Nilay Patel, and several of their colleagues. The backlash was immediate. Kara Swisher, whose name the tool had been using, told Platformer‘s Casey Newton: “You rapacious information and identity thieves better get ready for me to go full McConaughey on you. Also, you suck.” Investigative journalist Julia Angwin filed a class-action lawsuit. The feature was killed on March 11.

The feature is dead. The lawsuit is filed. But the Decoder interview, published today, is the thing from this whole mess that I can’t stop thinking about. Mehrotra sat for more than an hour of pointed questions and still couldn’t understand what the wrong thing was. He isn’t necessarily evasive in this interview. I don’t think he’s stonewalling. He’s being candid. And what his candor reveals is that the basic concept (that a person’s name, reputation, and expertise belong to that person, and you need their permission to use those things to sell a product) doesn’t exist in his head. He can’t hear the question Patel is asking because the premise behind it doesn’t register.

That’s worth paying attention to.

A bad feature, not a bad idea

Throughout the Decoder interview, Mehrotra makes a series of moves that all follow the same logic: every time Patel confronts him with a problem of consent, Mehrotra reframes it as a problem of quality. The feature was bad. The team missed. The execution fell short. What he never says, not once in the entire conversation, is that they shouldn’t have used people’s names without asking.

Patel asks how many people at Superhuman worked on Expert Review. Mehrotra’s answer: “It was a small team. It was probably a product manager and a couple engineers.” He says he personally hadn’t spent any time looking at the feature before the backlash hit. This is meant to contain the damage, to make it sound like a minor project that slipped through. But think about what it actually tells you. Superhuman has about 1,500 employees. A team built a feature that used hundreds of real people’s names and likenesses to sell a subscription product. It was live for seven months. And nobody, in a company of 1,500, flagged it. Nobody in the chain between “a couple engineers” and launch day said, “Hey, should we ask these people first?” A rogue team gets fired. This team didn’t get flagged, because there was nothing to flag. Using someone’s identity without their knowledge was just how things worked.

Then there’s how Mehrotra describes the decision to kill Expert Review. “I came and looked at it and I said, ‘This is off-strategy for us,’” he told Patel. Off-strategy. He killed it because it didn’t fit the company’s product direction. He frames the whole thing as a strategic misfire, a product that didn’t serve users or experts well, a team that “missed.” At one point he says, “the feature was not a good feature. It wasn’t good for experts, it wasn’t good for users.”

You’ll notice what’s absent from that explanation. There’s no “we shouldn’t have used people’s names without their consent.” There’s no “taking someone’s identity to sell a product is wrong.” There’s no acknowledgment that the problem was ethical. In Mehrotra’s telling, Expert Review failed the same way any product fails. Bad execution. Low usage. Didn’t align with the roadmap. Blah, blah, blah. Time to move on.

Patel pushes him on the legal claims. Angwin’s lawsuit argues that Superhuman violated New York and California laws barring the commercial use of people’s names without consent. Mehrotra’s response: “Respectfully, we believe the claims are without merit. The idea that the feature is impersonation is quite a big stretch.” But impersonation isn’t the claim. The claim is unauthorized commercial use of a name. Mehrotra keeps pivoting to how the feature included disclosures saying the suggestions were “inspired by” experts. “It’s far from that test,” he says, still answering a question about impersonation that nobody asked.

There’s one more exchange that I think is the most telling moment in the whole interview. Patel asks where the expert names came from. How did Grammarly decide whose names to use? Mehrotra’s answer: “It came right from the popular LLMs. So it’s exactly the same experience you would have if you came to Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT and said, ‘Can you take this piece of writing, recommend the people who would be most useful to give feedback on it, take their most interesting works and use that to try to give me feedback.’”

He means this as a defense. The names aren’t special. The models already know these people. Anyone could get the same result by prompting a chatbot.

And he’s right. That’s what makes it such an accidental confession. The models do already have all these people inside them. They do already use their work without permission or compensation. Every chatbot will happily generate advice “in the style of” any named writer you ask for. Grammarly just made the mistake of being explicit about it. As Casey Newton wrote in Platformer: “Grammarly just had the bad manners to put my name on it. The bigger problem, though, is the one that’s still invisible: all the ways my work, and the work of every other writer, is being used, right now, by systems that are smart enough not to tell us about it.”

Mehrotra looked at that invisible system, made it visible, put a price tag on it, and then couldn’t seem to understand why anyone was upset.

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Write for exposure, 2026 edition

Here’s where the interview gets really interesting. Because Mehrotra doesn’t just fail to see the problem. He thinks he has the solution. And the solution is, somehow, just as bad.

Midway through the conversation, Patel asks Mehrotra what the economics should look like for experts on Superhuman’s platform. Mehrotra explains that the company is building an agent store with a 70/30 revenue split (70% to the creator, 30% to Superhuman). Experts can build their own AI agents, put them on the platform, and get paid when subscribers use them. He compares it to YouTube. He invokes the “1,000 true fans” theory: get 1,000 people to pay you $100 a year, and you’ve got a $100,000 business.

Patel asks the obvious question: “If you already had that system, why build another system that used my name for free?”

Mehrotra: “We didn’t have the system at the time.”

So, to be clear about the sequence here: Superhuman took hundreds of people’s names, used them to sell a subscription product, and is now offering those same people the opportunity to do additional work, on Superhuman’s platform, to earn a share of future revenue. The people whose names were used without consent are being pitched a business plan.

Patel puts it plainly: “You understand that you’re saying I have to do that because all of the work I’ve produced in my career to date has been taken without compensation by AI companies.”

“I didn’t make that statement,” says Mehrotra.

Patel: “You’re saying I need to invent some new business model as an expert and upload an agent of myself to your tool and then advertise it... because my actual body of work has been reduced to zero value. That’s a pretty hard sell.”

If you’re a writer or journalist or creator of any kind and you’ve been around long enough, this pitch has a familiar ring to it. In the early 2010s, outlets like The Huffington Post built enormous businesses on the backs of unpaid contributors. Early in my writing career, I did my share of this kind of writing. The argument was always the same: we can’t pay you, but think of the exposure. Think of the platform. Think of the audience you’ll reach. Writers eventually recognized this for what it was (exploitation with good PR), and the practice became broadly understood as indefensible.

Mehrotra is offering a version of the same deal, except he’s made it worse in two ways. First, the old “write for exposure” pitch at least required you to say yes. You knew what you were getting into. Grammarly’s Expert Review conscripted people. They found out they’d been working for Grammarly when they read about it in the news. Second, the proposed fix asks the people who got ripped off to do more work. Build your agent. Train it to sound like you. Maintain it. Market it to Superhuman’s users. And in return, you get 70% of whatever comes in from the subscribers you attract to a platform you never asked to be on.

There’s an exchange near the end of the interview that captures this perfectly. Patel reads a tagline from Superhuman’s suite at South by Southwest: “AI can’t replace human creativity, empathy, or emotion... taste and judgment are more valuable than ever.” He asks Mehrotra: “Valuable on what metric? Is it dollars?”

Mehrotra talks about how Superhuman’s users are professionals, salespeople, support workers, and how the company helps them become “a better version of you.” He never answers the question about dollars.

Because that’s the trick. The AI industry loves to tell creators that their taste and judgment are “more valuable than ever.” It just means valuable in a way that can’t be deposited. Your expertise has never been worth more, and you’ve never been paid less for it. The value flows up. The work flows down. And if you want to get a cut, you’d better start building.

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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The best deal available

Mehrotra is unusually candid about all of this. But he’s not unusual. He’s just the one who sat for the interview.

Last October, I interviewed The Atlantic‘s CEO Nicholas Thompson for Depth Perception, the Q&A series I co-write for Long Lead. At one point I asked him about AI’s impact on journalism, and he described the AI companies with a clarity you rarely hear from someone at his level:

“It’s being run by companies that took our data in the middle of the night, violating our terms of service, lied about it, hid their activities, covered up their tracks, and built competitive business models without any compensation. So I have mixed feelings.”

The Atlantic has a deal with OpenAI. I asked Thompson about it. His explanation:

“With most of the AI companies, they took all our content, they trained their models on them, and gave us nothing. With OpenAI, they took our content, trained their models on us, and paid us money, and allowed us to have a seat at the table as they design their search product. So we prefer the OpenAI model to the other models.”

Long Lead Presents: Depth Perception

Running on AI: How Nicholas Thompson wrote a book while leading 'The Atlantic'

Nicholas Thompson is actually getting faster with age, defying the usual trajectory of human physiology. In April 2021, two months after being named CEO of The Atlantic, the veteran journalist set the American record for men 45 and older in the 50-kilometer race…

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The CEO of one of the most respected magazines in American journalism is describing the best available option, and the best available option is: every AI company stole from us, but this one paid us afterward. That’s the good outcome. That’s what winning looks like when the table is set this way.

Every option Thompson describes starts with the same first step: they took our content. The only variable is what happened next. Did they pay? Did they offer a seat at the table? Or did they just take it and walk away? “They don’t take it” is not on the menu. It was practically a hostage negotiation.

This is the same dynamic Mehrotra is proposing, just viewed from the other side. His 70/30 agent platform is the Grammarly version of what OpenAI offered The Atlantic: we already took your stuff, and now here’s a way to get something back. The difference is that Mehrotra is making this pitch while the lawsuit is still active, which makes the audacity a little harder to miss.

And the logic is the same everywhere you look. OpenAI’s official position on using copyrighted material to train its models is that “training is fair use, but we provide an opt-out because it’s the right thing to do.” If it’s fair use, the opt-out is a courtesy. If the opt-out is “the right thing to do,” then maybe it’s not actually fair use. The sentence contradicts itself, and nobody at OpenAI seems to have noticed. It’s the same incoherence as Mehrotra insisting that generating fake advice under someone’s name is “attribution.” The stories these companies tell about what they’re doing don’t hold together under the slightest pressure. They don’t need to. They just need to hold together long enough.

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Sloppelgängers

The advice was terrible.

I mentioned earlier that the AI-generated edit attributed to Patel was generic slop. But that was one of the milder examples. In her Times op-ed, Angwin describes what Grammarly’s version of her actually recommended. One suggestion: replace the factual opening sentence of an investigative article with an invented anecdote about a fictional person named Laura, a patient whose medical privacy had been violated. The tool generated the fake anecdote in full and offered a button to paste it straight into the article. Uh oh.

Angwin notes why this is a big problem: “Replacing a factual sentence with an imagined story about a person who doesn’t exist is not only bad editing. It’s a deception that could end my career as a journalist.”

And she’s right. If someone had actually taken that advice, under Angwin’s name, and published a fabricated anecdote in what was supposed to be an investigative news story, the reputational damage could land on her. The person whose name was on the suggestion. The person who had nothing to do with it.

Author Benjamin Dreyer found that Expert Review would generate writing tips attributed to Stephen King even when you fed it lorem ipsum, meaningless placeholder text. The tool didn’t care what you wrote. It didn’t understand what you wrote. It just grabbed names and generated vaguely editorial-sounding sentences and presented the whole package as if a real person was helping you.

Angwin, borrowing a term coined by writer Ingrid Burrington on Bluesky, called these AI imitations “sloppelgängers.” It’s the right word. They weren’t good enough to pass for the real thing. They were bad enough to cause real harm while trading on real names.

Maureen Ryan, the veteran TV critic and author of the best-selling Burn It Down, was one of the people included in Expert Review. She didn’t find out about it until the news broke. In an open letter she published on March 10, she wrote: “You just take that? You just take my identity? And you do that in an environment where making a living from writing is an ever more precarious proposition? And then you make me take time out of my day to tell you that’s wrong?”

Before Superhuman killed the feature, its response to the backlash was to set up an email address where experts could request to be removed. Opt out. Unsubscribe from the service you never subscribed to. The burden was on the people who’d been used, not the company that used them. Ryan, who is busy writing a book, was being asked to take time away from her actual work to undo something that never should have happened in the first place.

And the thing is, as Angwin argued in her Times op-ed, the law that covers what Grammarly did isn’t new. New York’s right of publicity law is a century old. At least 25 states have versions of it. You can’t use someone’s name to sell a product without their consent. The technology is new. The principle is settled.

This is what the blind spot produces. Mehrotra and his company couldn’t see the consent problem, so they couldn’t see the quality problem either. If you don’t think you need someone’s permission to use their name, you’re certainly not going to check whether the advice you’re generating under that name is any good. Why would you? You don’t think you owe them anything. The feature was bad for the same reason it existed at all: because the people who built it genuinely did not consider the humans attached to those names to be stakeholders in the process.

Scared for their jobs

Near the end of the Decoder interview, Patel brings up an NBC News poll on public perceptions of AI. The numbers are grim. AI has a net negative favorability rating of -20. It polls behind ICE.

Patel suggests this might have something to do with how extractive the technology feels. Mehrotra disagrees. “People are scared for their jobs,” he says. He thinks the public’s unease is about employment, not about how AI companies treat creators.

He’s probably right that people are scared for their jobs. And he can’t see that his own interview is a case study in why. An hour of explaining, in detail, how his company used real people’s work and names to build a product, killed it when it became inconvenient, and is now pitching those same people on the opportunity to earn their way back in. All while insisting that nothing wrong happened.

At the very end, Mehrotra tells Patel he’d love to work with him on building an agent. This is how the conversation closes. An hour of “how much should you pay me” and “we believe the claims are without merit” and “I’ve literally never said anything like that,” and Mehrotra’s parting thought is a sales pitch.

I’d love to work with you. We’d love to have you on our platform. The door is open.

They took your name, generated garbage under it, sold it for $12 a month, and now they’d like to know if you’re interested in a partnership. Welcome to the future, I guess.

I need to get something out of the way up front: Kat is my friend. We both worked at Media Matters. I wrote about her campaign once before, back in April 2025, shortly after she announced. I wanted her to win. I posted about supporting her on social media. But I made a deliberate decision early on to keep a wall up between that and what I published here at TPA. I didn’t want to spend the campaign writing cheerleader pieces about my friend’s congressional run. So I waited to see how things played out before weighing in again. Things have now played out.

I also want to be honest about what this loss was and what it wasn’t. Biss is a good candidate. He’s progressive. He’s the well-liked, twice-elected mayor of Evanston, a former state senator who I personally voted for over JB Pritzker in the 2018 gubernatorial primary. He has solid positions on LGBTQ issues, on immigration, on economic policy. He had Jan Schakowsky’s endorsement, Elizabeth Warren’s endorsement, the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Once Biss entered the race, I remember thinking that this was going to be a real challenge for Kat. It was. He’ll be a fine member of Congress, a fitting successor to Schakowsky.

If you’re a pundit looking to spin this as evidence that Kat was too far left, or that her positions on some specific issue doomed her, I’d encourage you to consider that the urge to say those things probably has more to do with your own politics than with what actually happened in this race. She lost to a progressive with deep local roots and years of institutional support. That’s a different story than the one some people are eager to tell.

My friend Katelyn Burns wrote a great piece today on how Kat ran her campaign: the Twitch fundraising, the mutual aid, the AIPAC spending, the indictment. I’d recommend reading it. I want to write about something slightly different. I want to write about what Kat’s campaign meant, and why Democrats across the country should be paying attention to it right now.

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Something to vote for

That April 2025 piece I mentioned was about a CNN interview where host Jim Sciutto tried to get Kat to agree that support for trans people had cost Democrats the 2024 election. She didn’t take the bait. “Absolutely not,” she said. “Democrats deciding that trans people are the reason they lost the election in 2024 — it’s ridiculous. It’s offensive.” And then she said the thing that stuck with me for the entire year that followed: “A far bigger issue is that we aren’t giving people something to vote for.”

I think about that line a lot. Democrats have spent the last several years agonizing over which voters they’re losing and which positions they should abandon to win them back. Should they distance themselves from trans people? From Palestinians? The premise of this conversation is that the party’s problem is ideological, that it stands for too much, and the fix is to stand for less.

Kat’s campaign was a rejection of that premise. She spent a year trying to build the thing she told CNN was missing: a campaign that actually gave people something to vote for. Her slogan was “What if we didn’t suck?” and it’s funny, but it’s also a real question that most Democratic campaigns don’t bother trying to answer.

Her platform tied everything together under what she called “basic existence”: housing, healthcare, climate, LGBTQ rights, economic justice, all treated as the same fight. “I’m so sick of treating all these issues like they’re separate,” she told The Advocate in January. “Every person deserves to afford housing, groceries, and health care, with money left over. We’re the richest country on Earth — there’s no reason we can’t.”

Every person. That’s the part I want to sit with for a second. Trans people, yes. But also Trump voters. Republicans. People of every race and religion and background. The vision Kat was offering wasn’t about carving the electorate into pieces and deciding which ones to fight for. It was the radical (apparently) idea that a better world is possible for everyone, and that a political party should be in the business of trying to build one.

What not sucking looks like

So what does that actually look like when you try to do it? It looks like turning your campaign office into a mutual aid hub. Coats, boots, hand warmers, menstrual products, all donated by supporters and available to anyone in the community who needed them. No questions asked, no voter registration required. It looks like holding neighborhood cleanups as campaign events and distributing “know your rights” wallet cards instead of glossy mailers designed by consultants. It looks like charging a box of sanitary products as the entry fee to your campaign launch and donating them to a local nonprofit. It looks like a knitting circle at a bar in Evanston.

In her concession speech last night, Kat told the crowd that the campaign “fed and clothed thousands of people across the Ninth District.” That’s not a metaphor. That’s what the campaign literally did while also, by the way, raising $3.3 million (more than any other candidate in the field), almost entirely from small-dollar donors who gave $200 or less. No corporate PAC money. No call time spent begging rich people for checks. The candidate who refused to water down her values outraised everyone. That fact alone should end a few arguments about what’s supposedly necessary to fund a competitive campaign.

One of Kat’s campaign fellows, a Northwestern student named Shayna Tribush, told the Daily Northwestern something after the loss that I keep coming back to: “I want more people to have that expectation for their candidates, that they should actually, tangibly be helping the community they’re running in before they are elected.” That’s it. That’s the lesson. If you’re running for office and your campaign isn’t doing anything for the people you want to represent until after you win, maybe ask yourself why.

The thing she didn’t do

I wrote in that April 2025 piece about Kat’s refusal to accept the premise that trans people cost Democrats the election. What I didn’t know then was whether she’d hold that line for an entire campaign, under real pressure, with real money being spent against her. She did.

That matters to me personally. I’m trans. I’ve watched a lot of politicians over the years decide, after a bad election, that my rights are an acceptable bargaining chip. They don’t usually say it that bluntly. They say “messaging” or “prioritization” or “meeting voters where they are.” The result is the same: they back away, and people like me get the message. Kat told The Advocate that attacks on queer and trans people follow a pattern: “This is what every authoritarian regime does. They go after visible minorities, queer folks, and Jews.” She said it in January, months into the campaign, when softening the position might have bought her a few points in the suburbs. She didn’t soften it. She didn’t treat it as a liability to be managed. She treated it as part of the same fight as everything else on her platform, because it is.

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The model is there

There are dozens of progressive insurgent candidates running for Congress right now. Brad Lander in New York. Justin Pearson in Tennessee. Cori Bush running again in Missouri. A lot of them watched Zohran Mamdani win the New York mayor’s race last year and took away the right lesson or the wrong one. A piece in Dissent about Mamdani’s campaign noted that since his win, a crop of candidates have copied the aesthetic (slick videos, kinetic shots, man-on-the-street interviews) without understanding what actually made it work, and warned that “no amount of digital savvy can substitute for political vision, energy, and grassroots support.” The same is true of Kat’s campaign. The viral clips weren’t the thing. The mutual aid was the thing. The positive vision was the thing. The refusal to treat your campaign as something separate from the community you want to serve was the thing.

I’m proud of Kat. I’m proud that she looked at everything going wrong in this country and decided to try to do something about it. We both ended up at Media Matters because we’re the kind of people who care about the information environment we all live in, who think it matters that powerful people tell the truth. Watching her take that same impulse and channel it into running for Congress, knowing what it would cost her, knowing the odds, was something. I’m proud to be her friend.

In her concession speech, Kat told the crowd: “Every single loss like this one just makes the path easier for the next person who takes the same chance.” I hope this isn’t the last we’ve seen of her in politics. But whether it is or not, the model exists now. Someone built it, ran on it, and came within a few thousand votes of winning with it. What if we didn’t suck? She tried to answer that question. Other people should try, too.

We covered a lot of ground. His novel. His new Substack. What it’s like to play songs that are now older than you were when you wrote them. But the thing that stuck with me was his answer when I asked about the infrastructure that used to exist around music. Pitchfork, MTV, the music magazines, the labels that could actually put a new band in front of an audience. He compared musicians to canaries in a coal mine. The stuff everybody wants, the stuff that got monetized early, that’s what gets hit first when the economics shift. “They’ll go first,” he said.

And then: “Some of the stuff that we’re seeing in media, and especially legacy media, we already went down this road a decade or more ago with music.”

I think he’s right. And I think the version of this that’s coming for news is worse.

Here’s what’s left

In January 2024, Condé Nast merged Pitchfork into GQ. Editor-in-chief Puja Patel was let go, along with most of the editorial staff. Anna Wintour delivered the news wearing sunglasses. Andy Cush, one of the writers who lost his job, told The Needle Drop there was “this real sense of despair about ever having a place to do the kind of work you feel like you’re good at.” At the time, Pitchfork had the most daily active users of any Condé Nast publication. It wasn’t absorbed because nobody was reading it.

In November 2025, Stereogum paywalled its content. Its editor explained the decision in a piece titled “Getting Killed by AI.” Two months later, in January 2026, Pitchfork followed, launching a $5-a-month subscription and limiting non-subscribers to a handful of reviews a month.

That’s the infrastructure Geoff was talking about. Or what’s left of it. The system that used to find new music and explain it to people is either dead or behind a paywall. Sure, there are still influencers, but it’s less centralized and more scattershot. So what happens to the people who depended on the old ways?

So what do you do?

Geoff saw it coming early. When Thursday released War All the Time, their major label debut on Island Records, in 2003, it hit the Billboard Top 10 in its first week, selling around 80,000 copies. But the label had done something unusual: they hosted the illegal downloads themselves, just to measure what they were losing. On day one, there were 325,000. The label told him he probably would have charted at number one or two if all those downloads had been sales. “I don’t think that everybody who downloads our record is going to buy it,” he told me. “I just was like, well, that’s a pretty huge change.” He could see the graphs going in opposite directions. The label told him his audience would get hit first. “Country won’t be hit for another six, seven years” was the attitude. That was 2003.

If you’re Geoff, you adapt. “I’ve always admired bands like Fugazi,” he said, “but I’ve always been much more pragmatic. I just see what’s going to work.” He’s put out records on everything from small indies to major labels, ran his own label, published a novel (Someone Who Isn’t Me, a hallucinatory autofiction about heroin addiction that got serious literary attention in 2023). And most recently, he started a Substack called Solo Record, where he’s writing personal essays, serializing short fiction about life on tour, and posting demos.

Solo Record

Singer of Thursday. Author of SWIM. Producer of MCR. This is my solo record. Personal essays, demos & unreleased music, plus a serialized collection of short stories about growing up on tour.

By Geoffrey Rickly

His solo record isn’t music. It’s writing.

How he got to Substack is its own story. He’d been posting on Instagram about who writes the best sex scenes (research for his second novel), it went viral, Vice offered to run a column, but he decided to just do it himself. “My most successful endeavors in life have been kind of DIY,” he said. “Not doing it for a bigger platform.”

He’s not the only musician who’s ended up here. Patti Smith is on Substack. Jeff Tweedy has over 146,000 subscribers. Charli xcx, Tegan and Sara, Neko Case. When I asked Geoff why so many artists were migrating to a platform originally built for journalists and newsletter writers, he was blunt: “Giving it away on X or Instagram just feels so compromised. Like, I can’t believe I’m giving this corporation content.” He acknowledged that Substack has its own problems (”I know that Substack has gotten a lot of flack recently, and probably rightly so”), but said the environment just feels different from everywhere else.

There’s an irony here. The collapse hit music a decade before it hit news. But journalists found this particular lifeboat, as tenuous as it is, first. I started my own newsletter five years ago, back when it was mostly writers who’d been laid off, trying to build something after the institutions they’d worked for disappeared. And now here are the musicians, a decade after their own industry fell apart, landing in the same place for the same reasons. The destination is the same. The wreckage that sent them there just happened on different timelines.

But here’s what nags at me. When every artist is their own media operation, nobody is doing the work that Pitchfork, for all its problems, used to do. Nobody is telling you what’s worth your time and making a case for why. The curation is gone. The criticism is gone. What’s left is direct-to-audience communication, which is great if you already have an audience and invisible if you don’t.

I asked Geoff about that. About the bands who are where Thursday was 25 years ago, five kids with no following and no connections. “I often think about what the bands today that would love to be in a similar position, what’s their path these days?” he said. “And I think it’s just really different.”

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And then there’s news

Geoff doesn’t worry that much about the collapse of music media. He thinks people will keep finding ways to share opinions on music, and that the best writers will find audiences. What worries him is what’s happening to news.

“I have anxiety about the news, newspapers in general,” he told me. “I think there’s such a motive to be able to manipulate that and to paint everything in a propagandistic way rather than a fact-based way.”

This is a guy who has spent 25 years inside the collapse. And when he looks at what’s happening to news media, his reaction is: that’s worse.

He’s not wrong. Local newspapers are shutting down. The ones that survive are being bought by corporations with obvious political interests. The same people buying up CBS and CNN also control TikTok. And the music industry’s version of this collapse produced a world where every artist has a platform and nobody has an editor. The news industry’s version is producing a world where every politician has a newsletter and nobody has a reporter. The first one means you might miss a good band. The second one means something else entirely.

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Geoff about Thursday’s upcoming tour. They’re playing (most of) Full Collapse. The album turns 25 next month. I asked him if it was weird that the record is now older than he was when he made it.

“Wow,” he said. “I hadn’t really grappled with that yet.”

“When you’re young, you don’t realize that when you get older, you don’t really feel different.”

That’s the thing about collapse, too. It doesn’t feel like a dramatic event from the inside. It’s a slow accumulation of things that used to work and don’t anymore, until one day you’re 47, writing a newsletter on a platform full of journalists, because the system that was built for you no longer exists. And you don’t really feel different. You just are.

He was responding to a CNN report published Thursday that cited multiple sources saying the administration had misjudged Iran’s willingness to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. The New York Times had published similar reporting days earlier. Hegseth called CNN’s story “fake news” and “fundamentally unserious.”

And then: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”

He kept going. He complained about CNN’s chyrons (“Mideast War Intensifies”), then offered his own alternatives for what he called “an actual patriotic press.” His version of “War widening” was “Iran shrinking, going underground.” A former Fox News host, now running the Pentagon, told reporters he knew how headlines worked because “I used to be in that business.” The Defense Secretary was writing chyrons from the podium. Six American service members had been confirmed killed in a refueling aircraft crash in western Iraq that same morning.

CNN’s response was five words: “We stand by our reporting.”

I wrote about this administration’s contradictory war framing earlier this week, so none of the bluster surprises me anymore. But a sitting Defense Secretary, during an active war, publicly endorsing a specific corporate acquisition of a specific news outlet because it published a specific story he didn’t like? That’s worth stopping on. Because Hegseth didn’t just bash CNN. He told you what the Ellison deal is for.

“Editorial independence will absolutely be maintained”

Here’s a timeline. Read it all the way through.

In December, the Wall Street Journal reported that Paramount CEO David Ellison had offered assurances to Trump administration officials that he would make “sweeping changes” to CNN if his company acquired its parent, Warner Bros. Discovery. Days later, Trump said publicly that “it’s imperative that CNN be sold.” David Ellison’s father Larry (the Oracle billionaire and close Trump ally who’s bankrolling much of the deal) reportedly spoke with a White House official around the same time about removing specific CNN hosts Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar.

And we already know what Ellison’s version of “editorial independence” looks like in practice, because we’ve been watching it play out at CBS News since last fall. Ellison bought Bari Weiss’s Free Press for $150 million and installed her as editor-in-chief of CBS News. What followed: a 60 Minutes segment on CECOT pulled after the Trump administration declined to comment (effectively handing the government a veto over critical stories). Anderson Cooper leaving after nearly 20 years, with sources saying he “wasn’t comfortable with the direction the show was taking under Bari.” Eleven of 40 CBS Evening News staffers taking buyouts. One departing producer, Alicia Hastey, writing in a farewell memo that stories were being “evaluated not just on their journalistic merit, but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.”

Then, on March 5, Ellison went on CNBC and said this about CNN: “Editorial independence will absolutely be maintained. It’s maintained at CBS. It’ll be maintained at CNN.”

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It’s “maintained at CBS.” Right.

I’ve seen this move before. When Washington Post CEO Will Lewis pushed out executive editor Sally Buzbee in 2024 and replaced her with a loyalist, he told staff: “The Executive Editor is free to publish when, how, and what they want to. I am fully signed up to that.” As I wrote at the time, anyone paying attention could see what he was doing. You promise independence right after you’ve installed the people who’ll make the choices you want. The promise isn’t a safeguard. It’s cover. Message sent. Message received.

Ellison is running the same play. The European Council on Foreign Relations published an analysis comparing Ellison’s takeover of CBS News to the early stages of Viktor Orbán’s media consolidation in Hungary, describing the pattern as “a politically aligned buyer, a regulator that clears the path, and a newsroom that understands what incentives now govern its future.” Orbán told American conservatives at CPAC Budapest in 2022: “Have your own media.”

Most people making the Orbán comparison have framed it as a warning about what could happen. After today, it’s a description of what’s happening. If the deal closes, the Ellison family will control CBS, CNN, HBO, TikTok’s U.S. operations, and dozens of other properties. Bernie Sanders looked at the list and called it “oligarchy.” It’s getting hard to argue with him.

Still too much

The thing that gets me about Hegseth’s outburst is this: CNN isn’t particularly adversarial toward this administration, especially on the topic of the war.

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Not at war, though. Definitely not that.

That same week, from the other end of the Capitol, Sen. Lindsey Graham reached a different conclusion: “We’re at war with Iran. We’ve been at war for a long... they’ve been at war with us. We’re finally at war with them. It’s an undeclared state of war.” Graham also voted against the War Powers resolution.

I went through the public statements of six Republican senators from the same week. All six described the situation in Iran differently. Sen. Markwayne Mullin told CNN “this isn’t a war”; Sen. Tommy Tuberville called it “a conflict that should be very short and sweet.” Sen. Tom Cotton was arguing that “Iran has been an imminent threat to the United States for 47 years” (a phrase that bends the word “imminent” past its breaking point). Sen. Cynthia Lummis posted that “the United States has been in a forever war with Iran since the late 1970s.” Graham went all in on “undeclared state of war.” And Sen. Ron Johnson wouldn’t even bother with a label. Six people, six completely different characterizations.

All six voted the same way on the War Powers resolution.

Sen. Johnson was maybe the most honest about it. Asked about the competing characterizations, he told The Hill: “Who cares what you call it? I don’t. Bombs are dropping. Bad people are dying.”

They’re not confused. The administration and its allies are running multiple arguments at the same time, and the arguments don’t need to be consistent with each other. They just need to do the same job: keeping Congress out of the decision-making process and letting Trump do whatever the hell he wants.

Argument 1: It’s not a war, it’s a limited mission

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying troops into hostilities and to withdraw those troops within 60 days unless Congress authorizes the action. The law doesn’t hinge on whether anyone calls something a “war.” It hinges on whether it constitutes hostilities. So when Johnson called the operation “limited” and said “the mission is nearly accomplished,” those were words aimed at a specific legal target: if this is a short, limited mission rather than an ongoing deployment into hostilities, the 60-day clock either hasn’t started or won’t matter by the time it runs out.

Trump notified the Gang of Eight shortly before the strikes began. That satisfies the 48-hour notification requirement in the narrowest technical sense. What he didn’t do was ask Congress for anything. He told them. There’s a difference.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune was asked whether Trump would need congressional authorization once the 60-day window ran out. He said “No,” then added that “the president has the authority that he needs” and moved on. No elaboration. Just: no.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered something a little more creative. “No presidential administration has ever accepted the War Powers Act as constitutional,” he told reporters. “Not Republican presidents, not Democratic presidents. All that said, we complied with the law 100%, and we’re going to continue to comply with it.” So the law is unconstitutional, but they followed it. Got it.

And all of this is coming from the Department of War. That’s what they call it now (it’s still legally the Department of Defense). Trump signed an executive order in September 2025 rebranding the Department of Defense, and the White House fact sheet said the new name “conveys a stronger message of readiness and resolve.” Pete Hegseth goes by Secretary of War. The website says war.gov. But they’re not at war. They’re running a mission.

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Argument 2: It’s a war, and it’s been going on for 47 years… or 50… or a thousand

The second argument runs in the opposite direction. If the first one says this isn’t really a war, this one says it absolutely is, but that Iran started it decades ago, and there’s nothing new to authorize.

U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz laid it out on Meet the Press on March 8. “The Iranian regime started this war in 1979, under Jimmy Carter,” he said. When pressed on whether the U.S. is currently at war with Iran, he landed on: “I describe it as Iran has been at war with us.” Then, when the question turned to the War Powers Act, Waltz said he’d “leave it to the lawyers.” On GB News the same day, he was more direct: “This war has been dragging on for 47 years.”

Hegseth made the same argument at his March 2 Pentagon briefing. “For 47 long years, the expansionist and Islamist regime in Tehran has waged a savage, one-sided war against America,” he said. Foreign Policy noted that this was false: “the first shots in the current conflict were fired by the United States and Israel.” And in briefings that same week, administration officials told congressional staffers that U.S. intelligence did not suggest Iran was preparing to strike U.S. forces. The “imminent threat” Trump cited in his announcement didn’t exist in the intelligence.

Trump made the case more casually. “Something had to be done, and it’s been 47 years,” he told German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on March 3. “They’ve been killing people all over the world.”

The number 47 comes from 1979, the year of the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis. But the number keeps moving. Rep. Darrell Issa went on Bloomberg on March 1 and called the conflict “50 years in the making.” Graham called the strikes “the catalyst for the most historic change in the Middle East in a thousand years.” 47, 50, a thousand. The timeline inflates because the timeline was never really the point. The history is being assembled after the fact to fit the constitutional argument: if Iran declared war in 1979, then this isn’t a new conflict, and no new authorization is needed.

And that’s just the war question

The “is it a war” question is where the contradictions are most obvious. But they’re not limited to it. The administration can’t stay on message about regime change either.

Hegseth, at that same March 2 briefing: “This is not a so-called regime change war, but the regime sure did change, and the world is better off for it.” That’s a real sentence a person said out loud at a Pentagon podium. Meanwhile, Trump’s video announcement of the strikes told the Iranian people that “the hour of your freedom is at hand” and urged them to “take over your government.” By March 6, he was posting on Truth Social that there would be “no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” followed by the selection of “GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s)” and “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).” He told Axios he wants to be “personally involved in selecting Iran’s next supreme leader.” Not regime change, though.

And then there’s Vice President J.D. Vance. In January 2023, still a senator, he wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed endorsing Trump under the headline “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.” The sub-headline: “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.” Three years later, on Fox News, Vance insisted that “there’s just no way that Donald Trump is going to allow this country to get into a multi-year conflict with no clear end in sight.” Then, in the same interview, he conceded: “We could go for a little bit longer. We could go a lot longer.”

War or not a war. Regime change or not regime change. Four weeks or “a lot longer.” None of these positions agree with each other. But they all point in the same direction: whatever this is, Congress doesn’t get a say.

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How the talking point gets mainstreamed

The “47-year war” argument doesn’t stay in congressional hallways. It gets picked up, repeated, and sent out through every layer of right-wing media within days. Media Matters documented the full roster, but even a partial list tells you everything you need to know about how this works.

Jesse Watters on The Five, March 3: “We’ve been at war with these people since 1979.” Julian Epstein on Fox News Live, February 28: “Iran has been declaring open war against the United States since 1979,” followed by the claim that Trump “could qualify him once again for a Nobel Peace Prize.” Sean Hannity, March 4: the war would bring “a peace that hopefully is lasting in the Middle East” and the world “is a safer place.” And Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty, who managed to contradict himself inside a single thought: “Iran is not a forever war. In fact, right now Iran has been a war to end forever wars. Right now, I’m not even sure it is a war. Not yet.”

That’s the cable tier. Then the argument moves up. On March 3, the Washington Post ran an op-ed by Marc Thiessen under the headline “The Trump Doctrine is here. It ends forever wars.” Thiessen argued that “for 47 years, the Iranian regime has been waging war against the United States” and that Trump was therefore ending a conflict, not starting one. Thiessen is a former George W. Bush speechwriter and an American Enterprise Institute fellow. (I’ve written about him before, in the context of his “siding with Iran” rhetoric, which functions the same way: build an intellectual scaffold around a political decision that’s already been made.) Trump reshared Thiessen’s piece.

The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s outlet (whose installation at CBS News I’ve also written about), ran a piece on March 1 titled “Our 50-Year War with Iran,” which opened by telling readers not to “pretend” this was the start of the conflict. It used 50 years, not 47. Nobody at this stage in the chain was checking the math, because the math was never the product. The permission structure was the product.

Within days of the strikes, the same argument traveled from Hegseth’s Pentagon podium through Fox, Newsmax, and talk radio, then landed with a byline in the Washington Post and a first-person essay in The Free Press. Each stop dressed it a little differently. Hegseth said “savage, one-sided war.” Thiessen wrote it as geopolitical analysis. Savodnik wrapped it in a childhood memory. Same argument. Different costumes.

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Pick one

These two arguments cancel each other out. If Iran declared war on the United States in 1979 and the conflict has been ongoing ever since, then what’s happening right now is unambiguously a war, and Johnson’s “limited mission” framing collapses. If it’s a limited mission with a short timeline, then the 47-year war is retroactive fiction assembled for the occasion. Pick one.

You don’t need both to be true. You just need both to be available. When Tim Kaine stood on the Senate floor and said “Members of the Senate, this is war!” the response was the 47-year argument: it’s not a new war, it’s an old one. When someone raised the constitutional question about starting a new conflict without authorization, the response was the limited mission argument: it’s not big enough to count. When one framing gets challenged, you reach for the other. The floor is always moving.

Ron Johnson said it himself: “Who cares what you call it?” He’s right, from their perspective. The label only matters because of the legal constraints it carries. Switch labels fast enough and the constraints never attach.

The House War Powers resolution failed 212-219. The Senate version failed 47-53. John Fetterman was the only Democrat to vote no. Rand Paul was the only Republican to vote yes. Even if both resolutions had passed, they’d have needed a two-thirds majority to override a veto, and that probably wasn’t going to happen. The strategy didn’t need to be coherent, just to hold together long enough for the votes to happen. It did.

The next argument

The 60-day clock under the War Powers Resolution is now running. In theory, that means the administration has to either get congressional authorization or begin withdrawing forces. In practice, what will happen is a new argument. Maybe the war will be over by then. Trump has said four to five weeks. Hegseth has said maybe eight. If it is over, the clock won’t matter. If it isn’t, there will be a third framing, and it won’t need to be consistent with the first two.

The Department of War is not at war. The Department of War is running a limited mission. The Department of War has been at war for decades. Who cares what you call it.

That’s the whole thing, right there, in one sentence. If you oppose the war, you are siding with the enemy. If you think the president should have gotten congressional authorization before launching Operation Epic Fury, you are siding with the enemy. If you note that Trump’s own Defense Intelligence Agency contradicted his stated justification for the strikes, you are siding with the enemy. There is one acceptable position, and it is total agreement. Everything else gets filed under treason or something like it.

Trump, for his part, said the same thing louder. “What most people understand is that they are only complaining BECAUSE I DID IT,” he wrote on Truth Social Monday night, going after Democrats who’ve criticized the strikes. “The fact is, whatever I do, they will be on the opposite side. These people are SICK, CRAZY, and DEMENTED.”

Thiessen says it in pundit-speak. Trump says it in all caps. Both saying the same thing: get in line.

If you’ve been alive for the last 25 years, you’ve heard this before. You’ve probably heard it from some of the same people. And if you know who Marc Thiessen is, the déjà vu is about to get very specific.

The script

Here’s how this works. It’s the same every time. A president launches a military operation without congressional approval. Critics raise objections. Maybe it’s about legality. Maybe it’s about strategy. Maybe it’s about the fact that the justification doesn’t hold up. The specifics vary, but the next part doesn’t.

Supporters skip past the objection entirely and go straight to motive. You’re not questioning the war. You’re siding with the enemy. “Siding with Iran.” “Maduro supporter.” “Saddam lover.” Pick your era, fill in the blank.

Now the critic is on defense. They have to prove they’re not rooting for the bad guy before anyone will engage with what they actually said. So they lead with a concession. “Of course, Iran is terrible, BUT...” “Obviously, Maduro is a dictator, BUT...” They’re trying to clear a loyalty checkpoint before getting to their point.

But the concession does something worse than fail. By opening with “Iran is bad,” the critic has already accepted the terms of the argument. They’ve agreed that the question on the table is whether Iran is bad. And once that’s the question, the answer is obvious, and anything you say after “but” sounds like an asterisk on something everyone already agrees about. The real questions (did the president lie about the justification? is this legal? does the public support it?) never get asked because the critic just spent their opening statement answering a question nobody actually disagreed about.

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The pattern

President George W. Bush gave the modern framework its catchphrase. On September 20, 2001, standing before a joint session of Congress, he told the world: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Six weeks later, at a press conference with French President Jacques Chirac, he boiled it down: “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.”

That framework helped sell both the immediate response to 9/11 and the Iraq War, which was built on claims about weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be false. Iraq cost the United States trillions of dollars and the lives of more than 4,000 American service members and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. The framework did its job.

Marc Thiessen was there for all of it. He joined the Bush administration in 2001 as chief speechwriter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, working out of the Pentagon. He was in the building when it was hit on September 11. He later moved to the White House, eventually becoming Bush’s own chief speechwriter. He spent years crafting the language that told Americans to pick a side or be sorted into the enemy camp.

The same guy

So here’s where Thiessen is now: Washington Post columnist. Fox News contributor. And the author of Courting Disaster, a 2010 book arguing that the CIA’s use of waterboarding was effective, lawful, and moral. That last one is worth keeping in mind. When Thiessen talks about America’s moral authority abroad, remember that he wrote an entire book defending torture.

On the day the bombs started falling on Iran, Thiessen went on Fox News and called it a historic triumph. On Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (an organization on whose board he sits) and addressed Iranians directly: “This is your fall of the Berlin Wall.” And on X, he posted that he couldn’t understand why Democrats were “siding with Iran.” Three platforms, three registers, one argument: get in line.

What makes Thiessen worth watching, though, is the timeline. He was on the Guy Benson Show on January 12, weeks before the strikes began. Iranian protesters were in the streets. Trump had threatened intervention but hadn’t acted. And Thiessen was already talking about why the U.S. should “decapitate the regime” and describing the left’s opposition as a “sickness,” accusing critics of equivocating the Trump administration and the Iranian regime. The framework was locked in before the first bomb dropped. Before there was a military operation to debate, the terms of said debate had already been set: if you hesitate, something is wrong with you.

The dress rehearsal

Two months earlier, the framework got a test run in Venezuela.

On January 3, 2026, the U.S. military launched Operation Absolute Resolve, capturing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro without congressional authorization. Trump announced that the U.S. would “run the country” until a transition could take place. Democrats objected, mostly on constitutional grounds, and they were careful about it.

Schumer’s statement opened: “Let me be clear: Nicolás Maduro is an illegitimate dictator. But launching military action without congressional authorization and without a credible plan for what comes next is reckless.” Jeffries devoted his entire first paragraph to condemning Maduro — calling him “a criminal and authoritarian dictator,” saying the rule of law had “broken down” — before mentioning Trump or Congress at all.

The day after the operation, Axios reported that some Democrats privately wanted their colleagues to stop criticizing the operation and start celebrating. The headline was “’It looks weak’: Some Democrats want their party to shut up and clap for Maduro’s capture.” One anonymous House Democrat told Axios, “Maduro is bad, glad he is gone ... You can’t have it both ways.” Another said, “If you don’t acknowledge when there is a win for our country, then you lose all credibility.” These were Democrats, arguing from inside the caucus that the binary was correct. It wasn’t even enough to throat-clear about how bad Maduro was. Either you celebrate, or you look like you’re on the wrong side.

The Ayatollah Protection Act

So far, this has been a story about Republicans and conservative pundits telling Democrats to pick a side. But the framework doesn't belong to any party. It belongs to whoever picks it up.

In February, a bipartisan war powers resolution would have required Trump to get congressional authorization before attacking Iran. Rep. Jared Moskowitz told Jewish Insider what he thought of it. “They should just rename it the Ayatollah Protection Act because that’s what it does,” he said. “I am not willing to preemptively tell the supreme leader that he has nothing to worry about, no reason to negotiate because you are totally safe, and that the people of Iran can’t depend on us.”

It’s an effort to redefine what the vote means. A vote to require the president to follow the Constitution’s rules about declaring war becomes, in Moskowitz’s telling, an act of protection for the enemy. The War Powers Resolution becomes a gift to the Ayatollah. If you vote yes, you’re telling Iran it’s safe.

Sen. John Fetterman’s version came two days after the attack when he posted on X: “Every member in the U.S. Senate agrees we cannot allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. I’m baffled why so many are unwilling to support the only action to achieve that. Empty sloganeering vs. commitment to global security, which is it?”

Fetterman’s version is even slipperier than Moskowitz’s. There’s no name-calling, no “Ayatollah Protection Act.” It sounds reasonable. But look at what it’s actually doing. It starts with a premise virtually everyone agrees on (Iran shouldn’t have nuclear weapons) and treats this specific unauthorized military operation as the only possible conclusion (as opposed to, say, a nuclear agreement). If you agree with the premise, you must support the war. If you don’t support the war, you’re just sloganeering. “The only action” forecloses every other option, including diplomacy, including the fact that the U.S. and Israel had already hit Iran’s nuclear sites eight months earlier.

This is the same framework Thiessen uses, but deployed from inside the Democratic caucus.

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The throat-clearing trap

So what are Democrats supposed to say? Look at what they actually said and a pattern emerges fast.

Schumer, on February 28: “When I talked to Secretary Rubio, I implored him to be straight with Congress and the American people about the objectives of these strikes and what comes next. Iran must never be allowed to attain a nuclear weapon, but the American people do not want another endless and costly war in the Middle East when there are so many problems at home.”

Jeffries, the same day: Iran is “a bad actor and must be aggressively confronted for its human rights violations, nuclear ambitions, support of terrorism and the threat it poses to our allies like Israel and Jordan in the region.” But, he continued, “the Trump administration must seek authorization for the preemptive use of military force that constitutes an act of war.”

Two different Democratic leaders. Same structure. Open by accepting the administration's premise, then pivot to process. Schumer's version has the literal 'but.' Jeffries doesn't need one. The pivot does the work on its own.

There are Democrats who skip the concession, and their statements come across a lot stronger. Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Marine veteran, called it “a war of choice without congressional authorization.” No “Iran is bad, but.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren went further. She called the war “dangerous and illegal” and said it was “built on lies.” That last phrase matters. “Built on lies.” That’s the message. Not “the president should have asked Congress first.” The war is built on lies.

The Democratic response is a spectrum, from Schumer’s full concession to Warren’s near-miss. But none of them do what their own voters already believe: this war is wrong, the justification is a lie, and it should stop. The administration would love for the question being debated to be “is the Iranian regime bad?” Schumer and Jeffries appear to be okay with the question being “should the president have asked permission?” But the question the public is already answering is “should this be happening at all?” Jack Roush at the London School of Economics’ US Politics blog made the same comparison to 2004, when John Kerry tried to criticize the Iraq War’s management without opposing its underlying mission and got outflanked from both sides.

The throat-clearing might actually make the administration’s framing stronger. When Schumer says “Iran must never get nukes” before pivoting to authorization, he’s agreeing with the administration’s stated premise for the war. He’s just disagreeing about whether the president needed to ask permission first. To anyone listening casually, the Democratic position sounds like: we agree that something needs to be done, we just wish you’d asked us first. That’s not what three out of every four Democratic voters think. They oppose the war. But their elected representatives are so afraid of being sorted into the wrong side of the binary that they lead with concessions designed to preempt the accusation. And in doing so, they accept the frame. “Iran is terrible, but” isn’t going to stop Trump and guys like Thiessen from calling Democrats traitors, anyway.

And they’re covering for a justification that barely holds together. Trump claimed Iran’s missiles could “soon reach the American homeland.” His own Defense Intelligence Agency’s 2025 assessment said that capability was a decade away at the earliest. He claimed he’d “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program in June 2025. Eight months later, the threat was somehow urgent enough for a full-scale war. Every second spent on “Iran is bad, but” is a second not spent on “the president’s stated justification contradicts his own intelligence agencies.” The whole point is to make sure nobody talks about the substance.

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What 27 percent tells you

Here’s the thing about this war that makes it different from the ones that came before it: the public isn’t behind it. Not even close.

Reuters/Ipsos put approval at 27 percent over the first weekend of strikes. YouGov had it at 35. Afghanistan started at 92 percent. Iraq started at 71. And as writes, the rally-around-the-flag bump that has accompanied every American military action going back to World War II basically didn’t happen. These are the good numbers. This is day one, before the first American service members were killed, before gas prices spiked, before any of the things that typically erode support had even started.

Trump, asked about the numbers in a New York Post interview on Monday, had thoughts: “I think that the polling is very good, but I don’t care about polling. I have to do the right thing.” And then: “I think people are very impressed with what is happening, actually. I think it’s a silent, if you did a real poll, the silent poll, and it’s like a silent majority.”

Sure thing, Don.

Democrats who actually oppose this war (and not all of them do; Moskowitz and Fetterman clearly support it in at least some capacity) have never had a better opening. In 2001, opposing the war in Afghanistan meant going against 92 percent of the country! In 2003, opposing Iraq meant going against nearly three-quarters. Politicians who opposed the war paid a huge political price. The “whose side are you on” framework was effective in part because the public really was on one side. Opposing the war meant opposing the consensus, and the framework turned that into opposing the troops, opposing the country.

That’s not what’s happening here. The public already opposes this war. The lane is wide open. And if Democrats don’t fill it, they’re betting that someone else will, or worse, that the lane will stay open forever. It won’t. The whole point of “whose side are you on” is to close it. To keep repeating the binary until people accept it, until the silence starts to look like agreement, until enough people conclude that something must have been necessary because few in power were saying otherwise.

The country isn’t where it was in 2001 or 2003. The framework is. And right now, the question isn’t whether “whose side are you on” will keep getting asked. It will. This time and the time after that, and the time after that. The question is whether people in positions of power are going to say, clearly and without a loyalty disclaimer, that this war is wrong. The public is already there. I think they’re waiting for someone to say it out loud.

Pick a week. Any week. Take January 11-18, 2026.

Four days earlier, on January 7, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis. By the week of the 11th, protests had spread nationwide, federal agents were deploying tear gas in residential neighborhoods, and a federal judge had ordered ICE to stop arresting peaceful protesters. The administration’s response was not to investigate the shooting, but to open a DOJ investigation into Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Jacob Frey for obstruction. Trump floated invoking the Insurrection Act. The Pentagon ordered 1,500 soldiers to prepare for deployment to Minnesota.

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Here’s the post, from the conservative account EndWokeness:

Gov. Newsom to a black crowd in GA: “I am like you. I’m a 960 SAT guy. I can’t read.”

Ted Cruz amplified it. Tim Scott amplified it. Nicki Minaj amplified it. Megyn Kelly said it would “haunt him forever.” Mark Levin said any Republican who’d said the same thing would see their career end. Rep. Randy Fine called on Democrats to demand Newsom’s resignation. Fox News ran it. RedState ran it. Townhall ran it.

But the quote, as presented in the tweet, is fabricated. Newsom didn’t say it.

What Newsom actually said, at a book tour event at the Rialto Center for the Arts in Atlanta on Sunday, was a longer, messier answer about living with dyslexia. He talked about discovering his diagnosis in his mother’s file cabinet. He talked about being the kid in the back of the classroom praying the teacher wouldn’t call on him. The key passage: “I’m like you. I’m no better than you... literally a 960 SAT guy, you’ve never seen me read a speech. Because I cannot read a speech. Maybe the wrong business to be in.” And then: “I haven’t overcome dyslexia. I’m living with it.”

End Wokeness compressed that into “I can’t read.” Those are not the same words. “I cannot read a speech” is a statement about dyslexia. “I can’t read” is a statement about illiteracy. They put quotation marks around a sentence Newsom never said, described the audience as “a black crowd” when video showed a mixed, possibly majority-white crowd (which even RedState acknowledged), and posted it to millions of people.

I want to be clear about something before we go any further, because I know how this reads. I really don’t like Gavin Newsom. I think his comments about trans athletes being “deeply unfair” to compete in women’s sports, delivered on a chummy podcast with Charlie Kirk of all people, were a calculated betrayal of a community he once ostensibly championed. I have a long list of problems with this guy. I do not want him to be the Democrats’ 2028 presidential nominee. Yesterday, as this was blowing up, I was on Bluesky criticizing him over something else. The reasons I don’t like him are all real. None of them require a fabricated or mangled quote.

And that’s the point. There is no shortage of legitimate things to criticize about this guy. Which makes it all the more worth asking why, instead of criticizing the things he actually says and does, people are responding to something he didn’t say.

This keeps happening

There’s a version of this pattern that’s been around for years, and it works every time.

In 2010, Nancy Pelosi told the National Association of Counties that the Affordable Care Act would be better understood once it was implemented, saying: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.” Sixteen years later, millions of people still believe she said Congress needed to pass a bill they hadn’t read. The final clause, “away from the fog of the controversy,” changes the entire meaning. It’s always cut.

In 2012, Barack Obama gave a speech in Roanoke, Virginia, about how individual success depends partly on public infrastructure. Roads, bridges, teachers, firefighters. The line that went viral: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” The “that” referred to infrastructure. The Romney campaign turned it into an entire convention theme (”We Built It”). Romney himself, in a speech five days later, acknowledged that Obama was talking about infrastructure. Then he kept using the distorted version anyway.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton told a fundraiser audience that “half” of Trump’s supporters could be categorized in a “basket of deplorables.” What almost nobody remembers is what she said next, because it’s always cut: she described a second basket, people who felt let down by the economy and the government, and said those people “need understanding and empathy.” The empathetic second half of the statement vanished, and all that survived was the word “deplorables.” Diane Hessan, who tracked undecided voters for the Clinton campaign, later wrote in the Boston Globe that the moment triggered the single largest shift toward Trump she observed during the entire race.

Every one of these followed the same formula. A longer statement gets compressed. The compression changes the meaning. The compressed version goes viral. The full version doesn’t.

What happened with Newsom yesterday fits the pattern, but there’s one detail worth pausing on. In every example above, the words that went viral were at least words the speaker actually said, just shorn of context. The End Wokeness post turned “I cannot read a speech” into “I can’t read.” That’s two dropped words. They’re the two words that make it a statement about dyslexia instead of a statement about illiteracy. And tens of millions of people saw the version without them.

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The first version wins

Go back and look at the End Wokeness caption agaiin. “Gov. Newsom to a black crowd in GA: ‘I am like you. I’m a 960 SAT guy. I can’t read.’” You read that before you watched the clip. By the time you pressed play, your brain was already listening for those words, in that order. And you heard them. This is how priming works: you see a frame first, and it shapes what you perceive next. Social media captions and headlines do this constantly, and they’re very good at it. They resolve ambiguity before you encounter the actual clip.

But the priming is only half of it. The other half is what happens after someone points out that the quote was wrong. You’d think a correction would fix the problem. It mostly doesn’t. Psychologists call this the continued influence effect. The idea is that misinformation keeps shaping how people think even after they’ve been told it’s false. The first version of a story builds a model in your head, and when the correction shows up, it leaves a hole in that model your brain doesn’t want. So you keep the original. Even when you know better.

This is what it looked like with Ilhan Omar. In April 2019, Imam Mohamad Tawhidi posted a 19-second clip of Omar speaking at a CAIR event, captioning it with the claim that she “does not consider [9/11] a terrorist attack” and had described it merely as “some people did something.” That caption was the priming. What Omar was actually doing in the (roughly 20-minute) speech was arguing that American Muslims had been losing civil liberties since 9/11, and that it was unfair to be perpetually lumped in with terrorists. “Some people did something” was her way of drawing exactly that distinction. But right-wing media ran with Tawhidi’s framing. Dan Crenshaw. Ronna McDaniel. Brian Kilmeade, who asked on Fox whether Omar was “an American first.” The New York Post ran a front page with a photo of the Twin Towers being hit and the headline “Here’s your something.”

The correction never caught up. Almost seven years later, “some people did something” is still treated as proof that Omar dismissed the September 11 attacks. The first version won.

That’s what’s happening with the Newsom quote right now. The model is already built, and the caption did its work before anyone pressed play.

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He did both.

Talarico is running in the Democratic primary for the Texas Senate seat currently held by Republican John Cornyn. His main primary opponent is Rep. Jasmine Crockett. The interview was supposed to air the night before early voting began for Texas’s March 3 primaries.

The restrictions went beyond just pulling the interview. According to Colbert, he couldn’t show a photo of Talarico, couldn’t show a drawing of Talarico, couldn’t do anything that would constitute a candidate appearance “by voice or picture.” He did the interview anyway, posted it to The Late Show’s YouTube page after the broadcast, and told viewers to go find it themselves. CBS wouldn’t let him share a URL or a QR code.

The whole segment was Colbert at his best, and the details are worth your time.

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Here’s what Colbert said on air

The segment ran at the top of Monday’s show. Colbert opened with some band announcements, told the audience Jennifer Garner would be his guest, and then:

And you know who is not one of my guests tonight? That’s Texas state representative James Talarico. He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast. Then I was told, in some uncertain terms, that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on. And because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.

So you might’ve heard of this thing called the equal time rule, okay? It’s an old FCC rule that applies only to radio and broadcast television — not cable or streaming — that says if a show has a candidate on during an election, they have to have all that candidate’s opponents on as well. It’s the FCC’s most time-honored rule, right after no nipples at the Super Bowl.

There’s long been an exception for this rule, an exception for news interviews and talk show interviews with politicians. Now, that’s crucial. How else were voters supposed to know, back in ‘92, that Bill Clinton sucked at saxophone?

But on January 21st of this year, a letter was released by FCC chairman and smug bowling pin, Brendan Carr. In this letter, Carr said he was thinking about dropping the exception for talk shows because he said some of them were “motivated by partisan purposes.” Well, sir, you’re chairman of the FCC, so FCC you. Because I think you are motivated by partisan purposes yourself. Sir, you smelt it ‘cause you dealt it. You are Dutch-ovening America’s airwaves.

Let’s just call this what it is. Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV, because all Trump does is watch TV, okay? He’s like a toddler with too much screen time. He gets cranky and then drops a load in his diapers.

So it’s no surprise that two of the people most affected by this threat are me and my friend, Jimmy Kimmel. When this letter dropped, we both talked about the letter on air, and then later Carr defended it like this: “If Kimmel or Colbert wanna continue to do their programming and they don’t want to have to comply with this requirement, then they can go to a cable channel or a podcast or a streaming service and that’s fine.”

Great idea, man whose job is to regulate broadcast TV. Suggest everyone just leave broadcast TV. It’s like when Arby’s changed their slogan to, “Arby’s: Would it kill you to eat a salad?”

Anyway, am I being clear? Have I been clear so far? Okay, this one, super important. I decided to take Brendan Carr’s advice. I am going to interview James Talarico tonight, but it’s not gonna be on The Late Show. It’s gonna be on The Late Show’s YouTube page. The network says I can’t give you a URL or a QR code, but I promise you, if you go to our YouTube page, you’ll find it. After the show, right? Little later, okay.

Now, Carr here claims he’s just getting partisanship off the airwaves, but the FCC, as I said, is also in charge of regulating radio broadcasts, and what would you know? Brendan Carr says right-wing talk radio isn’t a target of the FCC’s equal time notice. No, no, I get this part. It makes sense. You can’t get rid of talk radio. What else would your angriest uncle do in traffic? Talk to your saddest aunt?

Now, as I said, at this point, he’s just released a letter that says he’s thinking about doing away with the exception for late night. He hasn’t done away with it yet, but my network is unilaterally enforcing it as if he had. But I want to assure you, ladies and gentlemen, please, I want to assure you: this decision is for purely financial reasons.

And this doesn’t just affect interviews. The rules forbid any candidate appearance, including by voice or picture. That’s right, I am absolutely not allowed to show a photo of Texas state representative James Talarico — ‘cause that’s not him. That’s a stock photo we found when we Googled “not James Talarico.”

Heck, I’m not even — and this is true — I’m not even allowed to show you a drawing of him, okay, which is why I cannot show you what I’m drawing out of fear that James Talarico looks like Snoopy.

Carr is not joking around here, folks. He is serious. He is as serious as the season cliffhanger of Matlock. Matlock, watch it or don’t watch it, I leave in May. She’s great though. Kathy’s great. You should watch, Kathy’s fantastic.

Okay, because a couple of weeks ago, on Carr’s orders, the FCC opened an investigation into ABC’s The View after their James Talarico interview. That is absolutely shocking. James Talarico did The View before my show? Et tu, Whoopi?

So I cannot show you any form of James Talarico. I can’t interview James Talarico. I can’t show any pictures of James Talarico. I’m not even sure I can say the words “James Talarico.”

Well, what I can show you is what we always show when we have to pull material at the last minute: this tasteful nude of Brendan Carr.

We’ll be right back with Jennifer Garner.

Colbert told you the most important part himself

Pay attention to this line:

He hasn’t done away with it yet, but my network is unilaterally enforcing it as if he had.

Here’s what actually happened with the FCC. On January 21, the agency’s Media Bureau issued a public notice saying that late-night and daytime talk shows can no longer assume they’re covered by the “bona fide news” exemption to the equal time rule. That exemption has been in place since 2006, when the FCC ruled that the interview portion of Jay Leno’s Tonight Show qualified as bona fide news and was therefore exempt from the requirement. Networks have operated under that precedent for two decades. Carr’s January notice said, essentially, don’t count on that anymore.

But here’s what Carr didn’t do. He didn’t formally revoke the exemption. He didn’t issue a new rule. He didn’t make a formal determination that any specific show fails to qualify. What he released was guidance. He said at a press conference that shows motivated by “partisan purposes” wouldn’t be entitled to the exemption, and that the FCC hadn’t seen evidence that any current talk show qualifies for it. Then the FCC opened an investigation into The View after Talarico appeared on that show earlier this month.

An investigation. Not a ruling. Not a fine. Not a revocation. An investigation that FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez (the lone Democrat on the commission) called “government intimidation, not a legitimate investigation.” Gomez said the real purpose is “to weaponize the FCC’s regulatory authority to intimidate perceived critics of this Administration and chill protected speech.”

And it’s working. CBS didn’t wait for a ruling. Their lawyers saw what happened to The View, did the math on what Paramount Skydance’s relationship with the Trump administration looks like these days, and decided on their own: no Talarico.

I wrote about this exact dynamic back in September, when ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel after Carr made threats on a podcast. Jamelle Bouie had a term for what’s happening: the administration is building a “simulacrum of an authoritarian state,” a fake version they’re hoping becomes real. The government doesn’t have to formally censor anyone. It just has to make enough threats that corporations start censoring themselves. ABC wasn’t ordered by a court to pull Kimmel. Congress didn’t pass a law. Carr made some noise, and Kimmel was off the air for nearly a week.

That was six months ago. The system is running more smoothly now. Carr didn’t call CBS. He didn’t order them to pull the Talarico interview. He didn’t have to.

And then there’s talk radio

Colbert pointed this out on air, but it’s worth sitting with for a second.

The equal time rule applies to broadcast television and radio. Carr has acknowledged this. He said so at a press conference in January. The rule doesn’t distinguish between the two.

But when Carr was asked whether conservative talk radio would face the same scrutiny he’s applying to late-night TV, he said he saw no need to apply the same scrutiny to radio stations. His explanation was that TV broadcasters had been “misconstruing” the 2006 Leno precedent and radio hadn’t. So the enforcement was about correcting that specific misunderstanding, not about the rule itself.

That’s a pretty fun distinction if you think about it for more than five seconds. Sean Hannity has Republican candidates on his radio show constantly. Conservative talk radio is, by any honest measure, more overtly partisan than anything Colbert or Kimmel have ever done. If the concern were really about “partisan purposes” in broadcasting, talk radio would be the first place you’d look. Commissioner Gomez said as much: the rules “must be applied evenly to the administration’s friends and critics alike.”

They won’t be, of course. When the FCC chair tells you he’s enforcing a rule against liberal TV hosts but not conservative radio hosts, he’s telling you the rule isn’t the point. The politics are.

I’ve been writing about CBS for a year now

I know. Bear with me, because the Talarico incident doesn’t make sense unless you see where it sits in the timeline, and laid out in sequence, it’s worse than any individual story suggested.

In April 2025, Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, resigned after 37 years at CBS News. He told his staff, visibly emotional, that he’d “become the problem.” The catalyst was a $10 billion lawsuit Trump had filed over a Kamala Harris interview, and Paramount’s desperation to get Trump’s approval for its sale to Skydance.

In July, Paramount paid Trump $16 million to settle that lawsuit, which the company’s own lawyers had called “completely without merit.” Democratic senators called it extortion. Stephen Colbert called it “a big fat bribe.” Three days later, CBS announced The Late Show would end in May 2026. Not just Colbert’s run. The entire show, a CBS institution since 1993. The network said it was “purely a financial decision.”

In September, CBS installed Kenneth Weinstein as its first-ever “bias monitor,” fulfilling a promise Skydance had made to Carr’s FCC to secure merger approval. Weinstein is a former conservative think tank head, a Trump reelection donor, and a former Trump ambassador nominee. That same month, ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel after Carr threatened the network over a late-night monologue about the Charlie Kirk assassination.

In October, Paramount acquired The Free Press for $150 million and installed its founder, Bari Weiss, as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Weiss reports directly to Paramount CEO David Ellison, whose father is one of Trump’s closest allies.

In December, Weiss killed a fully vetted 60 Minutes segment about Venezuelan migrants being tortured in El Salvador’s CECOT prison. The segment had been cleared by CBS’s lawyers and by Standards and Practices. It had been screened multiple times and promoted on social media. Weiss pulled it hours before airtime because the Trump administration had declined to comment, and she said the story wasn’t “ready.”

Three weeks later, in January, CBS published an anonymously sourced story claiming that the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis had suffered “internal bleeding.” The sourcing was two anonymous U.S. officials. CBS’s own staff raised concerns before publication, with one calling the report “a thinly-veiled, anonymous leak by the Trump administration to someone who’d carry it online.” Within hours, JD Vance and Elon Musk were using the CBS story to justify the shooting.

And now, February. CBS lawyers call The Late Show and tell them they can’t interview a Democratic Senate candidate, can’t show his photo, can’t show a drawing of him, and can’t tell the audience that any of this is happening. Based on a rule that hasn’t been changed.

In April, CBS lost a producer who couldn’t do honest journalism there anymore. By July, they were paying off the president and canceling the host who said so. By fall, they’d handed editorial control to a Trump donor and a Free Press founder. By winter, they were killing stories the administration didn’t want aired and publishing stories the administration did. And now they’re enforcing the government’s preferred censorship before the government has even formally imposed it.

CBS isn’t being pressured anymore. They’ve internalized it.

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Colbert can do this because he’s already dead

Not literally. But professionally, at CBS, the show is over. It was over the moment they announced the cancellation last July. He’s got three months left. He said it himself on Monday, tucked inside a joke about Matlock: “Watch it or don’t watch it, I leave in May.”

That’s what made Monday night possible. Colbert could defy his network’s lawyers on air, could say the thing they told him not to say, could draw Snoopy and call it James Talarico, because there’s nothing left for CBS to take from him. They already took it. What are they going to do, cancel it again?

And the segment was good. It was genuinely funny and genuinely angry and it laid out the problem clearly enough that millions of people now understand what Brendan Carr is doing and how CBS is helping him do it. The YouTube interview got more attention than a normal Late Show booking ever would have. As an act of defiance, it worked.

But Colbert is the exception. He can do this because he’s a dead man walking at his own network. What about everybody else?

What about the next Late Show host (if there is one) who wants to book a Democratic candidate? What about the producer at CBS or ABC or NBC who pitches an interview with someone the administration doesn’t like and gets told by legal that it’s not worth the risk? What about the late-night writer who has a good joke about the president and decides not to pitch it because, honestly, who needs the hassle? What about the local news director at a CBS affiliate who remembers what happened to KCBS in San Francisco when they reported on an ICE raid?

Those people won’t make the news. Nobody will draw Snoopy in protest. The interviews just won’t get booked. The jokes won’t get written. And that’s the whole point. The chilling effect isn’t measured by the people who push back. It’s measured by the silence.

Colbert’s Monday night segment was a man with nothing left to lose doing something nobody with a future at the network would dare to do. That’s not a free press. That’s a hostage situation where one guy is about to get released and decided to mouth off on his way out the door.

Good for him. I mean that. But he leaves in May. And then it’s just CBS.

You can watch the full Colbert/Talarico interview, the one CBS wouldn’t air, here: