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Viktor Orbán has been defeated. That is good for Hungary, good for Ukraine, and good for anyone who believes the will of the people should mean something. It is also, if we are being honest, a problem for a certain kind of political analysis—the kind that spent years insisting Orbán was something that the election results now suggest he wasn’t.

Orbán was a right-wing strongman: genuinely reactionary, an obstinate bully on the world stage, and, by any reasonable accounting, corrupt. He was an intellectual hero to J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump. He proudly called Hungary an “illiberal democracy”—his way of saying that the institutions would serve the party, not the other way around. For a while, Hungarians liked what he was doing. Then they didn’t. And they voted him out.

That last sentence is the one I want to linger on.

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On his HBO show a week before the election, John Oliver said, “independent observers have deemed Hungarian elections” since Orbán took power and started changing laws, “free but not fair, which is an interesting combination. You are free to vote for anyone you want, whether it’s Orbán or whoever inevitably loses to him.” The audience gave a big laugh.

He then threw to the Princeton sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele, who argued: “We tend to think of a coup as happening with tanks in the streets, you know, and the military takeover and the announcement on radio that all civil liberties have died. That’s not what autocracy looks like anymore. You don’t get phalanxes of tanks. You get phalanxes of lawyers.”

This is typical of the analysis around Orbán. He is not just a strongman; he’s an autocrat, ruling without constitutional limits, just a few steps from being a fascist. No tanks needed to stay in power, thank you very much.

And of course, one of the things autocrats do is steal elections. According to Civil Rights Defenders, which promotes democratic reform around the world, Orbán “systematically dismantled the country’s legal system and changed the election system to ensure future election victories.” Since his election in 2010, the group added, he has been able to maintain his hold on power through “a combination of fraud and a rigged election system.”

It turns out the system might have been a bit rigged, just not rigged enough. On Sunday, Orbán didn’t just lose, he lost in a landslide. And rather than insist that the election had been stolen or some such, he gave a gracious concession speech just three hours after the polls closed, congratulating the winner, Péter Magyar.

What kind of autocrat is that?

There are some people I think should seriously grapple with that. I will subscribe to the first political scientist or foreign affairs journalist who writes, without hedging, that they got it wrong—that autocracy may have been the wrong word, or at least that they deployed it in ways they shouldn’t have.

For instance, the historian Timothy Snyder has said that Orbán “created a model of postmodern authoritarianism . . . to create an apparently invincible strategic position for one-party rule and his own personal power.” David Rothkopf, a left-leaning foreign policy analyst, has also described Orbán’s time in office as an example of “authoritarian rule,” and has used Hungary as an example of where Donald Trump is headed. The philosopher Jason Stanley has described Orban’s Hungary as “the model for the global fascist assault on democracy.”

The public hears “autocracy” and imagines a place where journalists disappear and elections are theater. Sophisticated scholars like Stanley and Snyder sometimes surely know and make use of this kind of charged language, even if they mean by “autocracy” a place with a compromised judiciary, anti-gay initiatives, and tilted campaign finance laws—but still one that is closer to North Dakota than North Korea.

And is it really an autocracy if you can vote the leader out? Is it an autocracy if the strongman who bent the institutions didn’t bend them past the point where the people can say no and be heard? It seems commonsensical to say that if an “autocrat” loses an election, he wasn’t an autocrat after all. Maybe Orbán was Schrödinger’s autocrat, who we couldn’t know was or wasn’t an autocrat until he lost. But he did lose, and therefore, we have to conclude as a matter of intellectual honesty that he was something less than an autocrat, and certainly never a dictator.

Orbán wasn’t running gulags. Reporters could fly into Budapest, stand in the shadow of the parliament, conduct interviews with regime critics or even Orbán-insulting tour guides, and leave unmolested. Scheppele, from Princeton, told The New Yorker that “if you went there on vacation, you would never guess that it’s a dictatorship. And that’s because the way that Orbán exercises control is through money. Orbán has eliminated the system of welfare and unemployment insurance and so on, so that you only get those things if you pass his litmus test.” That is ugly and worth opposing. But it also seems to be the case that Hungary wouldn’t be recognizable as a dictatorship because it in fact was something less than a dictatorship.

The reason I have been thinking about all of this, of course, is that I am an American, and Donald Trump has been said to be everything Orbán was accused of: fascist, dictator, autocrat. Often the accusation came with Orbán as the direct comparison, the proof of concept, the cautionary tale made flesh. Orbán is the bottom of the slippery slope so many of our experts warn we are on. If Orbán could do it in Hungary, Trump could do it here.

So the question I want to ask the people who made that argument most forcefully—the “democracy indexes” that categorized Hungary as a fragile democracy according to allegedly empirical methods, the Jason Stanleys, the David Rothkopfs, the Tim Snyders, the scholars who mapped Orbán’s playbook onto Trump’s ambitions—is: How careful were you, really? Were you trying to get it exactly right? Or were you trying to scare us? Or were you perhaps a little too excited to have invented a category that only the truly sophisticated democracy-watchers who subscribed to your Substacks could perceive?

I understand the impulse to overreact rather than underreact when you think democracy is at stake. But “overreacting” does not mean “misdescribing.” And there is a version of overstating Trump’s power and cunning that does not make people more vigilant but more afraid and more irrational. Spending years insisting that Trump is so dominant, so strategically dangerous, so much more pernicious than ordinary politicians ends up not merely misdescribing his power but conferring it.

Orbán, who is 17 years younger than Trump, who was genuinely rigorous about consolidating power, who actually understood how his government worked, who had a coherent ideological vision, who was not a real estate developer but a lawyer, lost power in the ordinary and democratic manner. What does that say about the prospects for a man who never once had a coherent plan for anything, who is less popular in his own country than Orbán ever was in Hungary, and who is watching his poll numbers deteriorate in real time?

Here is where I have reset my calibration. I have always believed Trump’s party was going to lose in 2026 in a free and fair election, and on that basis alone, I thought the autocracy talk was overblown. I still believe 2028 will be a free and fair election. I believe the will of the American people will be registered and respected. There will be some tinkering at the margins for electoral advantage because there always is, from both parties, but that doesn’t mean a king is in the offing, “No Kings” rallies notwithstanding.

Trump is not a dictator. He was not one on day one. He won’t be one on day 1,461. He is something more ordinary and in some ways more manageable: a cartoonish thug who is losing popularity and is about to lose at the polls, which will be counted accurately.

"The Pitt" Asshole Tracker

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Asshole ratings have been adjusted.

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What Changed?

At the end of episode 11 of season 2, Curtis Larson awakens from an alcohol, cocaine, and 4-milligram-Versed nap and immediately commits a “Code Hula Hoop”: he puts Emma, the gape-mouthed new-grad nurse, in a chokehold. Dana injects him with more Versed off-screen and tells everyone he "slipped," accounting for the bloodied nose.

Dr. McKay informs him that his alcohol-cocaine cocktail produced a metabolite called cocaethylene, which can cause psychosis, confusion, and aggression. But also, he’s an asshole. The cocaethylene does not, however, get him off the hook for an assault that the nursing staff is pressing charges over. When McKay tries to leave him with rehab literature, he tells her and the entire hospital to "fuck off." Then he catches a judgmental look from the officer guarding his room and pivots instantly to a groveling, "Not you, officer!"

Perhaps a metabolite called cop-a-ethylene kicking in. Curtis the golfer has been upgraded from a 4 to a 5 on the Asshole Scale.

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The Big Question: Is Dr. Robby an Asshole?

In season one, Dr. Rabinovich was portrayed as a crinkly-eyed savior with feet of clay. Now that he's more obsessed with burning rubber, he is, according to Vulture, the exact creature we've been tracking: an asshole. The Pitt Asshole Tracker™ was designed to assess patients and interlopers, not staff and doctors, but if Robby were subject to its scoring system, he would rate out a 0. He may be acting like an asshole, or coming across as one, but what he's really doing is embodying the medical community pushed to its limits, demonstrating that even a fundamentally good person can be driven to the edge. He may appear to outsiders like an asshole—outsiders who have developed a more parasocial relationship with a doctor and his eyewear than is healthy for a dramatic critic. There's another reason Robby is not an asshole at heart: main characters, and especially main characters who are executive producers and indeed the entire reason the program exists, receive fully fleshed-out treatment. Interlopers can be assholes, and often are—but only, per The Pitt's established rules, if they're white.

So what do you think: Is he an asshole? Tell me in the comments:

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You can see my original post, unlocked for free subscribers, here:

Also, every asshole is white.

Understand, I am NOT saying all the white characters are assholes. In fact, the multiracial array of doctors and ER workers represents a model of complexity and humanity. Likewise, so many of the patients, accurately reflecting the multiracial visitors to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, embody the entire range of the human condition in extremis. They can be stressed, grieving, pained, generous, flippant, scared, defiant; the full spectrum. But if they're assholes, they're white.

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The biggest asshole of the first season was Doug Driscoll, who punched beloved Nurse/Air Traffic Controller/Yinzer/Saint Dana in the face. Other irredeemable figures include a scurrilous quasi-journalist, a brutish security guard, an angry anti-vaxxer and a different, equally angry anti-masker. Lesser assholes include the aggrieved son who refuses to honor his father’s DNR and the mother of the teenage daughter who refuses to allow her to get an abortion. That character’s family members are also white, and not assholes, and therefore are not counted toward the white asshole census. But on The Pitt, if the asshole gene runs through a family’s DNA even as a recessive trait, you can bet so too does a certain pallor of the visage.

The Pitt features some patients, like the sex trafficker and the psychotic, both white, who are terrible but for whom 'asshole' does not cover their inadequacies. This is distinct from the patient whose asshole was inadequately covered, resulting in an explosion of diarrhea all over fourth-year medical student Ogilvie. It’s OK, Ogilvie, who is white, is kind of an asshole.

The closest the show comes to a non-white antagonist in two seasons is an ICE agent. Though the skin visible beneath the mask suggests he is not white, the point seems to be that ICE is a faceless, inhumane entity that transcends race, even as the show takes a different tack at all other opportunities.

But other uniformed personnel confirm the pattern of Caucasian culpability. There were the EMS workers in season one who mistook a sickle cell reaction for a drug overdose. The paramedics on The Pitt come in all races and ethnicities, but these specific ones, among the few first responders the show allows to be bad at their job, were, such being the caprice of fortune, white.

Similarly, in season two, a campus security guard mistakes an undergraduate having a schizophrenic break for being high on drugs. Anyone could make that error, but this security guard was aggressive, petty and ignorant. He was also, in a twist to make you suspect the intervention of providence, white.

Why does The Pitt do this? For all its strengths, the show remains in the tradition of moralizing Hollywood drama. It gets the medicine right, or seems to, I'm not an ER doctor. It achieves breakneck pacing and a cinematography that conveys chaos precisely because it is so carefully composed. But the show sees itself as something more than entertainment, with Wyle speaking approvingly of the power of inserting messaging in an entertaining hour of TV, “so that it could just bleed into the consciousness.”

The Pitt collaborates with USC’s Hollywood, Health and Society program, which “has conducted 50 consultations related to health equity or systemic racism,” with medical dramas creating plotlines and facilitating “stories highlighting health inequities, including systemic racism.” The USC program, which “provided consultation on every episode and facilitated briefings for the entire writers’ room,” also supplies tip sheets recommending ways to depict racial disparities in the American medical system. Some of the studies those tip sheets recommend are incredibly weak or have been debunked outright. Others are driven by a social justice framing that has some validity but is more ideological than empirical. For a writers' room whose training flags every negative portrayal as a wound, assigning asshole duties solely to white characters is simply "first, do no harm."

Thus, every irredeemable character is white, and in most cases, a white man, though the Pitt Asshole Tracker indicates 29% of the assholes were white women.

"The Pitt" Asshole Tracker

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A rating of every character in "The Pitt" who is an asshole.

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Yesterday, New York Magazine made the case that even the once-revered protagonist, Dr. Robby, cannot escape the white man's burden on The Pitt. Yes, the character formerly described by the same author as operating with "unassailable empathy and decisiveness" is now said to be in his asshole era, a case built, among other charges, on the stressed-out Senior Attending's supposed racial insensitivity:

A man who has yelled at basically every brown woman he works with, lied about his self-destructive tendencies (wearing a motorcycle helmet, my ass), and failed to protect his patients and colleagues against ICE’s incursion into the ER. …This is Robby’s asshole season, and it’s tougher to watch than all the de-glovings and severed limbs The Pitt can throw at us.

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In the most recent episode before this writing, two potential antagonists arrive at the ER. One is a man who dislocated his elbow catching a home run at a Pirates game. The other is a golfer who got drunk on the course.

When the doctors approach the baseball fan and ask if he’s one of those guys who stole a ball from a kid, I immediately think: no, of course not. He identifies himself as Roberto, like Clemente, and is played by a Hispanic actor. And indeed, assholery is not the twist.

But when the comatose golfer is wheeled in, I know immediately he will be trouble. Not only is he a golfer, the whitest of the white avocations, but he picked a fight with another foursome while drinking. If anything, I underestimate the drunkard’s potential for destruction.

His golf buddy, also white, materializes and reacts to news of his friend’s incapacitation the way one reacts to a Croc that has stepped in dog feces, spending a few obligatory seconds tending to it before arriving at the conclusion that the trash can was always the destination. The friend says he’ll just come back later after his companion regains consciousness.

But when the golfer wakes up, he immediately puts a half nelson on the most perpetually gape-mouthed young nurse in the ER, his white arms coiling around her slim brown neck, choking her without thinking, sort of like this inescapable plot device from The Pitt.

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The Pitt Asshole Tracker Graphic:

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I was in a yoga class not long ago, when a woman folded into a pigeon pose and tears started streaming down her face. “Just let it out,” our teacher cooed. Then, addressing the class, she explained what was going on: “Trauma lives in your hips, in the psoas muscle.”

Yoga classes are always full of anatomical fan fiction. (I’m pretty sure spinal twists don’t wring out toxins.) But this one grabbed me. It was just so specific—and the evidence was impossible to ignore: A stranger, sobbing into her foam-and-rubber altar of self-improvement.

Which brings us to today’s case: Does the body store emotional trauma in your hips, or anywhere besides your brain? Or more broadly: Does the body keep the score?

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The Metabolic Price of Meaning

The reason I found this claim so suspicious is that neurons are major energy hogs, accounting for 20% of your resting metabolism while making up only about 2% of your body weight. If some other body tissue could do the same job, evolution would have happily outsourced it. But suspicion isn’t evidence, so I emailed my favorite big-picture biological thinker, neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin, author of “One Hand Clapping: Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind.” (Highly recommend.)

Kukushkin agreed and explained what makes neurons so special: They have designated lines to thousands of partners, and each line (or synapse) is tuned with experience.

“Other cells also have memory. But they can’t memorize a thousand individual interactions with other cells. They can’t remember to send, in the future, twice as much signal to cell no. 59 and twenty times as much to cell no. 663, and at the same time to be especially sensitive to signals from cell 4103, but not 4102,” he wrote.

This level of complexity is what it takes to model our complicated world—to record what happened in the past, predict what might happen in the future, and update expectations as new evidence rolls in.

Muscle cells can learn, but what they “learn” is extremely limited: For instance, after repeated endurance training, they build more mitochondria so they can crank out ATP more efficiently and keep working for longer. Muscle fibers can change their “default settings” along a few blunt dimensions, like energy metabolism, fiber type, calcium handling and repair pathways. They can also broadcast fairly non-specific chemical signals, which are picked up by anyone with the proper receptors. What they emphatically cannot do is build a network of associations you can later replay and revise. And they are nowhere near capable of building the kinds of recurrent circuits needed to store and later update memory.

Put another way: muscle fibers and other body cells have only a few knobs; they’re mostly labeled more/less. Neurons, in comparison, are tiny mixing boards with thousands of controls that connect to other, equally complex neighbors.

Spoiler: He Doesn’t Actually Mean Your Piriformis

“The Body Keeps the Score” isn’t just a slogan—it’s a very popular book with a title that has escaped its cover and entered the zeitgeist. People have been pressing it into my hands for years. I finally read it (for you, dear Gist listener), and I was surprised by what I found: the author, Bessel van der Kolk, never claims that traumatic memories are stored outside the brain. He does, however, underplay the brain’s starring role—practically inviting people to make that incorrect leap. (Tellingly, he has explicitly disavowed any responsibility for readers concluding that trauma memories are literally stored in muscles, fascia or joints.)

Here’s another thing Kolk leaves out: Many memories are stored not as narratives (semantic memory), but as sensations, bundled together by the hippocampus—what’s known as episodic memory. Proust’s madeleine scene is a canonical example in which biting into a cookie triggers a slew of sensory experiences from one’s youth. Another example is the classic PTSD “flashback”—like when fireworks suddenly force a soldier to relive a harrowing ambush in Afghanistan. In both the warm, Proustian memory and the terrifying veteran version, it can feel like time and space have collapsed, and you are back in that moment, briefly living inside it again. You feel these sensations in your body, but the whole experience is coming from your brain.

In addition to external cues, internal cues can also trigger an episodic memory. The feeling of your limbs arranged a certain way (proprioception) or a surge of a racing heartbeat and gut churn (interoception) can act like a key in the lock, prompting the hippocampus to reassemble and replay a past moment, especially one that was intense enough to be deeply stamped in. So, if a bully once bent back your wrist, an accidental wrist hyperextension in your yoga class could suddenly plunge you into a state of terror.

That’s awfully specific, though, and I suspect there’s a simpler explanation for my classmate’s pigeon-pose tears. Deep stretching can feel intense. Add yoga’s suggestible, hypnagogic state (slow breathing, a focus on body sensations) and an oft-repeated truism (“this pose releases trauma”), and you’ve got a recipe for sobbing.

The Hips Aren’t the Hard Drive

So far, we have been talking about classic PTSD, but there’s also chronic PTSD (cPTSD). That’s when you spend years marinating in high alert, and your nervous system starts treating “normal” as “unsafe.” The stress-response machinery gets quicker on the draw. Your baseline muscle tension creeps up. Sleep gets lighter. Your heart rate and gut may feel jumpier. You can end up with a body that’s perpetually braced for impact, even when nothing is happening. But all of those things, from startle response to habitual muscle tone, are controlled by your brain—specifically, the lower areas of your brain, like the brain stem.

The brain stem generally operates beyond your conscious control, and that’s why body-based practices can help even though the memory itself is purely neural. Slow breathing, steady movement, feeling supported by the floor: these are ways of sending the brain new data. Not “the trauma is leaving your hips,” but “the present is safe enough to downshift.” You’re not wringing out toxins, you’re updating predictions.

So, does the body keep the score? Well, setting aside the fact that your brain is part of your body, the answer is no. From setting your habitual muscle tone to replaying sensations from the past, it’s all brain, all the time.

I emailed van der Kolk to ask if he’d consider retitling his bestseller, The Brain Keeps the Score, the Body Is the Scoreboard. While it’s not as pithy, it’s way more accurate. His assistant said he was too busy to respond.

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Anxious about the environment? Of course you are. The world is on fire, so here come the eco-cures: stainless steel straws, plastic bag bans, swaps, and rituals. Some of it does a little. Most of it addresses how you feel about what it does.

Anxious about your health? Of course you are. Every week, a new threat. Every week, a new imperative. Every week, a new molecule is trying to kill you.

Hydrate.

More than that.

NO—more than that.

Now you carry a Stanley cup the size of a Roman impluvium that is less a vessel than a statement. The goal is to live life as your moist authentic self.

Anxious about the state of the world? Of course you are! Politicians understand this. They do not ignore anxiety. They speak to it. They channel it. That is not entirely cynical. You have to meet people where they are. But once you are there, you can guide them—or you can keep them there.

The news media, like a tape worm, heavies your load as it feeds off of your anxiety.

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Consider how economic improvement is covered. Growth rises. Inflation cools. Wages move. The question is not, “Don’t these improving numbers reflect an improving life?” The question is, “Why doesn’t the public feel it?” When economic numbers improve, but the public still says the economy stinks, you never hear the anchorperson asking the politician, “Are voters misreading the data?”

The question—channeling the anxious mood of the public—is always, “The public isn’t feeling it.”

Because all the public ever feels is anxiety.

Biden says the public is not feeling the recovery, and he is called out of touch. Trump reacts to the same framing with anger.

Same numbers. Same unfair and unanswerable question. Same refusal to consider that the public might be wrong, or that it might take time to feel reality, or that its hard to feel anything else when what we’re all feeling all the time is anxiety.

A PR solicitation landed in my inbox. It states: “What is clear is that voters across the country increasingly believe crime is getting worse and are demanding answers.”

A good answer is: “You’re wrong.”

A more detailed answer: “You’re wrong. Calm down. Crime is decreasing. Don’t let your anxiety-emitting gut win this one.”

The email, incidentally, was pitching Ken W. Good, Board of Directors, Professional Bondsmen of Texas. Business is dependent on our society's increasing anxiety about dangers that are, in fact, receding.

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Let’s take another political worry. The fear that America is drifting toward autocracy was not invented. It is real to many people, but it is also narratable, packageable, and deliverable. You can be reassured by a historian who tells you we have been here before. You can be alarmed by a historian who tells you this time is different. Either way, the anxiety finds a home.

Most of all Anxiety is a business model.

We live in an age of abundance: food, goods, information. The baseline needs are met for most people most of the time. Scarcity is not the central driver.

Anxiety is.

The old business school truism is that a great product solves a problem. Now the best products solve the same beat of a problem that wears different guises. Anxiety.

And anxiety can never really be solved, only serviced. So much of marketing is not about solving problems. It is about maintaining a level of unease that keeps you receptive. Not panic. Not resolution. A steady, managed concern.

Anxiety Sustained™️.

That is the product.

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Read at The FP

The latest product that China has ripped off, refined, and resold to the United States is not a knockoff AI, or Shein leggings, or a $99 Temu tablet. It is Olympic freestyle skier Eileen Gu.

With a reported income of $23 million last year, Gu is the fourth-highest-paid woman in sports and the highest paid Olympian at this year’s games. She earned more than tennis star Naomi Osaka and basketball phenom Caitlin Clark. It’s not hard to understand why. With on-camera virtuosity to match her on-slope acrobatics, Gu is among the most poised and skilled athletes in the world. Oh, and beautiful too.

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Gu, 22, was born and raised in San Francisco and attended Stanford University. Her American father is a Harvard graduate, and her mother is a Chinese national and successful businesswoman who has lived in the U.S. for decades. In the early part of her career, Gu skied for the U.S., but in 2019, she switched sides and became a competitor under the flag of the People’s Republic of China. Skiing for China, Gu won two gold medals and one silver in the 2022 Olympic Winter Games. She added a silver last week in the freeski slopestyle competition and another on Monday in the freeski big air. She has another chance in Cortina this week to add to her—and China’s—medal haul.

And yet, outside of circles portrayed as jingoistic knuckle draggers, Gu barely faces even the mildest breeze of criticism.

In a recent New York Times profile of Gu, the only condemnations came from the mouths of those not given much credence by the paper’s readers. “Right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson, then at Fox News, described her choice [to compete for China] as ‘dumb’ while the channel’s co-host Will Cain said she was ‘ungrateful’ and had ‘betrayed America,’ ” reported the Times.

The BBC, reporting on those who questioned Gu’s decision to ski for a repressive, authoritarian state, noted that “much of this backlash appears to be driven by political commentators and a vocal minority on X, rather than the broader public or the sporting world.”

The BBC is right. Rigorous contemplation of Gu’s decision, let alone criticism, is largely absent from respectable media. You wouldn’t expect hand-wringing in Vogue cover stories—or social media posts celebrating Gu’s campaigns for Tiffany & Co. or Louis Vuitton—but you might expect tougher questions from, say, Time. The magazine put Gu on the cover last month, yet not once in the 4,000-word panegyric did the author use the words communist, repressive, autocratic, or the like.

The closest the author, Sean Gregory, came to mentioning the elephant in the room is when he asked Gu about China’s “checkered human-rights record,” noting that “the U.S. government has accused China of abuses against its majority-Muslim Uighur population.” Gu responded that she hasn’t “done the research. I don’t think it’s my business. I’m not going to make big claims on my social media.”

Gregory pointed out that “as a Stanford international relations major, she could surely do her homework on this issue, no?” Not according to Gu, who said she would have to “go to the place, maybe talk to 10 primary-source people who are in a location and have experienced life there,” followed by consulting records.

The article contained no critical voices outside of the same recycled Will Cain and Tucker Carlson quotes that appeared in the Times.

Glowing profiles of Gu in the American press are often indistinguishable from the coverage of Gu in official state-sponsored Chinese media. “Freeskier Eileen Gu Honored to Inspire Girls in Sports,” read the headline of an NBC feature on Gu. Meanwhile, the CCP-funded Global Times reported that Gu is “emphasizing her role in inspiring millions of young girls to embrace winter sports.”

Considering the recent backlash over U.S. comedians playing a single gig in Saudi Arabia, how does Gu manage to ski past any real criticism of her decision to compete for China?

Part of the answer is that she’s a magnetic interviewee. “Eileen, you are such a delight,” enthused The Today Show’s Dylan Dreyer at the end of an interview last week.

Another is her looks. Gu “is stunning by any and all standards,” according to Vogue. The fashion magazine complemented her “chiseled features and naturally athletic physique.” (In Gu’s case, nature has, of course, been shaped by hours of training and conditioning.) And Gu doesn’t portray her fashion work as frilly girl stuff but rather the “intersection of femininity and power,” a perfect framing for an icon who seldom falters or reveals flaws.

But charisma and good looks cannot fully explain the almost complete absence of a sense of betrayal or disloyalty in the American media’s extensive coverage of Gu. The skiing star’s decision to compete for America’s most important geopolitical rival has been almost completely frictionless—bringing in its wake only great celebration and remuneration.

This would have been hard to imagine at any other time in U.S. history.

Imagine if Mike Eruzione, Ken Morrow, or another of the gold-winning Miracle on Ice Olympians had followed up their triumph in 1980 by lacing up for the Soviets in Sarajevo in 1984. There’d be outrage. And I feel confident saying that even if the hockey players had been chiseled specimens with great Instagram feeds.

In the U.S. today, most media, NBC’s Olympics machine chief among them, does not report on Gu’s nationality as an issue, but more as a cross-cultural dividend.

In one video, a reporter for an NBC affiliate somewhat exasperatedly explains that whenever Gu is asked, “why does she compete for China?” she responds that she felt she could do more to inspire young Chinese girls to take up skiing.

Indeed, Gu has consistently presented herself as nothing more than a post-national global ambassador: “I’m fluent in Mandarin and English and fluent culturally in both.” To The Sporting News, she said, “Since I was little, I’ve always said when I’m in the U.S., I’m American, but when I’m in China, I’m Chinese.”

But let’s be honest here: The Eileen Gu story isn’t just about spanning divides and maximizing marketing potential. It’s also about cold, hard cash. Beijing is paying her handsomely.

Last week, in a welcome change from the fawning coverage elsewhere, The Wall Street Journal described the hidden sources of funding for the American-born star that were accidentally revealed in Chinese-government documents last year: “In 2025, the Beijing Municipal Sports Bureau was set to pay Gu and another athlete a combined $6.6 million.” The Journal notes that most of the money went to Gu—not the other unnamed athlete. (She is believed to be figure skater Beverly Zhu.) Gu reportedly received the exact same sum in 2023.

China is certainly getting what it’s paying for. While it is true that Gu is a genuine ambassador and a transcendently successful businesswoman, she is also a psyop on skis. As the Global Times put it during the Beijing Games: “As the U.S. faces more and more prominent racial problems, outstanding athletes with a dual cultural background at the Beijing Winter Olympics will be an awakening for the country to reflect on its deep-rooted racism against Asian people.” The same commentary predicted a more general talent drain in which “a more open and prosperous China will be able to draw more and more talents with Chinese descent to contribute to it.”

Gu herself has heralded the fact that her success is causing young Chinese girls to take up skiing—the best of whom, of course, will one day compete in the Olympics. . . against the U.S. As she put it to Harper’s Bazaar in 2022: “The impact that I’m able to see in terms of encouraging girls to start freeskiing—and the speed at which freeskiing culture and sports culture itself has proliferated across China and across the world—I hope that I played even a small part in that.”

Zituo Wang, a USC-based researcher and Chinese national who has studied Gu’s social media impact, told me that Gu’s success and appeal has been a big propaganda victory for Beijing. He said that while some in China question whether Gu is really Chinese, “even if they know she was American, they think China is so strong that they can turn an American girl to represent us. That shows the strength of China.”

On Friday, Gu will have another chance at a medal when she competes in the halfpipe. If she once more fails to attain gold, it will be portrayed on NBC as nothing worse than a golden girl who came up short.

If she wins, it’s great news for the following entities: her sponsors Tiffany and Louis Vuitton; NBC; official Chinese state media; and the Chinese Communist Party. But not so great for the country where she was born and raised—and whose media has elevated her story into one of inspiration rather than betrayal.

“It was my understanding that pet feces is not compostable, so why spend the extra $$ on these fancy bags?” Joshua writes.

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Dear reader, I must confess: I, too, buy “compostable” pet-waste bags. And unlike the dog-park do-gooders, I don’t even get the benefit of being seen with my tasteful green halo. I use them to scoop cat litter in the privacy of my own home, judged only by my calico overlords.

Well, I did a little digging in the litter and found that Joshua is 100% correct. Plastic poo bags, like pretty much all “compostable” plastic, only break down in industrial composting facilities, which heat garbage up to at least 131 degrees. Also, the vast majority of these facilities do not accept pet waste, because it can carry pathogens and parasites. So, unless you plan on peeling the bags off the turds, rinsing them off and taking them to an industrial compost facility, there’s no benefit to buying “compostable” plastic bags.

The misleading marketing of these doo doo bags is so egregious that it was even addressed by the FTC in 2015, which sent a sternly worded letter to 20 manufacturers of such bags. Despite this decisive show of federal force, the bags are somehow still ubiquitous.

Bag of Lies

So what is a concerned consumer to do? Are there any options besides making little turd satchels? Will future alien archaeologists conclude that Earth’s apex species spent its final days carefully packaging shit?

It’s hard to say, but according to Outside Magazine, one better option to reuse your plastic grocery bags or buy bags made out of recycled plastic. For the truly dogged, you can compost dog poop in your personal composter or hound your local authorities to do it for you.

Saving Forests, one Squirt at a Time

Of course, everyone poops, including dog owners, which prompted Joshua to ask about using recycled toilet paper. Here, the news is much less bleak: Using this calculator, I determined that an average person would save about half a tree a year by switching from premium toilet paper to Who Gives a Crap—the preferred brand of pinko commies everywhere, including Joshua’s mom.

The downside is that bidets are terrible for aura farming. There’s no little green bag to brandish at the dog park, no visible flag of righteousness. So you may need to compensate with an “Ask Me About my Bidet” T-shirt. Or for the truly dogged, become the neighborhood evangelist for doggie bidets.

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But in 1994, we couldn’t have known they’d come for the cutest planet any more than we could have predicted what college would become. What began as a quirkily irksome strain of political correctness hardened into wokeism and, by the 2020s, occasionally tipped into something like full-blown institutional meltdown. The true extent of on-campus craziness is still disputed: for every University of Missouri communications professor calling for a reporter to be intimidated, there were a thousand professors quietly teaching the inverted pyramid and going home. Still, I’d wager that this Halloween there were dozens of white kids at Yale dressed as K-pop Demon Hunters, blissfully unaware that a decade earlier the same costume might have triggered accusations, tears, recriminations and charges of appropriation, hinging on the curvature of one’s Gok-do. (곡도)

Some of this nuttiness required intervention, the institutional equivalent of an EpiPen. But we did see an era of safetyism, speech codes, and eventually an outburst of rage aimed (to take one totally random example) at Jewish students on college campuses. And it was up to publications like the Washington Free Beacon to document these excesses.

Then came the correction, or what might alternatively be described as the Trumpian spasm of revenge. True, the protest-fueled speaking cancellations were illiberal: the first female head of the IMF and the first Black U.S. attorney general were deemed insufficiently progressive and shown the door. But threatening to pull the plug on Alzheimer's funding? That's not a correction. That's a shakedown. One side wielded the heckler's veto; the other sent a guy named Vito saying, "Nice research lab you got here. Shame if someone smashed it to bits."

This brings us to today. Colleges fear Title VI complaints alleging that they do not sufficiently protect Jewish students, and they have curtailed the most glaring excesses, such as chasing professors from their classrooms and into future ivermectin advocacy.

So now, with much less craziness, the tales from campus begin to sound less like fundamental rights violations and more like hijinks that might offend only Phyllis Schlafly.

College students are supposed to be a little wilder than the modal adult in society. This is good. This is why we nostalgize the keg-filled bacchanalias we imagined our predecessors having, when in fact they were probably just turning up the collars of their Izods and rocking out with Kenny Loggins.

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Recently, the Washington Free Beacon ran a series of pieces blowing the cover off the blowing of Amherst College undergraduates, or at least the pantomimed version thereof during orientation, ostensibly of the academic variety." Video exists of a group of upperclassmen performers miming sexual acts, much to the squeals of freshmen at Amherst. The article begins, "Amherst College was founded over two centuries ago to prepare young Christian men for the ministry," and goes on to note that prominent alumni, including Calvin Coolidge, "would have looked on in horror if they saw the event." A few Lord Jeffs1 did object, which in normal times would be good fodder for a few pointed letters to the editor of The Amherst Student.

Of course, in our agitated times, the story broke campus containment and became a cause polémique. It should not have.

The Beacon article, offended on behalf of a President born, in his own description, of “English Puritan stock” in 1872, makes much of the implied umbrage of the event having taken place in a chapel. It is, however, a non-denominational chapel where a Hindu on a Tuesday and a rabbi on a Thursday might offend a certain stripe of Christian more than a few seconds of pantomimed heterosexual fornication on a Friday.

The Free Beacon also reports, with audible tsk-tsking, that drag queens have been hired in the past by this private college to perform for adults. “Last year, the Office of Student Engagement and Leadership funded nine performers, including one who went by the name, "Stanley Coochie." The two-and-a-half-hour show included songs "Vagina" and "Big Ole’ Freak."

Big Ole Freak sold two million units for Megan Thee Stallion. It's not exactly a contraband Tijuana Bible for the crowd of teenagers who probably sang along to it at most of their junior proms and Sweet Sixteens. Vagina is a bodily organ possessed by at least 54% of those in attendance. Stanley Coochie is just a good joke.

The annoying part of all this is the reaction to the Free Beacon article. Members of the student body first responded with predictable ridiculousness, labeling the piece “misinformation” and pressing the administration for more protection. The administration had already positioned the real issue as the doxing of students who had eagerly simulated sex acts on stage. Students worried “whether the college’s recent negative attention could result in violence against [the students]” in light of the recent shooting at Brown University.”

That’s par for the college course. But then came the administration’s response: it appears to have fired several employees responsible for the event. The school claims these personnel moves were all pre-planned, but the students aren’t buying it, and it’s easy to see why. The school was scared. All colleges are jumpy. The Trump administration has put them on notice that a few moments of air humping can have massive ramifications for funding.

It's disappointing that the Free Beacon is joining the excessive bullying of higher ed, playing hall monitor for zealous bureaucrats who treat every bit of undergrad folly as a five-alarm fire. In the past, the Beacon provided useful information that forced genuinely concerning policies into the light. Now they’re playing tattletale to reactionaries and pretending that college kids are supposed to be something other than a little stupid and a lot horny.

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Parts explanation, explication, and takedown, the report renders Rubio “a true believer,” who “knows what the rules are,” and is “a bulwark against worse things.” And whose words were these? Those assessments belong to “a former U.S. official who worked in Latin America”, “a European foreign minister,” and “former U.S. official.” Yes, but which senior elected official, senator, whoever? We do not know, because this profile, which included over 200 phrases and sentences within quotation marks, relied as heavily on anonymous sources as any profile I’d ever seen. In fact, I organized them all into this spreadsheet.

View all named and anonymous quotes

To be clear, there is enough “to be clear” throat-clearing and dutiful conveying of Rubio’s traits and accomplishments that this story, if pruned of its 80 or so condemnatory paragraphs, could serve as the longest defense of Marco Rubio ever committed to paper. But it is not that. It is a fairly scathing critique, with reams of quotes reaming Rubio, in order to get the reader to agree with the final conclusion: “If it all falls apart, Rubio will get the blame.” (Sourced to “the former U.S. official who worked in Latin America.”)

Could that quote have been rendered on-the-record? Probably not. If we know who it was from, would it land harder? Almost certainly. In any case, the glut of two hundred quotations, a quasi Bartlett’s unto itself, is an accomplishment. From the tersely rendered “Global Glue”, used to describe the Secretary of State’s traditional role as relationship maintainer, to the prolix:

“Access to resources and markets can no longer be assured through colonialism. You can’t just go in and capture large swaths of the world and force these countries to hand over their minerals. The competition is going to be ferocious.”

If you set aside quotations uttered years ago, previously available remarks, stock turns of phrase requiring quotation marks, or statements made on the record to someone other than Dexter Filkins, the article still contains 80 anonymous quotes..

“That’s a lot,” said a person familiar with the phenomenon of eyes that ache from the outside in.

Those anonymous quotes are credited to such spectral elocutionists as: “a lobbyist working in Florida at the time;” “a former adviser to Rubio;” “a former longtime diplomat;” “a senior British official;” “a senior Mexican;” “a Washington lawyer who speaks to Trump often;” and “someone who worked with both men.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the no-longer-employed had more time to talk to Filkins. He quotes a former Western diplomat, and then the same former Western diplomat. A former senior Democrat in the Florida legislature, and then the same former senior Democrat in the Florida legislature. It’s a shame he didn’t get reelected in between quotes.

There are, by my count, at least 40 people quoted anonymously here, though the exact number is hard to pin down because several may be the same person speaking into Filkins recorder, running out to the car, changing clothes, and then showing up 75 paragraphs later wearing a hat Is the “former U.S. official who worked in Latin America” in paragraph 96 the same “former U.S. official who worked in Latin America” in paragraph 98? Are either of those the same as the four later appearances of “the former U.S. official who worked in Latin America”?

I assume it is the second former official, though that assumption, like the man’s status, remains unofficial.

There are, of course, many useful insights to be gleaned from anonymous quotes. It is apparent why certain people in sensitive positions ask for and require anonymity. I am not sure that all eighty of these anonymous quotes adhere to The New Yorker’s standards for anonymous quoting. For instance, I am not sure that the strictest standards were met before anonymity was extended to a “former Rubio staffer” in service of this piece of reportorial contraband:

“He reads voraciously,” the staffer said. “Most senators don’t read.”

There are, we should say, 14 different people quoted on the record. They account for 51 of the quotes. Some of the on-the-record people are former spokesmen, the president of the union for diplomats who wasn’t afraid to put his name to his critique of Rubio, and, weirdly, Donald Trump.

Trump did not talk to Filkins, but I do believe Filkins unearthed a heretofore unreported detail in which the president—in the presence of Rubio—got activist and impassioned Trump supporter Laura Loomer on the phone and told her, “Laura, send Marco all your reports.” Sufficiently briefed by the highest-placed sources in hemispheric relations, Rubio then flew to confirm social-media conspiracist Loomer’s preliminary findings.

The reason that I’m critical of this piece—which, in all fairness, is useful to read and contains scads of information; how could it not, at the length of two complete editions of The Baltimore Sun—is that while the reporting and quoting were copious, the main premise was off.

The New Yorker describes the piece this way:

“The resulting portrait is of a man who is ideologically malleable, always ready to execute on the President’s most draconian impulses.”

I disagree. The evidence shows that in the most crucial instances, Rubio tempers Trump’s impulses, imperialism, and ire.

Take the negotiations in Ukraine, in which Trump sought to cut out Volodymyr Zelensky. J.D. Vance was clearly siding with Vladimir Putin, but it was Rubio, navigating the tricky Trump ego, who brought things back into the land of the sane.

In fact, that name—J.D. Vance—only glancingly appears in three paragraphs of this 100-plus-paragraph piece. (It is Vance’s presence, and the role of the elements of the party he represents, that prompt me to cut Rubio more slack than the senior official who said, “I hope he fails.” If he fails, who will be there to further whatever version of the Trump agenda next presents itself?)

The Secretary of State in a Trump administration is not going to be John Quincy Adams. Trump doesn’t know the diplomatic bona fides of a Lord Palmerston from an Arnold Palmer (except that the latter didn’t walk softly but did carry a big stick). Trump’s Secretary of State will come from Trump’s orbit. Within that constraint, Marco Rubio is among the few candidates who temper Trump’s instincts and bring substantive policy knowledge to the role.

I might not love Rubio, though I have now accumulated more knowledge of his inner workings than Mossad had on Hezbollah pager protocol. But I do love Rubio as a senior figure in this administration, because the alternative is not Metternich (full name: Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar, Prince of Metternich-Winneburg zu Beilstein), but a more humbly named, though vastly more empowered, figure standing just a few feet from Rubio in those Oval Office press availabilities.

Filkins offers a thorough dossier of sometimes indeterminate provenance. I offer a three-word rebuttal: Rubio isn’t Vance.

Over the past two days, I've been watching Vanderpump Rules, Season 10. Until 48 hours ago, I couldn't tell you a Scheana Shay from a Martha Raye.

But then, a friend asked me to guest on his podcast about the series, and, like any responsible anthropologist, I decided to immerse myself in the culture. By "immerse," I mean devouring episodes like a competitive eater downing pierogis.

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My wife already watches. I've developed a more sophisticated approach: strategic deployment of other screens (laptop, phone, the New York Times) positioned between my eyes and whatever's happening on the television. Call it a DMZ for my frontal lobe. It provides distraction, preserves mental faculties, and offers plausible deniability.

There are worse ways to spend the post-Christmas doldrums. I keep telling myself this.

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The Vanderpump season I watched was something of a zenith of nadirs in reality TV history—a true “Peak Bottom.” One character cheated on another, which might seem like the foundation of the genre, but this particular dalliance was elevated to the level of scandal. I’d like to believe it was because of the viewers’ deep attachment to the characters they’ve followed for years. More likely, though, it was because the cheating character’s surname lent itself to a pun.

He is, of course, Thomas Humpachick—if you haven’t heard the tale already, I’m afraid this is not my story to tell.

I kid, the incident in question involved a man named Tom Sandoval, who did what many reality TV personalities have done before him: he had an affair. And people lost their minds. Unlike previous televised infidelities, this one resonated across the culture like a snow shovel striking the downed electrical wire of the national consciousness. It was treated as a culture-spanning betrayal. You'd think Julius Rosenberg had come back from the dead to pass new secrets to the Soviets, this time on Bravo.

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Which leads us to a Famous Torture Experiment

I’ve been reflecting recently on the death of Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, whom I had the opportunity to interview about his infamous prison experiment. While his work was provocative and generated insight, it’s the sort of study that could never be conducted today due to ethical considerations. Same goes for Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments. (Zimbardo and Milgram were classmates at James Monroe High School, which must have had the most demanding gym teacher in the entire New York public school system in the 1950s.)

That said, the insights gleaned from Milgram’s work on authority and obedience still hold up, while Zimbardo’s conclusions about situational power dynamics have faced more serious scrutiny and debunking in recent years. Still, both experiments sparked further discussion, debate, and genuine insight into human behavior.

What did Vanderpump Rules Season 10 lead to? Well, most obviously, it led to Season 11—and a complete recasting of the show for the upcoming series. It also resulted in a 50% ratings spike compared to the previous season and the entertainment (or titillation) of millions of viewers.

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But as I reflected on its cultural impact, I began to wonder: was this season, in all its manufactured chaos, actually more unethical than the aforementioned social science experiments, which at least provided us with genuine insight? To explore this theory further, I turned to ChatGPT.

The results were damning. I give the remainder of the post, save for a postscript, over to the answer to the prompt quoted in full:

Sexy Unethical Reprobates

If Vanderpump Rules were reimagined as a university-level social science experiment, it would likely violate several key ethical principles in research, particularly those outlined in the Belmont Report and codified in university Institutional Review Board (IRB) guidelines. Below are the primary ethical violations it might commit:

1. Lack of Informed Consent

• Participants on the show may not fully understand the extent to which their personal lives will be exposed, manipulated, or edited for dramatic effect.

• If this were an experiment, the lack of detailed, transparent disclosure about potential harms (e.g., public humiliation, mental health stress) would be a major ethical breach.

2. Deception Without Debriefing

• Producers often manipulate situations or encourage conflicts for entertainment. This could be seen as deception if participants are unaware of the manipulation.

• Ethical research requires either no deception or, if deception is necessary, a full debriefing afterward—neither of which occurs here.

3. Lack of Confidentiality

• Participants' personal information, relationships, and private conflicts are broadcast publicly. In research, maintaining participant confidentiality is a cornerstone ethical principle.

• Public airing of sensitive information without safeguards violates privacy and exposes participants to social stigma.

4. Exploitation of Power Dynamics

• Participants often have less power than producers, creating a coercive dynamic. For example, they may feel pressured to engage in certain behaviors to remain part of the cast or maintain their jobs.

• Ethical guidelines prohibit exploiting power imbalances, particularly when participants feel unable to withdraw.

5. Failure to Protect from Harm

• The show often places participants in emotionally distressing or high-conflict scenarios, potentially exacerbating mental health issues like anxiety or depression.

• Ethical research must minimize risks of physical, psychological, or social harm. Here, harm seems almost designed into the process for dramatic payoff.

6. Lack of Ability to Withdraw

• Participants may feel they cannot easily leave the show due to contractual obligations, financial incentives, or fear of public backlash.

• In ethical research, participants must have the ability to withdraw at any time without penalty or coercion.

7. Conflict of Interest

• The producers' dual role as orchestrators of drama and documentarians creates a conflict of interest: their goal is entertainment, not participant well-being.

• Ethical research prioritizes participant welfare above all else.

8. No Benefit to Participants

• Reality TV participants might argue they gain fame or career opportunities, but the emotional toll and potential damage to their personal lives often outweigh these benefits.

• In ethical research, the study should offer some benefit to participants or society. Reality TV primarily benefits the producers and networks.

Conclusion:

If Vanderpump Rules were conducted as a university social science experiment, it would almost certainly fail to pass an IRB review due to its blatant disregard for the principles of Respect for Persons, Beneficence, and Justice. It’s a great case study for why reality television and academic research are two sides of the same cyclically oppressive coin: both reveal human behavior, but often do so under vastly different ethical constraints.

We Can’t Have Nice, Albeit Unethical Things

Mike’s Postscript: I get that it’s probably unfair to subject a form of entertainment to the cold, squinty eye of academic scrutiny—even if said entertainment happens to exhibit all the telltale signs of operant conditioning.

So in the spirit of evenhandedness—and because I’ve heard it said that reality TV is to women (and gay guys) what sports are to men—I decided to consult ChatGPT.

ChatGPT’s verdict:

College football, as it currently exists, would struggle to pass ethical guidelines under the Belmont Report if integrated into a university curriculum. The risks and inequities associated with the sport would likely outweigh the educational and physical benefits unless significant reforms were implemented.

Mike’s Conclusion:

Maybe nothing that’s interesting is ethical.

Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, in an email to colleagues including Anderson Cooper and Lesley Stahl, called the decision political: “Pulling (the story) now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”

She continued: “When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship (italics mine). We are trading 50 years of ‘gold standard’ reputation for a single week of political quiet.”

By Sunday evening, the story had media-tastasized into a national controversy about censorship, oligarchy and authoritarianism. Former Representative Adam Kinzinger declared, “Bari Weiss—now the head of CBS News—clearly a right winger, clearly in line with Donald Trump, has made it clear that 60 Minutes will do the administration’s bidding now.” The Daily Beast ran the headline “CBS Boss Censored 60 Minutes for Not Interviewing Stephen Miller,” which is an inaccurate account of what Weiss had done.

Weiss, as made clear in her leaked editorial memo about the story, steered the segment to engage in the strongest version of the administration's legal argument, not just the lame soundbite Karoline Leavitt offered. That's good journalism: steelmanning your opposition makes your case stronger if you can still dismantle it. Also, the administration may not always make its own best argument. Officials speak to different audiences, have varying communication skills, and deploy different legal strategies in different forums. While it’s not 60 Minutes’ job to help the government communicate, it is their job to best inform their own audience about what is actually at issue. Asking for additional comment to achieve that is not censorship. It's a normal, albeit late-in-the-day, editorial decision.

How does Alfonsi’s theory of the case work?

Putting aside her grandiose regard for 60 Minutes’ standing as the “gold standard”—not 24-karat, as it turns out, the core claim is that there’s political advantage in delaying the story for a week or two while it’s tweaked to the editor’s satisfaction.

Really? Did Alfonsi know that the Lions vs. Steelers game would end up with an insane pass interference play and set a ratings record? If so, Sharyn Alfonsi needs to open a FanDuel account. Otherwise, “a single week of political quiet” makes no sense. Put aside the fact that the story wound up airing on Canadian TV by mistake, and it certainly did make the administration look bad. What was gained by the delay except the opportunity to add the reporting Weiss requested?

The Terms-of-Debate Shift

What I wish to do here is rebut the claim that holding the 60 Minutes piece was “censorship” or, in Alfonsi’s description, certainly “political.” It may have been bad editorial guidance (I think it was generally sound). It definitely came too late in the process (on this, I agree with critics). But “frustrating” and “late” do not equal “right-wing censorship” or “fascist editorial capture” or “Bari Weiss spiking stories to appease Trump.”

Could politics have influenced the decision? Of course. CBS owners Larry and David Ellison want to buy Warner Bros. Trump keeps talking about the deal. But Weiss's memo also raised legitimate editorial concerns that are hard to dismiss as a convenient pretext. Critics of Weiss's worldview, who see no need for even the slightest editorial reset at CBS News, reject all her suggestions as illegitimate. But conduct a thought experiment. Ask, "What might a center or right-of-center editorial sensibility demand of this segment?" You'd get something very close to the memo Weiss composed.

The censorship theory requires believing that holding the story for two weeks to add tougher reporting somehow helps Trump or the Ellisons. But how? Get Miller and Homan on camera for harder questioning—that helps Trump? Demand analysis of whether he exceeded his authority—that advances a business deal? Hold the piece for a couple of weeks, when the Warner vote won’t happen until spring—that changes anything?

The Specter of Authoritarianism

When it comes to all things Bari Weiss, the most extreme explanations for her choices are so often the ones loudly cited by her critics. Take former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes. He and Weiss sharply disagree about Israel. So when Rhodes assesses the CECOT decision, he doesn't frame it as an editorial choice he disputes. He jumps right to authoritarianism.

I take the threat of authoritarianism seriously. So when Ben Rhodes treats an editor requesting more precise language about criminal records—"let's not say 'almost half' don't have records, let's say most do"—as evidence of tyranny, I wonder how much we can trust his authoritarianism detector. That's not fascism. That's editing.

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Blasting a Publication You Don’t Read

The critique that bothers me most appears in Adam Serwer's Atlantic article, which contends that Weiss and other "so-called free speech advocates" stay silent when the right restricts speech, exposing their commitment as purely partisan. I respect The Atlantic, where I've published. I respect The Free Press, where I've also published. But Serwer's assertion is demonstrably wrong.

The Free Press doesn’t just occasionally cover right-wing threats to speech; it does so extensively. Consider, for example, their package titled “Are Conservatives the New Snowflakes?” explicitly tracking “how the right, now that it’s back in power, has adopted some of the worst tactics of the intolerant left—from suppressing dissenting views to enforcing ideological purity tests.” Weiss’ Free Press has run dozens of articles falsifying Serwer’s attempts to lump her in with “yesterday’s free-speech champions” who transitioned “so easily into today’s pro-Trump censors”. He writes:

Taking the claims one by one:

1. Claim: Weiss and The Free Press support the deportation of pro-Palestinian advocates.

   Fact: The article “No Deportations Without Due Process” rebuts exactly that: “The protocol cannot be: This student is a national security threat—trust us. But that is the kind of sloppiness that is typifying the Trump administration’s deportations thus far.”

2. Claim: Weiss and The Free Press are silent on book bans.

   Fact: They published the full text of a speech Ryan Holiday was to give, challenging Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s book ban—a speech the Department of Defense also banned.

3. Claim: Weiss and The Free Press believe “when the federal government says left-wing speech is violence worthy of firing or prosecution, it’s fine.”

   Fact: The article “His Wife Called Charlie Kirk a ‘Nazi.’ He Was Fired” is a 2,500-word direct denunciation of this exact practice, arguing: “For years, the right decried the left’s equation of speech with violence—now it is doing the same thing. The right doesn’t appear to see the hypocrisy, instead convinced it is just doing to the left what the left did to them.”

4. Claim: The Free Press doesn’t care about the right’s threat to speech on campus.

   Fact: They’ve addressed this often. Here’s the best version, from the always interesting Coleman Hughes:

   The Free Press

   The Bipartisan Assault on Free Speech

   Attorney Greg Lukianoff, the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), has spent his career fighting threats to free speech. FIRE is known for its defense of protected speech on college campuses, where student expression has faced censorship from the left. Now, with President Donald Trump threatening those universi…

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   8 months ago · 57 likes · 64 comments · Coleman Hughes

5. Claim: Weiss and The Free Press do not object to the government defining what speech is acceptable, with a link to an article about Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension.

   Fact: The piece “Jawboning and Jimmy Kimmel”, signed by “The Editors,” argues “the FCC’s coercion undermines our most fundamental values.”

Serwer either didn't bother checking The Free Press's actual coverage, or he checked and decided it didn't count. Either way, his central factual claim about Weiss and The Free Press is wrong—which is especially rich given that his overriding thesis is that Bari Weiss threatens journalistic accuracy while he, Serwer, is its accurate adjudicator.

What We Actually Know

Bari Weiss is an editor, not a censor. You don’t know her motives. You can guess they were in service of political or business goals, and I acknowledge the timing would be extremely frustrating to any journalist. But her requests also comport exactly with what an editor trying to move a newsroom toward what she defines as more honest, fairer footing would do.

Bad timing isn’t evidence of bad faith. And the substance of her concerns—get the principals on camera, explain the legal framework, sharpen the data presentation, advance beyond existing coverage—are legitimate editorial standards.

Fortunately, when the story eventually runs on 60 Minutes, all the critics will reconsider their excoriations of Weiss, exhale, and admit, “Well, that was dicey, but as they say, ‘the truth will out.’”

No, they won’t! They’ll claim vindication, arguing the only reason the story aired was public shaming, leaked memos, and whatever other factors allow them to say “We were right all along.”

Just like they’re right that The Free Press has no investigative journalists when it does. Just like they're right about all the inconvenient stories it won't touch, except it runs them.

And just to be clear: If The Free Press were as wildly inaccurate about The Atlantic as The Atlantic was about The Free Press, I’d write that story too. But I suspect there wouldn’t be a pile-on declaring The Atlantic a sign of authoritarianism, as there was with this incident from the guardians of media. There would be a raft of unfair critics from the right, in which case we’d say those who jumped to the most extreme conclusions showed themselves to be catastrophists at worst, partisans at best.

I think we can say exactly that about the analysis here.

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Savage, a Princeton graduate who saw his dream of becoming a screenwriter fade into a life of ticket scalping and, eventually, being mocked by Bluesky users, argues that the reckoning/awokening was born on the back of his exact cohort. He further argues that it was older white men who exacerbated the problem out of a sense of self-preservation. This is both plausible and rhetorically clever—even those who don't buy into the idea that there was an injustice in suppressing the number of white men hired have something to hang onto if the great villains of this period were older white men.

I appreciated the piece mostly for the statistics.

Media:

By 2024, white men accounted for just 11.9% of lower-level TV writers in L.A.

In 2021, new hires at Condé Nast were just 25% male and 49% white.

Of the parent company of The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, 39% were male and 31% white.

NPR reported that 78% of new hires were people of color.

And what about the pipeline?

Since 2020, only 7.7% of Los Angeles Times interns have been white men.

Between 2018 and 2024, of the roughly 30 summer interns each year at The Washington Post, just two or three were white men.

Since 2018, just 10% of the nearly 220 fellows at The New York Times have been white men.

Academia:

White men fell from 39% of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18% in 2023.

At Berkeley, as recently as 2015, white male hires were 52.7% of new tenure-track faculty; in 2023, they were 21.5%.

UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences since 2020. Just three are white men.

UC Santa Cruz, of the 59 Assistant Professors in Arts, Humanities and Social Science appointed between 2020 and 2024, only two were white men (3%).

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The main value of this piece wasn’t what was the most debated about it: whether Jacob Savage was discriminated against for just not being good enough. As if the question can be settled if we just get our hands on the Frasier spec script he wrote in 2011 and count how many zingers he put in Niles’ mouth. No, the value is to document a moment that really did happen, that we risk retconning or denying. said on his House of Strauss podcast:

“I think it’s worthwhile to capture the recent past because people will adjust so quickly and pretend as though whatever moment we’re in, it was like that before.

And they’ll especially lose sense of taboo. The taboos change. They won’t reveal, oh, ‘I was scared to say this back then. I was completely terrified to say that. I was worried about losing my job at all times…’ They’ll just act like that didn’t happen or memory hole it.“

If you’re a visual learner, I remember the posts from that period of proud media organizations like NPR and the Wall Street Journal celebrating the next generation of talent:

I also noticed that each year, the Macarthur Awards were making up for having previously defined genius as overly white and male. Genius diversified between 2019 and 2025, with only 18 of 161 geniuses (11%) being White males. Before that, most (51.3%) of the award winners were white men.

Since that period, the culture has reset a bit. “Vibe shift” is the inexact phrase we use to describe an inexact change. Savage is left to contemplate his past decisions and ponder the lessons for his sons. Me too. I would not tell them to flat-out avoid entire professions, and if I did, it would not primarily be because their demographic is being punished.

On the other hand, their path will surely be different from mine, and not just for economic, technological, or algorithmic reasons. The culture made a statement then, somewhere between cri de cœur and just desserts. I am not sure it is quite done.

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Between the family drama, the forced cheer and the possibility of Santa getting stuck in the chimney and dying, the holidays sure are stressful. No wonder suicides spike during the holidays—or so people say. Eighty percent of Americans guessed that December was the month with the highest rate of suicides, according to a 2024 survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

But the reality is more “It’s a Wonderful Life,” than Gremlins. December has the lowest number of suicides. The holidays are stressful, but people do seem to get joy out of seeing friends and family.

The holidays can kill you, though, and in a variety of ways.

During Christmas, you’re more likely to:

• Get into a motor vehicle accident. (32% more likely on Christmas Day)

• Have a heart attack. (37% more likely on Christmas Eve)

• Die from a heart attack. (5-10% more likely on Christmas—possibly because of understaffed ERs, or because you delayed treatment.)

• Land in an ER due to alcohol poisoning. (50% more likely on Christmas)

• Feed a Mogwai after midnight and have your town destroyed (.37% more likely on Christmas)

But you’re less likely to get robbed! So that’s good.

As for the suicide-holiday myth, no one knows where it comes from. One possibility is “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which plays a lot during the holiday season and has a suicide related plot, though it does end with a firm rejection of despair.

The media are also to blame: In 2023, about 58% of articles on the topic said, incorrectly, that suicides peak during the holidays. (Hey, at least the misinformation is down from 2000, when 77% made that link.)

I did find a decorated popcorn tin kernel of truth in the holiday-suicide myth: While suicides dip in the winter, weirdly, depression peaks. This increase is modest, and it’s mostly seen among people already struggling with a mood disorder. But the lack of sunlight really does get many people down. (Or maybe it was Gremlins 2: the New Batch)

The persisting theory is that “calm winter depression” gives way to the “energetic despair” of spring—when vigor and motivation return, sometimes in dangerous ways.

In any case, if you’re struggling with depression and stress during the holidays, you’re in good company, and help is just three numbers away: dial 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

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Blaire Fleming, a volleyball player at San Jose State University, was pretty good. Not great, but when her 6’1” frame rose high above the net, she could generate enough force to register as one of her conference’s leaders in the volleyball statistic officially called “kills.” That Fleming’s prowess was rooted, in part, in the benefits of having undergone male puberty was not known by her teammates until relatively late in her career. When it became known, a cascade of tumult and recrimination resulted. But so too did an earnest discussion over whether it was fair to the Mountain West women’s volleyball players to allow Fleming to compete against them. In Zengerle’s story, fairness concerns aren’t pathologized or reduced to villainy. They’re voiced by conflicted teammates, opponents, and administrators who are sympathetic to or affectionate toward Fleming personally but struggle with the competitive implications of her presence. At the same time, Zengerle shows how outing Fleming, challenging her eligibility, and turning her into a flashpoint produced exactly the kind of all-out culture-war backlash that punishes people who’d done nothing wrong.

Nobody in Zengerle’s piece is a cartoon villain, not even Fleming’s cute blonde former teammate who sued her and garnered MAGA-ecosystem media hits along the way.

None of the teams that refused to compete against Fleming were bought off by Betsy DeVos. Fleming’s assistant coach, who filed a Title IX complaint, wasn’t misled by Clay Travis or Tucker Carlson. Those who objected to a trans woman competing alongside biological women had no ideological commitments beyond fairness in volleyball. This isn’t the Republican base. These are women on volleyball teams at regional universities. What would Torre have them do? Pursue their concerns quietly into the maw of a media and higher-education apparatus that in 2022–2024 regarded such complaints as illegitimate at best, ignorant and bigoted at worst?

To effectively advocate in 2025 requires putting culture-war claims in the mouths of the most charismatic actors. Physical beauty helps advance a story, given the role of the visual in social media. For conservatives, connections to Donald Trump are multipliers. A victim narrative plays well and grows over time. Revictimizing the victim confers martyrdom.

Torre claims his other reporting gets into what he calls the most contentious question in sports. But in his interviews with journalist Katie Barnes and science writer David Epstein, he doesn’t give an opinion either. Yes, those episodes go deeper into whether testosterone confers strength and power (enormously, it turns out), but the fairness issue is sidestepped there too. It’s easier for Torre to assail Gaines as unfair than to say that Lia Thomas had unfair advantages in the pool. It is a sign of our media incentives that the same news organization, the New York Times, that commissioned Zengerle’s thoughtful article also ran Torre’s piece under a headline shaped by their seven-figure deal with him.

The podcast version of the article begins with the phrase “All-American Grift”, but what’s the grift? Who has Gaines stolen from? Does Betsy DeVos think she’s not getting her money’s worth? I am similarly nonplussed by the question asked in the YouTube / Substack version of the report:

Her exact income, I suppose? (Which Torre also didn’t unearth, but I did.) If we were to ask, “What is Pablo Torre hiding?” the answer is he’s hiding behind narrative complexity to avoid stating what the science actually shows. And he’s hiding the fact that this isn’t actually a complicated scientific question—it’s a complicated political one.

Why I Actually Care

Here’s what motivates me about this story, and it has little to do with women’s swimming, volleyball, or the specific question of trans women in sports. Let them play, I say, except when scholarships or Olympic-style glory is on the line (i.e., National Championships, regional qualifiers, etc.) Also, reclassify “men’s” sports as “open” divisions, and allow all to compete without testosterone suppression. If you have a different suggestion, then fine, just please dispense with the posture of feigned ambiguity about the parts of this issue that aren’t ambiguous. If we as journalists want credibility on COVID vaccine effectiveness or global warming, it would behoove those in our profession to level with readers and not pretend it’s terribly, terribly complicated to regulate someone who went through male puberty competing in high-profile women’s sports that depend on strength, power and endurance. It is abundantly clear that in combat sports like boxing, in events like swimming, in the parts of volleyball where height and power combine to generate kills, testosterone is an enormous benefit.

I cannot abide the de rigueur sentences like “not every man is more athletic than every woman.” I chafe at the obligatory “You know Serena Williams is better at tennis than you, even though you’re a man.” As if any serious person concerned about fairness in the pool, on the court, or in the ring doesn’t understand this distinction. We have to pretend that the science is complex and that stating it plainly is bigotry. Sure, there’s complexity. There are chemical compounds and nanograms per deciliter, and many scientific studies. Knuckle-draggy state legislatures do reach for the chainsaw solution too readily. But treating the existence of some grey areas as a license to toss bucketfuls of colored confetti into the proceedings is insulting. It’s further maddening that the disseminators of these distractions are the purported nuance police, castigating the benighted, possibly bigoted parents who think it might not be fair that their daughters are losing to competitors who experienced the benefits of male puberty.

There doesn’t have to be a one-size-fits-all solution for all levels of sport (that suggestion is called erecting a straw man). But there do have to be some basic, very plain premises at stake, like: Caster Semenya, Imane Khelif, or Lia Thomas OF COURSE benefited from testosterone in ways that no woman born as a biological XX, non-DSD woman could. Did I leave out a qualifier? Did I not use the ever-evolving multi-hyphenate terminology exactly? Pardon me if I did. No pardons for those who use evasions, vilification and partisan animus as a stand-in for being straightforward.

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Lia Thomas, the UPenn swimmer, did win the title in another event at that meet and then receded from the inhospitable glare of what became a massive cultural debate. Gaines dove in.

Gaines is narrative catnip: an influencer who can be cast as either Joan of Arc or Casey Anthony, depending on the audience. To journalist and podcaster Pablo Torre, she’s an infuriating demagoguette, bought and paid for by the worst kind of billionaires: conservative ones.

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What repels Torre is exactly what advances Gaines. She has the aesthetic shorthand political movements crave: pretty, blonde, aggrieved. As so often happens in American public life, once a figure like this is anointed, the underlying issue is subsumed by the personal. Fairness to women in sports becomes a referendum on whether you believe the protagonist or the villain.

The problem isn’t that Torre, a gifted storyteller with a taste for villains, mysteries, and big reveals, has a political point of view. The problem is that when such a compelling antagonist comes along, it short-circuits the nuance he claims to bring. Across his constellation of reporting (podcast, video, print article, interviews, tweets, Twitter fights), Torre never comes close to making the case that Riley Gaines is fundamentally wrong. He proves that she’s wealthy, that she’s dramatic, and that the people who most elevate her are the usual villains—Clay Travis, Tucker Carlson, and the right, but her core thesis? Untouched.

To clearly state Gaines’ premise: “An athlete who experienced the testosterone benefits of male puberty winning an NCAA Women’s championship in an individual sport is unfair.” It is left unaddressed in this podcast and, at best, elided but never rebutted in his past podcast work. He doesn’t lay out an argument against what Riley Gaines is advocating; he lays out an argument against Riley Gaines.

The Argument Against Riley Gaines

The Pablo Torre Finds Out episode on Gaines details her locker room story, her speaking fees, her coach’s misconduct (twice), and her DeVos connections. It’s hard to know how to regard each offense (none illegal, all typical for a prominent advocate) without engaging the fundamental question. “Do transgender women retain advantages from male puberty?” goes unanswered. But the question “Is Riley Gaines awful?” gets affirmed many times over.

I can anticipate what Pablo Torre is thinking right now if he’s reading this. He’s shaking his head, saying to himself, “But I explicitly said this episode isn’t about the bigger issue of trans women in sports.” He did say that: “We can go back and forth about the competitive advantage debate… We’ve done episodes on that.”

But it’s impossible to engage on whether Gaines is unethical without weighing in on whether her cause is just.

It’s hard to see how Torre’s takedown could win over anyone legitimately concerned about trans women in elite sports. Torre and his Mother Jones partners weigh in on the exact question of fairness by highlighting studies designed to inject unfounded ambiguity where little exists. As I noted in my original essay, Torre wants to establish two premises: that competition between trans women and biological women is fair, and that it’s rare. But in order to prove fairness, already thin studies are stretched like taffy and conclusions are infused with more ambiguity than they warrant. The lengths Torre goes to avoid obvious conclusions undercut the entire enterprise.

After Torre critiqued me for not seeking his comment on my first piece (writing, “I didn’t write the Mother Jones feature, and I didn’t pick any of the studies you cite”), I asked Torre for comment on this article. I questioned him about the co-produced Mother Jones piece, which gives readers, I believe, a false impression of the lasting effects of testosterone, even when suppressed. Is there anything in it he doesn’t stand by? I have not heard back from Torre.

Pretending that male puberty advantage isn’t an issue, depicting those who raise unavoidable biological questions as distorters of truth, is a common tactic. It won’t surprise you that there’s no moment in the YouTube episode “What Is Riley Gaines Hiding?” or the podcast “All American Grift: We Investigated Trump’s Favorite Sports Troll” where Torre allows that Riley Gaines might have a point. She can’t have a point. She’s “MAGA,” “Trump’s favorite,” “a troll,” “Regina George.”

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A Good Enemy Is Satisfying

We want our enemies to be evil and their causes to be unjust. It flatters our positions and sense of moral superiority. But if our media and polarized algorithms select for the exact flaws we find disqualifying, we’ll inevitably dismiss all counter opinions because they emanate from figures we can’t stand. The echo chamber of disconfirmation is thrust upon us. “Oh, that concern can’t be valid because Elon Musk says it.” Or, “That issue can’t be taken seriously because Greta Thunberg is prattling on about it.”

There is a way around the polarized reveling in takedowns of loathsome activists, but it’s hard to execute well and not popular when you do. Pablo Torre’s video “What Is Riley Gaines Hiding?/ Secrets of MAGA’s #1 Sports Troll” has garnered almost a quarter of a million views as of this writing. The two previous pieces he cites as straightforward explorations of the issues, sans villains, got 6,000 and 11,000 views, respectively.

A Better Piece of Journalism

The clearest window onto how fairness and inclusion concerns can coexist is found not in Lia Thomas or her satellite-turned-supernova Riley Gaines, but in Blaire Fleming, the trans volleyball player at San José State profiled by Jason Zengerle in The New York Times Magazine.

Note: I’m stopping here for today, but if you’d like to read part 2 tomorrow, subscribe and have it delivered straight to your inbox or the Substack App.

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After clocking in his years at ESPN, journalist Pablo Torre packed up his podcasting kit and took his talents to South Beach, and the Dan Le Batard-founded Meadowlark Media, a safe harbor for former ESPN talent who found the Worldwide Leader a bit too squeamish about their left-leaning enthusiasms. Torre’s undoubtedly got chops. He knows how to build a narrative and work an angle. His latest production is a deep dive into Riley Gaines, the ex-Kentucky swimmer who’s become the conservative movement’s designated hitter on the trans-women-in-sports beat.

Torre’s M.O., as he confessed to Ethan Strauss, is to infuse every subject with mystery. He seems to have cracked some version of the code, because The Athletic just cut him a seven-figure licensing check at a moment when narrative podcasting is otherwise sinking like a diver who hit his head on the springboard.

Torre’s Riley Gaines piece demonstrated all the genre’s signature moves. Moves that are starting to feel a bit long in the tooth, if we’re being honest. There’s the montage effect: get six different people to say the same thing, and suddenly the shopworn becomes profound. There’s the promise of a story with this, that, and a discordant other thing. Here it was: The Philadelphia Eagles, The Orlando Magic and… Charlie Kirk! There’s the boasting about time spent investigating, rabbit holes descended, and lawyers hounded.

There’s the journalist-as-protagonist shtick, perfected by Sarah Koenig in Serial, which has spawned a thousand copycats. The pitch is always the same: Come discover with me. The promise: to expose—or in Torre’s mind, surely, to discredit—Riley Gaines and all her works.

So let’s unlock the mystery. What did Torre discover?

Three things, mainly.

The Lawsuit

Gaines’ college coach has been sued by two U.K. assistant coaches for sexual assault. Gaines graduated in 2022. The lawsuit alleges the head coach assaulted former swimmers after they’d become members of the coaching staff. Torre doesn’t break this news; the suits are well known, as is the coach’s ineligibility to coach again. Gaines has stood by her coach until this lawsuit surfaced, and now says she knows nothing about what actually happened, though she’s sympathetic to assault survivors, naturally.

The 2022 Locker Room

Gaines has made hay describing what she calls “a fully naked male in the women’s locker room,” claiming University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas stripped down in front of teammates and displayed male anatomy. This is Torre’s strongest card, as he documents how in Gaines’ original recitation, “no one looked” as Thomas changed in a corner, but in later retellings, Gaines would begin to liken Thomas’ use of the locker room to sexual assault. On the other hand, even if Gaines’ outrage was amped up over time for effect, many women across America have voiced similar discomfort, or genuine fear about biological males in women’s locker rooms. Whether these reactions stem from misplaced safety anxieties, self-protective instinct, or raw prejudice, the widespread shock or upset would persist even if Gaines’ own description were shaped by narrative calculation.

The Money

Torre’s third revelation: Gaines, a charismatic eyewitness to the most glaring example of a cause dear to conservative hearts, was funded by conservatives. Wealthy conservatives, no less than the DeVos family. I have to note: despite Torre’s boasting about six months of investigation, I found, in a couple of hours of poking around, that Gaines wasn’t paid the $124,000 as reported, but $474,000. I don't understand how Torre missed this, especially while boasting about the months of work his show invested in nailing Gaines to her chlorinated cross.

At one point, the sheer scandal of a conservative spokesperson being funded by conservatives so overwhelms Torre that he starts dropping F-bombs about the DeVos family’s other holdings. The NBA’s Orlando Magic becomes “the Orlando fucking Magic.”

The Orlando fucking Magic…This shit worked.

Torre just couldn’t stop himself from swearing on a show that bleeps out swears, and stayed so overcome that he never went back to retrack things, even though his show doesn’t allow on-air profanity. Just as it shouldn’t be shocking that conservative patrons fund conservative icons, it also should come as no shock that there is a fair amount of performance in million-dollar podcasts.

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Fair and Rare

Torre’s case does not actually hinge on sussing out Gaines’ funding sources or the misdeeds of her former coach. For the argument to cohere in the audience’s mind, Torre has to establish two premises about athletes who have gone through male puberty competing in women’s sports: that it’s fair, and that it’s rare.

On fairness, Torre cherry-picks studies, emphasizing the bits that help him and burying the parts that don’t. He cites an Air Force hormone-therapy study this way:

A pair of studies analyzing military fitness test data from the Air Force in 2020 and 2023 found that after two and four years of hormone therapy, respectively, trans women’s performance was comparable to that of cis women on two out of three measures.

Here’s a fairer rendering of the actual findings of those studies. The 2023 study found:

• Transgender women continued to record higher sit-up scores than cisgender women throughout the four-year period, though the statistical difference disappeared after four years.

• Transgender women remained significantly faster than cisgender women in the 1.5-mile run for the first two years of treatment; afterward, their run times declined but did not fall below cisgender female levels. (Though the 2020 study showed that a faster time did persist for trans women even after two years of taking feminizing hormones.)

• Transgender women continued to outperform cisgender women in push-ups at every time point measured.

That’s just one set of studies, but the one Torre and his print partner Mother Jones cite. Study after study shows that male puberty confers lasting advantages in athletic endeavors that require strength, power, and speed. Also, Lia Thomas did not take four years of hormone replacement therapy. According to the Daily Pennsylvanian, she began therapy after May 2019, and continued until the start of the 2021-2022 season, meaning she was taking feminizing hormones for two years, give or take a few months.

Torre also ignores competitive context. At the NCAA Championships, Lia Thomas won the 500-yard freestyle and tied Riley Gaines for fifth in the 200-yard freestyle. Thomas was the tallest swimmer in the field with the longest wingspan. These are advantages of male puberty that matter enormously in elite swimming. Yet Torre won’t describe these advantages plainly. Instead, he deploys obfuscatory language designed to suggest there’s meaningful scientific debate about whether testosterone and male puberty help in sports.

There isn’t. You can find individual sports where the advantage is smaller, or specific cases where a trans woman doesn’t dominate. But at high-performance levels—Olympic boxing, middle-distance running, events that historically had no rules for athletes with DSDs—the pattern is clear. XY athletes with testes-derived testosterone (like Caster Semenya, who has 46, XY DSD and naturally elevated testosterone) dominated these events for years until regulations arrived.

That’s Torre’s fairness argument, and it’s fairly clear Torre knows he’s playing a weak hand.

RARENESS

Now to rarity.

Mother Jones notes that 0.002% of NCAA athletes are known to be transgender. An equally fair way to put it: we don’t know how many transgender women are in college athletics because, until this year, the NCAA never asked.

But even if the numbers are low, there are ways to see this as more troubling than Pablo’s dismissive wave suggests.

Take Blair Fleming, a trans woman volleyball player at San José State. The New York Times Magazine ran an excellent piece on Fleming. I wish it had been Torre’s tonal template. Reading it, you realize that because even one transgender athlete plays dozens of opposing teams in a team sport, the cascade was significant. Fleming faced dozens of teams in her NCAA career, but five, upon learning she was trans, refused to play her. Whether it was from misplaced safety fears, their definition of feminism, or bigotry, it doesn’t matter. The point is that one athlete had caused a cascade affecting many others.

Two lessons emerge: even a single athlete has ripple effects beyond herself, and one athlete can scramble the schedules, standings, and decisions of dozens of teams. Second, given the firestorm around Fleming, you can see why so few athletes would want their status revealed. Fear, backlash, scrutiny, and conflict are all understandable deterrents.

There’s another problem with waving this off because the percentage is small. Let’s pick a cause that animates liberals as deeply as keeping trans women out of women’s sports animates conservatives. Let’s pick book banning.

The Liberal Equivalent of Trans Women in Sports

PEN America reports 3,362 book bans across 153 school districts in the most recent year. There are roughly 13,300 public school districts in America. So 153 out of 13,300 comes to 1.15%. A conservative could minimize it: “Look, only 1.15% of districts banned books.”

Want to minimize further? Use the denominator of 900 million total K-12 school library volumes: 3,362 bans out of 900,000,000 books equals 0.00037% of books removed.

But liberals would never accept the argument that what matters is how few books were banned. A liberal would say any book ban is an injustice; any book ban violates our commitment to free inquiry and democratic citizenship. Any book ban leads to further injustices, further chills, further erosions of freedom.

Likewise, a conservative might concede that a trans female athlete in the pool or on the volleyball court probably isn’t going to hurt or kill anyone. She may simply displace an athlete born female who “deserves” a podium spot. That the deserving woman has striking blue eyes, pretty blonde hair, and has hugged Donald Trump makes the issue more salient to conservatives; nonetheless, it shouldn’t be dismissed by association. Opponents of trans women in sports would argue that high-profile athletes point to broader risks that extend well beyond the rare, visible moments in national championship events. They cite prisons, shelters, and other spaces designed specifically for women, where the examples are more opaque, but also more dangerous.

In the end, Torre’s real discovery is this: Riley Gaines is a conservative who believes conservative things and enjoys the support of other conservatives. Scandalous stuff. He documents no actual lies, just messaging decisions he doesn’t like. He follows the money, albeit sloppily, missing $350,000 on his first pass. He deploys the classic activist’s whataboutism that is attractive because of how well it works on human brains: If Riley Gaines REALLY cared about women, she’d talk about [issue I care about] rather than [issue she cares about]. If you cared about theft, you’d talk about wage theft rather than shoplifting. If you cared about the environment, you’d talk about light rail rather than Elon’s EVs, etc.

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You have to admit, even if those perpetuating her ecosystem won’t, that Riley Gaines did not suffer much; she is, at best, barely a victim. But that is not the point of her power as a figure. She is the avatar the movement wants, and the movement is paying her for her story, image, and symbolism. Conservatives exist. They might select for pretty blondes with first-hand stories. They might not present issues the way liberals would, which, in this case, means not mentioning them at all. But what do we do with their opinions? Gainsay them via process arguments? Pretend, as RFK Jr. and his adherents do, that established science is much more vague than it is?

Pablo Torre makes compelling content attempting to discredit the tactics surrounding this culture warrior, when it is actually the existence of the cultural issue he has a real argument with, not its specific expression in a modern-day flaxen-tressed Botticelli, her sea the right-wing ecosystem, her seashell a DeVos-funded platform.

Riley Gaines is as much a grifter as anyone who gets attention using every presentation and attention-getting tool at their disposal. That’s something Pablo Torre found out how to do a while ago.

This leads to the perennial argument over what a “fair” map should yield. The prevailing but misguided consensus holds that a state’s congressional delegation should mirror its presidential vote: if 38% voted for the Democrat, roughly 38% of its representatives “should” be Democrats. Both parties embrace this logic—not because they’re lying, but because it flatters their interests and fundamentally misunderstands how elections work.

Let me explain why this reasoning is mathematically wrong.

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Everyone’s Getting the Math Wrong

On the conservative side, Victor Davis Hanson makes the case about California’s 52 congressional seats while discussing redistricting and what Gavin Newsom doesn’t want you to know:

“Here in California, to take the most relevant example that involves Prop 50, we have 52 congressional districts—52. Currently, there are only nine Republicans out of that 52. That represents about 17% of the congressional districts. However, in most statewide and national elections, Republicans usually poll about 40%.”

Newsom loves the gerrymandering issue. He’s taking victory laps in Texas over it. And you know what? Gerrymandering is fire, and Newsom is right that you have to fight fire with fire. But let us not be ignorant or deceived about what the ideal number of representatives would be without the distortions created by gerrymandering..

I am constitutionally—lower-case “c”—ill-disposed to calling everything a crisis. This development is troubling, but not apocalyptic. True constitutional crises occur when branches of government collide with no remedy in the Constitution. We’re not there yet. We’re just in a messy situation that could, like almost anything, escalate.

The Proportionality Trap

Even responsible, non-partisan sources use this weird rule-of-thumb “fairness” metric. The New York Times article “Gerrymandering War Spreading Across U.S. Is a Crisis, Experts Say” notes that Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee could soon send no Democrats to Congress, despite 34 to 38% of their voters choosing Kamala Harris in 2024. The implicit argument is clear: these numbers should match.

The American Constitution Society makes the same case with more examples: “In Texas, where Kamala Harris won 42% of the vote in the 2024 presidential election, Democrats hold only 34% of the congressional seats (13 of 38 seats). In Indiana, Democrats hold two of seven seats, which is 22% despite Harris’ 40% share of the 2024 vote. In Missouri: Democrats hold two of eight seats, which is 25% despite Harris’ 40% share of the 2024 vote. In Mississippi: Democrats hold one of four seats, which is 25% despite Harris’ 38% share of the 2024 vote.”

The Brookings Institution piles on with empirical data: “In red states … Republicans garnered 56% of the vote but 74.6% of representation.” The Associated Press reports the same pattern: “Fifty-eight percent of Missouri voted for Trump, but they want to send an 87% representation to Congress.” The Center for American Progress argues for districts where “the views of elected representatives … better reflect those of the people who elect them.”

Critics see all of this as proof of injustice.

Yet Massachusetts, where 36% voted for Donald Trump, already sends zero Republicans to Washington. Is that a crisis? There’s decent evidence that it’s all but impossible to draw a fair map that actually includes any Republicans in Massachusetts, even if more than a third of the state is of a rightward ilk. And if it were, there’s no better place to implement the principles pioneered in the land of Elbridge Gerry.

A couple of notes: There’s no racial disenfranchisement at play in Massachusetts, and the preclearance considerations of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act wouldn’t apply, as it targets former Confederate states with histories of suppressing Black voters. The cases now before the Supreme Court also don’t factor into a map like Massachusetts’. My point isn’t that one situation is fair and the other isn’t; it’s to define what constitutes “fair.”

Fair is NOT for three Massachusetts seats to go to Republicans or four Missouri seats to go to Democrats just because 40% of that state voted for Harris.

The Math That Everyone Ignores

The common argument—that fairness means seats proportional to votes—doesn’t meet the standards of basic probability.

Even academics fall into this trap. A 2021 paper by John F. Nagle and Alec Ramsay considers “deviations from the proportionality ideal” as part of their fairness metrics for districting. But what they call “deviations from perfect proportionality” are statistical necessities. Even a purely neutral, random map would produce a delegation skewed toward the majority party, because representation is a discrete, winner-take-all process—exactly what the hypergeometric distribution shows.

Think about it: In a state that is 60–40 in favor of one party, if every congressional district were drawn in perfect accordance with the overall political makeup of the state, you’d have zero representatives from the minority party. If state congressional districts were drawn “proportionally” to reflect the state overall, every congressional district would have the overall skew of the state, which in over 40 states practically means clean-sweeps of congressional races.

But that’s not how districts are drawn or should be drawn. But how they SHOULD be drawn isn’t to get congressional districts in line with overall state voter registration.

I give you hypergeometric distribution.

God, Guns and Gum

Imagine the state as a gumball machine containing 99 gumballs total: 59 red and 40 blue. That’s a 60-40 split, matching our hypothetical state’s partisan breakdown.

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Hair in soup—disgusting, right?

That’s what people tell me. I wouldn’t actually know; it’s never happened to me. Possibly because food isn’t on my plate long enough to make eye contact with it. But I do know it’s a cultural trope, so I wondered: Should we be grossed out by hair in soup, or is this one of those things that seems disgusting but is scientifically harmless?

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How Germy Is Hair, Actually?

I dug into bacteriology studies where scientists literally yanked hair off volunteers (grad students, I bet) and counted bacteria.

In the most recent paper (Watanabe 2019), researchers found that bacteria on the shaft of head hair were pretty sparse: about 10⁵–10⁶ colony-forming units (CFU) per cm².

Compare that to:

• 10⁸ CFU/cm² at the oily hair root

• 5 × 10⁹ CFU/cm³ in your average kitchen sponge

As it turns out, hair is clean because it’s the Mojave Desert of the body. Bacteria prefer warm, moist, protected environments. A stray hair is dry, sun-exposed keratin, not very microbe-friendly.

Then, Why the Hairnets?

If hair isn’t a major disease vector, why do we make food workers wear hairnets?

I combed through FDA regulations, Federal Register archives, and public health journals and found no evidence that loose hair has ever caused a foodborne illness outbreak.

What I did find was a PR plot twist.

In the 1920s, hairnet sales were tanking because women were cutting their hair into fashionable bobs. Enter Edward Bernays, nephew of Freud and father of modern public relations. Hired by the Venida hairnet company, Bernays convinced doctors to write letters claiming loose hair was a public health hazard.

He didn’t stop the bob, but he did save the hairnet industry, and arguably made Americans permanently hair-in-food-phobic.

I do suspect this is an American thing. In France, there’s a phrase, “Arriver comme un cheveu sur la soupe,” to “arrive like a hair in the soup.” It means awkwardly timed and out of place, not disgusting.

Fun fact: Early hairnets were made of actual human hair.

So, in trying to keep hair out of soup, we may have invented a way to drop more hair into soup.

(Editor’s note: This is not fun for me. Just perplexing. Did they think it was like vaccination, where exposure to the substance offered some immunization? Not for answering, just for contemplating.)

Meanwhile... FEATHERS

You know what else is relatively sterile? Feathers!

I’m an amateur nature educator, and one of my favorite things is giving kids feathers I find on the trail or beach. They’re gorgeous, and when you put them under a magnifying glass, the interlocking barbules look like nature’s zipper.

But parents react like I’ve handed their child a syringe I found behind a Walmart. “Ew, that’s GROSS, PUT THAT DOWN.”

So naturally, I had to investigate. And guess what? Feathers are cleaner than you think.

Bacteria by the Numbers (All in CFU/cm²)

Final Takeaway

Hair in soup?

Mostly harmless.

Wild bird feathers?

Not that germy after all! No need to ruffle your feathers, parents.

Kitchen sponges?

Burn them. Salt the earth. Start over.

There was Stephen Colbert, gently pushing back on her soft-pedaling of Biden’s debate performance. (”Disappointment is such a light term,” he noted.)

And there was Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker, who committed the journalistic sin of reading passages from Independent back to Jean-Pierre, receiving denials, corrections, and professed bafflement in return.

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I was also included in this book tour. I sat down with Jean-Pierre eight days before publication, with every intention of airing the interview when the book came out. After thirty contentious minutes with the former press secretary, I decided not to inflict what amounted to audio waterboarding on my listeners. But after a week of watching Jean-Pierre confuse everyone who interviewed her, I’m reversing that decision.

The book itself presents a puzzle. Early on, Jean-Pierre trains her fire at Democratic failures. She writes:

Then I saw the party somehow fumble the ball again, when Biden left the race and his vice president, Kamala Harris, became the nominee. Somehow it was unable to help a trailblazing, extremely accomplished former prosecutor who wanted to uplift everyone in our society defeat Trump, a habitual liar and convicted felon who openly embraced the politics of cruelty.

Not a new observation, but later in the same book, she writes, “The truth was, I never really believed Harris could win.” Which raises the obvious question: Why did you stand at that podium day after day, defending decisions you apparently knew were catastrophic? And it raises a further question: If you never believed Harris could win, how was the party’s failure to elect her such an egregious betrayal that it inspired you to publicly defect?

Here’s the non-dissonance-inducing explanation. Jean-Pierre wants to rehabilitate her image and preserve whatever marketability she has after performing as the archetypal Biden insider who drove the party into a vat of toxic marmalade by keeping his condition under wraps. She knows “the Democratic Party” is unpopular, so she tries to define herself in opposition to it, when in reality, she embodies the worst of the cloistered, condescending, we-know-better tendencies they represent.

Spiking an Interview

I went into my conversation with Jean-Pierre with what I thought was a reasonable strategy. While it might seem fair to present a spokesperson with the words the person spoke, I’ve never seen this bear fruit. Every press secretary, when confronted with past statements, even wholly inaccurate ones, deploys the same defense: It was a hard job, I represented the president with the information I had, I did my best. Fine. Stipulated. Moving on.

I also didn’t plan to cite any of the numerous examples of Biden’s visible decline, because Jean-Pierre’s book makes clear she either didn’t see it, didn’t believe it, or has convinced herself she didn’t see it. She writes about Jake Tapper and his reporting on Biden’s condition with the air of someone discussing a conspiracy theorist:

Tapper wrote a supposed tell-all about Biden, “Original Sin,” with Alex Thompson, accusing him of a cover-up of his mental decline and how his aides quashed concerns. I was technically a part of the president’s inner circle and saw Biden every day and saw no such decline. I never read Tapper’s book and don’t ever plan to because that does not track with what I saw in the White House.

Why waste time presenting evidence to someone who’s announced they’re not interested in evidence? Instead, I wanted to ask straightforward questions: What makes you an independent? Where do you actually differ from Democratic Party orthodoxy? What would you have done differently regarding Biden’s exit and Harris’s coronation?

These are, in fact, the questions her book purports to answer. The book is titled Independent, after all, not I Agree With Everything But Am Slightly Miffed About The Tone. It’s also not Yes, I Was the One Assuring You Joe Biden Was Doing Great, Which I Still Believe, But Now I’m a Truth-Telling Rebel.

For twenty minutes, I got a masterclass in evasion—no, strike that, a birthday party magician display of distraction. Jean-Pierre would pivot to referencing long passages from her book that my listeners didn’t have in front of them. She would reframe questions to answer points I hadn’t raised. She would retreat to a tendentious viewpoint epistemology.

I eventually asked what was, I’ll admit, a long question—a minute and twenty seconds of trying to pin down all the contradictions we’d been circling. It came down to asking what her theory of the case, or policy positions that she, as an independent, is championing that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or the Democrats don’t already back?

She criticized the question as a “tangent.” A tangent from what, exactly? From not answering anything? Then she delivered a nearly five-minute response that somehow managed to address nothing, announced the interview was over, and left.

Time was of the essence, she explained. It always is when you’re fleeing.

The Politics of Futility

What strikes me about Jean-Pierre’s book tour—my interview included—is not that she’s defensive. Of course, she’s defensive. She was the public face of an administration that hid its president’s decline from the American people, then acted shocked when the debate revealed what many had long suspected. The Democratic Party is furious with her, and she’s furious back. Fair enough.

There is probably an interesting book somewhere in here. But what’s presented to the world is reputation rehabilitation without the rehabilitation part—just the assertion that rehabilitation shouldn’t be necessary because nothing was really wrong except everyone else’s perception of what happened.

A Document of Obfuscation

I’m publishing this interview not in the hope that anyone would actually enjoy it, but as a document of how an interview, a press strategy, and a line of argumentation can go tragicomically wrong. This is what happens when someone writes a book called Independent while remaining dependent on narratives that have already collapsed, and on a calculated sense of faux-righteousness.

In 11 years, I’ve spiked perhaps five interviews. I thought this would be among them. “I can’t torture my listeners with this,” I thought immediately after she ended the interview. But after watching Jean-Pierre confuse and frustrate every journalist who’s engaged with her since, I figured: why should I suffer alone? But also, what was once an artifact of obfuscation has now turned illuminating, at least as far as witnessing the stripped mechanics of self-justification.

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But this isn’t about definitions of genocide. If it were, I would point out that even that small weight a reasonable person might give to explanations for Israel’s actions other than genocide actually means it’s not a genocide. Genocide can be the only reasonable inference to explain a combatant’s intentions in conflict for the charge to hold up. But again, this isn’t about definitions of genocide. This post is about the broader failure of the genocide-alleging international and human rights community to grasp the fundamentals of war, peace, and policy objectives. They haven’t learned their Lemkin or their Clausewitz.

If we are being fair, we should consider the successful negotiation of a ceasefire by Donald Trump and contrast it with what came before, allowing at least a sliver of legitimacy to the view that Trump, Israel, and others who rejected the findings of Human Rights Watch and the UN commissions understood something essential: that the application of force, even enormous, is not antithetical to laws of war but often central to them.

The pressure from the international community—the United Nations, human rights organizations, and large contingents within both U.S. political parties—was relentless. The prevailing line was simple: Israel must stop fighting, pull back its military pressure on Hamas, lessen the suffering, and thereby allow peace talks to ensue. But this deal surely seems to belie that theory—and so, in fact, did past deals in this conflict.

The human rights community’s catechism, shared by many decent people who recoil at the spectacle of suffering, is this: fewer bombs, less suffering, more peace. But that logic only works if combatants believe they can win by following the human rights community’s precepts of war. Countries wage wars to win wars, not to follow the rules of war, and when the two are in tension, combatants will never choose to lose.

The laws of armed conflict were negotiated by nation-states that knew they would one day have to wage war. They allow for brutality not because of moral blindness but because their authors understood necessity. The proclamations of NGOs, on the other hand, need never account for the imperative to win a war—and so they don’t. And this is my point: in seeking to stop the current hostilities that are so morally vexing to all of us, in seeking to stop them immediately and always, these groups so often prolong wars, because actual combatants have only two choices—brush aside the demands or adhere to them and forfeit any chance of achieving a decisive outcome. In fact, Human Rights Watch, on October 2, issued this typically ponderous proclamation advocating a raft of bureaucratic procedures which could lead to the implementation of sanctions while at the same time rallying support for the UN’s “Special Rapporteur,” because the world “can’t wait for a peace deal.” The next day, Hamas agreed to release all the hostages.

For the international community, the highest imperative is that civilians who are dying right now stop dying. Urgent. Imperative. This is the pressing, emergency language of human-rights intervention—by definition, short-term thinking. For nation-states, the highest imperative is to preserve the safety of their citizens in the long term, and that often means winning wars.

Put it this way: if Human Rights Watch—and I use them as shorthand for similar organizations—had been active during the U.S. Civil War and the Union had followed their guidelines to the letter, the Confederacy would have won. The same is true of Nazi Germany in World War II. To follow these precepts when one’s adversaries do not—in anything close to a balanced conflict—is to lose.

The reason Ulysses S. Grant won the Civil War, and the reason Lincoln stuck with him after cycling through a series of less aggressive generals, is that Grant relentlessly took the fight to the enemy. The Overland Campaign, the siege of Petersburg, and General William Tecumseh Sherman’s doctrine of “hard war”—explicitly aimed at breaking civilian morale — were decisive. Without these techniques, which got Grant labeled “the Butcher” and “Unconditional Surrender Grant,” the Union might have failed to prevail.

The United States can comply with most laws of armed conflict because it is powerful enough to win regardless. Yet even it often runs afoul of Amnesty International’s or Human Rights Watch’s definitions of lawful warfare. So we are left with a naïve, unrealistic, and counterproductive situation: the international community, out of righteousness and genuine moral conviction, has one mode—urging an end to combat. Its only tools are to shame, cajole, or threaten punishment of the combatants.

But since most modern wars are not fought between nation-states, those calls are inevitably heard by only one side. What are you going to do—revoke Boko Haram’s U.N. committee assignments? Sanction the Houthis? Pass a resolution that will be faithfully observed by FARC, the Tigray separatists, or Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb? These appeals are almost always aimed at the more powerful combatant, because the weaker side is either a non-state actor or impervious to diplomatic pressure. And so the pattern repeats: moral condemnation directed at the side that can actually hear it, and predictable disregard from those who can’t.

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A policing expert once explained to me how the use of force—sometimes overwhelming, and even punishing—can actually promote peace. In threat assessment, time matters: a threat that persists over time becomes increasingly likely to materialize. If that threat is handled decisively, even brutally, it ends. The war in Gaza has now gone on for two years, the longest such conflict in Israeli history. But Israel’s time horizon has allowed the threat of Hamas—which ceased to be hypothetical on October 7—to linger. The ceasefires, hostage releases, and celebrations in both Tel Aviv and Gaza—where Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad also celebrated—are a referendum on one truth: actual force has a logic, and, perversely as it sounds, a morality, at least to the combatants, versus the alternative of yielding to outside pressure—“Stop fighting and accept more suffering in the hope that your enemy will then agree to your terms.”