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Matt Osborne — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:00:31 GMT

I am just getting back in the swing of things after a three-week slowdown for a slipped disc that made it impossible to do much writing, or much of anything at all. The grand plans I had for August have been delayed into September.

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Forget 'Gender Dysphoria': Almost All The Hormonal 'Gender Medicine' Is Billing Fraud

Everyone can stop talking about ‘gender dysphoria’ now. The term is largely irrelevant to questions about kids and puberty blockers and hormones, anymore, because hardly anyone is actually billing for coverage under that diagnosis…

2 months ago · 4 likes · Matt Osborne

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Why Democrats Are In Disarray

CNN is reporting on a “midterm war” in the Democratic Party over the rise of Democratic Socialism…

2 months ago · Matt Osborne

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Was Venezuela Payback For Havana Syndrome?

Early on the morning of 3 January 2026, at least 32 Cuban guards around Nicolás Maduro were reportedly incapacitated by a weapon that American forces were using for the very first time…

2 months ago · 1 like

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'White Supremacy Culture' At The Smithsonian

During a hearing by the House Oversight Committee yesterday, Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas grilled Anthea M. Hartig, director of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History since 2019. She is the tenth director in the history of the museum and its first female director since it opened in 1964…

2 months ago · Matt Osborne

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The Vibe Shift Is Real

“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules”, Saul Alinsky advised. Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas made American Bar Association (ABA) President Michelle A. Behnke live up to her own set of rules in a House Oversight Committee hearing, “The Future of DEI in Law School Accreditation and the Legal Profession”, yesterday…

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2 months ago · Matt Osborne

Polemology Positions

The Wildberries Option

Ukraine has surpassed Russia in the scale of their long-range strike capabilities. Successive, overlapping campaigns have created gas lines in Russia, swept the Sea of Azov clear of Russian ships, hammered logistics, and in recent days has expanded to Wildberries warehouses…

2 months ago · Matt Osborne

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Why 'The Odyssey' Discourse Is Not Over Yet

The Odyssey needs a solid …

2 months ago · 3 likes · Matt Osborne

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Why Oregon Has So Many Kids On Hormones

Oregon’s Intermountain Education Service District fired social worker Roderick E. Theis II in November 2023 for the crime of displaying the books He is He, She is She, and Johnny the Walrus in his La Grande Middle School office. Last week, a divided federal appeals court ruled that Theis was not protected by the First Amendment when he showed the books to students who asked to see them…

2 months ago · 2 likes · Matt Osborne

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Pride Goeth Before The Fall Of Civilizations

Abdul Rahman Toufic Ballout, a man of Lebanese descent born in Berlin, plowed a vehicle into a crowd outside a Pride event at the Tiergarten on Saturday night. Ballout exited the vehicle, a white Citröen Space Tourer, and stabbed bystanders before fleeing the scene. One woman was reported killed and 29 people injured…

a month ago · Matt Osborne

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On The Women Of Toulouse And The Trebuchet That Killed Simon de Montfort

“[T]here was in the town a [siege engine] built by a carpenter and dragged with its platform from St. Sernin”, writes the anonymous author of Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise, or Song of the Cathar Wars. “This was worked by noblewomen, by little girls and men’s wives, and now a stone arrived just where it was needed and struck Count Simon on his steel helmet, shattering his eyes, brains, back teeth, forehead and jaw. Bleeding and black, the count dropped dead on the ground…

a month ago · Matt Osborne

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There Is 'Nothing Left' Of The Progressive Movement That Delivered Obamacare

“Most of the people I encountered in progressive politics, but especially in the criminal justice reform space, came from extremely privileged backgrounds”, Evan Barker writes in her memoir. Barker found that “personal wealth insulated them against the consequences of the policies they promoted…

a month ago · Matt Osborne

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Maine Democrats Cannot Find A Normal Guy To Run Against Susan Collins

Journalist Steve Robinson of Maine Wire has reported that Troy Jackson, the Democratic Party’s replacement candidate for Graham Platner, lives in a common law relationship with his second cousin, Lana M. Pelletier. The relationship has been an open secret in the tiny town of Allagash, where they live. The couple has two adult children…

a month ago · 5 likes · Matt Osborne

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We Have To Talk About Liberalism And The Leftist Mental Health Crisis In America

Francesca Hong, a failed restaurateur and Democratic nominee for governor in Wisconsin, had a mental breakdown at 18. “ I didn’t actually walk at my high school graduation because I had been hospitalized for a week at a child psychiatric hospital”, she told…

a month ago · 16 likes · Matt Osborne

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The Closer Is Coming

It all feels so familiar because it is familiar, by now. The president calls a timeout for negotiations at the behest of the Saudis, Qataris, and Pakistanis with planes in the air. Then Iran denies any negotiations…

a month ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

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Sophie Cunningham Is Pointing To The Death Of The Irony That Is Men In Women's Sports

“The problem is that the grown-ups in the room have turned into cowards, and they are all running away from the fantasists”, Sir Trevor Phillips said in an interview with The Telegraph last week. “When I was a student, one of the things we fought for was that women could operate independently of men. Now, according to this new fantasy world, the one thing women cannot do is decide when they want to be separate from men. It’s not just outrageous, it’s insane.” Or: ironic…

a month ago · 24 likes · 1 comment · Matt Osborne

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A Bloody Slave Rebellion That Broke An Empire

Islam did not experience a straightforward or unified progress. The Abbasid caliphate and its capital Baghdad had existed for over a century, surviving defeats and challenges, when the Zanj rebelled in what is today southern Iraq and southwestern Iran, devastating the imperial plantation economy…

a month ago · 3 likes · Matt Osborne

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Why America Cannot Spend Our Way Out Of The Public Education Crisis

Chances are that you have encountered the argument that the Department of War should be downsized, so that schools can have the money. According to this logic, the only thing that can solve the crisis of public education is an infinite supply of money. When we value schoolteachers enough to pay them more than defense contractors, all of our social ills will be solved…

a month ago · 2 likes · Matt Osborne

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Democrats Lose When They Skip Oppo Research

Stick a fork in Abdul El-Sayed. He is done. He hates football. He hates the 4th of July. He hates the 2nd Amendment. Normal Michiganders will not vote for someone who hates everything they love. Mike Rogers just has to stand still and act normal to win handily in November. So goes the hand-wringing, anyway. Who knows, they could be right…

a month ago · Matt Osborne

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The Artillery Park Of Jeanne D'Arc

During the 19th century, French nationalism and widespread literacy developed a mass interest in medieval history and national heroes, with Joan of Arc foremost among the latter. Images of French history appeared regularly in popular publications and posters of the time. As one might expect, artists tended to romanticize their reconstructions of medieval sieges in a contemporary mode, though they turned to the historical texts for their material. Arsenals still held examples of obsolete weapons to serve as models. Here and there lay remains of medieval fortifications to inspect…

a month ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

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'A Case Of Transphobia': Crybullies Campaign Against The Rights Of Women In Brazil

In 2025, Brazilian feminist activist and graphic designer Isabella Cêpa received political asylum in Europe because she faced years in prison for online comments that offended transgender politician Érika Hilton. Cêpa became the world’s first gender critical political refugee and an embarrassment to Brazil, which had proudly overcome its authoritarian past…

a month ago · 11 likes · Matt Osborne

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On The Slow Self-Destruction Of The University

Nobel Prize recipient Dr. James Watson, the discoverer of the DNA double helix, was a genius in the true sense of that word. Still, Watson was destroyed personally and professionally for saying out loud that intelligence has a genetic variability linked to what we call ‘race’. In the western academy, it is a thoughtcrime to notice that genetic variation produces more or less desirable traits in human beings, or that evolutionary time in different environments will produce a variety of traits…

25 days ago · Matt Osborne

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Iran Is Going Down Exactly Like I Said It Would

On Tuesday of this week, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fired two missiles towards the territory of the United Arab Emirates. Both missiles were aimed at marine traffic and fell into the sea without effect, one inside and one outside the boundaries of the Emirates. In retaliation, the UAE suspended all banking and commercial trading with Iran, essentially cutting off one-third of Iran’s foreign economic activity…

20 days ago · 2 likes · Matt Osborne

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Why Rob Bonta Is Killing Hollywood

Archaeology will perhaps wonder, millennia hence, just what gods the people of southern California worshipped at a certain hill overlooking the former urban skyline. Based on the needle hazards they find in the destruction layer, those future scientists will likely speculate that worshippers all used intravenous drugs during some sort of mass pilgrimage…

14 days ago · Matt Osborne

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No One Has Dredged A New Channel Through Hormuz. ‘Milk Run’ Tankers Made Iran Mad

Last Friday, a YouTube content creator named Matt Morse started a fake news cascade when he reported that a new passage had been dredged in the Strait of Hormuz. In fact, the passage between the Fakk al Asad peninsula and the island of Bab Musandam has been charted for many centuries, and powered vessels use it all the time, including the present hostilities…

9 days ago · 1 like

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On The Scrupulosity Of Socialist Youth Cadres

Emotional healing is the latest form of fascism. Getting over your trauma, or coping with your problems, makes you a literal Nazi, according to Rev. Jinzu Minna Jain, pronouns they/them…

4 days ago · 5 likes

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On The Scrupulosity Of Socialist Youth Cadres

Matt Osborne — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 19:01:48 GMT

Emotional healing is the latest form of fascism. Getting over your trauma, or coping with your problems, makes you a literal Nazi, according to Rev. Jinzu Minna Jain, pronouns they/them.

“Even in left-wing spaces we can accidentally reproduce health fascism through the language of healing”, Reverend Jain told the Socialism 2026 “Liberatory Spirit, the Spirit of Liberation” panel this weekend.

“Organizers need to be careful about what ‘healing’ means, because sometimes people are not looking to ‘get better’ or ‘move past’ trauma at all”, Jain opined. “What people may need instead is collective support while sitting with the cracks, sitting with the bones, and sitting in the horror together.”

We must stay stuck in our feels, otherwise the fascists win. Here is a clip of Jain, an “artist, writer, and racial & systemic equity educator” who identifies as “BIPOC, disabled, queer and trans/nonbinary”, displaying the arrested development of an unhappy young adult.

An intense, often distressing preoccupation with personal moral, spiritual, ethical, or ideological ‘purity’ is commonly called scrupulosity. It is also known as ‘religious OCD’ or ‘moral OCD’. Author Ben Appel, who was raised in the Lamb of God cult, developed a bad case of scrupulosity as a child. He tells the story in his memoir, Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic.

Conditioned to think of himself as a hell-bound sinner by the spiritual abuse of the cult, which he likens to sexual abuse, Appel struggled with involuntary urges to pray. He would pray silently in class, and then try to sneak the word “amen” out loud as a cough, or else rush to the restroom, fall on his knees in a stall, and call on God to help him stop feeling tortured.

Scrupulosity is mental self-bullying. Sufferers experience intrusive doubts and fears that they have sinned, violated their values, become spiritually contaminated, or failed to live up to an impossibly high standard of goodness. Constantly aware of their own imperfections, the scrupulous constantly seek reassurance that they are still “clean” or morally acceptable. They are seeking permission to love themselves.

“I was mistaken to believe that the prayer, if I could just say it correctly or repeat it enough times, would eventually ease my shame”, Appel laments. “Praying only made it more potent.” His constant urge to pray became so debilitating that the only cure was to stop praying altogether.

Many years later, Appel discovered he had joined yet another cult after he was accepted into Columbia. In this campus cult of woke, being homosexual was not radical enough. Appel was white, and ‘cis’, not “properly queer”, and at Columbia, that made him the oppressor. His struggle meant nothing to the cult of social justice. His story of healing and personal growth was unwelcome.

Appel had wanted to join the queer tribe, but “the group I had longed to unite with, dedicated to social justice and equality” was “more conformist and intolerant than the fundamentalist religious leaders of my childhood … and even crueler than my middle school bullies.”

One commonality with Appel’s previous cult experience that stood out to him was the struggle. Within the history of communism we find class struggle, Lenin’s post-revolutionary struggle to purify the state, Stalin’s two-line struggle between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ views, his purges, and the ritual humiliation sessions of Mao. When everything is a struggle, helplessness sets in.

The ‘liberationist’ teachings Ben Appel received from certified Marxists at Columbia were “a remarkably familiar reprise of the close-minded, intolerant orthodoxy of the Christian cult from which I had escaped at age twelve.” Students “literally wore pajamas” because they were so fragile and infantilized. The lectures they attended did not help.

This was perhaps an historical inevitability. Ludwig Feuerbach, the German socialist philosopher, was explicit about replacing God with humanity. Drawing on Feuerbach, Marx replaced humanity with the socialist state. Lenin replaced the state with the Party. The woke era has seen the Party replaced with identity in the dialectical formulation.

Leftist ideology is simply ersatz Christianity stripped of grace and forgiveness. Once you see it, you can never unsee it. The Socialism 2026 panel put it on grand display.

Why Rob Bonta Is Killing Hollywood

Matt Osborne — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 20:01:07 GMT

Our future scientists must after all explain the midden layer of tents and sleeping bags, too. Evidence of fire destruction, followed by abandonment, will hint at some mysterious cataclysm. How did everything burn?

Most of the silent movies ever made are gone forever. Most of the ‘talkies’ that were ever made are also going to disappear forever, or else get Bowdlerized for streaming. Every creative property is subject to enshittification, the decay of content.

This reductive force of cultural re-creation — call if film entropy — means that our notional future archaeologists will struggle to assemble and interpret scraps, references, and clips the way 19th century epigraphers struggled to assemble shattered clay tablets.

Like the frantic final message of Ammurapi, the king of Ugarit, reporting the mysterious sea people(?) on the horizon, perhaps there will be tantalizing evidence in the ruin that Rob Bonta was responsible, at the end.

Bonta, the attorney general of California, leads a multistate legal effort to stop the merger and acquisition of Warner Brothers by Paramount. All twelve state attorneys general involved in this effort are Democrats.

This week, Bonta walked away from negotiations with David Ellison, the chairman and CEO of Paramount, whose long-contested acquisition of Warner Brothers has been cleared by the EU, the US government, and WB shareholders. Bonta wants the case to drag into next year, costing Ellison $7 million a day in contractual delays, per the terms of the merger.

Ellison wanted Bonta to agree to cover the costs when Paramount wins in the Supreme Court. The AGs of Montana and Iowa have now asked the Court to block Team Bonta, arguing that the merger is in the interest of their states. The legal picture remains complex and fluid, but few informed analysts give Team Bonta much chance of winning.

Delay seems to be the real strategy. Bonta’s motives are both political and personal. If Ellison acquires CNN, a beleaguered cable channel in a post-cable era, before November, he could complicate the midterm election plans of Democrats by putting Bari Weiss in charge. Of course, this is all speculative, but powerful people clearly doo perceive high stakes in the matter.

Netflix made its own bid for Warner Brothers, and is eager to see Ellison bleed, or even recover WB for themselves. Netflix would refurbish CNN, sell off the rest of the acquired assets, and maintain the studio lot in LA as a political plum. Not by coincidence, Patty Quillin, the wife of Netflix co-founder and former CEO Reed Hastings, is a major donor to Rob Bonta as well as his wife Mia Bonta.

Bonta says the case is about unlawful market concentration under antitrust law, the Clayton Act. Ellison says the case is about punishing his company for political purposes. In response, he stands ready to punish California by pulling up stakes and re-concentrating the movie industry in the American south: Austin, Atlanta, and Nashville are likely candidates.

Hollywood will not be missed immediately, but eventually, through the progressive degradation of film culture. The limited attention-spans of the first generation raised on ‘smart phone’ apps like TikTok will do the rest. Succeeding generations will note the decline in quality from previous generations, evoking nostalgia, but the past is a country we cannot visit.

By the time everyone remembers what was lost, Hollywood and its social values will be history, pronouns was/were.

The city made choices. Los Angeles long ago ceased to be a good place to shoot for any sort of screen. Potential sets are filled with homelessness and the hazards it produces, requiring heavier security. Red tape, an uncooperative city government, and union rules make content production so expensive in LA that it is cheaper to fly an entire movie crew and cast to a foreign country.

Sound stages are going out of business. The WB studio lot is probably worth more as real estate than as a studio. The movie business is the most people-intensive art form, as the credits to any film will attest. Everyone from writers to caterers to key grips has lost work in recent years. Many have relocated. Others have given up and found new careers.

Unions played a major role in the decline of Los Angeles production. The successive strikes after covid reduced production at exactly the wrong time. Better contract terms did not translate into better earnings because production never recovered. Both strikes deserve to be seen by historians as a massive mistake.

All of this weirdly resonates with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, in which Matt Damon realizes that he and his men were the real sea people the whole time. Nolan’s film has made a comfortable profit, mainly through an exclusive four weeks in IMAX theaters. It was surpassed however in its third week by Spider Man: Brand New Day, which is on track to make $2.5 billion.

There is still money to be made in making movies, just not in Hollywood. Americans still want spectacle and entertainment in theaters, but they do not care whether the production was overseen in Hollywood or not. Artificial intelligence will reduce the number of creatives required to produce the same amount of content, and stories will be rendered more quickly. More to the point, this is all happening at once.

Eric Cline, eminent historian of the so-called Bronze Age Collapse, makes earnest and consistent efforts in every presentation to say that no single cause can explain everything.

Ugarit may have been sacked by the mysterious sea peoples, but other cities may have been burned down by their own citizens. Mycenean palaces definitely declined, but earthquakes seem to have played a role. A climate shift, possibly resulting from a volcanic eruption, may have caused agricultural peoples to leave their famine lands in search of better country.

Any one of these problems on its own would have been survivable for the economy of the late Bronze Age. All of them at once, together, reduced the network of elites until almost no one was left. Kings need the society of other kings to be seen as kings themselves.

When trade resumed after the ‘collapse’, it ran on new terms. Instead of centralized management from a palace, private merchants pursued profits on their own terms, while sovereigns focused on protecting merchants and collecting tax. A new economy replaced the old.

A similar story is now culminating in Hollywood. The decline of Warner Brothers took decades, but the sale of WB was the bill coming due for a decade of easy money. Global investment capital declined after 2022 due to the Russian war on Ukraine. On top of everything else, it was too much.

Rob Bonta is simply the agent of destruction that arrived in the middle of the mess to complicate the outcome and leave his name in the economic wreckage. Bonta wants power, so he aims to reshape the electorate of California even if it kills the state.

Political science calls this the Curley Effect. It is the same with Karen Bass, Nithya Rahman, and the political machinery that still holds back reconstruction almost two years after the Palisades burned. The damage is intrinsic to the project of creating and maintaining power. We cannot see the Curley Effect in the archaeology from Ugarit, but it was probably there.

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How The Trump Administration Is Shutting Down The Pediatric Sex Rejection Clinics

Matt Osborne — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:00:31 GMT

Dr. Travis Morrell is a senior fellow at Do No Harm, an organization that defends evidence-based medicine from identity politics. We discussed the new report from the Department of Health and Human Services, “Wolves in White Coats”, the Trump administration campaign against fraud in gender medicine, and a new strategy for getting the politics out of the American Medical Association.

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You can find Dr. Travis Morrell on X here.

The Do No Harm website is here.

On The Slow Self-Destruction Of The University

Matt Osborne — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:01:47 GMT

Touching the third rail of racial determinism destroyed Dr. Watson. Academia hates determinism, whether it involves race, gender, or sexuality. Spare me your diatribes on the imaginary racism that Jason Arday supposedly endured in the press with appeals to imaginary white men who got away with something in a dream you just had. Watson dared to say out loud that some inequalities cannot be eradicated safely or reasonably. The academy destroyed him for it.

Nor was the press notably racist against Jason Arday. The most consequential article unmasking him ran in the Guardian, which is hardly a noted right wing outlet. No, the actual racism thrives inside the ivory tower of the academy, among the elite professoriate. The racializing tentacles of academic racism radiate outwards through the host civilization of the western university, corrupting everything.

It is unsustainable, and moreover the reckoning is due. The economics professors can explain it to their colleagues: the enshittification of society, politics, and industry began as, and will likely end in, the dismantling of the university as donors and politicians reprioritize. The academy will go down very much like the English monasteries, now, because the universities are governed by the very utopian idealism they have imposed upon us all.

Race and the superstitions of the academy

To repeat: Dr. Watson recognized a link between IQ and race. Group average differences are not the same as individual destiny or justification for discrimination, as Watson has recognized, but he was still stripped of all his honorary titles and hounded by the academy, anyway. His family went through months of media harassment.

He did not take his own life, though, because he was not a coward, or a pathetic fraud, which is the same thing. Narcissistic collapse is a much bigger red flag for suicide than autism. And anyway, Jason Arday’s story about being autistic was clearly false, as people who knew him as a child say that he was verbal.

His miraculous story of magical African mother-healing does real harm to actual parents of actual autistic children who mistake his risible lies for truth, then blame themselves for inferior results in their kids. Of all his intellectual crimes, that one is the most unforgiveable, to me, and it speaks volumes about privileges afforded the ‘neurodivergent’ in the academy today. When the neurodivergent have privileges, everyone will become neurodivergent.

Arday is no innocent. A man who sends the police and libel lawyers after journalists when they ask him questions very likely has something to hide. Still, in the 48 hours since his body was found, Jason has become Jesus. Activist students are gathering to hold vigils and declare Jason Arday innocent of plagiarism. Academics who defended his fraud now declare him innocent of same. Never mind the hundreds of examples of plagiarism staring us all in the face: we are supposed to buy this cockamamie story in which racists made it all up, because someone with a degree has said so.

Tyler Austin Harper is such a person. Arday “was fetishized in his downfall by white conservatives who saw him as a test case for their own obsessions with an academic apparatus that they believe is not meritocratic enough — which is to say, not white enough”, Harper writes at The Atlantic. This puts the cart ahead of the horse: a purely meritocratic academy would necessarily be a whiter academy, say the genetic determinists, who are racist for saying so, according to Harper. He deplores the “nakedly racist enthusiasm” for the Arday story which, again, culminated in the pages of the left wing Guardian.

Which is disappointing, because Cambridge is synonymous with academic elitism, and Harper recognizes how out of touch the academy is. He sees “a British academic aristocracy so blinded by do-gooder racial neurosis that it was unable to spot lies that would have been obvious to any Joe Schmo”, someone who is not educated enough to buy Jason Arday’s bullshit. Men who never go to college, who work for long periods of time in blue collar occupations, meet fabulists like Arday, and learn to recognize them. Every working class neighborhood has someone like him.

The degreed classes lack this form of immunity. People who grant actual doctorates to students for masturbatory self-biographies disguised as a dissertations will naturally have no bullshit detector for any man who claims to have run nine marathons on a broken leg. A nonwhite man who makes the same claim will be received with glowing approval by a white academic elite professor, for he feels his privilege most keenly, being a cleric of the ideology of social justice.

Writing about Arday at City Journal before the suicide, John McWhorter said that academic hucksters all share “an assumption that his view is one that everyone would share if not compromised by hatred of the subaltern”. Arday was “a Magic Negro. The kindly, antiracist white academics think suspending their judgment when it comes to a black man makes them good people.”

The cathedral of the university has no immunity to a fraud with Jason Arday’s constellation of real and claimed characteristics. Indeed, it is impolite to question the word of a nonwhite person anywhere, anytime, inside or outside of the cathedral grounds, because of past racism. Black men are presumed truthful because they are held innocent by default due to past racism. This is all supposed to correct past racism, but it is deeply racist, and racializing. It promotes someone like Arday above their ability, guaranteeing an eventual, likely consequential, failure at some point.

That point came when Arday secured a $1.4 million book deal with Simon and Schuster. The triggering event that started the landslide of exposures was Jason Arday chasing a payday with lies. This was not the fault of any white person. Nathan Cofnas dared to write about Arday only after other people had met with Arday’s intimidation tactics. Cofnas is just one academic heretic who has exposed Arday’s extensive plagiarism using standard detection tools.

Never mind: we are supposed to blame racism because Cofnas has been railroaded out of the academy for the same thoughtcrime as Dr. Watson. Harper for one is sure that Cofnas is too tainted by racism to speak about Arday. Harper notes the exposure of Ross Barkan as a plagiarist, and the discrepancy that Barkan has kept his new job at The Nation. Racism, surely!

But this is nonsense. In the counterfactual universe where Arday did not take his own life, he might have profited handsomely on a tell-all memoir, How I Got Away With It. Writing before the suicide, McWhorter made this same point. “We don’t even need to speculate whether sometime in the near future, Arday will use critical race theory to justify his inventions, on the premise that his anecdotes represent a ‘common black narrative.”

In this, he will be backed by people devoted to that school of thought who say that we need to understand him “on a certain level.”
What level is that? A low one—bigotry.

We will never know, of course, because Arday was unable to cope with disclosure of the truth. He probably needed intensive cognitive behavioral therapy. So where were all the people who had lifted him up, at that moment? Why were they not getting him the help he so obviously needed?

The answer, of course, is that they were ghosting his messages. Those are now the same chattering bunch of Brits who demand “accountability” for his death. They are washing their hands in the blood of Jason Arday, martyr to the anti-racist cause. All their DEI crimes are forgiven, now. Thus the effort to sanctify him, exonerate him, and lift him up once again as a saint.

Democrats Lose When They Skip Oppo Research

Matt Osborne — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:03:38 GMT

Since he won his party’s nomination for the open Senate seat last week, El-Sayed has suffered a series of media hits. In politics, if you are explaining, you are losing, and El-Sayed keeps explaining his views on Mackinac Island and defending his views on Sharia law and the separation of church and state. The most glaring post-primary oppo drop, however, is the contents of El-Sayed’s now-deleted YouTube channel.

This one seems unforgiveable, from a professional point of view.

The dirty secret of the ‘liberal media’ is that they rely on partisan political opposition research for most of their stories about political candidates. What, you thought mainstream reporters spent their time actually sleuthing out stories to research? How quaint. No, reporters develop contacts and work their contacts.

The reader may recall how the campaign of increasingly disturbing allegations against Graham Platner began only after the filing deadline for the open Senate seat. Maine Democrats found out about his alleged rape of an ex-girlfriend, but only after The New York Times tried to catch and kill the victim’s story, delaying release until after Platner won the primary.

By that time, Platner’s polling with white working class Maine voters — the demographic he was supposed to win back to the Democratic Party — had already cratered so badly that one can reasonably draw conspiratorial deductions about party shenanigans.

The more subtle point, though, is that Democrats did not release the story themselves during the primary, and then ‘the liberal media’ resisted telling it properly — until the incentives changed.

Money is the biggest incentive. Much of what the legacy media ‘reveals’ about candidates for office is oppo research that was funded by campaigns, parties, PACs, and other entities with an agenda. In normal times, the press gets free research from both sides.

Except this time, for these midterm primary races, I think maybe a lot of Democrats decided to spend the money on other things. I think they tried to replace traditional oppo research with AI in this primary, and rushed the work, if they even did the work. The result is shoddy work.

Michigan Democrats did not hold a truly competitive primary (go figure) in this dimension, and it shows. El-Sayed only beat Stevens by a single point. Imagine that everything we have learned about him in the last few days had been known by Michigan Democrats two weeks ago. Somebody dropped the ball.

How Ritchie Herron Survived His Gender Identity And Lived To Talk About It

Matt Osborne — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 11:02:06 GMT

Ritchie Herron spent years living as ‘Abbie’. He took the cross-sex hormones and underwent a devastating genital surgery. Now detransitioned, Ritchie is a critic of the ‘gender affirming’ care model. He has a lawsuit pending against the British National Health Service.

Not only was Ritchie pushed into surgery, he says that his clinicians went out of their way to deny that he was experiencing regret. Ritchie shares his harrowing tale of alleged medical abuse and the lifetime of recovery after.

You can find Ritchie on X here.

His Substack is here.

Why America Cannot Spend Our Way Out Of The Public Education Crisis

Matt Osborne — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:01:18 GMT

It is a lie. It has always been a lie. The United States spends more on Social Security than defense. Although the federal share of funding for schools is small, on average, federal funding already benefits high-poverty districts more than wealthy districts, and accounts for a substantial share of revenue in some districts, according to a recent report from the Brookings Institution.

Unlike other analyses on the topic, the report both includes federal spending and leaves out local cost of living adjustments. The results show that schools in high-poverty, non-white districts spend more per student than wealthier, whiter districts, and that this higher cost goes to labor, i.e. teachers.

Contrary to the hypothesis that infinite money will fix the schools, “high-spending states do not produce systematically better educational outcomes”, the report finds.

The average deviation of districts’ spending from the own-state average was relatively constant until about 1995 for all quintiles. After 1995, the distribution of spending within states shifted considerably towards the highest non-white-share districts and away from the lowest non-white-share districts, similar to trends by poverty quintiles. In 2021, predominantly non-white districts spent $2,500 per pupil more and predominantly white districts spent over $1,000 less than their state’s average.

Across all 50 states, the worst-performing districts spent more per student on average, while the best-performing districts spent less per student than average. The report finds “that the least-white districts spent substantially more than the whitest districts” consistently for the last three decades.

The assumption in the ‘infinite money’ argument — that sufficient federal spending can fix the inequality of outcomes in data — is demonstrably false. Of course, that does not stop people from continuing to believe it is true, anyway. Unionized teachers in particular have no incentive to believe otherwise, which points to the actual source of the crisis in public education.

Helen Joyce Has A Long And Weary Road To Victory In The Dumbest Culture War Ever

Matt Osborne — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 11:04:15 GMT

Are you tired? Helen Joyce is tired. Campaigning to enforce the laws and rights of women to single-sex spaces, sports, and prisons is exhausting. Five years after she published a book to “pre-but” the case for transgender ‘inclusion’, she has yet to hear any debate opponent make an original argument for it.

In this conversation, we discuss the long and lonely road to victory in what we agree is the dumbest culture war ever waged. Helen Joyce is politically homeless, isolated by the media establishment, and out-funded by orders of magnitude compared to the legacy activist organizations that push insane ‘self-ID’ policies. She will fight until she wins. How long that will take, and how much of her, remains to be seen.

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The Sex Matters website is here.

Helen Joyce’s X account is here.

This is her Substack.

We Have To Talk About Liberalism And The Leftist Mental Health Crisis In America

Matt Osborne — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 11:04:04 GMT

Hong’s experience is common in female adolescence. “It was a numbness that took over, and a pain that I couldn’t describe. I couldn’t feel anymore, and that scared the hell out of me. And I found myself self-harming to feel something.” She was cutting herself and unable to function.

“I was diagnosed with bipolar disease. I was taking SSRIs and I’d overdosed on lithium. I didn’t know why I couldn’t connect with people deeper, and that pushes you into isolation.” Hong says she got better, and became an independent adult, by working in a restaurant.

There, she found people “from so many different backgrounds and life experiences, and the best restaurant teams take care of one another so that you don't have to think about if you belong here or not.” Immigrants like her own parents, for example. Hong explicitly identifies with the DSA wing of the Democratic Party, the young communists.

“And between women and people who identify as non-binary, there's this group of phenomenally underrepresented folks in the food and beverage industry”, Hong told her interviewer. Hong spoke of her restaurant business as a collective, “we”. “Specifically, women, women of color and non-binary folks who don't often see themselves as leaders in an industry”, Hong responded when asked to explain.

“The most compassionate, hardworking people are just not valued and seen in an industry that's supposed to value and see everyone, because food is for everyone.” Hong ascribed this ‘found family’ identity, this sense of ‘solidarity’, to the galvanizing effects of the first Trump administration.

“He affirmed that we had all been very complacent and comfortable”, Hong told a food magazine(!). “And I don’t think democracy is supposed to be comfortable if it’s operating in the right way. It definitely shouldn’t be comfortable for the folks who have been in positions of power.”

“We need to start giving people money”, Hong said, pronouncing the lessons of covid, for “they will know what to do with it.” We must eat the rich and redistribute their flesh to the masses. As a failed restaurant operator, Hong will be the perfect governor to have Wisconsinites eating each other in no time at all.

There are lots studies on the correlation of leftist politics and mental illness

Magical thinking

“Restaurants can be a sustainable industry”, Hong said, uttering the power-word of the green new deal. “Community” and “communities” need sustainable restaurants like her own.

Hong’s marriage on the other hand proved unsustainable. “We didn't make enough time to honor each other as individuals because we were so immersed in the restaurant and our child.” The separation left Francesca Hong free to focus on politics.

Her restaurant was also unsustainable. Hong had to rent a restaurant kitchen in order to shoot a campaign ad in her run for the state house. Her solution to the inequalities of the restaurant trade is political.

“I am competing with ghost kitchens, I am competing with fast-casual, I am competing with Mark [Cuban] investing in restaurant tech that I will never be able to afford, and I’m being priced out”, she complained in 2023.

I think the restaurant industry is reliant on income inequality, and it is absolutely reliant on the wealthy becoming wealthier. The nuances of inflation are also that those who are controlling a lot of the supply chains dictate the cost, and consumers absorb that cost. So capitalism has not been working for consumers or workers. There has to be transformative change in those economic structures, and it’s going to come from more people fighting for economic justice. It starts with increasing wages and giving people agency over their wages, and then ensuring that the costs of childcare, transportation, housing, and education are seen as a public good, and that government itself can be used for good. It is a systems change that needs to happen. I am a business owner who is anti-capitalist because I know that for a business my size, I am no longer competing with other businesses my size.

If the reader has encountered an ordering kiosk at McDonald’s, they will already have seen how the economics of wage inflation, measured in higher minimum wages, has played out in the fast food industry. Franchise chains of all types have been squeezed between the rise in supply chain costs and the rise in wages. The results are automation, rebranding, cost-cutting, and the disappearance of the dollar menu.

Of course, by “those who are controlling a lot of the supply chains dictate the cost”, Hong means capitalism. Capitalism is the problem that she intends to fix for Wisconsin (“systems change”).

In 2023, she had evolved beyond the laws of supply and demand because she was no longer in competition with other businesses like her own, somehow. This is an economic theory born of cognitive dissonance, which is to say it is crazy talk. Hong is mad, and mad about her restaurant.

To recap, Francesca Hong began self-harming; was diagnosed as bipolar; had a mental breakdown; overdosed on lithium, and had to be hospitalized. Her adult origin story begins there.

After her divorce, her restaurant failed, so she went into politics, where she can seize the means of food production and redistribute them to marginalized communities. The nonbinaries will be first in line, apparently.

“Wisconsin is what I call a petri dish for authoritarian tactics,” she told her interviewer. She said she was talking about Trump, but I say Francesca Hong was telling us about herself. She gave Wisconsin fair warning of what she really is.

Maine Democrats Cannot Find A Normal Guy To Run Against Susan Collins

Matt Osborne — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 18:01:27 GMT

Platner dropped ou…

There Is 'Nothing Left' Of The Progressive Movement That Delivered Obamacare

Matt Osborne — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:17:10 GMT

Simultaneously, their wealth made them self-conscious. Barker writes about one heir to the Hunt oil fortune in Texas “whose grandfather, H. L. Hunt, promoted racist policies. To me, it seemed like Leah felt immense guilt over her wealth and was using her inheritance to try to right her family’s wrongs.”

In Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, Barker writes of Chloe, “granddaughter of British Communist Party member Claud Cockburn; the daughter of Andrew Cockburn, a distinguished journalist; and the sister of Olivia Wilde, a famous actress who had two children with Jason Sudeikis.” Chloe promoted criminal justice ‘reform’ by directing donations (“incredible funding”) to progressive district attorney candidates.

“Not long after I spoke with her on the phone, several mysterious donations began coming in through ActBlue, from donors I knew were connected to Cockburn.” Donors received memos from Chloe Cockburn prompting them “to read the Atlantic article ‘The Case for Reparations’ by Ta-Nehisi Coates” and “follow Black Lives Matter founder Patrisse Cullors, transgender activist Andrea James, author Ibram Kendi, and others, including prominent ‘prison abolitionists.’”

“I remember thinking Chloe was the living embodiment of a ‘coastal elite’ ... the type of person who orbits the highest echelons of the party ecosystem.” Barker could recognize privilege because she came to politics from a very different place.

Born to the working class, Barker struggled through childhood with “a rare, life-threatening genetic disorder called primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD)” that insurance companies would forever exclude as a pre-existing condition.

She became a health insurance reform advocate, speaking on behalf of the Affordable Care Act and supporting Barack Obama’s Democratic Party as they pushed ‘Obamacare’ through Congress and paid an enormous price in the ensuing midterm elections.

“I thought it would bind me to the Democratic Party forever”, Barker writes. According to the theoreticians of Marxist revolution, that is exactly what should have happened. Barker was supposed to become a member of the dependent classes, a reliable Democratic voter because she depended on a Democratic legislative achievement to survive.

Reading this memoir inspired nostalgia in me for the progressive movement that existed in 2009 and 2010. It is gone now, though, and this is a memoir of the going. “I was seeing the destruction of the party of the working class in real time. The Democrats were now run by people who had zero cultural connection to the people the party had long represented.” When she saw it, she could not unsee it.

Like me, she found her breaking point when she was in the room with other Democrats. I was at a networking conference, however, whereas Barker was a much higher flyer, and walked out of the 2024 Democratic National Convention when she realized that Democrats were cooked.

Barker was never a party insider. She was however an accomplished fundraiser, able to work the Chloes of the progressive movement on behalf of candidates. Her team ethos drew on Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glenn Ross: “Always be closing”. Barker chose to work with the progressive insurgent candidates and keep them on task with Call Time, the hated work of cold-calling donors.

Her campaign work ended when she took a job at Left Rising, an organization that works with Justice Democrats, the Sunrise Movement, and other progressive nonprofits linked to the Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the party. But during the early 2020s, this machinery “seemed to have one, singular goal: punish all white people and demean anyone who wasn’t ‘oppressed.’”

At the same time, Barker could see the progressive youth vanguard becoming cogs within the Democratic Party machinery. Rather than a reform movement, they were a faction within the party. Barker has examples of progressive change candidates undermined by their own party. They not the juiciest morsels in the book, though.

Barker dishes on Shaun King and his Real Justice PAC, both “backed by a web of powerful people who had real money behind them.” As King embarrassed himself through social media grifting, Barker grew discontented. She ultimately canceled King, quietly.

“After one final article came out where King had been caught begging his followers to send his wife money on Cash App the same day she closed on a near-million-dollar home, I messaged my coworker who managed our website and asked her to scrub any association of Real Justice PAC from my biography.”

Then in 2020, “I met several operatives in the progressive movement who said they used ‘they’ and ‘them’ pronouns.” Her turn had come. The gender goblins had finally arrived to forcibly convert Evan Barker to the Church of Woke.

Swann Marcus Wants Democrats To Be Normal Again

Matt Osborne — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 11:03:52 GMT

“Swann Marcus” is the X handle of “Jon”, an anonymous app user who attracted a large following before the 2024 election. Then he walked away from social media for eight months after Donald Trump won.

In this exclusive interview, Jon analyzes his own blind spots and complains that fringe candidates are becoming the face of the Democratic Party, further alienating voters outside of deeply-blue, highly-educated, liberal urban bubbles. He is a vocal critic of the socialist DSA wing and candidates like Graham Platner.

Jon agrees that identity politics have been a disaster for both parties. Republicans lose when they pander to Black voters and win when they are just normal Republicans who serve Black constituents well. Democrats on the other hand have slowly lost Black men by pandering to anti-police activism.

Then I asked Jon to analyze the party’s adherence to gender ideology, and we found our point of disagreement. He has not been radicalized on the issue (‘peak trans’). He still believes that “actual transgender people” need special rights. And like many Democrats, he discounts the valence of social issues at election-time.

However, Jon acknowledged that, like unrestricted immigration or consumer inflation, gender ideology can have deleterious long-term effects on the Democratic coalition that are hard to see in polling data. He admits that Democrats have a hard time being normal — and he is pessimistic about the future of the party.

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Jon’s X account is here.

Pride Goeth Before The Fall Of Civilizations

Matt Osborne — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:04:04 GMT

After a 20-hour manhunt, a German SW…

Why 'The Odyssey' Discourse Is Not Over Yet

Matt Osborne — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:01:41 GMT

This is actually painful for me to look at because it looks like plastic. Forget your anachronisms, I don’t care that it isn’t made out of boar’s tusks. Just don’t show me a helmet that looks like a 3D printer creation in your movie poster and expect me to pay the opportunity cost and ticket price of an IMAX film. Not happening

The Odyssey needs a solid …

Male Socialization And The Warrior Path To Enlightenment In 'Circle of Iron'

Matt Osborne — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 11:02:24 GMT

The intergenerational transmission of accounts of real journeys is far older than written language — and the chain of transmission has always been male to male

“Bruce set the story in a land that never was and always is,” a title card informs us at the opening of the 1978 film Circle of Iron. Unfolding as a series of Zen koans, the movie is ostensibly a …

'White Supremacy Culture' At The Smithsonian

Matt Osborne — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 11:03:53 GMT

Like the Smithsonian itself, the history of American de…

Which Conspiracy Theories Are Worth Believing? An Interview With Gerald Posner

Matt Osborne — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 11:00:34 GMT

Gerald Posner is a journalist and author of several books. We recently had a wide-ranging discussion about Nazi gender experiments, puberty blocker experiments, the great conspiracy theories of our age, and why the Jews always get blamed for everything.

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You can find Gerald Posner’s X account here.

His books are available at this Amazon link.

Here is his Substack.

Why Democrats Are In Disarray

Matt Osborne — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 13:01:22 GMT

CNN is reporting on a “midterm war” in the Democratic Party over the rise of Democratic Socialism.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York reportedly confronted Sen. Bernie Sanders over his “meddling” in a primary challenge against Rep. Valerie Foushee in North Carolina during a recent phone call.

“He seemed to not care,” said Rep. Greg Meeks of New York, “a Jeffries ally” on that call. I believe Rep. Meeks because Sanders really does not care about black representation in Congress. Sanders wants Democratic Socialism represented in Congress. It can come in any color, for him.

Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam, the first Muslim woman elected to office in North Carolina, was endorsed by Sanders, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement, and the Working Families Party.

Foushee won the March primary by a single percentage point. It was just one of several races in which the progressive wing of the Democratic Party challenged the ‘old guard’, which just happens to include the old Democratic Party coalition.

The youth vanguard of Democratic Socialism is led mainly by immigrant populations, these days. Rep. Ro Khanna, a Hindu, comes to mind. So does Allam, or Abdul El-Sayed, the Michigan Senate candidate, both Muslims.

Demographic displacement is not only painful, but unpopular. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaigned for El-Sayed in Detroit last week. About three-quarters of the city’s population is black. Fox News reporter David Marcus found only around 100 people at the venue.

Among them were “fewer Black people than you could find at Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s restricted beach club in Rhode Island.” The Congressional Black Caucus has endorsed Haley Stevens in the race.

Marcus talked to “the spokesperson for Don Offord, the progressive running for the Democratic nomination in Michigan’s 11th Congressional District.”

One of the animating elements of this socialist insurgency became crystal clear, as he couldn’t stop talking about AIPAC.
“Don doesn’t take any money from AIPAC (the pro-Israel lobbying group),” Mark said proudly. I asked him if this could be a problem, not just with Jewish voters, but with moderate Democrats who support the Jewish state. A kind of shock fell over him, as if he’d never considered this, and he just refused to answer.

El-Sayed has found the limits of DSA pandering as well in Michigan, for he has distanced himself from ideological socialism while keeping the progressive economic agenda. He “believes” in a capitalism that is “regulated”. It is the DSA agenda — Medicare For All, wealth taxes, and businesses breakups — wearing a suit and tie.

This intersectional car-crash is coming into focus now because of the disaster in Maine, where Democrats are scrambling to replace Graham Platner as their challenger to incumbent Senator Susan Collins, a Republican.

Ink Pour

Matt Osborne — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:02:05 GMT

It’s time for another roundup of all the keyboard-tickling and podcastiness that I’ve been up to, lately. Next week, premium subscribers will get to hear my full interview with author and journalist Gerald Posner. Free subscribers will have to wait until August. I have also been working on a couple of short stories for premium subscribers, and one of th…