A terrifying thing appeared on my Twitter feed this morning. Secretary of Health and Human Services and bear-fighter Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that he’s “teamed up” with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for the “Pete & Bobby Challenge.” This, unfortunately, is a fitness challenge. Even more unfortunately, it involves doing 100 push-ups and 50 pull-ups. Most unfortunately of all, they want us to do it all in five minutes or less.
You might take heart that in the gym-based, sweat-soaked motivational video that accompanies the Tweet, RFK Jr. takes a whole five minutes and 25 seconds to complete this challenge. However, keep in mind that he’s in his seventies, and does the entire challenge in jeans. SecDef Pete, who, if he’s an alcoholic, is the healthiest alcoholic who’s ever lived, completes the under-five-minutes no problem, doing pull-ups like he’s God playing games with dice.
The odds that I’m going to do this challenge are equal to the odds that I’ll take up needlepoint, start liking mayonnaise, or watch an episode of Virgin River: Zero. I’m all for health and fitness, but this version of Bowflex America isn’t for me. My US passport doesn’t mean I need to crawl through mud like a Marine. I’m the one the Marines are supposed to be defending.
I preferred a previous generation’s fitness plan: Michelle Obama’s program of growing your vegetables and engaging in some peppy light multicultural Sesame Street dancing. I mean, I didn’t do that, either; I had a reputation as America’s coolest dad to protect. But it was more accessible than RFK’s roided-out brotastic exercise nightmare.
It’s a matter of exercise perspective. I don’t treat my life like a high-intensity interval. I treat my body like I treat my barbecue: low and slow, with the occasional wet rub. The latter part means I enjoy a good schvitz. Get your mind out of the sewer.
My fitness program is this: 30 to 45 minutes of low-to-moderate intensity yoga at least five teams a week, and at least a half hour of at least semi-brisk walking a day. And I don’t eat every meal like someone just dumped a barrel of fried chicken tenders into a trough. It might not seem like a lot, and I don’t exactly look imposing, but when I have to duck under a rope in airport security, walk up four flights of stairs, or hump for miles around Chicago with a 30-pound suitcase on my back (which happened last weekend, for reasons that I’ll tell you at dreary length if I see you sometime), I can do it without collapsing.
I’m all for a renewed Presidential Fitness challenge, and can get behind the MAHA healthy eating program. But I reject this idea of treating life as though it were Basic Training that we must complete every day. The goal should be to get through your routine with minimal stress and strain. They call it Functional Fitness, and unless you are an Olympian, a professional surfer, (or, apparently, a Cabinet member), it’s all you need.
I treat every day of my life like I’m recovering from a medium-intensity injury or a mild illness. Sure enough, it helps prevent medium intensity injuries and mild illness. I can hold a five-minute plank without even trying, but it’s not because I’m jacked. It’s because I do light, boring, mild exercise every day. My abs aren’t a six-pack, but a solid pony keg in the middle will do the job as well.
Whose fitness example would you follow: RFK Jr. and SecDef Pete, who look like they’re training to defend Thermopylae against the armies of Xerxes, or President Trump? That man is 79 years old, and his fitness routine involves a weekend round of golf and furious midnight thumb-typing. You can do it, America. It’s an achievable goal.
Author: Neal Pollack
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Why I am never doing the ‘Pete & Bobby Challenge’
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What the skibidi?
People whose minds stopped evolving 20 years ago are having a snit because the Cambridge Dictionary, the world’s largest online lexicography, has added a few Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha slang terms to its more than 6,000 entries. The most controversial include “skibidi,” “delulu” and “tradwife.” You could argue that the latter is more of a millennial linguistic formulation for the extremely online, but the other two are definitely youth newspeak.
Tradwife, as a term and a viral activity, is going to stick around for a while. “Skibidi,” derived from the YouTube Skibidi Toilet meme, is a word with as many meanings as “aloha” and “shalom,” and has the potential for a generation-spanning shelf life. “Delulu,” short for “delusional,” is a ridiculous babyism and is already about as cool and relevant as saying “cray cray.”
In other words, the world changes, time and language marches on. I would advise against heading in the mental direction of writer and artist Lee Escobedo, who wrote in the Guardian: “Skibidi brainrot encapsulates a generation fluent in irony but starved for meaning. This kind of hyper-chaotic media serves as both entertainment and an ambient worldview for young men raised online. Their minds normalize prank-as-expression.”
Kids today and their skibidi brainrot, amirite? This kind of stuffed-shirt intellectual condemning the kids’ vibe periodically emerges in generational cycles. Words come and go. But the real comedy comes when normies try to get hip with the youth.
Since I’m the last surviving member of Generation X, the current mild strain of language controversy reminds me of the “Lexicon of Grunge” that the New York Times published in 1992. Times freelancer Rick Marin (author of Cad: The Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor), seeking to report on how the cool kids were talking, called up the offices of Seattle indie-rock label Sub Pop. He got receptionist Megan Jasper, one of the greatest Gen-X heroes, on the line.
Jasper, who later ended up being Sub Pop’s CEO, proceeded to pepper Marin with a glossary of nonsense words. Despite some Times fact-checking, the terms got through the filter, leading Marin to write, “all subcultures speak in code.”
And that’s how we learned that “grunge” people used “swingin’ on the flippity-flop” to refer to hanging out. A loser was a “cob nobbler,” though not as bad as a “lamestain.” Some of the terms, like “harsh realm” and “score,” actually entered mainstream vocabulary. Unfortunately, “bloated big bag of bloatation,” for drunk, didn’t. In a 2020 interview, Jasper, in typical Gen-X fashion, regretted the whole episode, but in particular regretted that Marin didn’t use the term “tuna platter,” which she’d offered him as grunge slang for “hot date.” Either it was too risqué or so ridiculous that it rang even the Times’ broken BS detector.
The Gen-X irony here is that if she’d grown up in the age of TikTok, Jasper’s Grunge Lexicon might have gone mega-viral, becoming the actual lexicon, and fast. The world might have found itself calling old-ripped jeans “wack slacks.” There would be a “Bound and Hagged” entry in the Cambridge Dictionary, telling people that it meant “staying home alone on a weekend night.” But since it was Gen X, the words just fell into a pit, and will never see the light of dictionary justice.
So here’s to aimless young men and their prank-as-expression. Hooray for brainrot. Our brains are going to rot anyway, so we might as well play Word Jabberwocky while we can. One of the joys, for me, of being alive for nearly six decades is watching the world change, sometimes gradually, sometimes quickly. You can wake up and find yourself immersed in a whole new culture, a completely different language, and you don’t ever have to leave the house. Any skibidi cob-nobbling tradwife who doesn’t enjoy that feeling is being completely delulu.
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Jussie Smollett’s conspiracy theory
Like a cold sore that pops up when your immune system is busy elsewhere, or a text-thread chain that you thought had concluded, Jussie Smollett has returned to the conversation. He has a new single from Rowdy Records, a movie (which he directed, co-wrote, and stars in) on Tubi, a role in the Fox reality series ‘Special Forces’ that airs in September and he features in a Netflix documentary, The Truth About Jussie Smollett? that airs later this month. Now he’s doing interviews as well.
In a chat with Variety’s Tatiana Siegel this week, Smollett claims that the alleged hate-crime at the hands of two MAGA-hat wearing, noose-holding, bleach-splashing white guys he experienced in 2019, later revealed to the world as a hoax, was, in fact, not a hoax. Not only did it happen, he says, but it was part of a deeper conspiracy that involved the Chicago Police Department and then-Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel.
“I’m not an investigative reporter or a detective,” Smollett tells Siegel. “I can’t sit and tell you exactly, beat by beat, what happened. I can only tell you what did not happen. And what did not happen is the story that’s been out there for almost seven years, that somehow I would have even a reason to do something as egregious as this.”
On the one hand, Smollett is small potatoes, a strange E! True Hollywood story sidebar to the era when woke peaked and everything was a hate crime. When the farce of his situation came to light, the bubble popped, the fever broke and we all had a nice laugh. Jussie got a (later-overturned) conviction for felony disorderly conduct, and the Nigerian brothers who he drew into his scheme wrote a book called Bigger Than Jussie: The Disturbing Need for a Modern-Day Lynching.
But now he’s back, certainly not bigger than ever, but giving it another shot, and showing that, no matter how much someone disgraces themselves in American life, there’s always an avenue for a comeback, as long as people are willing to self-perpetuate myths and accept a little debasement. “Every single other person’s story has changed multiple times,” Smollett says in the interview. “Mine has never. I have nothing to gain from this.”
In fact, he has everything to gain. He can gain money, a shred of his former stellar reputation, and, most importantly, publicity. “Every time I have to go do something now, I tell myself, ‘Time to be Whitney Houston,’” he tells Variety. “It’s like a role that you’re playing when you go out there, where it’s who you are, but it’s not really who you are.”
It doesn’t matter who Jussie Smollett really is in private, or in his own mind. He could be the kindest and tenderest son, brother, friend, coworker and fiancé who ever lived. But to the public, he’s someone who tried to exploit a tense political climate around race for personal gain, and failed in the stupidest way possible. The grift is eternally real, and in his comeback apology tour he’s acting just as disingenuous as he did during his headline-grabbing moment. If he’s Whitney Houston, then I’m Charles Dickens.
Smollett has got less juice than the average real housewife or B-tier podcaster. But in a world where Netflix has its own reality universe, and where reality stars and former A-list celebrities can endlessly compete for cash and publicity on various platforms, there may still be a path forward for Jussie. Bottom feeders can survive in a rich media ecosystem. Sometimes, they even rise to the top.
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Wow! The Trumpiest Kennedy Center list ever
In the most-hyped announcement of Kennedy Center Honor nominees ever, President Trump appeared this morning at the Kennedy Center, or, as he put it on Truth Social last night, the “TRUMP/KENNEDY CENTER, whoops.” Now all the teasing is done, and the nominees stand revealed as: country superstar George Strait, the original Broadway Phantom of the Opera Michael Crawford, Sylvester Stallone, Gloria Gaynor and, yes, KISS. It’s 2025 and Donald Trump is enshrining KISS at the Kennedy Center. We live in the greatest timeline.
While there will certainly be objections, this isn’t a particularly objectionable list. But it is the Trumpiest Kennedy Center list ever. Last year, the Biden administration honored the Apollo Theater and the Grateful Dead, among others. Fat chance Trump would include those. In 2022, George Clooney, the anti-Trump, got the call. During Trump’s first term, honorees included Lin-Manuel Miranda, Sesame Street and Joan Baez. But Trump wasn’t in charge of our nation’s leading cultural institution then. He is now.
The President had kind words about all the nominees, but he seemed most excited about Stallone, telling the origin story of the Rocky movie at great length. “He’s a little bit tough,” Trump said. “He’s a little bit different. He’s a little tough guy… The only one that’s a bigger name on the Hollywood Wall of Fame is a guy named Donald Trump. I’m on the Hollywood Walk of Fame too, believe it or not.”
We believe it, sir.
Then Trump fulfilled the dream of every 12-year-old boy from Detroit Rock City by reciting the names of the band members of KISS: Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, Gene Simmons and Peter Criss (the cat), all of whom, younger readers might not know, put out solo albums in 1978. “They’re great people,” Trump said. “They work hard. They’re still working hard. It’s an honor.”
Trump spent many words tying in the revitalization of the Kennedy Center with his overall plan to make Washington, DC sparkling and safe again. “We ended the woke political programming,” he said. “We’re going to have the best entertainment in the world… We have completely reversed the decline of this cherished national institution. Look at this marble. These columns, the next time you see them, will be magnificent. The bones are so good. If you don’t have the bones of a building, you might as well forget it.”
The Kennedy Center Awards ceremony will take place in December. The host will be Donald Trump. “It’s gonna be a big evening,” said Trump. “I said, I’m the President of the United States. Are you fools to ask me to host? They said, sir, you’ll get much better ratings.”
Against all odds, the Kennedy Center board managed to persuade their chairman, a man who loves being on stage and on TV more than any other person who’s ever lived, to host the ceremony. It will be huge, Trump said, bigger than the Academy Awards, which has been bleeding audiences because it became too political. Trump said he finally agreed to do the show because he used to host live finales for The Apprentice, which were very successful and got ratings almost as big as the Academy Awards themselves.
“I don’t want to make it political,” Trump said. “Maybe I will make it political. But it will be our kind of political… We’re going to have a tremendous day in December. It’s going to be very special.”
This is an important moment for President Trump because he’s long coveted his own Kennedy Center Honors nomination. “I wanted one, but they never gave me one,” he said. “I waited and waited and waited. Instead, I became chairman. Maybe next year they’ll honor Trump.”
Shout it, Mr. President. Shout it. Shout it out loud.
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The White House UFC cage fight
When President Trump said in July that he planned to host a Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the White House lawn next year as part of the U.S.A.’s 250th birthday celebrations, people dismissed it as a typical piece of hyperbole and bluster. “We have a lot of land there,” Trump said, which is somewhat true, but that doesn’t mean that you can plop down an Octagon, right?
Well, as it turns out, that’s exactly what it means. Trump is like that boy in the old Twilight Zone episode. Whatever he wishes, comes true. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, UFC boss Dana White, one of Trump’s biggest supporters, said that the UFC 250th anniversary (of the U.S.) is definitely going to happen. “Fighters will be warming up in the White House,” White said. “It’s incredible.”
It certainly is, especially when you consider the cultural proclivities of Trump’s two immediate predecessors. On his last day in office, Barack Obama, the ultimate NPR President, had lunch with novelists Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith and Colson Whitehead. Joe Biden spent much of his term hiding, masked and socially distanced. Trump is building a grand ballroom and plans to hold a blood-soaked cage match for the biggest American birthday party in two generations.
The hype possibilities would make the late Don King drool. As it turns out, the current UFC men’s heavyweight champion is a British fighter named Tom Aspinall. Assuming he’s still up top when next summer rolls around, you’d be crazy to not pit him against a scrappy American challenger who has a chance to pull an upset. It would be like recreating the American revolution – in a cage. Maybe mixed martial artist Curtis Blaydes would be a good choice. He’s currently fourth in the world, and is definitely a bad dude. The number two fighter in the world is Cyril Gane, from France. In the spirit of the American Revolution, he could provide financial support, or tag in when Blaydes gets tired.
On the women’s side, there’s no better choice than Bantamweight division champion Kayla Harrison, who’s so American that she’s from a place called Middletown. She’s an absolute beast. Everyone would love to see her take down her number-one challenger, Julianna Peña, “The Venezuelan Vixen.”
But there are other possibilities for the undercard. Why not stick Jake Paul in the ring? He gets ratings. Maybe have him fight Mr. Beast, who’d better start training now. Conor McGregor must appear. Maybe he can fight Jake Gyllenhaal, an enactment of their epic duels from the Road House remake. The political realm has us imagining other fights: AOC versus Nancy Mace. J.D. Vance versus Pete Buttigieg. Collin Allred versus John Cornyn. Of course, RFK Jr. needs to fight a bear, and win. And we know that Trump is going to get into the ring and grab the microphone, but who wouldn’t want to see him go a few rounds with Gavin “Tough Guy” Newsom, or even, better, Vladimir Putin? Let’s settle this Ukraine issue once and for all, not with Alaska diplomacy, but with mano-a-mano bare knuckle combat.
We no longer live in NPR America. NPR is dead. No novelists will be visiting the White House unless Ted Nugent writes a novel. This is Donald Trump’s America, UFC America, let’s get ready to rumble America. Mike Judge’s Idiocracy has come to vivid life. Not Sure will monster-truck duel in the pits with Beef Supreme while President Camacho shoots a flamethrower into the air. UFC. It’s what plants crave. It has electrolytes.
“I don’t give a shit if there’s only one seat at this thing,” Dana White told the WSJ. “This is so monumental and historical and just such a cool thing. All I care about is the Octagon on the lawn and the fight happening with the backdrop being the White House and the Washington Monument.”
It’s so stupid and crazy, it just might work. The ratings will the huge, the biggest ratings ever. Happy birthday, America. It’s time.
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South Park is ICE-cool on Trump
In this week’s South Park, the second episode since Paramount paid Trey Parker and Matt Stone eleventy billion dollars to make content, Parker and Stone absolutely and brilliantly rip the Trump administration to shreds. Unlike our late-night comedy hosts, who don’t have the chops for anything other than name-calling and juvenile slap fights with the President, South Park gets to the heart of darkness of the Trump administration, and also to what’s so funny about our new political age.
Not only does the episode feature a savage attack on Trump, depicting him as Mr. Roarke at Mar-a-Lago as Fantasy Island, it also shows J.D. Vance as a tiny Tattoo, who Trump literally kicks out of the way when he gets annoying. There’s actually a bedroom scene where Satan, Donald Trump’s lover, is reading in bed and J.D./Tattoo asks Trump if he wants him to “oil Satan’s butthole.” My God.
But that’s just a side gag at the end of an episode that savagely portrays Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as an evil sadist who enjoys blowing out the brains of puppies on camera. She also has a hideous makeup face that can slide off her skull and take on a life of its own, shades of The Substance. There’s an ICE raid, including guidance counselor Mr. Mackey, who’s trying to “make his nut” by arresting illegal immigrants, on a Dora the Explorer Live! concert. Later, ICE stages a raid on heaven itself, where Noem tells ICE agents to only grab Latino angels: “If they’re brown, bring them down.”
If that weren’t enough, the B-story involves Eric Cartman getting into a pissing contest with another student to see who can be the most vicious conservative YouTube influencer, owning liberal college students in live debates, à la White House booster Charlie Kirk. The parody manages to make Kirk look like a total chode while also making the woke college students he’s debating look like clueless idiots.
When South Park is on target, and it often is, it’s a vicious over-the-top indictment of the way we live now. Parker and Stone are the scatological satiric geniuses of our time, and they’ve figured out a way into the whirlwind of Trump’s second term. As Trump said himself in a ridiculous weekend post, woke is dead, being a Republican is cool again. That also means that anti-woke Republicanism is now the language of the establishment. And the whole point of satirical comedy is to knock the establishment down a peg.
This time, the establishment, though maybe not Trump himself, is embracing the satire. J.D. Vance, responding to a cartoon depicting him as a servile sex dwarf, tweeted, “We’ll I’ve finally made it.” For Charlie Kirk, the South Park episode is the best thing that’s ever happened to his brand. He posted a clip from the episode where Cartman receives a nomination for the “Charlie Kirk Award For Young MasterDebaters.”
How do we know we live in a free country? When a cartoon can depict a president as having a gay love affair with Satan, and that president’s literal and figurative Number Two says “more, please.” It’s a good sign that we live in the best of times. Just watch your back if you’re at a Dora Live! concert, or if you’re a brown person in heaven.
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Nancy Mace: the fairest of them all
“Trump in high heels” is how Congresswoman Nancy Mace described herself earlier this week when she announced her candidacy for governor of her home state, South Carolina. We don’t know whether Trump in high heels already exists because we still haven’t seen the Epstein Files. But let’s not assume the worst, and let’s examine Mace’s claim at face value. Does she really have Trumpian qualities?
Like Trump, Mace has some idiosyncratic political views, while also going hard in the paint with the antiwoke rhetoric that has helped restore the Republicans to national dominance. Mace was the first female Corps of Cadets graduate from the military college The Citadel, where her father was on the faculty, and published a memoir about the experience in 2001. She’s fervently pro-life, but also fervently pro-exception in the cases of rape and incest. Mace is a sexual assault survivor herself, and has generally been a strong advocate for the rights of victims of sexual assault, but has also cleverly tied that into anti-immigrant sentiment by sponsoring something called the “Preventing Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act.”
Though Mace has significant detractors on the left, who try to lump her in with other controversial Republican congresswomen such as Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Lauren Boebert, she isn’t necessarily an empty pantsuit. As chair of the House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee on cybersecurity, information technology and government innovation, she presided over a remarkable public hearing last fall that claimed the Pentagon was hiding the truth about advanced aerospace technology and has been operating a UFO-crash-retrieval program for decades. “Are they keeping the president of the United States in the dark?” she asked.
This X-Files component is missing, however, from Mace’s South Carolina platform, which, judging by her campaign announcement, will center around popular Republican ideas such as expanding school choice and eliminating the state personal income tax. She faces a phalanx of Republican opponents in the primary, but doesn’t seem worried. In Trumpian style, she said, “I’m not the establishment’s pick. I don’t listen to political consultants. I never have.”
That’s because Mace is her own best political consultant. She has a master’s degree in journalism and, before becoming a politician, ran her own public-relations agency. She knows exactly how the news business and publicity works. Her most Trumpian quality is her ability to make herself the center of any news story, at any cost. She’ll break any egg to get into the headlines.
A Washingtonian magazine profile of Mace last year led with an anecdote of her speaking at a prayer breakfast of conservative Christians, discussing how she had to rebuff her fiancé’s sexual overtures to get there. “No, baby, we don’t got time for that this morning,” she said. “I’ve got to get to the prayer breakfast, and I’ve got to be on time.” The profile quotes several disgruntled former staffers, including one who says, “She’s not a real legislator. She’s not a legitimate or serious member of Congress – she’s just using her office to get on TV.”
In particular, that story highlights Mace’s publicity-seeking role in the ouster of former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. She received a lot of criticism for her anti-McCarthyism, including her response to the “backlash,” during which she wore a red “A” on her shirt, not to indicate that anyone had accused her of adultery, but because she meant she’d been unfairly persecuted by the media, by Democrats, and even by fellow Republicans.
After January 6, Mace spoke up strongly against President Trump, but in the Washingtonian profile, her staffers say it wasn’t out of principle. “She was begging senior staff, including myself, to let her leave the office so she could,” as one ex-senior staffer remembers Mace saying, “go get punched in the face by the rioters.”
More recently, Mace has placed herself in the hot center of trans politics, becoming a strong advocate for banning trans women from federal bathroom facilities and openly mocking the first trans member of Congress. In a highly publicized (by Mace) incident last year, she appeared with her arm in a sling after a House reception for the 25th anniversary of a foster-care act, claiming that “a PRO-TRANS MAN chose violence and threats, costing me an injured wrist,” though witnesses say that this person merely shook her hand and said trans people in foster care “need your support.”
It sounded suspiciously like a 2021 incident when Mace claimed “Antifa vandals” had spray-painted anarchist symbols outside her Charleston home, as well as slogans such as “no gods, no masters” and “all politicians are bastards.” A Mace fundraising email soon followed. All this put together would make Nancy Mace the only politician on Earth to have been attacked by Antifa, a trans man and, potentially, January 6 rioters. It’s a seemingly dubious galère because, frankly, she’s not that controversial.
But though she lacks Trump’s distinct politics, she is – like Trump would be if he wore heels – incredibly solipsistic, with a level of self-regarding narcissism that her political opponents would be foolish to ignore. She’s put together and nobody’s fool. One can imagine her as the electoral equivalent of the queen in Snow White, gazing into her mirror and asking if anyone else is getting more publicity than her today. If she doesn’t like the answer, and you’re in the way, be very careful when taking a bite from that apple. “I’ll never apologize for putting South Carolina first,” she said this week. But South Carolina is where Nancy Mace lives, and she’s the fairest politician of them all.
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Jim Acosta’s AI interview is a Black Mirror monster
An absolutely ghoulish spectacle unrolled on YouTube yesterday, as disgraced former CNN Trump gadfly Jim Acosta “interviewed” teenager Joaquin Oliver. The problem is that Joaquin Oliver was killed in the Parkland shooting in 2018. This interview took place with an AI simulation of Joaquin. On what would have been Joaquin’s 25th birthday, his father, Manuel Oliver, released this Black Mirror monster into the world. To make matters worse for the AI simulation, it had to talk to Jim Acosta.
On the one hand, the stream, as of this writing, has barely 6,000 views. The average seven-year-old Roblox streamer does better than that. However, the interview is so deeply disturbing, so bald-facedly manipulative, that it deserves scrutiny. The fact that Acosta thought it worthy of air shows exactly how lost he, and opposition media in general, truly is.
In a split-screen, Acosta sits on the left, appropriately, with Joaquin on the right, wearing a “Ruby Foo’s” beanie, staring blankly at the camera with a sun-swept uncanny valley in the distance.
“Joaquin,” Acosta says, “I would like to know what your solution is for gun violence.”
“Great question,” says Joaquin. “I believe in a mix of stronger gun control laws, mental health and community engagement. We need to create safe spaces for conversations and connections, making sure everyone feels seen and heard. It’s about building a culture of kindness and understanding. What do you think about that?”
There is no word that avoids cliché. The sentences run together. AI Joaquin sounds like an autistic android.
“I would like to know more about you,” Acosta says. “Can you tell us about yourself? What did you like to do?”
Here, Acosta acknowledges that he’s talking to a simulacrum of a dead person. AI Joaquin’s answer is so terrible that it causes a dark blanket of shame to wash across anyone who bears witness to its banality. It’s like staring into a gaping void.
“I’m all about love, laughter, and living life to the fullest!” it said, lips almost syncing to the words. “I cherish my friends and family and always try to spread joy wherever I go. Though my life was cut short I want to keep inspiring others and advocating for change.”
“Joaquin,” Acosta says, unsatisfied with this generic answer, keeps pressing. “Like, what’s your favorite sport?”
“I love basketball, it’s such a fun way to connect with friends and show off some skills plus there’s nothing like the thrill of a good game.”
As the “conversation” continues, we learn that Acosta likes LeBron James, which is totally disqualifying, and, well, you get the point here. It’s just some of the grossest, saddest, most second-rate content you’ll ever watch. The world was understandably outraged at the video, but its creator, Carlos Oliver, the late Joaquin’s father, isn’t apologizing.
“An AR-15 stole Joaquin’s life, not artificial intelligence,” he tweeted. “Instead of being infuriated at AI, you should be furious at the gun violence epidemic in the United States.”
Some people may reflexively balk at AI being used like this, but it’s an inevitable feature of modernity. No one can stop it from happening. And gun violence remains as much a problem now as it was when the Parkland shooting happens. People have every reason to be angry or sad about it, and to fight for change however they best see fit.
That’s not from whence the criticism of video is emerging. People don’t hate it because of the politics. They hate it because it’s strange. This fake robot teenager talking to Jim Acosta will change nothing.
Even if Joaquin’s father created the avatar to warn people about gun violence, and even if he’s willingly participating in this spectacle, Jim Acosta is still riding sidesaddle on a family’s seemingly bottomless grief. He’s simultaneously being cheesy, dumb and sinister.
Gun violence isn’t going to stop because Joaquin Oliver’s after-death AI doppelganger loves life or enjoys the playing style of the Miami Heat. It might even move the needle backward. I can hear AI Joaquin now: “Dad, and Jim Acosta, stop it. You’re embarrassing me.” -
Mamdani, the fraud abroad
On Monday night, New York City golden boy Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, tweeted, after the terrifying gun attack on Park Avenue, “I’m heartbroken to learn of the horrific shooting in midtown and I am holding the victims, their families, and the [New York Police Department] officer in critical condition in my thoughts. Grateful for all of our first responders on the ground.” He also sent special condolences to the families of Didarul Islam, the Bangladeshi immigrant and NYPD officer who died in the attack.
But there’s a reason Mamdani was holding NYC in his thoughts and not giving a press conference on the ground: He’s at his family’s luxury compound in Uganda, where he’s summering after getting married there a couple of weeks ago. You can’t fault him for getting married, or even for getting married in Uganda, where his father is from. But he’s running for mayor of New York City right now! I know that his roster of opponents is almost a literal clown car. Still, Mamdani needs to be in New York, dealing with New York problems.
The irony is too delicious. An avowedly socialist mayoral candidate, the presumptive heir to Gracie Mansion, is on a luxury vacation – in Africa – when a crazed gunman attacks the headquarters of an investment and financial-management company and the National Football League. Perhaps Mamdani was eating cake when he heard about the attack. But this is pretty on-brand for contemporary Democrats.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass also happened to be in Africa, on a ding-dong diplomatic mission, when the city’s fires broke out. She could have canceled the trip because the warning signs were there, but she didn’t. Mamdani’s “holding thoughts” also brings to mind other great moments of clueless rich Democrats in action, such as Nancy Pelosi’s Covid haircut or Gavin Newsom’s dinner at the French Laundry. I almost needed to be defibrillated when our erstwhile mayor in Austin, Steve Adler, a multimillionaire real-estate developer, sent out a Covid stay-home order while he was celebrating his daughter’s wedding in Cabo San Lucas, which he had reached via private jet.
This raised-pinky behavior in times of crisis is hardly exclusive to Democrats. Remember Ted Cruz bopping off to Mexico as the Texas power grid went down during a deep freeze? He shrugged his shoulders, said, “What me, worry?” and donned a little extra sunscreen. But Cruz’s nonchalance aside, Democrats acting like rich jerks in the face of disaster almost feels like a brand.
Anyone who thinks that Democrats, any Democrats, other than maybe John Fetterman, stand for regular people isn’t paying attention or is living in fantasyland. It’s a party of consultants, nonprofit scam artists, overpaid defense attorneys, artsy trust funders, and trust-fund TikTok grifters like the ones who pushed Mamdani over the top.
In many ways, Mamdani is the perfect representation of the modern Democratic Party. He espouses far-left populist rhetoric while enjoying a monsoon wedding under the watchful eyes of an army of paid security guards. His hustle makes the Black Lives Matter mansion buyers look positively amateur. It’s utter fraudulence, a total snow job, only without the snow because it’s a balmy 80 degrees over there.
Yes, Donald Trump was in Scotland when the shootings happened, and he also played some golf. But he negotiated a historic trade agreement with the European Union in the process and apparently also stopped a war in Southeast Asia. If something bad happens stateside, it’s not uncommon for Trump to be at his own estate, Mar-A-Lago. But that estate is in Florida. If a crisis breaks, Trump can be on the ground in the White House in under two hours.
Mamdani, on the other hand, is in Africa. He may only return when Gotham deems it’s time to place a crown upon his head. No matter how much tragedy occurs at home, it’s gonna take a lot to drag him away from there.
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Trump unleashes the evangelists
The Trump administration issued a memo Monday saying that federal workers are openly allowed to express religious beliefs in the workplace “to the greatest extent possible unless such expression would impose an undue hardship on business operations.” This means that they can display Bibles, religious artwork and items “such as crosses, crucifixes and mezuzah,” among other religious symbols.
But that’s not all. Workers are also allowed to talk about how their own faith is “correct” and how others should “re-think” their beliefs. “During a break, an employee may engage another in polite discussion of why his faith is correct and why the nonadherent should re-think his religious beliefs. However, if the nonadherent requests such attempts to stop, the employee should honor the request,” says the memo. “An employee may invite another to worship at her church despite being belonging to a different faith.”
On the one hand, freedom of worship is a fundamental pillar of the US Constitution, alongside freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom do what you want, any old time. But let’s also be clear what this is really about. Hint: It’s not Scientology.
Despite the mention of “mezuzah,” this order isn’t about Judaism, either. If Jews proselytized in the workplace, or anywhere, there would be a lot more of us in the world, and the kinds of Jews who do seek converts generally aren’t working in federal office buildings. Maybe the administration’s definition of “highly-qualified employees of faith” include Hindu and Muslim employees, but they would be a distinct minority. Mormons love converting people, but they have a well-oiled youth-preaching machine already in place. You’re not going to be hearing, “Hello, my name is Elder Undersecretary at the Department of Agriculture, and I am here to tell you about the most amazing book.”
No, this is a purely evangelical Christian play, to go along with a recent White House order about anti-Christian bias in the government, a problem that, institutionally, simply doesn’t exist. Many of the US’s early settlers were Christian dissidents. We’re a place where all different faiths can live in peace. That’s because religious tolerance is baked into the founding documents. But so is separation of church and state, which this memorandum takes a major step toward eroding. There is already a preponderance of Christians in the nation, and, we can assume, in the government. Why do they need to talk about their religious beliefs at work?
Without a doubt, this memorandum is all part of a larger push about spreading the good news. How, precisely, do you define the “break” during which an employee is entitled to discuss these matters? Is it a lunch break? A coffee break? A bathroom break? Are emboldened, federally employed Promise Keepers going to start sliding pamphlets under the bathroom stall or handing them out in the lunch line? The memo allows uninterested parties to reject the offerings but also allows for the faithful to keep the full-court press going.
Religion should be a private affair, or at least a family and neighborhood affair. It doesn’t belong in the workplace, unless that workplace is a house of worship or at least a business affiliated with a denomination. The idea that Christians are a persecuted class in the USA is absurd. This isn’t Syria or Lebanon. There are as many churches lining our highways as there are self-storage units and combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bells.
In his first term, Trump largely kept the evangelical portion of his base at bay. But he’s much more in tune with their needs and interests since the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. He truly believes God saved his life that day. And, who knows? Maybe God did. When he bombed Iran, Trump wanted to thank everyone, “but, in particular, God.”
That was Trump’s basically harmless way of adding a little juice to “God bless America.” But if God is really blessing America, we don’t need people telling us that at work. It should be implied. Instead, federal employees, whether they want to or not, are going to have to hear that He Is Risen, even if they’re only trying to grab a snack from the vending machine.