I got sick out of the winter meetings, so I’ve been slacking on the Saturday posts (and blogging and my newsletter in general). Here are the breakdowns I’ve written for subscribers to the Athletic in the last two weeks, at least:
- The Dodgers’ signing of Edwin Diaz
- The Orioles’ signing of Pete Alonso
- The Royals-Brewers trade with Angel Zerpa
- The Red Sox-Nationals trade of two pitching prospects
- The Orioles’ trade for Shane Baz
- The three-team trade between the Pirates, Rays, and Astros
Over at AV Club, I ranked the ten best new board games of 2025, and reviewed the games The White Castle Duel and Trinket Trove.
I have a few writing things to get done this weekend but I really hope to get another (free) newsletter out before Christmas Day. You can sign up here.
I also appeared on the Cubs Weekly podcast with my friend Lance Brodzowski to talk some Cubs prospects and what it might take to get Mackenzie Gore (very, very hypothetically).
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: A Mother Jones journalist asked the Pentagon about Pete Hegseth’s mentor. Serial fabulist Jack Posobiec responded with threats.
- ProPublica looks at the deaths that resulted from the USAID cuts that Trump, Musk, and company celebrated with cake.
- New Humanist looks at Finnish schools’ efforts to teach critical thinking so students can better detect fake news and misinformation.
- Brown alumna Lucy Feldman writes in TIME about why the mass shooting at the university hit her (and so many Brown graduates) so hard.
- Also in Mother Jones, serial plagiarist and Russian operative Benny Johnson has become a major propagandist and content creator for the White House.
- Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) diverted taxpayer funds for child welfare and health care to pay for his own consultants and advertisements, according to a report in the Tampa Bay Times.
- My Congresswoman, Rep. Sarah McBride (D), spoke out about her experience as a trans woman as the House prepared to pass two bills designed just to make trans peoples’ lives hell.
- Ohio Republicans are trying to groom and indoctrinate kids by putting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.
- Meanwhile, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court struck down that state’s social studies curriculum that mandated all kinds of Christian nonsense, noting that the changes were rammed through without adequate debate or public notice.
- Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) encouraged his Twitter followers to follow accounts belonging to a white supremacist and someone who has posted CSAM, and he doubled down when Westword called him out on it.
- U.S. students read fewer books than ever; the article points out that teachers assign fewer full-length books, in part because of the belief that kids won’t read them, but that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Other potential causes are state book bans and don’t-say-gay laws, social media, AI, and a privately produced reading curriculum called StudySync that leans more on excerpts.
- An ICE supervisor in Cincinnati was arrested for trying to strangle his partner, who is at least 22 years his younger as well.
- ICE arrested a woman in Minnesota merely for observing their agents arresting someone and asking what they were doing.
- Plastic pollution is on track to double by 2040, entering the soil, the oceans, and of course, our bodies.
- A proposed data center in Chandler, Arizona, won’t disclose how much water it expects to use. You know, in a desert.
- NPR looks at Syria a year after the fall of Assad.
- Two board game crowdfunding efforts of note: Grassfed is “a farm to tabletop” game from the publishers of Ascension and Shards of Infinity, and Chess Joker is a new game from Carl Chudyk, co-designer of Glory to Rome and designer of Innovation.
I can’t speak about Decker at all, but Hanania is absolutely worth following. He’s disavowed many of his worst prior views in a bluntly honest way. There’s still much to criticize him, but he’s maybe had the best criticisms of the conservative movement under this current administration. Coming from the right, I think that offers a lot of value understanding the right wing mindset under Trump. Add in his critiques of the tech right and their moral shortcomings and there’s more to be gained by following him.
Maybe we stop saying that people like Hanania are reasonable because they’ve jettisoned SOME of their poisonous beliefs?
Have you read any of his writing? Is it better we put ourselves in a bubble and only read those we agree with 100% of the time? I don’t understand that mindset at all.
What is one piece of Hanania’s writing that you find to be especially valuable to someone not on the far right?
That comment clearly shows you’ve never read him. But feel free to start with these:
https://open.substack.com/pub/richardhanania/p/conservatives-still-dont-read-but?r=1ju3r&utm_medium=ios
https://unherd.com/2025/03/how-elon-musk-lost-the-plot/
https://open.substack.com/pub/richardhanania/p/government-science-and-the-prestige?r=1ju3r&utm_medium=ios
Why aren’t you including the posts where he said things like “why do whites always end up near the top and blacks at the bottom, everywhere and always?” Or where he said that “Women simply didn’t evolve to be the decision makers in society” and that “women’s liberation = the end of human civilization?” or where he said that Latino people “don’t have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation?”
How about the part where he knew these views were so abhorrent that he wouldn’t even put his own name on them?
Or that he wrote them on extremely racist, xenophobic sites like Counter Currents and VDare?
He hasn’t renounced the specifics of these views, either. He’s instead said he’s changed his views because, for example, “even if groups differ in skills or cognitive abilities, we can all still benefit from the division of labor,” which, of course, is just a backdoor way of saying he still thinks Latinos are fucking idiots but now he figures we can use them to take out the trash.
Hard pass. There are plenty of conservative thinkers without a recent history of espousing wildly bigoted views.
If you think his writing is only valuable to the far right, then you clearly haven’t read him at all.
I was asked for writings of his that are valuable to anyone outside the far right. Those links were clear examples of that. Like I said, there’s much of his I don’t agree with one bit. But his insights on the right are more honest and often more accurate than almost all conservative writers. Outside of Ross Douthat or Andrew Sullivan, you don’t get as much of that on the right.
I read the pieces. You’re going to have to explain the value of these because I don’t see it. A right-winger critiquing other aspects of the right is not new, and I wouldn’t necessarily read it as particularly “honest.” Like the never-Trumpers before him, it reads primarily as trying to thread the needle between the larger right-wing project and it’s logical apotheosis in Trump, which is fundamentally *dis*honest. The writing itself is fine but could use an editor.
The first piece is not particularly rigorous, and asks the reader to presuppose that previous right-wing demagogues like Limbaugh were any less radical than their current versions without any evidence. Based on everything I’ve read about the rise of the modern right (the Perlstein books are a good place to start), this is absolutely not the case. It may be easier to *access* cranks these days, but they’ve always been around, they’ve always wielded power, and they’ve always been like this.
The second piece is a fine if overly credulous critique of Musk (I don’t think he’s a genius because he sounded good on a podcast once). His analysis in the piece reveals a child-like worldview (“profit tends to be straightforwardly related to improving social welfare”) that he only partially walks back in a rather trite acknowledgement of how power is actually wielded. Put simply, his critique is directionally correct, but so facile as to be effectively worthless.
The third article makes a fine argument, but a) takes a bizarre detour in the middle, and b) lacks specificity, much like the first article. It also seems to make the assumption that “market logic” and “societal benefit” are strongly related, which much like in the second article, is an incredibly small-minded view of things.
ya know, im pretty sure that Stalin and Hitler probably once in a very great while said something that wasn’t 100% abhorrent too.
I don’t know anything about nay of the people being described here.
I don’t care about them to follow what is going on.
With regard to what has been discussed:
1) I think it’s progress if someone with abhorrent views rescinds some of those views. Isn’t it better to acknowledge the positive change rather than condemning the person for not changing in full?
Some of my high school acquaintances who were staunch republican/conservative, apparently ended up becoming very liberal. I learned this many years after the fact from a friend who know both me and them in high school.
These were people I never thought would budge from their obsession with Limbaugh, GOP, right-wing, republican, etc. And the mutual friend (A leftist), when he told me, “Yeah, remember those guys from high school? They’re super liberal now”.
I was stunned and happy, And shouldn’t that be applauded and encouraged? I doubt it happened over night, all at once. Likely, they slowly changes their worldview. Maybe they received encouragement along the way, which would have helped them along a good path, rather than being blasted for “Not completely changing 100% from Right to left overnight”, which might have had the opposite of the intended effect. ?
That said, I agree with Mike and Keith – we shouldn’t give people a free pass for changing, perhaps superficially, some abhorrent views while still holding onto other abhorrent views.
Well, that was a rather lame and indecisive post on my part. I guess what I’m saying is, it depends on context. Don’t expect wrong=minded people to change fully overnight. Change takes time, and most people will die on their hill rather than budge one millimeter. So, acknowledge change, while still condemning remaining abhorrent views a person has.
I think the key differences in the context you speak of are trust and power. If someone you personally changes for the better, you can likely trust their intentions far more than a media member who might be doing it for cynical reasons. And the person you know also likely has little to no power nor any way to express it; they’re likely just changing their views for their own sake. You can’t really say the same for a pundit like Hanania, who is still clearly trying to advance a right-wing agenda, just through a somewhat modified method that he now sees to be the most fruitful.
From the Mother Jones piece you will all be shocked to learn that Kegsbreath’s mentor, who advocated against trans service members, is a connoisseur of trans erotica.
In case you didn’t hear, the Chandler data center was rejected by the city council 5-0. This was depsite Kysten Sinema coming to the meeting to lobby in favor of it.
The snippets of Nick Decker “thought” are breathtaking. It’s like he never grew out of the “stoned freshman debate” phase. Apologies to any stoners and/or freshmen I may have offended.
The descriptions of Posobiec’s behavior in the MJ piece are menacing. So many trolls in that movement.
Sarah McBride continues to impress. I can’t imagine how much courage it takes to willingly present yourself as a lightning rod for ignorance and hate.