Stay safe out there, Pham. Don’t lose any limbs or appendages. If you haven’t already, check out Bridget’s Dumpster Fire episode about America 250, the part about toilet paper is humbling and beautiful.

“America” by Walt Whitman

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #328

Supreme Court Detransitions Women’s Sports

Bridget breaks down the Supreme Court Hecox ruling upholding states’ rights to ban biological males from competing in women’s sports — and somehow it took nine justices, two lawsuits, and six months to confirm that girls are girls. Also: Supergirl bombed so hard even the pirates didn’t bother, and Armie Hammer makes a comeback in a role only an aspiring cannibal could pull off.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #397

Title

Drinkin’ Bros podcast host Dan Hollaway joins Bridget for an uncensored conversation about all the third rail topics you could ever ask for, from why we should probably just invade Mexico, to how 20 million illegals and BlackRock turned 29-year-old home-buyers into 40-year-old renters, the reality behind the horseshoe theory that brings together “Queers for Palestine” and actual Islamists, and Zohran Mamdani’s “brown guilt.” They explore how pure libertarianism was tried and failed during the founding of the United States, the truth about Trump’s plan to bring manufacturing back to the US, why the Constitution is the best document ever written, his belief that people aren’t stupid - they’re ignorant, why a nation of strong men is a strong nation, and why he only offends people because they’re delicate.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #315

Happy 250th Birthday, America!

A new CNN poll says only 29% of Democrats are proud to be American. Bridget Phetasy asked her audience what they love about this country — and got hundreds of responses. The four things that came up most: free speech, the founding documents, guns, and the freedom to build your own life. The people who felt it most weren’t born here. They were immigrants, refugees, and World Cup tourists who showed up expecting the country the media described and found something completely different. This is Dumpster Fire’s love letter to America on its 250th birthday.

DUMPSTER FIRE

THE SPECTATOR

The internet is dying and so are we

There is a lot of proof that the internet is dying. People aren’t burned out of politics, although that’s part of it. They are burned out from going “is this real?” No one has the bandwidth to become an investigative reporter for each post.

THE SPECTATOR

Geriatric Mommy

A Love Letter to the Sane Women Holding It Down

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 22

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while because, more often than not, I find myself doomscrolling, screaming “NOT ALL WOMEN!” It seems like most of the women represented in media are, for lack of a better word, insane. I blame the algorithms for elevating the craziest of us. So this is for you—the woman reading this who has been quietly holding it t…

Read full story

THE DAILY WIRE

America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead.

America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.

THE DAILY WIRE

Phetasy Merch

Share

Beyond Parody with Bridget Phetasy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A recent poll that CNN shared says only 29% of Democrats are proud to be American, but if you step outside of the news cycle and into a World Cup watch party, you’ll see a version of this country that the media has been trying to bury for 30 years.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA!

I love America. A lot of people do. In fact, I think most normie Americans do, and so do a lot of people around the world. Watching the World Cup footage and posts online has been amazing because so many visitors from other countries have flooded into the United States and have been posting about how blown away they are by what real America is like. Not the America they hear about in the news.

The America that’s been demonized and criticized to death for a solid three decades—at least. Being given the chance to see this country through the eyes of people who have never been here before gives us the ability to appreciate it in a new way.

I got this experience from my first husband. He was straight off the boat from Belarus. For those of you who don’t know, Belarus has been ruled since 1994 by Alexander Lukashenko, who is often referred to as “Europe’s last dictator.”

One night, we were watching South Park, and it was an episode where they were TP-ing some houses: “Bridget, what is this thing you do in America with toilet paper?”

And I explained that it’s a classic prank where people throw rolls of toilet paper over trees, bushes, and the roof of a house so the paper unrolls and covers everything in long streamers. It’s just a common teenage/housecoming tradition prank, usually harmless and meant to be funny, though the cleanup is annoying for the homeowner. Especially if it rains man, then it’s a nightmare.

And he stared at me. “You mean to tell me while I was standing in line for toilet paper, you were throwing it in trees?”

That line pretty much summed it all up for me, but there were many instances where living with him, I realized I’d been born into extravagant wealth and privilege most people in the world cannot begin to comprehend.

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I also realized that traveling as much as I have traveled, particularly to the developing world. Places like India, where on a bus across the country you shit in a hole in the ground because there are no public restrooms and you witness levels of poverty that are hard to imagine. Or Sri Lanka, which had rolling blackouts constantly and you never knew if you’d have wifi or power or if the country was going to erupt into civil war again. Nothing takes me back to my time in Egypt quite like the smell of burning garbage. True Patriarchies, where I learned to avert my eyes and cover my wrists and thought about how crazy it is in America I can be a mouth broad in booty shorts.

Even coming back from Spain felt like returning to a place that was wealthy beyond measure. This country is a goddamn miracle, and I think that most of the time we just take all of it for granted. But it’s our 250th birthday, and we need to take a moment to find some gratitude for this place.

First, I’d like to thank the men and women who sign up to keep this nation safe and to honor those who came before us, who gave the ultimate sacrifice, their lives, in order that we may live in this imperfect nation. And I do want to take a moment of silence for those who have fallen in the battle they waged abroad or the one they waged silently, when they returned home. You are the real heroes of this nation.

Even before the World Cup started, I’ve watched videos of people documenting their trips to America. A lot of them talked about how they were worried about how unsafe it would be. They were told it was dangerous by the media and by friends, and then they got here and they were like, “Holy shit, this is incredible.”

They love how big it is, how different all the landscapes are, how you can find beaches and mountains and deserts and bayous and farms and charming coastal towns straight out of a tourist brochure. They love the food and the yellow school buses, and the stunning natural beauty and the guns.

They LOVE the guns. Once they get here, they go to a gun range and are like, “I get it. I understand now why Americans love their guns.”

But most of all, they’re blown away by how friendly Americans are. Because we are goddamn friendly. They can’t get over how strangers will just start talking to you in a store or in the middle of the street, and you can wind up in a 15-minute conversation that ends up with an invitation over to their houses for a BBQ.

America takes a lot of shit. From the rest of the world and from its own people.

Do we have our problems? Yes. Is the history of our country a bit dodgy? Absolutely. But name me one country in the world that doesn’t have a dodgy history of its own.

When CNN reported that just 27 percent of Democrats say they’ll display the flag on July 4th and that just 29 percent of Democrats say they’re extremely, or very proud, to be an American, I wanted to know if this was just a vibe or something deeper, so I asked you guys what makes you proud. I asked: What do YOU love about this country? What makes you proud to be American? And if you’re not American — what’s your favorite thing about us?

I got hundreds upon hundreds of responses.

In going through all the responses I got from everyone about why they love America, four main themes emerged as the most popular.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH

This was number one by a mile. And what was interesting is the people who felt it most viscerally weren’t the ones who were born here — it was the people who’d spent time somewhere else.

Multiple people said they’d lived in Germany, or been stationed in Europe with the military, and came back genuinely shaken by how little speech protection actually exists over there. We think of Western Europe as these enlightened liberal democracies, and then you realize — oh, you can actually get arrested for a Facebook post in the UK, which we’ve covered on Dumpster Fire.

Freedom of speech is one of the hills I’ll die on. It is our greatest strength as a country, and we have to recognize the sheer brilliance of the founders in understanding that freedom of speech is the cornerstone of a free country.

My favorite response on this: “I get to talk all the shit I want. That seems silly, but it turns out to be vital.” Yes. It IS vital. That’s the whole thing.

THE DOCUMENTS

The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and The Bill of Rights. People LOVE the documents. One person bought their newly-naturalized coworker a copy of the Bill of Rights as a citizenship gift.

As many brilliant thinkers have pointed out, The Constitution does not grant rights. It secures rights that already exist. The Bill of Rights does not list everything a citizen may do. Instead, it prohibits the government from doing certain things to a citizen.

In America, the government doesn’t give you permission to exist; you’re born free, and the rules are there to keep them off your back. That was the opposite of every previous human society.

GUNS

Number three was guns. Of course it was. I asked hundreds of Americans what they love about their country, and the third most popular answer was guns. We are so on brand. I love us.

Here’s what got me though: Multiple non-Americans cited the Second Amendment as something they envied. Including this absolute gem: “I’m a Dutch import now a citizen. I came for the date and stayed for the guns.” And then there was a guy who has never even been to America who wrote: “I’ve always envied two things from you folks: freedom of speech, and the Second Amendment. Without those you’d be like any other country. Fight for those.”

There was even a recent video about this from a British dude talking about how British people are a bunch of pussies now when it comes to protecting their nation, and they’ve been totally pacified through the removal of the right to bear arms.

I’m not saying we should put a Glock on the birthday cake, but maybe just a small one next to the sparklers?

THE FREEDOM TO BUILD YOUR OWN LIFE

This one came in a lot of forms. Self-determination. Opportunity. The ability to fail and try again. Someone wrote, “America is the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ Nation.” Someone else wrote: “People come here with nothing and then own stores in my neighborhood. You can start a business, or you can work for one of the big guys. You can decide to slack, or you can put in the effort and become wealthy. It’s truly incredible, and I don’t think it happens in any other country.”

And then there were the responses that didn’t fit neatly into any category but deserved their own moment. Someone wrote: “Being able to crank up Pantera at 3 am and nobody complains. Actually my neighbors will be like, ‘why weren’t we invited.’ Had cops show up and dance with us.”

Someone answered, “It’s where I keep all my stuff.” Fair enough.

Some of the best responses were from immigrants, or the children of immigrants. People for whom the promise of the American dream is a reality, it’s not just something they were born into and take for granted.

Now a lot of you might say, “But Bridget, you were just ranting about immigration.” Here’s my stance on this. It’s pretty much what the common sense stance was until about five minutes ago. I support legal immigration because America has always been strengthened by people who come here legally, work hard, learn English, and embrace our Constitution and culture.

But we've had far too much illegal immigration in recent years, and it has overwhelmed our borders, housing, schools, and hospitals and hurt the quality of life for everyone. Just ask Europe how it’s working out for them, too.

We need secure borders, we have to end catch-and-release, and deport criminals and recent illegal entrants. Assimilation is essential — immigrants should respect our laws and adopt core American values like liberty and self-reliance. Anyone who enters illegally or openly hates America and wants to replace or destroy our way of life has no right to be here. Sharia courts? Get the fuck out of here. Citizenship is a privilege, not a license to undermine the country.

Some of the most poignant replies were from people whose families fled something terrible, usually that something being communism. Because a lot of times, lately, when you ask an American what they love about America, sometimes you get: "Very little lately." But when you ask someone who escaped something — you get a completely different answer

One person wrote: "My favorite thing about America is that it gave my family a place to go after they were killed, their property was stolen, and their freedom was sacrificed to a government ideology called communism." No elaboration needed on that one.

Someone else: "I was married to a Polish man that escaped communism. My family came from Cuba. We had our lands taken. We were jailed. We were killed. So yeah, I celebrate the independence of this country because it became a haven where my family landed." And they ended it with: "I wish people really understood the power of our constitution." Me too, honestly.

A Hungarian student who arrived to study at BU in September 2001 — think about that timing — wrote: "I was taught the lesson which shaped my way of thinking forever: 'Stop saying no, János, start saying yes.' This is the fundamental difference between the old and the new world." He arrived a week before 9/11. And his takeaway was still optimism.

Still: America taught me to say yes. And this is a gift that America gives us all. Dream big. Say yes.

And then there was a Canadian who wrote in to say he watched the September 11th attacks from Calgary. "How you rallied as a people. Strangers helping strangers. As a Canadian, it was inspiring. My heart was filled with hope." He also helpfully described Canada as "the shit parts of America combined with the shit parts of Europe." God bless our neighbors.

The pattern across all of them is the same: the people with something to compare it to love it the most. The people who had to choose it — who earned it, who fled toward it — they know exactly what it is. They're not confused about it.

One guy from a Greek immigrant family put it simply: "I love the fact that we are all from somewhere else, we are all individuals, and yet somehow we actually get things done. Look how much better the world is since the ascent of America."

Look how much better the world is since the ascent of America. I promise you this--you don’t want to live in the world with a fallen America.

Happy Birthday, you beautiful, chaotic, Pantera-at-3am, free-refills-having, cheddar-cheese-loving, nobody-is-coming-to-save-you dumpster fire of a country.

I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.

Media outlets spent the past two weeks whining about Trump’s renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Politico spazzed about dead ducks. Then The Hill frantically scooped an update: “Two more ducks found dead in the reflecting pool.” As if a mass-murdering dictator had executed another infant. Lower the flags for the ducklings killed by fascism! Activists gnawed at the pool’s lining like piranhas in a river of hot dogs, then stomped through the water like Jenny from Forrest Gump, only somehow dumber and more crass. Because, in their performative tantrums, the Activist Class has lost all fidelity to heroism.

Only a villain would look at this national monument and hate its polyurethane and its “American Flag” blue in honor of our nation’s birthday. It’s hard for most people to understand the cynicism of someone who constantly wants to contaminate and destroy. As if the entire universe is nothing but their personal mirror.

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Hey! What are you doing? We’re not supposed to look away from the Reflecting Pool. What if we miss breaking news? Apparently some militant activists are going to dump noxious chemicals into the water so more cute animals die. If you keep talking about elections, you’re going to overlook this manufactured scandal. Enormous fire? I don’t see an enormous caustic fire gripping the horizon like a noose. Oh that fire, the one with the skull-shaped plumes of death-smoke and satanic howling and rants about how 9/11 was justified because America is Islamophobic? No, no, no. Hah. That’s actually a whirling super-miasma that envelops everything uniquely good in American life until society is vulgar, humorless, violent, and ugly. Don’t be dramatic: the deadly blaze is much less concerning than the Reflecting Pool algae. Just make sure the World Cup Europeans stay away from it. They shouldn’t have to witness that hellscape until they get back home.

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #326

Americans Can’t Get Enough World Cup Attention

World Cup fans came to America expecting the worst and left obsessed with free refills, ranch dressing, and Buc-ee’s. Bridget breaks down the Great American Sleepover, how we’re basically thirsty thots on Instagram excited that everyone thinks we’re pretty, why Europeans are treating gas stations like religious pilgrimages, and why America now deserves Greenland.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #397

Make Karens Great Again | Kira Davis

Bridget sits down with conservative commentator and political pundit Kira Davis to talk about why she thinks it’s time to bring back shame, decorum, and “Karens.” They discuss the Major League Baseball Pride Month controversy, why California’s election system is built to erode trust in democracy, why influencers don’t actually affect elections, the Gavin Newsom scandal Kira believes is about to blow up, and her predictions for the GOP and Democrat 2028 fields. They cover dealing with TDS from family members, inspiring people to love America again, and why we should be renormalizing normal — saying grace in public, flying flags, calling out bad behavior — because it is the only way to actually shift the culture.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #327

The Rise of the Anti-American Left

The Democratic Socialists of America just swept the New York City primaries, and one winning candidate has said 9/11 was America’s fault because of “capitalism, racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia.” Bridget breaks down the new anti-American wing of the Democratic Party, why “democratic socialism” is just socialism wearing a wig, why these aren’t just progressive Democrats — they’re revolutionaries who openly want to tear down America, and why gentle parenting might be to blame for all of it.

DUMPSTER FIRE

THE SPECTATOR

The internet is dying and so are we

There is a lot of proof that the internet is dying. People aren’t burned out of politics, although that’s part of it. They are burned out from going “is this real?” No one has the bandwidth to become an investigative reporter for each post.

THE SPECTATOR

Geriatric Mommy

A Love Letter to the Sane Women Holding It Down

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 22

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while because, more often than not, I find myself doomscrolling, screaming “NOT ALL WOMEN!” It seems like most of the women represented in media are, for lack of a better word, insane. I blame the algorithms for elevating the craziest of us. So this is for you—the woman reading this who has been quietly holding it t…

Read full story

THE DAILY WIRE

America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead.

America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.

THE DAILY WIRE

Phetasy Merch

Share

Beyond Parody with Bridget Phetasy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Few things are as poetic as the pursuit of flawless songs. Crate-digging for vinyl. Poking through alphabetized CDs at the mall, the “clunk” when you shove an 8-track cartridge into a car stereo, the fuzz of cassettes. All of these experiences produce warmth, the primordial joy of a successful hunt. Now that the music ecosystem has been mostly digitalized, these connective experiences have vanished. Analogue connected our physical bodies to the invisibility of music. And, thankfully, we’re seeing a resurgence in vinyl purchases, saving so many record stores that were on their deathbed. Radio is the king of analogue, and while it’s no longer as important as it was during Elvis, it’s the body of recorded music. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with NTS Radio. (Apparently, “NTS” stands for “Nuts To Soup” lol.) It’s very digital, but also very analogue. It’s hard to find a lot of the songs—apparently, 40% of the music is not available on Spotify.

It’s got two live stations, 24/7, and 16 stations with different genres of infinite mixtapes, hour-long sets by different DJs or musicians, as well as tribute sets (there are a ton devoted to David Bowie alone). Poolside is the most lovable, and the most reliably fun and relaxing. It’s almost always very cool. I highly recommend this station. The other day, the DJ was playing Yacht Rock and Eagles b-sides, and you could hear the crackle of the spinning vinyl.

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4 to the Floor is for anyone who missed the days of tent raves in a field. Slow Focus is great when you’re working or studying. Memory Lane is folk. Low Key is mellow hip-hop and great R’n’B, including some absolute bangers nobody should live without. Although if you’re looking for R’n’B or Soul or funk, go to Feelings. It’s incredible. Jazz, Reggae, Post-Punk. And two stations that pair well: Sheet Music, the realm of beautiful compositions, and The Pit—METAL!!!! And lastly, there’s Field Recordings. Just check it out. It’s weird and amazing.

Or better yet, put on Radio Phetasy. Here are this week’s bangers:

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #324

UFC At The White House Proves Men Are Back

Trump hosted UFC fights on the South Lawn of the White House and men are back! Blue Angels, Thunderbirds, a bald eagle, fireworks, and a 6-1 underdog who emerged victorious. Bridget draws a straight line from the 2016 pussy hat marches to UFC on the White House lawn, and what this means for the country.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #395

Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion | Luke Burgis

Bridget sits down with Luke Burgis to discuss his new book, The One and the 99: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. They explore one of the most uncomfortable ideas in modern thought: that we don’t actually know what we want — we copy the desires of others. They discuss why tribalism is surging even as loneliness is rising, the longterm effects of turning everything - even religion - into “content”. They share a variety of stories from attending seminary to winding up at an ashram cult, analyze the Gen Z stare, and talk about what it means to be a real person in an increasingly mediated world.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #325

Even the Gays Are Over Pride

Americans are suffering from Pride fatigue. Bridget breaks down how Pride went from a winning cause to a divisive one, why MLB players are getting warned by the league for writing Bible verses on their Pride Night hats, and why California now requires actual proof of being gay — paperwork and all — to win public utility contracts worth millions.

DUMPSTER FIRE

THE SPECTATOR

The internet is dying and so are we

There is a lot of proof that the internet is dying. People aren’t burned out of politics, although that’s part of it. They are burned out from going “is this real?” No one has the bandwidth to become an investigative reporter for each post.

THE SPECTATOR

Geriatric Mommy

A Love Letter to the Sane Women Holding It Down

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 22

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while because, more often than not, I find myself doomscrolling, screaming “NOT ALL WOMEN!” It seems like most of the women represented in media are, for lack of a better word, insane. I blame the algorithms for elevating the craziest of us. So this is for you—the woman reading this who has been quietly holding it t…

Read full story

THE DAILY WIRE

America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead.

America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.

THE DAILY WIRE

Phetasy Merch

Share

Beyond Parody with Bridget Phetasy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Here’s my idealistic take. I think information fatigue is shoving us into an era that values simplicity, where there’s value in everyday characters, storytelling with fictional people who embrace their wrinkles and birthmarks, the flaws that prove humanity.  Hello Kitty, Horatio, Superman, Atticus Finch, Leopold Bloom, Dante, The Dude, R2-D2.

Morality is involved. We tend to love characters who are unerringly good-natured and resilient. They’re usually fun, and—here’s the part that I find interesting—somehow they seem to be good for the world, as if they’re aliens (sometimes literally, like E.T. and Chewbacca) visiting us with an innocence and curiosity we’d forgotten about or abandoned but desperately need.

Carl Jung wrote that “all the highest achievements of virtue, as well as the blackest villainies, are individual.” But, he adds, “Nature is aristocratic, and one person of value outweighs ten lesser ones.” This involves authenticity. A character who is genuine in a saintly way. It ought to give all of us hope. That the characters we love contain humanity, the humanity we all want. Villains are powerful, but lovable heroes are the lifeblood of culture.

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #322

California Made Election Fraud Legal

In California you don’t need an ID to vote, ballot harvesting is completely legal, and ballots signed with a smiley face might be counted as valid. Bridget Phetasy breaks down how the LA mayor’s race went sideways, why Spencer Pratt went from second place to out, and why none of this is a conspiracy theory — it’s just what happens when you make the sketchiest possible voting practices legal and then dare anyone to question it.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #394

Woke Is Just Communism Repackaged | Xi Van Fleet

Bridget sits down with Xi Van Fleet, author of Made in America: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Enabled Communist China and Created Our Greatest Threat. Xi is a survivor of China’s Cultural Revolution and traces the eerie parallels between Mao’s revolution and today’s woke ideology. She draws on her own experience — growing up under the CCP, enduring re-education in the countryside, and eventually escaping to America — to argue that cultural Marxism is not a foreign threat but a homegrown one, and that American elites have been enabling the CCP’s rise since the 1920s.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #323

World Cup Tourists Discover Real America

The World Cup is in America and Europeans are losing their minds — in the best possible way. A German named Freddy went tubing down the Chattahoochee, discovered Buc-ee’s, watched an eagle fly around a stadium, and declared it the most “European mind can’t comprehend” moment of his life. A Swedish woman tried ranch dressing and said it was like crack. Bridget breaks down why watching foreigners fall in love with Real America is the 250th birthday celebration we actually needed — and why we take all of it completely for granted. Also: Tom Brady launched a coconut water brand called Good Nut and the slogan is “It’s a Delicious Mouthful.”

DUMPSTER FIRE

THE SPECTATOR

The internet is dying and so are we

There is a lot of proof that the internet is dying. People aren’t burned out of politics, although that’s part of it. They are burned out from going “is this real?” No one has the bandwidth to become an investigative reporter for each post.

THE SPECTATOR

Geriatric Mommy

A Love Letter to the Sane Women Holding It Down

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 22

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while because, more often than not, I find myself doomscrolling, screaming “NOT ALL WOMEN!” It seems like most of the women represented in media are, for lack of a better word, insane. I blame the algorithms for elevating the craziest of us. So this is for you—the woman reading this who has been quietly holding it t…

Read full story

THE DAILY WIRE

America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead.

America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.

THE DAILY WIRE

Phetasy Merch

Share

Beyond Parody with Bridget Phetasy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Summer is here. So I figured I’d share a lovely poem by Mary Oliver.

“Wild Geese”

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

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DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #320

The Vibe Shift Is a Lie

America is turning 250 and the birthday party is already a mess — every artist booked for the Freedom 250 celebration dropped out, but don’t worry, Vanilla Ice to the rescue. Bridget breaks down what the collapse says about the “vibe shift,” why woke is crawling out of hibernation, and why normie Americans still don’t want to be lectured - by anyone. Also: Democrat Graham Platner’s never-ending scandals, UFC fights on the White House lawn during Pride Month, and the Donald Trump buffalo in Bangladesh who is apparently Bridget’s spirit animal.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #393

The Left Turned on the Jews. Now What? | Batya Ungar-Sargon

Bridget sits down with Batya Ungar-Sargon — journalist, author, and deputy opinion editor at Newsweek — for a wide-ranging conversation about her new book, The Jews and The Left, about American Jewish history and the political realignment happening in real time. They dig into how Jews became so deeply identified with the Democratic Party, why October 7th forced a reckoning for secular Jews who had barely thought about their identity in decades, and what it means that the loudest antisemitism right now is coming from the Left rather than the Right.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #321

Billionaires Are Building Bunkers and Boobs Are Back

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are building a $1.4 billion luxury eco-resort on a Cold War bunker island in Albania — and locals are responding with Molotov cocktails. Bridget breaks down the corruption probe, why Ivanka should not have gone on a podcast to talk about this, and why every billionaire quietly building a bunker on a remote island should maybe read the room. Also: Hunter Biden went viral on X with an AA joke, boobs are officially back, and Spencer Pratt is still in the LA mayor’s race, but just barely.

DUMPSTER FIRE

THE SPECTATOR

The internet is dying and so are we

There is a lot of proof that the internet is dying. People aren’t burned out of politics, although that’s part of it. They are burned out from going “is this real?” No one has the bandwidth to become an investigative reporter for each post.

THE SPECTATOR

Geriatric Mommy

A Love Letter to the Sane Women Holding It Down

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 22

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while because, more often than not, I find myself doomscrolling, screaming “NOT ALL WOMEN!” It seems like most of the women represented in media are, for lack of a better word, insane. I blame the algorithms for elevating the craziest of us. So this is for you—the woman reading this who has been quietly holding it t…

Read full story

THE DAILY WIRE

America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead.

America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.

THE DAILY WIRE

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Beyond Parody with Bridget Phetasy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

My six-year-old recently asked me to define “gesture,” and I felt flustered because I had so much to say. I told her that a gesture is when you reach out to someone. But why? Why reach out to anyone?

Gesture expresses the impossibility of speaking. It rises from performance, from repetition that captures the meaning of an event, a motion, a sound, a crisis, a spectacle. Gestures serve as expressive forms, true symbols. A life without gesture lacks personality and music. Gesture expresses the impossibility of speaking. Here’s a lovely and confusing quote from a lovely and confusing writer, Giorgio Agamben: “An epoch that has lost its gestures is, by the same token, obsessed by them; for men from whom all authenticity has been taken, gesture becomes destiny. And the more gestures lost their ease under the pressure of unknown powers, the more life became indecipherable. And once the simplest and most everyday gestures had become as foreign as the gescic­ulations of marionettes, humanity — whose very bodily existence had already become sacred to the degree that it had made itself impenetrable­ — was ready for the massacre.”

To live as a human being demands vulnerability, love, disgust, contradiction. The swell of a melody, the wash of a chord, the simplicity of enjoying rain.

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DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #318

Hasan Piker Won’t Shut Up

Twitch streamer and communist LARPer Hasan Piker has been subpoenaed by the US Treasury over his Cuba trip — and instead of lawyering up, he immediately went on a livestream and started spilling everything. Bridget Phetasy breaks down the Piker legal saga, why the far left has always been allowed to play by different rules, and what it means that Elon’s baby mama ended up on a communist’s livestream giving away hoodies. Also: a meditation on Podcastistan, the nihilistic slop economy, and why livestreams are the laziest form of entertainment ever invented.

DUMPSTER FIRE

THE JEREMY BOREING SHOW

Tucker and Jon Stewart Are Running the Same Grift

The defining illness of new media isn’t bias. It’s audience capture — and a generation of hosts on both the left and the right have stopped trying to lead an audience and started trying to be picked by one. Bridget Phetasy has watched it happen, written about it, and shed followers for refusing to play along.

THE JEREMY BOREING SHOW

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #392

The DoorDash Generation Can’t Feed Itself | Courtney O’Dell

Bridget Phetasy sits down with Courtney O’Dell, food blogger and creator behind Sweet C’s Designs, to dig into the viral DoorDash discourse that exploded online and ask the obvious question: how did we end up with a generation that genuinely doesn’t know how to feed itself? They get into why convenience culture has replaced basic life skills with helplessness, what food blogging actually looks like as a career, how AI is changing the industry, and why the simple act of cooking dinner might be one of the most underrated forms of self-sufficiency left.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #319

Thomas Massie Lost and It Wasn’t Israel’s Fault

Thomas Massie lost his Kentucky primary by 10 points and immediately blamed Israel. Bridget’s not buying it. She breaks down why Massie lost his own constituents, why Israel derangement syndrome is the new woke, and why the anti-woke comedians who’ve gone down this road are starting to sound exactly like the people they used to make fun of. Also: Trump trolling the right by saying he’ll run for prime minister of Israel.

DUMPSTER FIRE

THE SPECTATOR

The internet is dying and so are we

There is a lot of proof that the internet is dying. People aren’t burned out of politics, although that’s part of it. They are burned out from going “is this real?” No one has the bandwidth to become an investigative reporter for each post.

THE SPECTATOR

Geriatric Mommy

A Love Letter to the Sane Women Holding It Down

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 22

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while because, more often than not, I find myself doomscrolling, screaming “NOT ALL WOMEN!” It seems like most of the women represented in media are, for lack of a better word, insane. I blame the algorithms for elevating the craziest of us. So this is for you—the woman reading this who has been quietly holding it t…

Read full story

THE DAILY WIRE

America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead.

America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.

THE DAILY WIRE

Phetasy Merch

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Beyond Parody with Bridget Phetasy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

President Trump released the UAP Files, and aliens might be real, so we should talk about your hair. It’s made primarily of keratin, a protein built from amino acids containing carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur. None of these elements originated on Earth.

So, where was your hair before you were born? In outer space (who knows how far), since before the Sun. Atoms that survived a supernova. Cooked at 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. Next, these pieces of your future self journeyed through the deathly void, until they encountered a collection of gas and dust larger than our solar system, the force field of a black hole. And this mysterious structure compacted the atoms into rock that wandered around the cosmos for God knows how long, guided by God knows what, till it eventually landed on Earth. The atoms lived inside this rock and waited for you to be born. Billions of years of waiting. Until you ate them and used them to make hair. Carl Sagan described it as being made of star stuff.

You are the subject of this gorgeous sonnet by 18th-century Romantic poet William Wordsworth: The Stars Are Mansions Built By Nature’s Hand. You participated in your own creation. And now you wear the last breath of a star on your head like jewelry.

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #316

A Data Center Murdered My Family

Commencement speakers got booed this weekend for mentioning AI — by the same graduating class that used ChatGPT to write their papers. Bridget Phetasy breaks down why the anti-AI panic is just climate anxiety with a new face, why Bernie Sanders and AOC’s plan to ban data centers is the worst idea in recent memory, and why China is absolutely loving every minute of our meltdown.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #391

The Dark Side of America’s Therapy Obsession | Jonathan Alpert

Bridget sits down with Jonathan Alpert, therapist and author of Therapy Nation: How America Got Hooked on Therapy and Why It’s Left Us More Anxious and Divided, to dig into something most mental health professionals won’t say out loud - that the therapy industry may be making people worse, not better. They cover how therapists are trained to validate rather than challenge, why the explosion of diagnoses tracks more with social media trends than actual illness, and how therapy culture has quietly become one of the most divisive forces in American life. They also discuss political bias in the consulting room, therapists coming between parents and their kids, how to tell the difference between good therapy and bad therapy, and how Jonathan was nearly de-licensed for an op-ed he wrote in the New York Times in 2012, arguing that if therapy isn’t working, you should probably leave.

DUMPSTER FIRE

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #315

The Death of Late Night and Why Nobody Cares

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show aired its final episode tonight, ending a decade-long run that cost CBS roughly $40 million a year and alienated half the country. Bridget Phetasy breaks down how Trump derangement syndrome turned late-night television from a unifying institution into a smug resistance rally — and why no one is actually sad to see it go. Also: the case for Dumpster Fire to fill the slot.

DUMPSTER FIRE

THE SPECTATOR

The internet is dying and so are we

There is a lot of proof that the internet is dying. People aren’t burned out of politics, although that’s part of it. They are burned out from going “is this real?” No one has the bandwidth to become an investigative reporter for each post.

THE SPECTATOR

Geriatric Mommy

A Love Letter to the Sane Women Holding It Down

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 22

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while because, more often than not, I find myself doomscrolling, screaming “NOT ALL WOMEN!” It seems like most of the women represented in media are, for lack of a better word, insane. I blame the algorithms for elevating the craziest of us. So this is for you—the woman reading this who has been quietly holding it t…

Read full story

THE DAILY WIRE

America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead.

America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.

THE DAILY WIRE

Phetasy Merch

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A JFK conspiracy theorist dies and goes to heaven. At the Pearly Gates, God greets him. “Welcome. You are permitted to ask me one question, which I will answer truthfully.”

The man asks, “Who really shot Kennedy?”

God replies, “Lee Harvey Oswald shot him from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. There were no accomplices. He acted alone.”

The man pauses. “Shit. This goes higher up than I thought.”

That’s the country now. Not just the guy in the joke—all of us, drowning in what I’d call X-Files politics: a shallow understanding of first principles, a deep distrust of every institution, and a general paranoia in which the lack of evidence is proof. “The truth is out there,” The X-Files promised. Except it isn’t. Increasingly, it feels like the truth is nowhere.

In fairness to the conspiracy-minded, most of this stuff has some basis in reality. There really was an island with a shrine where young girls were served up to the most powerful men in the world. The Boy Scouts really was full of pedos. There really are grooming gangs in the UK.

All the ugly truths escaped containment, and every conspiracy theorist could point at them and say see, we were right all along. Add to that the blatant “don’t believe your lying eyes” levels of propaganda that have occurred in the last decade. Racism is the real virus. Mostly peaceful protests. Russiagate. Very fine people on both sides. Politicians, institutions, and their media mouthpieces got caught lying enough times that “trust the science” became a punchline.

The Establishment collapsed. The Void opened, and it filled with half-truths.

It used to be that there was about one person in your friend group who was the conspiracy theorist. They were usually the stoner (I actually think mass weed use and a nation of marijuana addicts has contributed to this phenomenon, but that’s another piece entirely.) The village idiot in your friend group/family chat kept you up to date on the most recent developments with the lizard people, government surveillance, and how the moon is a hollowed out spaceship.

This isn’t a left/right thing. This is an everyone thing, as we saw in the aftermath of the White House Correspondents Dinner incident when STAGED started trending on X. Everyone is running the playbook now. The mainstream right. The mainstream left. The comedians. The podcasters. The whole influencer class.

We’re all Alex Jones now.

What I always hated most about the Trump years is that he gave us permission to be the worst versions of ourselves. But it’s also his super power. He’s revealed how full of shit and self-serving we can be. The comedians who had him on are now crying he betrayed them. Is he your boyfriend? They got conned by a con man. They saw their mostly male audience was with Trump and they followed—not the other way around. The influencers who spent years saying #MeToo went too far are suddenly very concerned about justice for the Epstein girls. The same people who platformed Andrew Tate. The folks who defended Harvey Weinstein just to be contrarian. These people did not suddenly develop a deep concern for the victims of Jeffrey Epstein. They see a way to get attention, money, and clicks.

Trump is right to call them out on their bullshit moral crusade about Epstein. Everyone is full of shit. Including him.

This isn’t hypocrisy in the old sense, because hypocrisy requires a shared standard of truth. And these influencers won’t admit to sharing truth, to there being some basic reality to which we all belong and against which our theories and speculations must be tested—in fact, their whole gig is that you’re a dope if you try. So this is what you get.

It’s a new business model, and the model doesn’t run without The Void. The grift economy isn’t a bug of post-truth politics. It’s the product. The idiots aren’t useful despite the collapse of shared reality. They’re useful because of it. Their relevance requires that nothing can be verified or falsified.

Who benefits when nothing is true? Every influencer, comedian, podcaster, and politician in this story. Trump. The people feigning outrage about Epstein. The ones pretending to be betrayed. Their careers depend on The Void. They are The Void’s contractors.

Pick a tribe, you get a villain and a vibe. The right has the deep state. The left has the oligarchs. The wellness moms have seed oils. The podcast bros have the Epstein class. Everyone has the Zionists. We’re all on the same broken feed, performing a certainty nobody has, competing for the same thin slice of attention. Everyone is sure. Nobody is right.

The rabbit hole isn’t a subculture anymore. It is THE culture. Look at your own feed. Count the things you’ve shared this year without reading. Count the people you’ve written off over a post. Count the times you’ve felt righteous this week and ask when righteousness got this cheap. Nobody here gets to stand outside of this, either. I’m writing a take about takes. You’re reading one.

You can’t fix this system. But you can starve it. Attention is the only currency this economy runs on—it’s what every name in this essay needs to stay relevant. It’s also the one thing no one can take from you without your consent.

The truth is nowhere. And when nothing is true, all the idiots remain useful.

Starve them.

President Trump brought an impressive entourage to China, maybe the most impressive entourage of all time, short of Jesus and the Apostles. The entire spectacle was breath-takingly surreal, from a thousand different angles. Like the exuberance of the Chinese school children as Trump walked alongside Xi Jinping, the glimpses of Elon meta-memes, the grace of Trump’s and Xi’s speeches. Or how we learned from Xi’s remarks that when he was young, he fell in love with America through The Federalist Papers and Thomas Paine, and studied the lives of great American presidents—that this staid leader of the CCP admires some of the most classic American literature (Whitman, Twain, Thoreau, Hemingway), and this whole time we had assumed that he hated Western civilization.

Then, after giving Trump a tour of the Temple of Heaven, Xi treated the President and his entourage to an opulent banquet dinner featuring Beijing roast duck, overcooked beef (a Trump favorite), and tiramisu. The People’s Liberation Army band played “America the Beautiful,” “We Are the World,” and the Elton John song from Lion King. Then, to end the night, The Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” Utterly surreal. The relationship between Donald Trump and “Y.M.C.A” deserves its own book. In an effort to explain this to my kids, I played “Y.M.C.A” and they shouted, “It’s the Minions song,” because they only know the Minionese cover from Despicable Me 2. I told them that last month, a marching band played the song in St. Peter’s Square to honor the first American Pope. That’s how American “YM.C.A” is—from every angle. Even the institution is based on. Did you know that the YMCA invented basketball, volleyball, and Father’s Day? Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are just two of the YMCA’s many important guests since its founding in 1844.

And we shout its name at football games, weddings, proms—any major public gathering. Americans are practically born knowing how to do the “Y.M.C.A” arm dance, which was invented by Dick Clark, “America’s Oldest Teenager,” live on American Bandstand. It’s impossible to describe how culturally ubiquitous that song is in our country. If we die knowing only a handful of the most important national rituals, the “Y.M.C.A” dance will be one of them.

While covering the 2020 presidential election, I undoubtedly suffered hearing loss from the volume that Trump played “Y.M.C.A” at his rallies. It lit up a MAGA arena with volcanic force. And even this has its own subplots: In 2022, the Village People asked Trump not to use the song at his rallies, but gave up, assuming Trump would eventually get tired of it. But then the “Trump dance” went indescribably viral. Globally. It was everywhere. And “Y.M.C.A” shot to the top of the Billboard Dance/Electronic chart—47 years after its release. And the world changed and the Village People performed at Trump’s 2025 inauguration eve rally. Most recently, “Y.M.C.A.” songwriter Victor Willis said that he’ll sue any news agency that describes the song as a “gay anthem,” which is a whole other discussion deeply rooted in American cultural history.

Trump’s China visit should make everyone in the world drop their shoulders with relief. Maybe we’re not stuck in a tragedy after all, maybe the human story really is a happy one, where rivalries don’t necessarily end with carnage, and humanity is actually redemptive. Maybe we’ve just lived through a Dark Age and now we’re witnessing its social Renaissance. Maybe, despite our digital era, “face-to-face” encounters can still improve moral responsibility and prevent wars and advance political stability. Anyone who’s complaining through this historic moment should be treated like a teenage nihilist. Who knew that life on earth could reach this level of beauty and hope? And America’s 250th birthday celebrations haven’t even started. We’re still a month from the UFC showdown on the White House Lawn, to celebrate Donald Trump’s birthday, which also happens to be Flag Day. I mean, come on, man, this is great stuff!

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #314

New Plague, Who Dis?

A deadly virus is spreading around the globe. Health officials are scrambling to keep it contained. We’ve seen this movie before and we did not enjoy it. But this time it’s a virus with a 40% mortality rate. Bridget walks us through the Hantavirus outbreak, how people are reacting to a potential Pandemic: The Sequel when our trust in our institutions is already shattered, and why the World Cup could be the accelerator event to a catastrophe. Are any of us actually ready to do this again? Definitely not.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #390

Why Left-Wing Violence Is a Suppressed History | Noah Rothman

Bridget sits down with Noah Rothman, senior editor at National Review and author of Blood And Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, to trace the long, suppressed history of radical left-wing political violence in the United States — from the anarchist bombings of the 1920s to the Weather Underground to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Noah argues that this history isn’t obscure, it’s deliberately buried, and that the same patterns driving today’s wave of violence have shown up in 50-year cycles throughout American history.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #315

America and China Are Pretending to Be Friends Again

America and China are in the world’s most expensive bad marriage — they need each other, they don’t trust each other, but it’s too expensive to get divorced. Bridget breaks down Trump’s trip to Beijing, the CEO delegation that proves capitalism always wins, the handshake heard round the world, and why the Left would rather Trump spit in Xi’s face than narrowly avoid World War III. Elon took pictures like a tourist and Marco Rubio has a new name and a new look.

DUMPSTER FIRE

THE SPECTATOR

The internet is dying and so are we

There is a lot of proof that the internet is dying. People aren’t burned out of politics, although that’s part of it. They are burned out from going “is this real?” No one has the bandwidth to become an investigative reporter for each post.

THE SPECTATOR

Geriatric Mommy

A Love Letter to the Sane Women Holding It Down

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 22

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while because, more often than not, I find myself doomscrolling, screaming “NOT ALL WOMEN!” It seems like most of the women represented in media are, for lack of a better word, insane. I blame the algorithms for elevating the craziest of us. So this is for you—the woman reading this who has been quietly holding it t…

Read full story

THE DAILY WIRE

America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead.

America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.

THE DAILY WIRE

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Exotica/Lounge is one of the most intriguing musical genres—weird bachelor-pad music that emerged in the 1950s. The genre takes the first half of its name from Martin Denny’s Exotica (1957). You’ve probably heard “Quiet Village,” which I place alongside “Yellow Bird” by Arthur Lyman. These songs capture the genre’s enchanted island croon, Hawaiian Easy Listening. Another gem is Eden’s Island (1960) by Eden Ahbez, a vaguely psychedelic jazz-folk album with sporadic poetry readings. “Mongoose” features Ahbez, backed by a beautiful chorus, repeatedly telling a mongoose to chase a snake away.

The “Lounge” part of the genre is twofold: 1) Latin-jazz cocktail music like Esquivel’s Latin-esque (1962), featuring “Mucha Muchacha,” which would later appear in Beavis and Butthead Do America, and 2) Wacky synthesizer space music. This is where Exotica/Lounge gets weird. Polymath composers like Les Baxter and Jean-Jacques Perrey applied their expertise to the Moog, the original synthesizer. These digital compositions are layered and at times cartoonish and sometimes downright beautiful. There’s elements of Retrofuturism, visions of a humorously 1950s-coded technological future. Funny enough, this Space Pop has become the most influential part of the subgenre, laying the foundation for electronica-driven pop from Depeche Mode to Brittney Spears, Lady Gaga, and Billie Eilish.

The Obscuro dual-genre of Exotica and Lounge supplies the soundtrack that plays during our most dreamy yet futuristic moments, a pleasant mindframe we could all use more of. Playful but not silly. Industrious, masterful, but never quite austere. Songs that take place either in another galaxy or on a beach in Honolulu. Although there has been a revival of Exotica/Lounge, as seen in “Lena’s Song” by the Sweet Enoughs, the genre had a short life. By the late 60s, it was mostly done, too innocent for an era characterized by Moon landings and nonstop assassinations. Next time you host a dinner party, sneak this playlist into the background and watch what happens.

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #313

Spencer Pratt STUNS at LA Mayor Debate

Spencer Pratt — yes, that guy from The Hills — lost his $3.8 million Palisades home in the LA wildfires and decided to run for mayor against the people who let it happen. He’s crushing debates, winning 88% of post-debate polls, and making the best political content on the internet. Then there’s the arsonist who started the Palisades fire: a Luigi Mangione superfan might as well have Googled “how to start a forest fire” before torching a city.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #389

Why the Word “Antisemitism” No Longer Works | Adam Louis-Klein

Bridget Phetasy sits down with Adam Louis-Klein, anthropologist and founder of the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ), to examine why the word “antisemitism” has stopped working — and what language we actually need to name and confront the Israel hatred spreading across campuses, media, and institutions. Klein traces antizionism from its roots in Nazi and Soviet propaganda through its capture of Western academia, explains how it functions as a libel machine resistant to any counterevidence, and lays out why defeating it — not just defending Israel — is the only path to peace.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #312

The End of Roadhead: Why the Government Wants to See Your Eyes

There’s a kill switch being built into every new car in America by 2027 — and both parties voted for it with a smile. Bridget breaks down the AI that decides if you’re too emotional to drive, why the mandatory seatbelt law was always a slippery slope, and how the surveillance state got built — not by the government, but by us, one smart home device and ignored terms of service at a time. The Alexa, the Ring doorbell, the face scan to unlock your phone — we handed all of it over for the sake of convenience. Don’t worry though, you can opt out. You just won’t be able to participate in society.

DUMPSTER FIRE

THE SPECTATOR

The internet is dying and so are we

There is a lot of proof that the internet is dying. People aren’t burned out of politics, although that’s part of it. They are burned out from going “is this real?” No one has the bandwidth to become an investigative reporter for each post.

THE SPECTATOR

Leave Me Behind

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 29

I caught clips of Tucker Carlson interviewing Nick Fuentes, and the thing that struck me was the body language. Here was a man who had the biggest show on cable news, who once commanded an audience of 5 million adults, sitting across from a twenty-something New-Age shock-jock with the energy of a guy trying to impress his son’s friends.

Read full story

Geriatric Mommy

A Love Letter to the Sane Women Holding It Down

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 22

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while because, more often than not, I find myself doomscrolling, screaming “NOT ALL WOMEN!” It seems like most of the women represented in media are, for lack of a better word, insane. I blame the algorithms for elevating the craziest of us. So this is for you—the woman reading this who has been quietly holding it t…

Read full story

THE DAILY WIRE

America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead.

America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.

THE DAILY WIRE

Phetasy Merch

Share

“Are unicorns real?” asked my then-four-year-old daughter, at the height of her love for unicorns. She’d recently asked a relative, who told her, “Well, no.” And now I had to rebuild the little walls of her imagination. I balked at the question: “How could they possibly know that there are no unicorns?”

Then I grabbed a handful of sand. “Think about all the sand you’ve seen. Sandboxes, playgrounds, rivers, beaches. But also the desert. There’s sand in mortar and concrete. Golf courses, volleyball courts. For every single grain of sand, there are 10,000 stars in the universe. 10,000. And for every grain of sand, there are more than a billion planets. If you counted to a billion one number at a time, it would take you 31 years. Altogether, there are about 10 septillion planets up there in the sky, too far for us to see. That’s a ten follower by 24 zeroes. And that’s just the observable universe. And, I’m sorry, but I just think it’s ridiculous that anyone, any human, could claim to know the truth about all of it. You’re telling me that, in all that endlessness, there’s not at least one horse-like animal with a horn on its head and maybe the ability to fly? Absurd.”

She smiled—gums swollen because she’d lost a tooth at school that day—in the beautiful way of a kid enjoying the redemption of magic, then asked, “Are mermaids real?”

“The oceans aren’t as vast as the universe, but humans have still only explored about 15% of the oceans, and almost none of the deep ocean sea floor. Just last year, scientists discovered a whole new ocean. An entire ocean that we didn’t even know about. You’re telling me that there are definitely no human-fish hybrids in all that unexplored ocean? There’s a decent chance that humans evolved from fish, so who’s to say whether a subspecies of half-fish, half-humans didn’t say, ‘Nah, I’m good,’ and stay in the ocean?”

Then she glowed with another swollen-gummed smile and stared up at me: “What about the tooth fairy?”

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #310

Democrats Have A Terrorist Problem

A gunman burst through the doors of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and opened fire — and somehow, within hours, Democrats were calling it a hoax. Bridget Phetasy breaks down the WHCD shooting, the shooter’s manifesto (which opens with “Hello everybody!”), and why his beliefs weren’t fringe at all — they were garden-variety left-wing media talking points. Also: why is the left so comfortable with assassination culture, and what does Trump building a ballroom have to do with any of this?

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #388

What the Internet Did to Girls | Freya India

Bridget Phetasy sits down with Freya India, British writer and author of Girls: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything, to dig into why Gen Z women are struggling in ways previous generations didn’t. They discuss why it’s not simply a case of kids being soft, and how the mental health crisis among young women isn’t just about bad parenting or weak foundations, but predatory industries stepping into the vacuum left by family breakdown, community loss, and the decline of religion — and selling girls a simulation of everything they lost.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #311

Anti-Hate Charity Got Caught Bankrolling the Klan

The Southern Poverty Law Center — America’s premier anti-hate nonprofit — has been indicted for secretly funding the KKK. If you donated to the SPLC thinking you were fighting racism, congratulations: you may have bought the Grand Wizard a new truck. Bridget Phetasy breaks down the most ironic scandal in nonprofit history and why the demand for racism apparently outpaced the supply, so they decided to manufacture some.

DUMPSTER FIRE

Leave Me Behind

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 29

I caught clips of Tucker Carlson interviewing Nick Fuentes, and the thing that struck me was the body language. Here was a man who had the biggest show on cable news, who once commanded an audience of 5 million adults, sitting across from a twenty-something New-Age shock-jock with the energy of a guy trying to impress his son’s friends.

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Geriatric Mommy

A Love Letter to the Sane Women Holding It Down

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 22

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while because, more often than not, I find myself doomscrolling, screaming “NOT ALL WOMEN!” It seems like most of the women represented in media are, for lack of a better word, insane. I blame the algorithms for elevating the craziest of us. So this is for you—the woman reading this who has been quietly holding it t…

Read full story

THE DAILY WIRE

America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead.

America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.

THE DAILY WIRE

THE SPECTATOR

Meet the male Kardashians

What happens when the Internet’s Groypers gather in Miami Beach for a night of “slay gurl” partying? Reality TV, the likes of which have never been seen.

THE SPECTATOR

Phetasy Merch

Share

I Loved You Before I Was Born by Li-Young Lee

 I loved you before I was born.  
It doesn't make sense, I know.

I saw your eyes before I had eyes to see.  
And I've lived longing   
for your ever look ever since.  
That longing entered time as this body.   
And the longing grew as this body waxed.  
And the longing grows as the body wanes.  
The longing will outlive this body.

I loved you before I was born.  
It doesn't make sense, I know.

Long before eternity, I caught a glimpse  
of your neck and shoulders, your ankles and toes.  
And I've been lonely for you from that instant.  
That loneliness appeared on earth as this body.   
And my share of time has been nothing   
but your name outrunning my ever saying it clearly.   
Your face fleeing my ever  
kissing it firmly once on the mouth.

In longing, I am most myself, rapt,  
my lamp mortal, my light   
hidden and singing. 

I give you my blank heart.  
Please write on it  
what you wish. 

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #308

Is the Government Giving Us Drugs to Forget About War?

Trump signed an executive order fast-tracking FDA approval of psychedelic drugs — psilocybin, MDMA, ibogaine — and Joe Rogan was standing right behind him when he did it. Bridget breaks down the results of a text message between Rogan and Trump, why libertarians are finally winning, and whether any of this is actually good for anyone. Plus: Aliens.gov is real, it’s launching soon, and the government has been quietly confirming UFOs exist for years.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #387

Why Tariffs Are Crushing Small Business | Scott Lincicome

Bridget Phetasy sits down with Scott Lincicome, Vice President of General Economics and Trade at the Cato Institute, to unpack what Trump’s tariffs have actually done to the American economy. They dig into why the apocalyptic predictions didn’t pan out, who’s really paying the price, and how small businesses got blindsided by customs bills they never saw coming.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #309

The Dangerous Truth About Media’s Favorite Radical

Hasan Piker sat down with the New York Times Opinion podcast — alongside Jia Tolentino and Nadja Spiegelman — and made the case that murdering a healthcare CEO is “social protest” and stealing is activism. Nobody pushed back. Bridget Phetasy and Mike Solana of Pirate Wires break down how assassination culture went from fringe rhetoric to the paper of record, what it means that the left has no “too far,” and why the NYT mainstreaming a violent Marxist is the actual story.

DUMPSTER FIRE

Leave Me Behind

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 29

I caught clips of Tucker Carlson interviewing Nick Fuentes, and the thing that struck me was the body language. Here was a man who had the biggest show on cable news, who once commanded an audience of 5 million adults, sitting across from a twenty-something New-Age shock-jock with the energy of a guy trying to impress his son’s friends.

Read full story

Geriatric Mommy

A Love Letter to the Sane Women Holding It Down

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 22

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while because, more often than not, I find myself doomscrolling, screaming “NOT ALL WOMEN!” It seems like most of the women represented in media are, for lack of a better word, insane. I blame the algorithms for elevating the craziest of us. So this is for you—the woman reading this who has been quietly holding it t…

Read full story

THE DAILY WIRE

America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead.

America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.

THE DAILY WIRE

THE SPECTATOR

Meet the male Kardashians

What happens when the Internet’s Groypers gather in Miami Beach for a night of “slay gurl” partying? Reality TV, the likes of which have never been seen.

THE SPECTATOR

Phetasy Merch

Share

Politics makes everything too serious. The worst kind of serious, too, where people suppress a laugh or a joke because they don’t want to stop frowning like a walrus. Humor is one of the greatest coping mechanisms for the condition known as life. People who can’t laugh are weird and alarming. Sure, it may seem like there’s not much to laugh about lately, but that’s exactly when comedy is needed the most. Even orangutans laugh.

It’s not my place to say that people should laugh at Trump’s Jesus meme and “The Pope is WEAK on crime” post. Anyone who was genuinely offended by it, like anyone who considered it unfunny or distasteful—that’s each person’s right. But holy outrage and invocations of the anti-Christ are harmfully serious, and, when voiced by commentators and politicians, presumably fake. All of this is harmfully serious. I say this as a devout Catholic. Especially as a devout Catholic. I take it seriously, but also Christianity is supposed to be the patient, loving, merciful, reasonably nonviolent religion. The only one of its kind. The truth of its message is so deep and strong that offensive depictions of the Lord are no big deal (unlike a certain other religion that hates music, bacon, and women, and flips out at the sight of Charlie Hebdo), Christianity is serious enough at the right time, in the right places, and genuine and stable enough to take a joke at its expense.

The NASCAR-graphic-style meme wasn’t even a particularly disparaging depiction of Christ; there are far worse ways he could have (and has) been portrayed. The offensive part, obviously, was that the guy who posted an AI-generated video of him as a fighter pilot bombing the No Kings protests with diarrhea was depicted as Jesus. He likely didn’t even see the meme before it was posted. Don’t activate BATTLE MODE over a metaphor.

I don’t mean this in a condescending “hey lighten up” kind of way. We can’t go around laughing at everything. That would be insane. And ironic and disturbingly serious. But it is worth our time, as a society, to remain eager for a comedic moment. This is how you transform the profane into the sacred.

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #306

Why Is Everyone So Mad? The End of Fun

Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ on Truth Social — on Orthodox Easter — and the right wing lost its mind. Then he attacked the new Pope, called him “weak on crime,” and the memes wrote themselves. Bridget Phetasy breaks down the MAGA meltdown, the elite-tier internet reactions, and why this is just the Right’s version of virtue signaling.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #386

Why Everyone Online Is in a Cult

Bridget sits down with Andrew Gold, host of the Heretics podcast and author of The Psychology of Secrets, for a conversation about cult dynamics, Islamism in Europe, purity spirals, and what happens when your online tribe starts demanding you sell your soul to keep them. Andrew breaks down how YouTube channels, political movements, and entire cultures operate on the same psychological mechanics as Scientology and Heaven’s Gate — just at different points on the spectrum.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #307

Normies Are Holding America Together

Bridget reads her viral essay — a love letter to the sane, normal women quietly holding it all down while the culture loses its mind. Not a trad wife, not a girl boss, not a Karen, not a pick-me — just the millions of women juggling kids, aging parents, marriages, and careers while being told their sanity is the problem.

DUMPSTER FIRE

CBS NEWS

Should older generations care if Gen Z likes them?

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #304

Leave Me Behind

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 29

I caught clips of Tucker Carlson interviewing Nick Fuentes, and the thing that struck me was the body language. Here was a man who had the biggest show on cable news, who once commanded an audience of 5 million adults, sitting across from a twenty-something New-Age shock-jock with the energy of a guy trying to impress his son’s friends.

Read full story

Geriatric Mommy

A Love Letter to the Sane Women Holding It Down

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 22

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while because, more often than not, I find myself doomscrolling, screaming “NOT ALL WOMEN!” It seems like most of the women represented in media are, for lack of a better word, insane. I blame the algorithms for elevating the craziest of us. So this is for you—the woman reading this who has been quietly holding it t…

Read full story

THE DAILY WIRE

America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead.

America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.

THE DAILY WIRE

THE SPECTATOR

Meet the male Kardashians

What happens when the Internet’s Groypers gather in Miami Beach for a night of “slay gurl” partying? Reality TV, the likes of which have never been seen.

THE SPECTATOR

Phetasy Merch

Share

I know we talked about Artemis last week, but how about those pictures of the Moon? Breathtaking. There are a lot of songs about the Moon and space flight and the cosmos, but for some reason, this one feels like the best expression of what Artemis II accomplished this week: “Into the Mystic” by Van Morrison.

Have a good weekend, Pham!

CBS NEWS

Should older generations care if Gen Z likes them?

Bridget talks to CBS News about her viral piece “Leave Me Behind,” which got picked up by The Free Press.

CBS NEWS

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #304

Every Man Falls Into One Of These Four Categories

Bridget Phetasy introduces the Genius/Asshole Matrix — the male version of the Hot/Crazy Matrix — and explains the Tortured Genius Line that separates icons from idiots. Plus, the UK just banned Kanye West from the Wireless Festival while looking the other way on grooming gangs, Kanye sold out two nights at SoFi Stadium for $33 million, Louis CK landed a Netflix special, and cancel culture is having an existential crisis. Why does genius buy forgiveness — and how much asshole can it cover?

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #385

The Death of Shame and the Collapse of Culture | Elnathan John

Bridget Phetasy sits down with Elnathan John, Nigerian satirist and author of Becoming Nigerian, for a wide-ranging conversation about what happens when an entire culture loses the ability to feel shame. Elnathan argues that the effectiveness of satire is directly proportional to a society’s capacity for shame—and right now, that capacity is bottoming out everywhere from Lagos to Washington.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #305

Why Ireland is Finally Exploding

Ireland just deployed its army against protesting farmers and truckers who are blockading motorways and the country’s only oil refinery. The government taxes fuel at 60% — and instead of negotiating, they sent in troops. Bridget Phetasy sits down with Dr. Eoin Lenihan, author of “Vandalizing Ireland,” to break down how Ireland became a corporate tax haven for Big Tech, abandoned its own people, and is now on the brink of serious civil unrest.

DUMPSTER FIRE

Leave Me Behind

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 29

I caught clips of Tucker Carlson interviewing Nick Fuentes, and the thing that struck me was the body language. Here was a man who had the biggest show on cable news, who once commanded an audience of 5 million adults, sitting across from a twenty-something New-Age shock-jock with the energy of a guy trying to impress his son’s friends.

Read full story

Geriatric Mommy

A Love Letter to the Sane Women Holding It Down

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 22

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while because, more often than not, I find myself doomscrolling, screaming “NOT ALL WOMEN!” It seems like most of the women represented in media are, for lack of a better word, insane. I blame the algorithms for elevating the craziest of us. So this is for you—the woman reading this who has been quietly holding it t…

Read full story

THE DAILY WIRE

America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead.

America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.

THE DAILY WIRE

THE SPECTATOR

Meet the male Kardashians

What happens when the Internet’s Groypers gather in Miami Beach for a night of “slay gurl” partying? Reality TV, the likes of which have never been seen.

THE SPECTATOR

Phetasy Merch

Share

For weeks ahead of the Artemis II launch, I repeatedly re-watched For All Mankind (1989), the Brian Eno-soundtracked masterpiece composed exclusively of footage from the Apollo space program. I also kept thinking about Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Windhover,” a reaction to the majesty of a falcon: “Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing! / Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here / Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion / Times told lovelier, more dangerous.”

But the day of the Artemis II launch, “Windhover” vanished from my mind, after I received a Facebook DM from my uncle Thomas, who has written articles, essays, poems, plays, fiction, and several books in his cottage outside Thurles, Ireland, a town of 8,000. It was a poem he’d written:

When there's a bridge
Between stars and sod
who knows all men may yet find God
  and so at last in one another  
see ourselves as sister- brother 
Bon voyage Artemis II

Uncle Thomas occasionally does an impression of John Wayne. It’s one of many ways that he expresses his deep love for America. The "Artemis II” poem is another lovely example of this spirit: Its speaker is piously overwhelmed by the universe, a void that’s about to be smaller than ever before, with a voyage once again led by the Yanks (and one Canadian), so the directness of American English is the best way to characterize this flight toward God: A rare moment where our species is as united as a family—stirred by the humane beauty of a rocket bursting into the steady air at 22 times the speed of sound, ascending like a God-appointed falcon, toward the grey chalky craters of our only moon, as part of a NASA mission to test equipment and scout for real estate, future gas stations along the route to Mars, through the darkness between giant bodies, the dust of interposing silences.

The poem’s speaker is so stunned by the enormity of it all that he disregards standard punctuation like commas and periods, reducing the stanza to an undifferentiated rush of thoughts. And then, as he looks up at the pluming terror of steam and fire, he feels an ancient hush, and it’s comforting, and he’s hopeful enough to say “Bon voyage” in salute.

Happy Easter, Pham.

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #302

No Kings Protestors Are Doing Exactly What Trump Wants

Bridget just got back from L.A. and has firsthand reporting from the No Kings protest — which turned out to be mostly octogenarians with arts-and-crafts signs and Starbucks cups. She breaks down why Trump is definitely jerking off to being called a king, why the real counterculture in Santa Monica is going to Catholic Mass, and why Americans need to appreciate the miracle of airplanes more.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #384

Our Tolerance Is Killing Us: Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Saving Civilization

Ayaan Hirsi Ali sits down with Bridget for an in-depth conversation about if and how the West can save itself. They discuss why the Constitution isn’t a suicide pact and shouldn’t be weaponized against us by those who seek our destruction, how our core values of tolerance and freedom are being exploited by adversaries who don’t share those values, the post-9/11 failure of Western elites to understand Islamic ideology and jihadist motivation, and the binary choice America faces with Iran’s regime — destroy them or they destroy us.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #303

Stop Pandering to Gen Z Radicals

Bridget reacts to her recent “Leave Me Behind” essay going viral and dives into why legacy media stars are desperately chasing a youth demographic that doesn’t care about them. She breaks down the difference between building a “territory” for your work versus fighting for “hierarchy” in an algorithm-driven world. It’s a call to stop performing for 20-somethings and start focusing on the “invisible audience” of late Boomers and Gen Xers.

DUMPSTER FIRE

Geriatric Mommy

A Love Letter to the Sane Women Holding It Down

Bridget Phetasy

Mar 22

I’ve been wanting to write this for a while because, more often than not, I find myself doomscrolling, screaming “NOT ALL WOMEN!” It seems like most of the women represented in media are, for lack of a better word, insane. I blame the algorithms for elevating the craziest of us. So this is for you—the woman reading this who has been quietly holding it t…

Read full story

THE DAILY WIRE

America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead.

America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.

THE DAILY WIRE

THE SPECTATOR

Meet the male Kardashians

What happens when the Internet’s Groypers gather in Miami Beach for a night of “slay gurl” partying? Reality TV, the likes of which have never been seen.

THE SPECTATOR

Phetasy Merch

Share

I caught clips of Tucker Carlson interviewing Nick Fuentes, and the thing that struck me was the body language. Here was a man who had the biggest show on cable news, who once commanded an audience of 5 million adults, sitting across from a twenty-something New-Age shock-jock with the energy of a guy trying to impress his son’s friends. See how cool I am? See how I’m not afraid to go there? An astute culture commentator, Jon Gabriel, recently posted on X:

You start reading the room instead of saying what’s true. You notice your audience is getting younger, more online, more radicalized—and instead of pushing back with the credibility you spent decades building, you chase them. Every take gets a little edgier. Every interview pushes a little further. You tell yourself you’re being brave, but really you’re just performing for an algorithm and a demographic that will forget your name the moment someone edgier comes along.

So much of what you’re seeing in the media right now is this dynamic playing out. The battle for market share. Massive legacy-turned-New-Media stars recognizing that their Fox News audience is aging and clinging to relevance. New Media stars getting older in the space, watching younger, ever more contrarian pundits and podcasters suck up all the energy and the eyeballs. The pick-me energy is palpable. So many interviews feel like, “See how based and cool I am?”

Maybe it’s the Gen-X in me, but I don’t care if the coveted demographic of 18-34 year olds like me—because they don’t know shit about shit.

They think they do, because they’ve grown up online with supercomputers in their pockets and cameras in their faces and gentle parenting. And because they’re young and it’s just a function of being in your twenties to think you know everything—in this way, they’re normal. In every other way, they’re not.

I’m not looking to the youth for wisdom—and I don’t care if they look to me for it.

If this sounds very “GET OFF MY LAWN” it’s how I mean it. Leave me behind. I’m fine with it. The problem with chasing the high of a younger audience—eventually they will turn on you for daring to get old, or as the kids these days would say, “Oldheads don’t understand the vision.”

My people are not the black-pilled, irony-poisoned youth who have been stewing in a vat of nihilism, victimhood, and entitlement. Very few of them read books. Most of them get their news and talking points from TikTok. They have no attention span and can’t make eye contact.

This generation is like an alien species to me, and mostly, I pity them. A lot of them are also thoughtful, astute, industrious, curious—they’ve been through some shit too, like multiple economic crises and an apocalypse-lite in which they had to stay at home in pjs and got their brains turned to pudding from a foreign virus in the form of TikTok content. But the ones everyone in Media is contorting themselves to impress are not the thoughtful ones.

My audience is Late Boomer, Gen-X and Elder Millennials (and some Gen-Z dudes who get me). My audience drank out of water hoses—this is obligatory, you cannot be Gen-X and not mention drinking out of hoses—and played outside until the street lights came on. We were children of divorce, latch-key kids. We rode our bikes. Everywhere. We remember life without the internet. We didn’t have the ability to get weed and food delivered to us via an app on our phone. In my teens, I lived on Burger King and cigarettes and got weed from a sketchy hippie who wanted to play guitar for me before he sold me my drugs. My audience came of age with E.T. and Star Wars. We grew up reading the classics. We grew up reading, not getting our brain melted by short-form content.

We grew up with many examples of the hero’s journey. These are my people.

I realize this might also be a function of the fact that I got a later start in Media, and I never really “peaked” or “blew up.” In the same way that it’s hard for an actress to age in Hollywood, I imagine it’s hard for pundits who had huge shows on Fox News or Comedy Central to lose relevance as they age. What happens, inevitably, is that you start chasing youth. Youthful looks. Youthful ideas. Clinging to the coveted demographic, like a tech bro with a blood boy.

About five years into my career as a writer and media personality, this realization bummed me out. However, at exactly that time, I was reading Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art for the umpteenth time, and his section about territory versus hierarchy jumped out to me:

“For the artist to define himself hierarchically is fatal…The artist must operate territorially. He must do his work for its own sake. To labor in the arts for any other reason other than love is prostitution.”

I don’t want that demographic. I don’t want to be on TikTok doing dances and dunking on children. I don’t want to learn whatever the new slang is—I’m going to be forced to learn it when my daughter is a teen and I’m in my fifties and she’s calling me whatever the new slang for “cringe” is.

Again from The War of Art: “I learned this from Robert McKee. A hack, he says, is a writer who second-guesses his audience. When the hack sits down to work, he doesn’t ask himself what’s in his own heart. He asks what the market is looking for.”

The algorithms and analytics have made hacks of us all. Some more than others. And you can see it if you’re paying attention—many of those with the biggest megaphones in Media are using them to parrot back whatever the coveted demographic already believes. I don’t need polls or studies about the percentage of young people left and right who hold antisemitic views or how support for Israel is collapsing among younger generations, all I need is to watch the weathervanes nod along, soften their positions, chase the algorithm. Pressfield had a word for that.

The kids have words for me. “Boomercon slop” is a pejorative that’s thrown around casually in any online debate these days and in the comment section by younger, online-savvy users to signal they’re above “normie” conservatism. Call me a Boomer. Call me out of touch. I get it because I remember being in my teens and early twenties and I thought all the adults were morons who didn’t know anything, too. Anyone who consumes my content knows I have my issues with Boomers, my sister and I have been raging against them since we were in our twenties, so welcome to the party, pal.

My grandparents were Depression-era kids and survived World War II. Big deal, I thought at the time. They don’t know what I’m going through now. I was so certain their experience had nothing to teach me. And they had the grace not to argue about it. They just waited. Because they knew something I didn’t: That wisdom isn’t persuasive to people who haven’t earned it yet, and that trying to make it persuasive is a fool’s errand.

I was a fool. Now I’d give anything for their wisdom and it’s too late.

The part the platform-chasers don’t understand: You cannot reason a twenty-three-year-old out of positions they were algorithmically radicalized into. You’re not going to win them over by learning their dumb slang and nodding along with their worst impulses. All you’re going to do is lose yourself. And your audience—your actual audience, the people who showed up because you had something to say—will watch you do it in real time.

I never peaked. I say that without self-pity. I got a late start, I never had the massive Fox show or the viral Comedy Central moment, and for a while, that bothered me. But it turns out never peaking is a kind of freedom. There’s no high to chase, no glory days to recreate, no slide into irrelevance to panic about. There’s just the work. Territory, not hierarchy. You do it because it’s yours to do, and you hope the right people find it, and if the coveted demographic thinks you’re an oldhead who doesn’t understand the vision—good. I only want to do my work.

Leave me behind. I’m fine here.

It’s always incredible when something I write breaks through all the noise, and wow, did my “Letter to the Sane Women Holding it Down” speak to women. I realize there is a male version of this as well, as I wrote in my recent piece for The Daily Wire, the men who make the world are the men who continue to show up and do the work, day after day. The rugged normies are the folks who build this country, and as it is America’s birthday, how this country came to be is something I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking and reading about.

I’m also trying to instill my daughter with the wonder that is the United States of America. It’s easy to look around and only focus on the problems. It’s fashionable to repeat the mantras of defeatism that permeate our culture. “Late stage capitalism.” “We are a nation in decline.” “We are on the backside of an empire in decline.” “America is done.”

My feeling, as I look around and focus on what makes this country great, is that America is whatever we want it to be. We the People. We are gifted this miracle of an experiment. We are descendants in the long line of thought, debate, science, exploration, Enlightenment values, and freedom that all fall under the umbrella of “Western Civilization” and that people all over the globe have clamored to experience. We owe it to our kids and our grandkids and our ancestors to be stewards of this gift, this miracle.

I’ve long had a theory that a lot of our current problems in America could be solved if we all had to do just one task our ancestors used to do in order to survive, like, for instance, churn butter. I’ve been reading the Little House on the Prairie books to my toddler, she loves them, and it’s equally hilarious watching her eyes go wide as she says, “What??? They used a pig’s bladder as a balloon?” Or “What?? Her doll was a corncob with a handkerchief???” And having to explain to her that they didn’t have refrigeration, or cars, or roads, or running water. All of this progress in technology in just 150 years. It’s actually insane when you consider it.

Now, consider the leaps we will make in the next 150 years. That is, if we don’t self-destruct. There is a great documentary out in theaters about the promise and peril of Artificial Intelligence called The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, and it does a great job of capturing the schizophrenic nature of our current moment. And yet, this country has been faced with many crossroads of promise and peril—and we are here.

I choose to remain cautiously optimistic. I have to for my daughter. What I won’t do is surrender to defeat, nihilism, self-loathing. I will do what my ancestors did. Take risks. Build. Put my head down and stay focused on the work. Feet planted firmly on the ground while looking up to the stars with wonder. Daring to dream of an even greater future and being one of the people working towards that, instead of against it.

We got our garden in. The dirt is so healing. As Maude says in my favorite movie, Harold and Maude, “I like to watch things grow.” Have a great weekend!

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #300

Champagne Socialists Tour Cuba While Afroman Wins America

Bridget Phetasy reacts to the ultimate irony of “Champagne Socialists” vacationing in the poverty-stricken ruins of Cuba while praising the system that broke it. Meanwhile, back in the states, Afroman is turning a botched police raid into a viral marketing masterpiece. It’s a tale of two worlds that proves one thing: whether you’re a communist tourist or a rapper with a lemon pound cake, capitalism always wins in the end.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #383

Big Tech Owns Society Now - Jacob Siegel

Jacob Siegel returns to talk about his new book The Information State: Politics and the Age of Total Control, which explains why the war on disinformation is a continuation of the War on Terror using repurposed counterinsurgency tools, and the replacement of bottom-up civic institutions with top-down algorithmic control. They cover how Obama’s administration built the censorship infrastructure that defined the Trump era, the role of the CIA in fabricating Russiagate through the Intelligence Community Assessment, how COVID censorship was far more radicalizing than Russiagate because it touched people’s everyday lives, how tech platforms concentrate power by eliminating private property rights, why younger generations don’t care about privacy because they’ve grown up under constant surveillance, and why freedom in the digital age must be found within the system rather than outside it.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #301

Why Hot Happy Kids Are Driving Critics Crazy

Bridget breaks down the Jesse Watters spring break video that’s making intellectuals and prudes equally furious, explains why hot, dumb happy kids are actually a sign America is doing fine, and reacts to the most insane headline of 2026: a quadruple amputee cornhole champion charged with murder who dumped a body from a self-driving Tesla. Plus, the new wildly inappropriate video game kids are addicted to.

DUMPSTER FIRE

THE DAILY WIRE

America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead.

America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.

THE DAILY WIRE

THE SPECTATOR

Meet the male Kardashians

What happens when the Internet’s Groypers gather in Miami Beach for a night of “slay gurl” partying? Reality TV, the likes of which have never been seen.

THE SPECTATOR

Phetasy Merch

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Most death albums usually aren’t much fun. The Mountain, Gorillaz’s ninth album, is an exception. It evinces the “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” principle: If a song is catchy and pretty enough, you can say anything you want. The perfect example on The Mountain is “The Hardest Thing” and “Orange County,” which are separate tracks, even though they’re perfect together and were released as a single. Their mantra is “You know the hardest thing / is to say goodbye / to someone you love / that is the hardest thing.”

We hear the voice of legendary drummer Tony Allen, the now-deceased polyrhythmic architect of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat—a genre of music that could bring corpses to life in dance—saying “Oya E dide erori,” which translates to “We are ready, let’s go.” The fact that the percussionless song features Allen feels almost like a troll. Instead, we get the somber parts of Bowie’s s Low (1977), one of the greatest albums ever made.

Then the fog clears and “Orange County” starts as the mantra continues: “You know the hardest thing / is to say goodbye to someone you love….” The song is infectious — the mariachi horn-hop over a Balkan beat and dreamy acoustic guitar strum somehow keep the whistled melody from getting old. Kara Jackson, 2019 U.S. National Youth Poet Laureate, sings the lovely “I’m not your enemy” bridge.

Anytime I listened to “Hardest Thing/Orange County” while my kids were around, they got so happy: “Is that the one with the whistles? I LOVE it!” But for me, watching them enjoy the song was a bittersweet experience. The song’s mantra, “You know the hardest thing / is to say goodbye to someone you love” is a reality of parenthood, which is so ruthless and beautiful.

The Mountain is full of apparitions, the ghost voices of Gorillaz collaborators who have died: Bobby Womack, David Jolicoeur from De La Soul, actor Dennis Hopper, Mark E. Smith from the Fall, and Proof from D12.

Death is central to the album in every sense.

Gorillaz creators Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett both lost their fathers in 2024, ten days apart. Then they went to India together, to begin work on what would become The Mountain and “The Mountain, The Moon Cave and The Sad God,” a nine-minute short film that captures the essence of the entire concept.

England, Albarn told The Sun, is just really bad at dealing with death. He visited Varanasi, the primary cremation site for the Hindu death ritual, which they believe achieves moksha (liberation from the cycle of birth and death). “On the banks of the Ganges,” he said, “every family is there with the body wrapped in a shroud and they’re burnt, and it’s going on everywhere. It goes on 24 hours a day and it’s been going on for thousands of years.”

He swam through the frothy, brown-green water, then cast his father’s ashes into the current, overcome by the phrase, “This is beautiful.”

I’m a huge fan of Damon Albarn. I discovered Parklife (1994) when I was 13, driven by an autistic urge to learn as much about music as possible. It revealed how cheeky lyrics can be, how wiry and bold, when you swaddle them in bewildering hooks and melodies.

Which is how Albarn became the anti-Pop Hero of Pop music. The earliest example of this is Blur’s “Song 2”—in which Albarn repeatedly shouts ”Woo hoo!”—a track you’ve definitely heard. Supposedly, it was written as a troll, a satirization of the commercialization of Grunge, a genre premised on anti-consumerism.

Albarn and comic book artist Jamie Hewlett, who co-created Tank Girl, were roommates in the late 1990s when they came up with the idea for Gorillaz, the original virtual band—not in the AI sense, but like Kraftwerk: a human simulation of digital musicians.

It’s been over two decades since Gorillaz became global anti-Pop Pop-stars with their revolutionary sophomore album Demon Days. It was everywhere. The famous clip of the origin of mega-hit “Clint Eastwood” as a garage-sale accident is illuminating in a way I almost resent—it shows us how the magic was performed, that the puppets are operated manually. But this has always been the point of Gorillaz.

The Mountain, which Anthony Fantano called the “most ambitious [Gorillaz] album so far,” opens with “The Mountain.” Our metaphor is immediate, as the air opens into a stock-footage moment, silk curtains parting to reveal a warm little oasis. The clouds bugle with a sitar cover of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” played by Anoushka Shankar, Ravi Shankar’s daughter.

This brief warm-up leads us to “The Moon Cave,” which is a banger through and through. The slop-turn halfway is beautiful filth — influenced by Hip-Hop (what new music isn’t?), but more advanced, a squall of 808 State chirps and Aphex Twin hyper-melodies, all the machinery of ‘90s electronica glued to acoustic floor toms.

“Shadowy Light” features vocals from Gruff Rhys, with his knack for lovable music. We don’t get the classic Gorillaz sound until “The God of Lying.” Idles is an interesting guest choice. “The Empty Dream Machine” is a Bowie electro-waltz in spangle.

“Damascus” is the only track I instinctively skipped, though I grew to like the heavy-handedness of the Indian influence.

Because The Mountain is worldly, the playbook of a globetrotter. It leaps around Asia like a wealthy tourist would: Japanese Shibuya-kei, Mandarin zither, Bollywood shuffle, Punjab vocal ornamentation, Hindustani tabla. A little bit of Buddhism, some Daoism, some Hindu superstition and Nepalese bansuri. Then it bounces around Africa, then across South America on a motorbike driven by Che Guevara in the form of Trueno, then off to Jamaica on a jet-ski made of conch and Wurlitzer, Dub spliced with reggaeton and Baile Funk, spider-webbed by harp sway.

Even the most proficient musicians of the World genre don’t attempt this sort of continent-hopping. At times, it sounds like some Indian dudes kidnapped Albarn and said, “Make Indian music sound cool or we’ll kill you.” And, to be fair, he succeeded.

At the same time, Albarn is as English as it gets. As the voice and face of Blur, he pioneered a genre literally called BritPop, and The Mountain, with guests like Johnny Marr and Paul Simonon (The Clash), is still British-hearted.

Oddly, the least powerful moments of the album are its Hip-Hop verses, although that’s probably because I have an escalating grudge against a genre I once deeply loved. Viewed more objectively, Albarn lives up to his knack for choosing Common-lineage American rappers who have gotten unfairly trapped on the honor roll of Underground Hip-Hop. And the question of our day, in music, is: What will replace Hip-Hop as the dominant form? Nobody knows. But, despite my grudge, I hope it sounds something like “The Manifesto.”

Like the rest of the album, it forces you to slow down.

You’re not meant to believe in Gorillaz the way you believe in Blur. Not even as a cartoon show, fabulous and convincing as Hewlett’s animation is. The projection and illusion of their performance is itself the veil that deepens its trance. The characters always wink at us, and we’re meant to wink back. Within this gimmick, the band operates on multiple levels simultaneously: Albarn the songwriter, boosted by big-studio production, a rotating cast of collaborators, and a cartoon mythology.

Albarn’s vocal melodies on The Mountain are transcendent. Can you believe he’s still creating gorgeous music full of new emotions and melodies? At this point in their career trajectory, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, The Ramones, Led Zeppelin, and many others, were already cover-band versions of themselves—this is the natural lifespan for most brilliant bands.

Although longevity is rare, there are examples of artists outfoxing it: Sonic Youth, The Beatles, Brian Eno. The finest counterexample related to Damon Albarn is David Bowie, who, while his later career never produced albums like Station to Station (1976), Aladdin Sane (1973), or “Let’s Dance” (1983), delivered bangers right up to Blackstar (2016), his gorgeous final release.

At each stage, Gorillaz have imitated Bowie—perhaps never more blatantly than on The Mountain. “The Empty Dream Machine” might as well be “Seven Years in Tibet.” And “The Happy Dictator” is practically a cover of “Weeping Wall,” right down to the way Sparks, who is himself one of Bowie’s forgotten love children, has Ziggy’s trebly tin-can vocals.

The centuries-old complaint is that Western civilization is dichotomy-minded. Occidental thought has always valued the individual over the collective, each part over the whole—the idea that we are all separate people. We view life as a composition of miniaturizations.

When confronted by the tiny particles of our world, we feel the need to understand them exhaustively, so we magnify them. We disassemble. We reassemble. We take small ideas and turn them into big ideas — monstrosities, often. The reproductions multiply into further reproductions, greater purity, deeper sound, more immersive experience. Our music is often so tangled into the reproduction of endlessly purified sound, high fidelity to excess.

Or at least that’s the conceit. As Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes, “Far Eastern thinking, on the other hand, is oriented toward complementary principles. Rather than stiff oppositions, reciprocal dependencies and correspondences preside over being.”

Ask any of my friends or family: If you spend time with me, you’ll be surrounded by music. That’s how I want to be remembered, as having been inseparable from beautiful songs. And when I’m reviewing an album, this soundtracking intensifies. It never stops playing. At all. It’s going even when I sleep and eat and mow the lawn. Partly because it allows me to gauge how quickly my family gets tired of it.

They never reached full burnout with The Mountain, a slick production of maximalist sound—the amusement park of a fire-jeweled sky.

Spring is here. The hangover of daylight saving time has mostly worn off. The weather is changing, the flowers are sprouting, the trees are showing off.

Entire books of poetry have been written about this moment, when the last of winter fades into the refreshment of spring. But I love this poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the greatest modern poets in the game. It’s fresh and direct.

EARLY SPRING 
Harshness vanished. A sudden softness
has replaced the meadows' wintry grey.
Little rivulets of water changed
their singing accents. Tendernesses,

hesitantly, reach toward the earth
from space, and country lanes are showing
these unexpected subtle risings
that find expression in the empty trees.

Have a good weekend, Pham.

Oh, and enjoy this little masterpiece, from the very talented Ben Howe:

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #298

Hollywood Hates You And Doesn’t Hide It Anymore

Bridget Phetasy watched the Oscars so you didn’t have to. From the “open borders” jokes to the blatant political snubs in the “In Memoriam” segment, Bridget breaks down why Hollywood remains a fortress of elitism that actively dislikes its own audience. Are the Oscars a celebration of film, or just a high-budget campaign rally for the people who want you at Dave & Buster’s?

DUMPSTER FIRE

THE DAILY WIRE

America Tried To ‘Fix’ Men For Two Decades. Here’s What It Got Instead.

America spent two decades trying to “fix” masculinity. It nearly broke the country — and the guys who complained the loudest about it turned out to be the ones with the least ability to fix it. America needs manly men — not men who are afraid of their masculinity, and not men who only talk about it.

THE DAILY WIRE

THE DANA SHOW WITH DANA LOESCH

How Woke Reich Podcasting Has Just Become Gossiping

Only Bridget has the cojones to dunk on the podcast chuds.

THE DANA SHOW

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #382

Why This Isn’t Iraq 2003: The Case for Taking Down Iran’s Regime - Behnam Ben Taleblu

Behnam Ben Taleblu joins Bridget to offer his expertise on Iran. They discuss who’s actually in charge in Iran right now, what Americans need to understand about the Islamic Republic’s ideology, why the plight of Iranian women gets ignored by Western feminists, and why this conflict is fundamentally different from Iraq 2003. They cover how the regime destroyed Iran’s environment to fund the Revolutionary Guard, how they worked with Mexican drug cartels and Canadian biker gangs to target dissidents on US soil, how AI-generated propaganda muddies the water in favor of the regime, why Hollywood actors completely miss what’s happening by lumping Iran with Palestine and Iraq.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #299

America Flexed Its Military Might And I Hate That I’m Kind Of Into It

Bridget breaks down why we’re living in a “Milli Vanilli” version of the 1990s, where nostalgia capitalism meets a very real threat of global conflict. She dives into why two decades of gender theory ended the moment America decided to start “flexing” its military might again. Plus, she calls out the “pick me” energy of legacy media stars desperate to stay relevant to a radicalized algorithm.

DUMPSTER FIRE

THE SPECTATOR

The Epstein files and the new Satanic Panic

The Epstein situation is different in one critical respect: Jeffrey Epstein was a real predator. Real crimes were committed. We know that real victims exist. But that kernel of truth is exactly what makes the current panic more dangerous, not less. It gives everyone permission to treat speculation as truth, proximity as proof and a flight log as a conviction. The fact that something terrible actually happened becomes a justification for whatever theory you want to push. “Isn’t it weird, man?” is compelling and it might be true. But it’s not evidence.

THE SPECTATOR

Phetasy Merch

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