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

Phetasy Merch

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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

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“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.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Paris has been a fashion hub for centuries, since at least the 1400s, then expanding when King Louis XIV popularized luxury clothing and industrialized textile manufacturing, making fashion design an economic staple of French identity. During the French Revolution, clothing became a political tool. Most of the philosophy and sociology on fashion has been written by leftists who have glorified political rebellion through fashion and dress and portrayed bizarre appearance as an act of subversion. The weirder a person looks, the more special they must be. This contrarianism has spiraled so that objective beauty is demonized and demonic ugliness is adored. This (NSFW) clip from Paris Fashion Week went viral, featuring a bare-chested woman in green body paint prowling the catwalk like a low-tier demon seeking a promotion. The global fashion capital is berserk! They’ve fully embraced abjection.

Which is far more worrisome than the Left’s usual theater-kid antics. Philosopher Julia Kristeva discusses the psychology of abjection, our defense mechanism—to recoil, to shriek, to vomit—against things that provoke disgust and horror, our subjective experience of repulsion. The abject is what haunts us, what we despise, hate, and fear, all the symbols and figurations of death—corpses, waste, carrion, spoil. Humans are not supposed to deactivate this innate mechanism. Without distinctions between life and death, humans have no framework for sanity.

Sure, fashion often requires deformation, alteration, and discomfort—but the ornaments and spangles and costumes of good fashion cannot resemble the most grotesque cosplay monsters stomping around Comic-Con. Or worse, ironic satanists who find themselves surrounded by evil. In alternative literature about fashion, right-leaning thinkers, who are far less bombastic and dramatic than the leftists who outnumber them, have examined fashion as a social contagion, an unexplainable fad. Sociologist William Graham Sumner described fashion as a “form of the dominance of the group over the individual, and it is quite as often harmful as beneficial.” Like how the miscreants in Paris, thanks in part to the philosophers who programmed them to deny reality, don’t understand the nature of subversion: They coordinated their ghoulish costumes so that they could all be hideous freaks in unison. Oblivious to the authentic expression of what they call fashion, which holds beauty as an objective and permanent force of life. BASED philosopher Roger Scruton observed, “The first effect of radical skepticism is not to free the mind, but to enslave it to fashion.”

The fashionable elite no longer have the slightest understanding of beauty. They can’t differentiate the beautiful from the terrible. And, look, I can’t be too judgmental: I wrote most of this commentary while wearing an oversized Bucc-ee’s t-shirt, a Halloween edition featuring the beaver as a happy ghost.

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #296

Terrorism Has A PR Team - The Mainstream Media

Bridget Phetasy breaks down the “headline surgery” of the New York Times after an attempted terrorist attack in NYC. From renaming pipe bombs to “smoking jars of metal” to the media’s desperate attempt to avoid the “T-word,” Bridget exposes why you don’t hate the media enough.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #381

Attention Span is the New Class Divide - Spence Klavan

Spencer Klavan joins Bridget for a fascinating conversation about why Plato’s 2,000-year-old warning about the invention of writing perfectly explains our AI panic, what it’s like to invent an entire language for Daily Wire’s Pendragon Cycle (and how it made him finally understand Tolkien), and why AI can only reproduce the “outer word” while humans alone possess the “inner word.”

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #297

Keeping Up With The Male Kardashians

Bridget Phetasy goes on a journey down the internet’s weirdest rabbit holes so you don’t have to. After seeing the new “Clavicular” trailer, she’s convinced we’ve officially entered the American Psycho era of masculinity. From young men obsessing over bone structure like it’s a full-time job to the rise of the “Male Kardashians,” Bridget explains why most women would still rather date Shane Gillis than a guy who thinks his collarbones are a personality trait.

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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Norman Mailer’s vision of America is enormous, but it can also be so small: “There could be no politics which gave warmth to one’s body until the country had recovered its imagination, its pioneer lust for the unexpected and incalculable.” As Americans, we occasionally believe that we have lost our spirit, our imagination, our combustible beauty and all the Hell that it causes. America has always had this quiet anxiety. But in its 250th year, it seems to be winning its fight against nihilism and spinelessness.

Operation Epic Fury has hammered this in, and there’s no shortage of evidence or memes, because the documentation and propagandization of the war is available immediately: Elon Musk shared that, this week, X saw its highest usage ever. Millions of us waded through the tsunami of information like futuristic detectives, searching for truth the way journalists used to. I sent my friends (including the Phetasy Team) so many “monitoring the situation” memes and jokes that we began abbreviating it as “MTS,” as in, “I’m MTS, are you?”

For some reason, the results of my incessant info-mining, and the passionate movement it aligned with, reminded me of Walt Whitman’s poem “America,” from his masterpiece Leaves of Grass, specifically his reading of it—the only extant audio of his voice, soundtracked by the crackle you’d expect from a wax recording cylinder recorded in 1888. It makes a pretty good hype track when you’re MTS.

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #294

America Bombed Iran and Made Memes About It

Bridget breaks down the weekend’s military operations and the bizarre explosion of AI-generated meme warfare that followed. From missile strikes set to relaxing beach music to the “first AI meme blitz,” Bridget explores our increasingly dissociative relationship with modern conflict.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #380

The Activist Handbook They Don’t Want You to Know About - Michael Young

Michael Young returns to the podcast for another epic conversation with Bridget to pull back the curtain on Beautiful Trouble—the activist handbook that’s basically Rules for Radicals on steroids. If you’ve ever wondered why protests seem to turn on and off like a faucet, why certain tactics feel weirdly coordinated, or how Minnesota went from zero to chaos overnight, this conversation breaks down the entire playbook. Michael walks us through the actual training manuals activists use: how to put targets in decision dilemmas, why “the real action is your target’s reaction,” deploying sympathetic characters like the Wall of Moms, playing to the audience that isn’t there (the cameras), using your radical fringe to shift the Overton window, the spectrum of allies strategy, power mapping, and how they literally hold training camps teaching people how to organize protests with color-coded violence zones.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #295

Liberal Feminists Love the Ayatollah

Bridget dives into the “breathtaking circular logic” of American progressive women who are mourning the dismantling of a theocratic regime. From TikTokers calling for the “Death of America” to the silence of feminists regarding actual patriarchy, Bridget asks why liberal women are more afraid of “Islamophobia” than a regime that hangs women for showing their hair.

DUMPSTER FIRE

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

BRIDGET WAS RIGHT

THE SPECTATOR: A state of virtual war

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It was Hockey Week, when the goblins of the culture war tried to ruin a nice, clean, beautiful American sports victory—a two-fer, no less. Only in America would a conversation about hockey overshadow a record-setting skull-crusher of a State of the Union address.

The culture war goblins hate when we normies have fun, so I defused my annoyance by watching Slap Shot (1977) starring Paul Newman, one of the greatest actors of all time. This is later career Newman, around the time he began his auto-racing career, but before the spaghetti sauce, which actually generates more wealth for the Newman Estate than his movie career.

I’m not big on spoilers, so I’ll only say that this is basically the Bad Santa of sports movies. These jokes make Trump’s quip look like a compliment. It also features Strother Martin, a fantastic and underrated actor who elevated True Grit (1969) to a comedic level. There are more than a couple of actual hockey players on the cast, as well.

Why not eat some penne in Newman’s Own Sockarooni sauce while you’re having a laugh, and…Welp, news just broke that the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran. Nobody cares about hockey anymore. I’ll feature an Iran-relevant movie or album next week. Surely the news cycle won’t change by then.

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #292

America Wins Olympic Hockey Gold…Then Ruins It on Social Media

The US men’s hockey team just won Olympic gold for the first time since the 1980 Miracle on Ice—beating Canada 2-1 in overtime. It should have been a unifying moment for American sports. Instead, social media did what it does best. Bridget Phetasy breaks down how outrage culture managed to turn a historic win into another culture war battleground.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #379

Michael Tracey Exposes Epstein Hysteria For What It Is

Journalist Michael Tracey joins Bridget to dissect the Epstein moral panic currently swallowing the internet whole—and he’s got the receipts on why most of it is “conspiracy-brain melted slop.” As one of the only journalists pushing back on the dominant narrative, Tracey breaks down what we actually know versus what people want to believe: the FBI’s fraudulent “1000 victims” number, why the Alex Acosta “sweetheart deal” wasn’t actually a sweetheart deal, how Whitney Webb’s “research” is a joke, and why the evidence doesn’t support the blackmail ring everyone’s convinced exists.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #293

Democrats STILL Have A Man ProblemLINK

Bridget Phetasy breaks down the longest State of the Union in history and why the Democrats’ response is only making their “man problem” worse. From Trump’s “aggressively masculine” variety hour to the nagging energy of the opposition, Bridget explores why the left is losing blue-collar men to the “Truck Commercial” energy of the GOP.

DUMPSTER FIRE

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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On the set of The Godfather (1972), Robert Duvall goaded James Caan into mooning Marlon Brando, who then escalated the prank into a full-blown rear-end-flashing contest. The whole Godfather set sounds like a real chuckle fest. Duvall later said, “[Director Francis Ford] Coppola would say, ‘Come on, guys. We got to be serious.’ But he knew that by all this fooling around and having fun, it relaxed everybody. Being irreverent in a positive way made the set more loose.”

True Grit (1969) is Duvall at 38, playing Lucky Ned Pepper, with his gnarly lip. He constantly fought with John Wayne, who threatened to punch Duvall at least once. When Duvall was young and poor, his roommates were Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman.

The set of Apocalypse Now (1979) was also insane. Dennis Hopper again, stoned out of his gourd, a habit he perfected on the set of Easy Rider, a perfect contrast to Duvall. Martin Sheen has a great anecdote about Duvall’s prowess as an actor on the set. Then there’s the famous “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” scene. Duvall later said, “From a quarter-mile I could feel that heat on the back of me when that thing began to go,” when describing the gasoline-based napalm used for a scene. Then there was Tender Mercies (1983). Lonesome Dove (1989), The Apostle (1997), Sling Blade (1996), Open Range (2003), Network (1976). Talk about range: He played a priest in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and a wise heist-man in Gone in Sixty Seconds (2000), from cult cinema to about as mainstream as it gets. Those are just a handful of stories from a handful of the 80-odd movies Duvall appeared in. What a gift.

Have a good weekend, Pham.

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #290

Where Do You Fall On The Epstein Spectrum?

The Epstein files are like a box of chocolates, you never know what kind of theory you’re going to get from someone. Everyone has a take on the Epstein files and Bridget is here to explain and analyze the Epstein Spectrum.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #378

Gender Affirming Care On Trial - Benjamin Ryan

Independent journalist Benjamin Ryan was the only reporter who sat through all three weeks of the first-ever gender surgery malpractice trial. He and Bridget discuss the chilling testimony of a mother who was browbeaten until she consented to her daughter’s mastectomy, a 15-year-old’s 11-month sprint from questioning her gender to surgery, and why the psychologist was an “enabler” instead of a measured professional.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #291

RFK Jr. Did Lines Off a Toilet Seat and Now He Runs American Health

MAHA is furious with MAGA today and Bridget whips out her RFK Jr. impression.

DUMPSTER FIRE

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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I know a lot of you are passionate readers who enjoy political nuance. So I want to tell you about Robert Nisbet, a conservative who founded the Sociology department at UC Berkeley, taught at Columbia, and worked at the American Enterprise Institute. A good starting place is “The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America.” It’s a book about the collapse of powerful institutions, a collapse that has played out around us more and more every day: “Nothing quite like our present society, with its multifold changes in morality, economic possibility, and residential patterns, has ever existed.”

After WWII, radicals attacked the middle class with Marxist ideas. They became the “clerisy” — a class of public intellectuals who were the priests of the secular state, where intellectuals of the past were attached to the Church. They encouraged our focus on individualism and centralization specifically because it causes cultural disintegration. It has made us too isolated.

Nisbet says that progress doesn’t work without decline, and anyone who sells endless progress is actually offering total destruction.

He said that conservatives see sexual immorality as a major problem in this decline, where in reality, “it is a weakening of the family that generates what we call ‘sexual immorality.”

He said that the solution is community and local life. Kinship, localism, citizenship. The importance of belonging. Institutions thrive when their functions appear distinctive and important, and they fade when those functions blur. Nisbet believed that freedom requires limits and that, to be healthy, societies need stable authority and order: “In societies where the family tie is fundamental, the power of the government stops literally at the threshold of the house,” he writes in Twilight of Authority. “The state is an association of families, not of discrete individuals.”

Anyway. Stay safe out there, Pham. Thanks for being part of this community. Nisbet would be proud.

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #288

They LIED About Fat Being Healthy

This one is absolute fire. Bridget started a war on X over whether the idea that “fat is fit” was mainstream. She brings receipts.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #377

Choosing To Be Chosen - Kylie Ora Lobell

Author Kylie Ora Lobell joins Bridget for a thoughtful conversation about her book, Choosing to Be Chosen, which tells the story of her conversion from atheist to Orthodox Jew. Kylie’s shift from atheism was sparked by a melting warmth she recognized as God at a Shabbat dinner, and it led her on a five-year journey of embracing kosher laws, rituals, the challenges of conversion, and a profound trust in God amid life’s darkest questions (like child suffering and October 7th).

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #289

Is The Tide Turning On Trans?

Is the tide turning on trans? The battle for reality continues with mainstream media outlets ignoring biological reality and falsely attributing a school shooting in Canada to a female. Is everyone as sick of the trans debate as Bridget is?

DUMPSTER FIRE

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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I was covering the Iowa State Fair in 2019, my dad was with me taking photos, and we were driving to a Biden rally at an abandoned fairgrounds in the middle of nowhere, along this claustrophobically thin highway with giant cornstalks on all sides, and we were just mowing down butterflies, thousands of monarchs migrating south, so many that we had to slow down because the car was getting dark, and I looked at my phone and said, “Holy shit, Epstein is dead.” And my dad said, “Who’s Jeffrey Epstein?”

Wild.

This week’s news cycle has been devastatingly bleak: Mormon blood, child sacrifice, STDs, sex trafficking, financial collapse, Satanic award shows, and, worst of all, Don Lemon. So I figured I’d send you guys some good vibes with a nice lil playlist of uplifting tracks.

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #285

Conspiracy Theorists Were RIGHT About Everything

I spent the weekend freebasing the Epstein Files. If the goal was to turn everyone in schizophrenics, congratulations, they succeeded.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #376

Our Current Media Ecosystem is Trash - Darvio Morrow

Media maven Darvio Morrow shares his story—from launching a record label at 16 and sleeping on studio floors to keep his dream alive, to growing up amid Cleveland’s economic decline, gunshots next door, and a family legacy tied to a great-grandfather raised by a former slave. He and Bridget discuss his nuanced take on reparations, why today’s media ecosystem is trash, white paternalism as a cousin to white supremacy, and our desensitization to global atrocities like the ongoing crisis in Iran.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #286

Why Autistic Barbie Sparks MASSIVE Controversy

Mattel released its first autistic Barbie and people are mad because she’s pretty. Would they rather she’s an uggo?

DUMPSTER FIRE

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #287

Hard Working Americans Are Being ROBBED

Insane amounts of fraud are being exposed all over the country. Commifornia is back doing Commiefornia shit. Karen Bass is under fire for allegedly “watering down” the Palisades fire report. Kamala is back being drunk and well, we aren’t really sure what’s she’s doing. And Gavin Newsom is lying about high speed rail again.

DUMPSTER FIRE

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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This tweet summed up the radical weirdness of our current reality:

This has been the general confusion all week in our writers’ meetings and group chats. It’s hard to tell which way is up anymore. You can hear it in Bridget’s voice on this week’s Walk-Ins Welcome and both Dumpster Fire episodes.

One of my favorite philosophers is Guy Debord. He was a French Marxist, but other than that, his ideas are fantastic. His big notion is Spectacle. A kind of social lie we all accept, like the notion that a career politician would actually mean what they say while asking us to look past their corruption.

Debord is best known for his book Society of the Spectacle, but parts of it are near unreadable, and if you’re curious for more, I recommend his follow-up Notes on the Society of the Spectacle. The former is stanky with beautifully written Commie slop.

He argues that the most intimate expressions of human meaning are reduced to spectacle, but spectacle, unlike any that Debord could have imagined. Spectacle fuels the sense of a world that hardly makes sense: “In a world which really is topsy-turvy,” he writes, “the true is a moment of the false. That’s a pretty good characterization of the world we’re living in: “In a society where no one can any longer be recognized by others,” he writes, “every individual becomes unable to recognize his own reality.”

Nobody actually believes the spectacle, but we all play along, often unaware that we are alone in this realization. But that’s not true. And all the cynicism in the world can’t fool us into believing that life itself has lost the plot.

Stay safe out there, Pham. And don’t doubt yourself. As Bridget put it on Tuesday’s Dumpster Fire: We’ve got to keep our eyes on the most principled people in America, the ones who see truth through all the spectacle.

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #283

Is Minnesota Ground Zero for Civil War 2?

Minnesota is apparently Ground Zero for the start of Civil War 2. How many times must I ask you all to stop murdering so we can get back to jokes?

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #375

How to Find Truth When Everything Feels Fake - Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer returns for a fascinating conversation about the crisis of truth in our polarized, AI-driven world. He and Bridget discuss the fate of print magazines, shrinking attention spans, the challenges of discerning reality amid deepfakes, misinformation, and Shermer’s new book Truth: What It Is, How To Find It, and Why It Still Matters.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #284

Unboxing Our 100k YouTube Award!

Unboxing our 100k YouTube Award! We reminisce about the long slow road to 100k and the history of Dumpster Fire.

DUMPSTER FIRE

FACTORY SETTINGS - EPISODE #62

20 Years of Phetasy

Factory Settings is back, baby! Maggie left on the 20th anniversary of Phetasy. Damn. So many funny moments in this episode. So many tender, thoughtful, insightful, electrifying moments. Jeren thinks the Dumpster Fire writers’ room is a support group. (It definitely is lol.)

Episode drops tomorrow :)

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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Enjoy the snow, Pham. My kids are so hyped that they won’t stop shouting “6-7!” Lol.

A few years ago, I read a poem about light to Kamal Ravikant in the makeup room of Mercury Studios. This was the pre-interview for Kamal’s appearance on Glenn Beck’s podcast. I’d spent the previous day reading Kamal’s book Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It, and during a break, I picked up a book at random: Charles Wright’s collection Black Zodiac, a weird gathering of poems that earned Wright the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

The fight against light and darkness. The compelling power of belief. The search for God. The weight of death in opposition to life. I read Kamal the final stanza of “Disjecta Membra,” the final poem from that collection. (“Disjecta Membra” is Latin for “scattered parts.”)

Take a loose rein and a deep seat,

John, my father-in-law, would say

To someone starting out on a long journey, meaning, take it

easy,

Relax, let what’s taking you take you.

I think of landscape incessantly,

mountains and rivers, lost lakes

Where sunsets festoon and override,

The scald of summer wheat fields, light-licked and poppy-

smeared.

Sunlight surrounds me and winter birds

doodle and peck in the dead grass.

I’m emptied, ready to go. Again

I tell myself what I’ve told myself for almost thirty years—

Listen to John, do what the clouds do.

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #281

Democrats Are Falling For Commie Propaganda

As anti-ICE protests rage on in Minneapolis following the death of Rene Good, former CNN anchor Don Lemon joined a mob of protestors as they flooded into a church during their Sunday service.

DUMPSTER FIRE

WALK-INS WELCOME - EPISODE #374

A Revolution Against Tech Is Coming

Mike Solana joins Bridget for a fascinating conversation about America’s shifting political fault lines, why critiquing tech is critiquing power, and the coming Luddite backlash. They discuss Mamdani’s Marxist housing advisor calling for the seizure of private homes (especially from the white middle class), and then crying about it when confronted with questions, the social justice ideas that escaped academia, why Solana thinks that “real leftism” is coming, and why social media is probably net negative.

WALK-INS WELCOME

DUMPSTER FIRE - EPISODE #282

Europe Is Garbage

A little over a year ago, Trump was working at McDonald’s and now he’s speaking at Davos. The European mind can’t comprehend that kind of hustle and upward mobility.

DUMPSTER FIRE

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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