She looks like Jay Leno if he were 50 years younger and were transitioning. Really.

Given all we now know about Nuzzi, it's not too much of a stretch to at least wonder about just what her relationship to Weiner was. Mind-boggling.

Olbermann deserves a little journalistic digging himself. He's had a huge number of political entanglements, plus there's the little matter of him literally grooming and keeping Olivia Nuzzi starting at 18 (two years from her "Jailbait" song). Do journalists every investigate their peers?

Oh no. Oh God no.

A new sugar daddy? RFK Jr.? Trump?

But there's no Institute of Peace anymore in the building, right? Or anyone else? What on Earth is that peace agreement signing going to look like?

Was one of them Olivia Nuzzi?

Is this the guy with no chin who likely.... um, hasn't likely had much experience with women that doesn't involve a financial transaction?

Just listen to Trump - he absolutely marinates in this stuff. If he believes anything - and I don't think he believes in much - it's that he can speak reality into being and make something go away by ignoring it.

You make your own reality! Manifest! It's powerful but also very, very easy for that to lead down the path of "if you're poor/sick/suffering, it's because you yourself just didn't try/pray/meditate hard enough".

Beyond that, though, is the just-world hypothesis - if you get hit by disasters, it's because you deserved it. You brought it on yourself. So helping you is actually violating the deep order of the universe. Trump's a devotee of Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote pretty much this exact shit.

Edit - the only mercy comes from switching sides. Amnesty for turncoats from MAGA, no mercy for the deadenders. Make an example of them. Ram through constitutional revisions (DC statehood, ending the electoral college, etc). Dems probably don't have that killer instinct, which is why I fear 2032

Then you fucking reverse-DOGE the bureaucracy at 12:01 pm on Inauguration Day in 2029. Fire all of Trump's people. Revoke every executive order at one stroke. Prosecute the most egregious crooks like Tom Homan immediately - put it on TikTok and put them in PMITA prison. No fucking mercy.

And religion itself's going to get pretty impacted by AI - I absolutely expect some MAGA megachurches to do something like computer simulations of Charlie Kirk/Trump/Vance/whoever their Lord and Savior at the time will be. I'll bet money on it right now.

Thankfully the stats are bottoming out in the US and among younger people in other parts of the Western world. I might be biased as a religious person myself, but it seems like the decline of organized religion did not lead to the New Atheist utopia - even the New Atheists have gone hard right.

Authoritarians absolutely LOVE to call chosen enemies both insignificant/weak who are not worth of life AND almost-omnipotent puppet-masters who must be rooted out in existential struggle. Not saying Yglesias is an authoritarian, but this comes right out of the playbook.