The Times gleefully self-flagellated about it in its own pages, a newsprint Bacchanal of a worldview some people at the Times were eager to validate.

So where's the exhaustive postmortem about Landon Thomas?

Spiers also has the gall to go "oh I'm old enough to remember Jayson Blair." Me too. I was in high school and had to endure white classmates crowing about how it proved the failure of affirmative action.

Precisely because the Blair scandal was *ubiquitous* and drawn out for days and weeks.

I've watched the New York Times grin as it lets itself get led around by the nose by Christopher Rufo, who literally says that's what he's doing *in the pages* of the Times. But then we're supposed to just accept "oh yeah we fired Epstein's Times buddy 6 years ago, it's cool, nothing to see here"?

There's a very obvious double standard at work here, where we get JAQing off FUD about Biden's mental health, the mere existence of transgender people, Clinton's email habits, trans people again, Mamdani's college app, more about trans people, but impenetrable "standards" for anything else.

My turn to say that I loved so much about "Light"--I am not from SoCal, but it had such a strong sense of place that I learned a great deal. (Also, Rachel says hi. I still hear legends about you using a blowtorch to season a wok ;) )

"no guys I swear, for real, just a little more transphobia, just a little more sexism, I swear bro, for real, just gimme a little more xenophobia, it'll totally win next time, just a little more bro, I swear!"

Yeah, to be blunt, if the filibuster goes *now*, you potentially get transphobic legislation being passed that codifies some of Trump's EOs. And I'm positive there's 50 GOP votes for it.

G K Chesterton on point:

“You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man.”

Even though *actually* savvy analysts would have seen how shallow that data was & how predictable a thermostatic backlash is. Indeed, the supposedly deep & enduring Trump "realignment" toward reactionary politics is ... already dead.