Sarah Posner
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sarahposner.bsky.social
Sarah Posner
@sarahposner.bsky.social
79K followers 670 following 9.6K posts
Investigative journalist, columnist, expert on the Christian right.

Author, Unholy. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/605774/unholy-by-sarah-posner/

More info, links: https://www.sarahposner.com/portfolio
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sarahposner.bsky.social
Super smart observation from @pbump.com

www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...
Given the past decade, it would be foolish to anticipate that Trump’s approval rating among Republicans will completely collapse — or even drop significantly. (The Epstein files, for example, will presumably not continue to be a salient element of the political discussion indefinitely.) But his approval rating isn’t really what will be important in the months ahead. Instead, it will be the extent to which Trump is able to direct his base’s anger and attention in the face of increasing competition from ambitious politicians and external media figures and influencers looking to carve out some of that power for themselves.
November 14, 2025 at 6:58 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
🫠
Another former Oath Keeper, Jessica Watkins, an army veteran who was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for her role in the Capitol attack, says she hadn’t even heard about the relaunch when WIRED contacted her this week. “I have not heard of a relaunch, but most J6ers I know are trying to rebuild their lives,” says Watkins, who added that even if she wanted to rejoin, she would be unable to do so as she had her sentence commuted rather than being pardoned. “Felons are not allowed to be in the Oath Keepers or work with them.”
November 14, 2025 at 6:34 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
I keep thinking about this bit in @hunterw.bsky.social's piece on Rod Dreher's tete-a-tete with Vance, and how it connects with Christian Zionists being furious with Kevin Roberts. 🧵

talkingpointsmemo.com/news/jd-vanc...
In his Substack post, Dreher suggested his message to Vance was based on extensive conversations he had with other conservatives during his trip to Washington. He specifically quoted one “DC insider who said that in his estimation, ‘between 30 and 40 percent’ of the Zoomers who work in official Republican Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes.”
November 13, 2025 at 8:23 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
She also has a close relationship with ADF

www.typeinvestigations.org/investigatio...
But a paper trail shows Barrett would have not only known about ADF’s policy positions, but would have had to agree with them to speak at the seminar. Documents obtained by Type Investigations since that time show that Barrett, while a professor at Notre Dame Law School, spoke twice at Blackstone seminars, in 2013 and 2015, delivering a speech titled, “Construction and/or Interpretation: Navigating the Scylla & Charybdis.” ADF sent faculty emails regarding rules and logistics for the gathering, and thanking them for “your commitment to the Lord’s Kingdom work through Blackstone.” The materials included a confidential “lexicon” containing a list of phrases participants should and should not use when speaking. Participants were told to use the phrase “defending biblical, religious principles, convictions,” but not “bigotry, anti-tolerance;” and to use “demands of/by the homosexual legal agenda, demands of/by advocates of homosexual behavior, special privileges,” but not “homosexual/gay rights, hate-crimes legislation, anti-discrimination laws,” noting that Alan Sears, one of the co-founders of ADF, has written that “the goals and agenda of advocates of homosexual behavior are not ‘rights,’ but ‘demands.’” Similarly, ADF’s lexicon called for using “homosexual behavior,” not “homosexuality or gay,” because “homosexuality is a personal struggle” and “the word ‘gay’ was conceived by advocates of homosexual behavior to de-stigmatize their behavior and advance their agenda.” Because ADF frequently litigates Supreme Court cases, taking positions against abortion, LGBTQ rights, and church-state separation, it is likely that if Barrett, who is only 48, is confirmed, she will be hearing arguments from ADF attorneys for many years to come.
November 13, 2025 at 7:40 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
This is an incredible resource, you can word search it and find out, for example, that Michael Wolff, Epstein, and Steve Bannon emailed each other about the @miamiherald.com getting a @sidneyhillman.bsky.social award for its reporting on Epstein.
November 13, 2025 at 1:19 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
Armando Iannucci couldn't write the script better.

via @davidkurtz.bsky.social @talkingpointsmemo.com

talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...
Damage Control Gone Wrong The tranche of emails released yesterday came from the Epstein estate in response to an August subpoena from the GOP-controlled House Oversight Committee, which sought the emails as a way of tamping down right-wing outrage over the Trump DOJ not releasing its Epstein files. So this started as a damage control effort. Early Wednesday, House Democrats released three choice emails from the tranche. House Republicans accused them of cherry-picking the emails and in an apparent attempt to muddy the waters released the entire tranche of 20,000+ documents. Another effort damage control gone very wrong.
November 13, 2025 at 12:59 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
Um

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/u...
Mr. Summers declined to comment on Wednesday beyond referring to previous remarks in which he acknowledged “regretting my past associations with Mr. Epstein.” (Mr. Summers is a contributing writer for The New York Times Opinion section.)
November 13, 2025 at 3:17 AM
sarahposner.bsky.social
Republicans have generally been steadfast in their support for the president, making their growing displeasure particularly notable. “I’m thoroughly disturbed by the government shutdown for 40-something days,” said Beverly Lucas, 78, a Republican and retired educator who lives in Ormond Beach, Florida, and compared Trump’s second term to “having a petulant child in the White House, with unmitigated power.” “When people are hungry, he had a party,” she said, referring to a Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. “I thought he seems callous.”
November 12, 2025 at 4:40 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
One of my favorite photos from No Kings is this clergyman taking a rest near the woman with the sandwich meme Free DC sign.
November 6, 2025 at 7:36 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
100%. Wrote about WV in Unholy. Having many deja vu moments recently, over incidents like this:
like Whitaker, “all but anonymous figures in the Federal bureaucracy,” who “toil away with titles such as executive assistant, personal assis tant, special assistant,” and are “among the earliest links in a network of young conservatives that is only now emerging in Washington.”83 Later, Whitaker spun off the Populist Forum into a new group he called Republican Action for the 90s, whose chief purpose was sup porting the Senate candidacy in Louisiana of former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke. Washington Repub licans steered away, and so did Whitaker’s old friends from the New Right. Still, Weyrich understood the Duke appeal.84 About Duke’s failed bid for Louisiana governor in 1990, Weyrich told the Heritage Foundation’s influential Policy Review journal that Louisiana voters “knew about his sympathies for Hitler, his racist past, and his asso ciation with the Ku Klux Klan.” But, he went on, Duke was “touching a chord and raising issues that people want to hear about and want dealt with.” A “substantial number” of Louisiana voters, he said, “feel so alienated from the political establishment that they’re willing to pick somebody as embarrassing and as scary as David Duke”—a can didate who, Weyrich said, raised important issues “of fundamental fairness and colorblindness in race relations, welfare and the destruc tion of families, unchecked crime.”85 In other words, as long as a white supremacist candidate didn’t wear a white hood or a swastika, Weyrich could get behind his ideas that were matters of “fundamen tal fairness.” (Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump, p. 146)
November 6, 2025 at 1:30 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
Severino was the director of the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services under Trump I
During a meeting with one Heritage employee who has since left, Roger Severino, the group’s vice president of domestic policy, allegedly suggested that she and her husband have six children, according to people familiar with the meeting. After a different meeting, a former intern raised Severino’s behavior with the Heritage human resources department, saying that he allegedly suggested during a mentorship session that she consider skipping law school in favor of motherhood, the people said. Heritage declined to comment on Morgan and Severino.
November 6, 2025 at 1:15 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
One of Roberts’s executive vice presidents and new chief of staff, Derrick Morgan, said in an all-staff meeting that he encouraged summer interns to “make yourselves marriageable and go out and seek marriage,” according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The Post. In response to questions from The Post, Morgan pointed to a quotation from slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk encouraging people to get married and have children that Heritage displayed on its building. Such views also surfaced in the think tank’s research. A draft policy paper called for robust incentives to induce heterosexual married couples to have more children. Subsequent drafts suggested awarding straight married couples an additional “half vote” in federal elections for each of their children, according to people involved.
November 6, 2025 at 1:13 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
Three employees wrote a letter to the board
The letter also accused Roberts of angry and profane behavior in meetings that the employee said made him or her “frightened for my physical safety.” The letter alleged that Roberts favored Catholic employees and humiliated female employees by saying single women without children had “no skin in the game.”
November 6, 2025 at 1:11 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
Oh my god
Some staffers defended Roberts and pushed back against his critics. One wanted to know what would happen to those who agreed with Roberts and Carlson, and another likened employees talking to reporters to “Judas.” Roberts’s speechwriter, Evan Myers, suggested that Heritage’s attempts to address accusations of antisemitism would eventually mean he would be required to attend a Shabbat dinner, which he said would conflict with his faith.
November 6, 2025 at 1:07 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
????
A staff meeting Wednesday — Roberts’ latest attempt to quell a week of resignations and condemnations over his defense of Carlson — was marked with calls for him to resign and squabbling over whether Christian employees would be forced to participate in Jewish rituals.
November 6, 2025 at 1:01 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
Meta is using revenues from advertising scams to fund its AI push

Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show - www.reuters.com/investigatio...
The regulatory pressure on Meta to do more to fight scams occurs as the company, in a race with competitors, is pouring money into artificial intelligence and plans as much as $72 billion this year in overall capital expenditures. While acknowledging the spending is “a massive amount of capital,” chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has sought to reassure investors that Meta’s advertising business can bankroll it.
November 6, 2025 at 12:51 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
The biggest impact of last night’s result may be to collapse D.C.’s collective denial about the sheer scale of Donald Trump’s unpopularity. A mix of spectacle, aggression and speed have created this on-going pageant of Trump’s power. And he does have a lot of power. He can break things. A lot of things. Here and abroad. Like God imputed Abraham’s faith to him as righteousness, the political class has read Trump’s power, perversely, as popularity or at least political power. But that’s not how it works. These results tell a clear story: an electorate eager to send a message to Donald Trump and clip the wings of his untrammeled power.
November 5, 2025 at 6:04 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
The whole thing is great (of course) but this graf gets at how outrageous the Missing Mike act is, better than the news:
It’s been so freeing to step back from the constant, 24/7 cycle of downers. Whenever I hear about the news, which I do almost daily when taking questions from the media, it sounds pretty bad. The president asking for $230 million from the Department of Justice? Reports of ICE detaining U.S. citizens, including children? Threats on Hakeem Jeffries’s life by one of the pardoned January 6 insurrectionists? A jet, for the president, from Qatar? President Trump’s alarming, rambling speech to the generals at Quantico? A bailout for Argentina? Trump’s note to Jeffrey Epstein? A pardon for Changpeng Zhao, former CEO of Binance—whom Trump says he knows nothing about? Yikes, yikes, yikes! I’m so glad I made the choice not to follow the news anymore. I am a gray rock. I am a floating cloud. I am a happy little tree. The other week, I spent a whole day in a sensory-deprivation chamber. It was awesome! By the time I emerged, I felt like I almost had a great idea for a health-care plan. Almost.
November 4, 2025 at 8:31 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
Poll: Frustration with Trump gives Democrats an opening a year before the midterms

www.nbcnews.com/politics/ele...
November 4, 2025 at 2:55 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
The resident said officers yelled at them in Spanish though they do not speak it. “This was five in the morning. They took me outside and hand-cuffed me,” he said. “They asked me where I was from. I said North Carolina. They said why do you live here? I said, because it’s affordable. They said, ‘Well you’re living with very bad people.’ That set me off because I immediately knew it was racial profiling. I knew the only thing I could do is talk in my American accent since they weren’t going to let me show my passport or license.”
November 3, 2025 at 4:51 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
Is Zuckerberg just too big to fail? why are we still subjected to the dumb and dehumanizing plans of this man

www.404media.co/the-future-o...
Ticketmaster's personalized AI slop ads are a glimpse at the future of social media advertising, a harbinger of system that Mark Zuckerberg described last week in a Meta earnings call. This future is one where AI is used both for ad targeting and for ad generation; eventually ads are going to be hyperpersonalized to individual users, further siloing the social media experience: "Advertisers are increasingly just going to be able to give us a business objective and give us a credit card or bank account, and have the AI system basically figure out everything else that’s necessary, including generating video or different types of creative that might resonate with different people that are personalized in different ways, finding who the right customers are,” Zuckerberg said.
November 3, 2025 at 3:22 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
As always, @stevevladeck.bsky.social explains everything clearly and clear-eyed
The fact that the Court issued this briefing order thus suggests at least four things: First, there aren’t five votes for the Trump administration on the non-reviewability issue (because, if there were, there’d be no need to ask about § 12406(3)); second, there aren’t five votes on the “rebellion” issue (ditto); third, the Court finds this argument plausible enough to at least require the Justice Department to respond; and fourth, the Court is comfortable keeping Judge Ellis’s TRO in place for at least 2.5 more weeks (the time from when it issued the briefing order through when the reply briefs are due). Whatever else might be said about the additional question the justices posed (about which more shortly), all of those are, in my view, good signs for Illinois.
November 3, 2025 at 2:25 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
This is an issue for him and his movement, obviously, but Catholics are also a shrinking segment of 18-29 yo. A lot of 18-29 yo are more pro-Pal/less pro-Israel *in general* and therefore not necessarily pro, say, Fuentes. See, for example, Trump's sinking approval in that age group.
October 31, 2025 at 2:39 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
And
Tucker Carlson Tucker Carlson has 6.7 million followers on X and 4.91 million YouTube subscribers. A former Fox News host, he has in recent years expressed isolationist views, not wanting the United States to assist Ukraine or Israel in their efforts to defend themselves against violent regimes and terrorists. However, more recently, he has expressed disdain for Israel and Christians who support Israel. In fact, during his interview with Fuentes this week, he claimed that Israel has always “funded extremism throughout the Middle East, including Hamas.” Carlson also told Fuentes that people he calls “neocons” have been “seized” by a “brain virus, and they’re not Jewish. … Most of them are self-described Christians.” He specifically named U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Senator Cruz, John Bolton, President George W. Bush, and Karl Rove. He went on to say, “And then … the Christian Zionists. Who are the Christian Zionists? Like, what is that? And I just say to myself, I dislike them more than anybody, you know, because like what? Because it’s Christian heresy, and I’m offended by that as a Christian.”
October 31, 2025 at 1:59 PM
sarahposner.bsky.social
Of course the piece is filled with apologia for others on the right who are racist (e.g., Chris Rufo), and presses Islamophobic claims, but notably does single out Fuentes (and Carlson) for rebuke for antisemitism:
Nick Fuentes Nick Fuentes is a 27-year-old white supremacist who praises Hitler and says that the Holocaust was “exaggerated.” He has been considered on the “fringe,” alt-Right, and his views have been widely rejected by conservatives, including Charlie Kirk and Turning Point, for the past nine years. However, tragically, Fuentes has recently gained a larger following (called Groypers), now has one million X followers, and was just interviewed by Tucker Carlson on his show. According to the Anti-Defamation League, “In a March 2023 livestream episode, Fuentes stated, ‘I think the Holocaust is exaggerated. I don’t hate Hitler. I think there’s a Jewish conspiracy. I believe in race realism.’” Fuentes also denies the mass murders, rapes, and kidnappings that happened on October 7, 2023, claiming that the attack was a lie created by Israel to “justify” their “unfolding regional war” with Iran. He has also claimed that Israel “allowed” or “participated” in the atrocity to kill their own people. Besides being anti-Semitic, Fuentes also expresses racist and anti-immigration views (even legal immigration). During a livestream on February 6, he said that white people need to “preserve their culture” and live among other white people because the United States has become an “alien nation.” In December 2023, he claimed that immigration has brought an “end of whites as a group, whites as a race. And it also spells the end of white civilization.”
October 31, 2025 at 1:57 PM