Chase Woodruff

When Stephen Miller hijacks the Major League Baseball social media account

perhaps the biggest story TFPever ran was a catastrophically shoddy argument that George Floyd ackshully died of an overdose. When confronted with irrefutable evidence that the piece was simply wrong, Weiss didn’t take it down, she asked her critic, @radleybalko.bsky.social, to come on a podcast.

There has been basically no (public) reckoning with the democratic strategists who said that "raising the salience" of immigration/deportations in ~March would help Trump, which was obviously wrong at the time and has been proved wrong over the last 6 months www.gelliottmorris.com/p/kilmar-abr...

“He believes in science”

Opinion | Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bridging Gaps vs. Drawing Lines

This was revealing. Worth reading. The basic demand is that Coates spend less time thinking/writing his true feelings and more time playing political strategist. Klein asks him over and over him to do Dem strategy; he says no, over and over. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/o...

Here's a story I reported in 2023 in Pueblo County, Colorado, which shifted 7 points towards Republicans in 2024 despite being a huge beneficiary of IRA-fueled clean energy investment: coloradonewsline.com/2023/10/12/p...

there is a point here i want to amplify. the free speech defenders of the mainstream seem to have no awareness that actual free speech is often more fractious and destabilizing than civil and respectful. a society where speech is genuinely free isn’t the deferential space they want it to be.

currently at record-high search interest for canceling disney plus. pulling kimmel is a bigger deal to the company's bottom line than any of the "woke" scandals of the past 5 years. i think news & entertainment corp execs need put more work into understanding their audience, & get off twitter

Matthew McConaughey says he wants a private LLM, fed only with his books, notes, journals, and aspirations, so he can ask it questions and get answers based solely on that information, without any outside influence.

this exists it is called thinking

Pic of Jay Leno speaking in defense of Jimmy Kimmel and he's got the Le Guin shaggy bowl cut

He's turning into Ursula Le Guin

This Is It Obedience and Support are the Same

"[F]ear is a weapon. Fear is a force multiplier. ... [T]he modern dictatorship does not need to rely on bloodcurdling terror of torture and death so much as the fear of nuisance, the fear of trouble, the fear of harassment."

im hearing he was a disturbed person with functionally illegible politics

Tweet from Rose Pugliese: "I’m calling on @jaredpolis to immediately fire this state employee for attacking the late Charlie Kirk. Political violence is unacceptable against everyone, which a supposed mental health professional should know!" The screenshotted post reads: "If you haven't said anything about the countless mass shootings, school shootings, or shit about ice raids, palestine, Black Lives Matter, and the violation of rights of LGBTQIA folks, women, or folks without access to shelter, food, clean water but want to talk about how we should/should not feel or react to how a pro-gun, pro-violence dude died via gunshot literally shut the fuck up and talk to yourself. Do some self reflection and interrogation of why you speak up for a white man who spews horrid shit against every marginalized community. No heart? Pleeeeeease look at who and what you're speaking up for."

At LibsofTikTok's direction, Colorado Republicans are organizing to call for the firing of this state employee, who says nothing in this post that could be construed as celebrating Kirk's death or supporting violence. A retaliatory purge for political speech underway.

basically a generational cohort split here where certain younger people intuitively grasp the irony poisoned context, and if you aren't already up to speed, very hard to explain

"This news conference is very clearly a plea for help. Officials have given no indication that they know the gunman’s identity, nor where he went. 'We need as much help as we can possibly get,' Gov. Spencer Cox said."

Man. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/09...

Ah.

To be at the end of day two and still just parceling this stuff out and asking for the public's help... does not seem great.

The Post reports social media accounts apparently belonging to the suspect are filled with white supremacist and antisemitic content, and a fascination with Columbine and other mass shootings: www.denverpost.com/2025/09/11/e...

an editor only leaves a sentence like this in if they hate the writer

Posts from @GeraldBourguet: "Political differences" are not the same thing as spewing hateful rhetoric on a daily basis, and refusing to mourn a life devoted to that cause is not the same thing as celebrating gun violence. Just so we're 100% clear on that. "He was a father" Half of y'all didn't give a DAMN about doing anything to stop gun violence when the victims of mass shootings were LITERAL children. And those kids weren't bigots spreading genocidal propaganda, or a mindset he directly fed into with this Holy Grail of Ironies:

If you're saddened by today's "political violence," horrified by the video, or repulsed by my response, ask yourself why your reaction was different when it came to school shootings, mass deportations or the HUNDREDS of videos of horrific murders in Gaza (which Kirk cheered on) Truly don't care if you think it's insensitive or poor timing to decline to respect an evil man who died. Too many of you are more concerned with being polite and *appearing* to be good people rather than showing some damn backbone and standing on principal to condemn hate

Here are the reporter's full comments. The most he actually says here is to imply that he "refus(es) to mourn" Kirk and "decline(s) to respect" him (while also distancing himself from those who are "celebrating" his death).

A Denver-based sports media company fired a reporter for social media posts critical of Kirk's long history of hateful rhetoric:

JeffCo sheriff's office in a media briefing just now described the suspect as being "radicalized" by an "extremist network," but said further details would be provided later.

According to a preliminary internal report circulated inside the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, federal and local officials recovered ammunition with the shooter’s rifle that appeared to be engraved with statements “expressing transgender and anti-fascist ideology.” But a senior law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation cautioned that report had not been verified by A.T.F. analysts, did not match other summaries of the evidence, and might turn out to have been misread or misinterpreted. In fast-moving investigations, such status reports are not made public because they often contain a mixture of accurate and inaccurate information.

NYT on the alleged messages on the shooter's weapon:

“awful people don’t deserve to be killed, but they don’t deserve to be praised, either” is apparently a thought too complex for the pundit mind

I was sure this couldn't be true, but it is. He said nothing about the Minnesota shooting, either through a spokesperson or on any social platforms. A day later he did post, congratulating himself on the anniversary of DACA.

He joked multiple times about Paul Pelosi getting smashed in the skull with a hammer.

Information environment has reached its grotesque conclusion in that there is a very real killer out there who has not been identified, apprehended, or investigated, a detail practically inconsequential to nearly every commentator’s purposes.

This guy is from the suburbs of Chicago and was quoted at length in articles about whether he Feels Safe on campus

this is insane, we know it's his signature, we don't need this level of analysis! the people claiming otherwise aren't arguing in good faith!!
bsky.app/profile/wash...