Adam Kleinheider

Flack. Serving @tnsenate in office of @ltgovmcnally. Formerly @RonRamsey, @WKRN, @NashvillePost & @TheCityPaper. 615.741.6806 [email protected]

[Bob Elder @southernphd]

I never met Gordon Wood, but I have a story about him.

In one of my grad school seminars, we read Wood’s Creation of the American Republic. The sheer erudition and evidentiary depth of the book bowled me over.

Back then, before kids and before life accelerated to warp speed, I used to call my mother every Sunday to catch up. Lots of times, we ended up talking about what I was reading that week in my grad seminars or for leisure. Mom had an omnivorous mind, and she was always looking for something else to read. She was a true intellectual—curious about almost everything, always eager to integrate new arguments or ideas into her existing schemas of how the world worked or to have those schemas challenged and changed.

When we talked that particular Sunday, I think I tried to describe to her part of Wood’s argument about the relationship between the state constitutions during the Articles of Confederation era and the federal Constitution. Maybe I was tired, maybe I didn’t completely understand her questions, but the end result of the conversation was that Mom had questions about Wood’s argument that I didn’t answer satisfactorily. I told her that she should probably just read the book, and we said goodbye.

She did eventually read the book, but the next Sunday, Mom started our conversation by saying, “Well, I had a lovely conversation with Gordon Wood this week.” For a split second, I thought she was joking, but then I remembered who I was dealing with. I started to sweat. “How?” I asked. A whole variety of unlikely scenarios in which the foremost historian of the American Revolution and my mother, who lived in Wichita, Kansas, might have met ran through my mind. “Oh, I just looked up his office phone number on Brown’s website and called, and he picked up!” Mom said. I decided I would have to find another profession.

As it ended up, Gordon Wood spent about an hour on the phone with my mother answering her questions about the Constitution. Ever since, I’ve had a soft spot for the man when I imagine him picking up the phone in Providence and finding Becky Elder from Wichita on the other end of the line. His generosity in that moment spoke very well of him.

Rest in peace, professor.

[Degen CPA @DrewVento]

When Walmart never went back to 24 hours nation wide after Covid I knew that was the end of America.

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

One of the big reasons for the current lack of patriotism and pride in our nation’s history is that about 40 years ago our most prominent storytellers in Hollywood just basically stopped telling stories about American history altogether, unless it has something to do with WW2, civil rights, or slavery. I mean they just released a movie about the meteorologist who did the weather report for D-Day. They’ll give WW2 weathermen their own movies before they tell a story from any other era of American history.

The Right has attempted to counteract this a little bit, but “conservative” attempts at American history films and TV shows are invariably hokey and kid friendly, the kind of thing you can watch with your grandmother and your 5 year old, and you’ll all be equally informed and bored by the experience.

We need R-rated adult-oriented American history stories. Daniel Boone should have his own series. It would be gritty and violent and not for children, but it would also be phenomenally entertaining and put an American legend back on the cultural map, so to speak. The fact that Daniel Boone hasn’t been depicted on screen at all since like the 60s is a travesty. Throw a dart at that guy’s Wikipedia page and you’ll land on something that could be its own feature length trilogy.

That’s just one example. How is there not a great R-rated movie or series about Antietam? Or Kit Carson? Or the Panama Canal? How does Theodore Roosevelt not have like 10 movies about different periods of his life?

You could go much farther back to pre-American history. A movie about Cortes’s conquest of Tenochtitlan would be tremendous and horrifying and fascinating, and it would introduce into the public consciousness one of the world’s most incredible stories that most Americans know next to nothing about. And on and on.

The possibilities are literally endless. All of these movies, if they’re executed to even a B+ level, could make hundreds of millions of dollars and transform the culture in a way that a million podcast monologues never could. If the Right actually wants to reclaim the culture, this is the place to start.

[Tyler Whetstone @tyler_whetstone]

nobody has ever said this about Mt. Juliet

[Mary Margaret Olohan @MaryMargOlohan]

NEW: Tulsi Gabbard plans to release the findings of a number of high profile investigations before she departs ODNI on June 30, @realDailyWire has learned, including Havana Syndrome/AHIs, COVID, weaponization, the 2020 election, and more.
https://t.co/Nhljl5rcnc

[claire rogers @kclairerogers]

Me the next time I need an excuse to skip the family function

[Benjamin Martin @Benwandert]

@UsingLyft He found the results he was looking for. Load the ads so that whenever he goes to click on what he wants, it’s bumped 1000 pixels down. Repeat as needed.

[Pay Roll Manager Here @UsingLyft]

He’s typing in a search bar, quick show him the search option he’s looking for.

Perfect. He typed the next letter that is also the next letter in the option we just showed him so take that option away and show him an option that doesn’t match at all

[Auron MacIntyre @AuronMacintyre]

Hey, I wonder why all those donors poured so much money into the Massie primary but little to nothing into the Virginia referendum that would have wiped out multiple GOP seats if they hadn't been saved at the last minute by the state supreme court?

[Shawn Ryan @ShawnRyan762]

Massie: $5.5M raised. Average donor gave $100. His opposition: $32 million. Three billionaires, Secretary Hegseth on the ground, four presidential attacks in one day, all to silence the guy fighting for the Epstein files. Trump calls elections rigged. Look in the mirror. Go Massie.

[Matt Fuller @MEPFuller]

I started writing this story about Rep. Thomas Massie seven years ago.

It’s been so long that the entire point of the story has flipped.

(Or has it?)

https://t.co/BjlhdL2hwx

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Rolling Stone ranks The Wire the second-best TV show ever made. Entertainment Weekly named it the best in 2013. The man who made it spent six years fighting HBO to keep it on the air. They were trying to cancel it after every single season.

The ratings never came. Season 2 peaked at 3.71 million viewers an episode. By the final season the average was under a million. The 2008 series finale pulled around 1 million, against The Sopranos finale's 11.9 million nine months earlier.

After Season 3, HBO was ready to end it. Two of the show's biggest characters had been killed off or sent to prison. To the network, that was a natural finish. David Simon disagreed. He spent two years pushing HBO to renew, which is why Season 4 didn't premiere until 21 months after Season 3 ended. He'd wanted Season 4 to cover immigration in Baltimore. By the time HBO finally said yes, there was no time to research it, so he switched to the public schools, where his writing partner Ed Burns had taught for years.

He also pitched HBO a spinoff about Tommy Carcetti, the politician character. Simon later said HBO boss Chris Albrecht looked at him like, "Dude, I'm trying to figure out how to cancel the one show."

Season 5 was supposed to be 13 episodes. HBO cut it to 10. The first episode of the shorter season is called "More with Less."

The casting almost fell apart for another reason. Idris Elba faked an American accent through four auditions to get Stringer Bell. He's from East London. The casting director coached him to lie. Dominic West, who played lead detective Jimmy McNulty, was also British, from Yorkshire. Simon didn't find out until the actors first read the script together. He'd specifically asked for Americans.

Carolyn Strauss, the HBO executive who approved The Wire (and The Sopranos, and Six Feet Under), also saved one of its main characters. Simon had written Detective Kima Greggs to die in Season 1, episode 10. Strauss told him no.

The awards did nothing for it. Two Emmy nominations across five seasons, both for writing. Zero wins. None of the actors were ever nominated, not even Idris Elba, Michael K. Williams, or Michael B. Jordan. Zero Golden Globe nominations either. One HBO executive said the network blamed the East Coast setting and the LA-based Emmy voters. The show that beat it every Sunday in the ratings was Desperate Housewives, originally pitched to HBO and turned down by Carolyn Strauss.

Two things kept The Wire alive. Simon refused to give up. The show built a reputation that only paid off after it had ended. People bought the DVDs and told their friends. The show that almost died five times became the one everyone said you had to watch. The greatest show in television history got five seasons out of a network trying to cancel it after every one.

[JD Flynn @jdflynn]

buddy, I was writing 10 page papers without having read the book.

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

Another point about our cultural decline. We started watching the show Widow’s Bay. It’s really good. Fantastic writing. Perfect blend of comedy and horror. Last night’s episode was legitimately one of the finest episodes of television I’ve seen in years.

If this same exact show came out in 2002, we’d probably remember it as an all time classic. But in 2026 most people haven’t even heard of it. It’s a blip on the radar. Another piece of content in the endless sea. You see it, or you don’t, and then it’s forgotten.

It’s not that good stuff isn’t made anymore. It’s that even when good stuff is made, we don’t have any shared experience of it. There’s plenty of good music you can find on Spotify, recent stuff, but you experience it in your little algorithmic silo. Almost nothing breaks containment to become a bonafide cultural phenomenon. That’s what made Project Hail Mary so unique. Severance maybe also achieved escape velocity. But even in those cases the escape is fleeting.

For the most part we experience the culture through the narrow pathway constructed for us by the algorithm. It might intersect with other people’s pathways, but only briefly. When we feel nostalgia for the Before Times, this is why. It’s not simply that we had a “better” culture back in the 90s or whenever. It’s that we had a culture at all.

[Erin McCullough @IsErinThere]

The final list of candidates for TN Congressional races is here: https://t.co/dlsJgEdzHf

[Nate Rau @tnnaterau]

Federal judge sides with state in crucial early ruling over Tennesee's new U.S. House map https://t.co/9O0u0B8uGt

[Jake Thornton 🇬🇧🇺🇸 @jakethornton]

“Tell him to enter the password he knows is correct. Inform him it is incorrect. Invite him to reset it. Watch as he enters the password he believed it to be all along. Then tell him he cannot use it… because it is his current password.”

[Richard Nixon Foundation @nixonfoundation]

For the mothers.

[Steve Gill @TheGillReport]

Fun fact:
The last time Tennessee Democrats controlled redistricting they enacted this map that connected Shelby County with Williamson, Davidson, and Montgomery counties. The same party complaining about the new map that extends all over West Tennessee linking Williamson to Memphis did this.

By the way, Democrat Congressman Cohen who is leading the objections to the GOP map was state Senator Cohen (D) at the time. He voted for this!!!