Greg Olear

Lapsed novelist, #DirtyRubles author, PREVAIL columnist & podcaster, co-host of "The Five 8," enjoyer of Friday Manhattans.

[Greg Olear @gregolear]

The cat's out of the bag, guys: my new Epstein book, ANOTHER WONDERFUL SECRET, is now available.
https://t.co/uSI4Er2OZB

I did a little Q&A about the Q&A book, in which I answer my own burning questions:
https://t.co/uge49NDzu6

[David Hemond @david_hemond]

An exceptional post Greg. I’m a longtime fan of the “romantic poets” and this is a great piece in drawing out their ongoing relevance. Kudos.

[Greg Olear @gregolear]

@david_hemond 🙏❤️

[Greg Olear @gregolear]

Two centuries ago, in the north of England, some sixty thousand people gathered in the town square to demand greater representation in Parliament. George III, whose tyrannical yoke the American colonists had thrown off a few decades earlier, was old and infirm. Napoleon was in exile at St. Helena—a more remote Mar-a-Lago, but without the killer omelet station. The four years since Waterloo had brought post-war recession, chronic unemployment, crop failure due to the so-called Year Without a Summer, and a woefully inadequate response by the aristocrats who made up the British government. People were pissed off.

In 1819, just one in ten men (and zero in ten women) had the right to vote. In the industrial centers of the North, the percentage was even smaller. So the Manchester Patriotic Union organized a rally at that city’s St. Peter’s Field to demand parliamentary reform, and arranged for the activist and orator Henry Hunt to speak.

The British had already witnessed revolutions in the American colonies and in France, and the spectacle of so many angry peasants at a “manhood suffrage” rally scared local magistrates out of their wigs. Long story short, the cops charged into the crowd, roughing up some peaceful protestors, including a child who later died (some things never change), before arresting Hunt. Then the British equivalent of the National Guard arrived, sabres drawn, to break the thing up. Fifteen people were killed and hundreds injured in the melee. A local newspaper dubbed it the “Peterloo Massacre,” a sardonic portmanteau of the scene of the crime and “Waterloo.”

The bloody crackdown sparked even more outrage at the more reactionary members of the British government, particularly Castlereagh, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; Eldon, the Lord High Chancellor; and the DeSantis-like Home Secretary, Sidmouth. Peterloo became a catalyst for change, in a way it probably would not have, had the proto-fascists just let Hunt do his thing.

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was living in Italy at the time, as poets do. When he heard the news, “the torrent of [his] indignation” compelled him to write one of his most famous poems, “The Masque of Anarchy.” He fired off a copy to England, but his friend and publisher, Leigh Hunt, feared that printing the poem would result in Shelley’s arrest, as the aforementioned Sidmouth was persecuting writers for political speech that didn’t support the government and the mad king. The poem was not published until the 1830s.

“The Masque of Anarchy” is long, but it’s broken up into 38 short, numbered chunks for easy consumption. One might even argue that Shelley gave us the first-ever Twitter-thread poem. In his poetical vision, the personifications of Murder, Fraud, and Hypocrisy (played by the aforementioned right-wingers Castlereagh, Eldon, and Sidmouth) are led into a Peterloo-like fray by Anarchy. But Shelley doesn’t mean “Anarchy” in the modern, Emma-Goldman-and-I-are-gonna-whack-that-no-good-greedy-plutocrat-Frick kind of way. It’s less specific than that.

In 1819, anarchist—from an-, no, and arch, ruler—was not yet the political term it would become in the latter half of the nineteenth century. While the idea of no central leader had been around forever, the French politician Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first to style himself an anarchist, decades later. When Shelley speaks of “Anarchy,” he means it in the literal, lunatics-running-the-asylum sense. His villain is the embodiment of disorder, of chaos, of No One in Charge, of the abdication of the rule of law to murderers, frauds, and hypocrites—basically, the MAGA of 1819.

Anarchy, in short, is lack.

Reading the poem now, it’s impossible not to recognize POTUS and his crooked cronies in the form of Anarchy, Murder, Fraud, and Hypocrisy. For the fourteenth stanza to scan—Of the triumph of Anarchy—the word “triumph” has to have one syllable, so: trump. Trump and his capos are indeed the heirs of Sidmouth and Eldon. The bishops and priests of the poem are the Evangelicals who equate Trump with Jesus. The murderers who follow Anarchy, meanwhile, may as well be drawn from the insurrectionist horde that besieged the Capitol 20 months ago. Stand back and stand by. Trump would turn on them in a heartbeat, of course, at the first whiff of trouble—just as Anarchy does here. Lack also indicates lack of honor, lack of expertise, lack of compassion, lack of kindness and human decency, lack of soul.

FULL PIECE:
https://t.co/zcB4sSA7gJ

[Greg Olear @gregolear]

@SundaeDivine Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

[Greg Olear @gregolear]

These are the best wedding planners, guys...

c: @chunkled

[Greg Olear @gregolear]

These are the best wedding planners, guys...

c: @chunkled

[Greg Olear @gregolear]

A Prison House is not a Pleasure Dome https://t.co/5Mgek5z9li

[Greg Olear @gregolear]

Carney has become the de facto leader of the free world.

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Mark Carney, "In the heart of Germany, above Weimar, there is a wooded ridge called Ettusberg. And for decades, Goethe walked, thought, and wrote there. An oak on that ridge came to bear his name, a living monument to the highest ideals of European culture"

"As the 20th century turned dark, that same oak became trapped behind the barbed wire of Buchenwald. A silent witness to humanity's deepest moral failure. Goethe understood that ideals must be fought for, that values do not defend themselves."

"Indeed, at the end of Faust, the old man's last vision is of a free people on free ground. Nödvg, Värdjän, Siegfreiheit. Wie das Leben, de taklik si eroban mus"

"Freedom and life must be earned every single day"

"Every day"

"Every day, not once in 1945 or 1956 or 1989. Every day, including this one."

My take: 1945, 1956 and 1989 are not distant history lessons: they mark Europe’s liberation from fascism, Hungary’s uprising against Soviet rule, and the fall of the Iron Curtain. Carney’s point is that freedom is never something Europe simply achieved and banked forever - it is a choice, a responsibility and, when necessary, a struggle renewed by every generation.

[Greg Olear @gregolear]

@rimaanabtawi Hbty!

[Greg Olear @gregolear]

If the Elon Musk documentary about the 2024 election is suppressed by Trump’s allies, it indicates that the 2024 election was illegitimate. That’s my interpretation, anyway.

I’m still waiting for the Brett Kavanaugh documentary to be released, by the way.

[Alex Gibney @alexgibneyfilm]

Ask Universal.

[Greg Olear @gregolear]

https://t.co/PnZa8I8GIh

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

JUST NOW: A confused, clearly not-there McConnell votes “AYE” after almost voting NO with Dems but getting *corrected* by handlers around him

[Greg Olear @gregolear]

@oopoopbdo An unintentional gift is still a gift.

[Greg Olear @gregolear]

It’s not every day you get the opportunity to kowtow to a traitorous billionaire who is Epstein adjacent, got busted in a sex trafficking sting operation, and gifted an NFL championship ring to Putin. Patriots my ass.

[Henry Abbott @TrueHoop]

Robert Kraft was on the board of Apollo Global. Founder Leon Black was Epstein's primary source of cash for a decade or so. https://t.co/SaM1XcmITw

[Greg Olear @gregolear]

@HenriMcAlister I sure hope so. When the TV series keeps hearkening back to stuff from the early seasons, that means it's wrapping up, right?

[Michael Weiss @michaeldweiss]

The New York Southern District unseals a grand jury indictment against five people part of a Russian intelligence network who enlisted Americans and US residents to commit murder on US soil and to conduct terrorist attacks in Lithuania, Poland and Czechia. https://t.co/NluM4oV9hy

[Greg Olear @gregolear]

He was just helping the sheep over the fence.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Kash Patel: "Applicants who have engaged in beastiliaty means they were victims of beastility because they were forced to do so. At this FBI we are not going to criminalize and prevent victims from serving."

[Stephanie "LB" 🟧 @LincolnsBible]

Two things:
First to @jack: you are not a poet or artist. Stop appropriating Cormac’s signature lower case use, you utter moronic hack.

Second, what all these goobers are doing to language, by slathering us in their garbage tech jargon in an attempt to impress their perceived superior intellect, is fucking pathetic and will be the death of us all.
These are damaged boys, trapped by a primal insecurity over their undeveloped anterior insular cortex.
We must take away their toys, ban them to the outer reaches of society, and tax the shit out of them.

[Greg Olear @gregolear]

Last week in Dallas, the notorious Dark Web crypto-criminal and Trump pardonee #RossUlbricht spoke at the 2026 Republican Midterm Convention. Introduced as a “libertarian icon,” the ex-con who made millions running #SilkRoad, the “eBay of drugs,” whined about being the victim of “a corrupt federal investigation.”

“I was accused of crimes I did not commit,” said the man convicted of crimes a jury determined he committed: narcotics conspiracy, engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiracy to commit computer hacking, and money laundering conspiracy. “I was smeared in the media, and even as a first time offender, I was sentenced to die in prison, no parole.”

Ulbricht then explained how Donald Trump, a sociopath devoid of basic human empathy, “felt compassion for me because he too was the target of a weaponized government.” During his time in the hoosegow, the rogue nerd said, he “learned that the machinery we built to protect ourselves from criminals can be turned around and pointed at people who have harmed no one.” That machinery “can be pointed at political opponents or anyone who stands in the way of those seeking power. This is incredibly dangerous. This is how a free country falls to tyranny.”

That part is, sadly, quite true, as any objective observer of the activities of ICE can attest. But Ulbricht, like all hardcore libertarians, can only see the world through his own self-focused lens. He went on, with a straight face, and with zero sense of awareness:

Now, sometimes I hear from the very people he made that campaign promise to that after he freed me, [Trump] lost focus on the cause of liberty. That’s not true. It’s just easy to miss all of his wins for liberty among the torrent of headlines out there…
President Trump has put our rights and our freedoms at the very center of his administration. I never thought anyone in the White House would do these things. He’s actually doing them. There’s work to be done, sure, but the work goes on because President Trump knows the costs when nobody does it. I stand here tonight, a free man, and you are free Americans, and that is thanks to him.

Oh, Trump has put our rights and our freedoms at the very center of his administration, alright—but not in the way this remorseless Norman Bates lookalike suggests. Does Ulbricht actually believe the egregious nonsense spewing from his smug pie-hole? Or is he so grateful for his ill-deserved pardon that he’ll say anything King Donald desires?

To refresh my memory about this dorky “libertarian icon,” I went back to the PREVAIL archive and found a piece from January 28, 2025, shortly after Trump was sworn in a second time and Ulbricht was released from prison. I am running it again today...

https://t.co/S3Hdoe1YbU

[Julia Ioffe @juliaioffe]

In Russian, we don't say "there's no free lunch." We say, "The only free cheese is in a mousetrap."

[Michael Weiss @michaeldweiss]

It gets better: Top executive from companies linked to Russian security services attended Trump son’s wedding • «Агентство» https://t.co/sB0J2iqbKR