People wonder how I can provide expert advice on: geopolitics, domestic politics, gender roles, state and local politics, world religions, and human sexuality. It's because I attended a 2-year Bible College (unaccredited) in Missouri. It gives me a leg up on my rival pastors🙏🇺🇸
I am the man who put Donald Trump on the Madison Square Garden videoboard during the national anthem at Game 3 of the NBA Finals, and I want you to understand that I did it on purpose, with a joystick, the way you'd guide a drone into a hornet's nest you built yourself.
I run the board. I am the board. Forty feet of LED above center court and I decide what twenty thousand people look at, which means tonight I decided what twenty thousand people would feel, and I felt it land in my own chest a half-second before it hit theirs because I am the only person in this building who knows the sound is coming before the sound comes. I cut to the suite. I framed him dead center, presidential, the first sitting president ever at an NBA Finals, and I held it, and I have never been more sober in my life, I have not had so much as a beer, the network does not let me, and that is the problem, because sober is the worst possible state in which to hear what I heard.
The boo. Not a boo. The boo. Twenty thousand human throats finding the same note without rehearsing it, a chord nobody conducted, the building itself growling through my speakers which are technically my speakers, I run those too, and underneath it, threading through it like a man trying to start a lawnmower at a funeral, a "USA" chant, somebody's lonely "USA, USA," and the two sounds wrestling in the air I am responsible for, and me up in the booth thinking, with total clarity, I did this, I made the room make this sound, this is the loudest thing I have ever built and it is made entirely of strangers disagreeing about a man on a screen I aimed.
He salutes. On my board. Forty feet of salute. And here is where my hands start doing the thing, not shaking, worse, working, perfectly, twelve years of muscle memory operating the joystick while the rest of me has left to go stand at the back of my own skull and scream, because I am framing the salute beautifully, I am giving the salute the heroic low angle, I am the best in the league at the heroic low angle, and the better I frame it the louder they boo, and the louder they boo the more the broadcast loves it, my producer in my ear going THAT'S IT HOLD IT HOLD IT, and I hold it, I always hold it, holding it is the entire job.
Nobody up here is on anything. I need you to know that. We are stone sober in the booth, eating the same cold arena pretzel we eat every night, and we are manufacturing the single most charged human moment in America tonight with the same six joysticks we use for the kiss cam. The kiss cam. I want to lie down. The same rig that finds two strangers and makes them kiss for a laugh, I just used to find a president and make a building roar, and the rig does not know the difference, the rig has no politics, the rig serves the boo and the cheer with the exact same obedient little servo whine, and so do I, God help me, so do I.
Here's the part. After. When they cut to commercial and the roar drains out and the game comes back and everyone forgets, the moment doesn't belong to him and it doesn't belong to them. It's mine. It's in my board's memory. I made twenty thousand people feel the realest thing they'll feel all week and it was a camera move. It was a camera move I practiced.
I didn't film the moment.
I aimed it.
And tomorrow there's a hockey game, and I'll aim that too, and the building will roar for something else, and it will be just as real, and I will be just as sober, and I will hold it.
I always hold it.
The people who used his addiction as a weapon for six years are now uncomfortable that he survived it with enough clarity to make jokes about it. That discomfort is not your problem to manage.
Seven years of sobriety through federal prosecution and national humiliation is not a political event. It is a human one. The wit he's bringing to it — the crack pipe photoshop correction, the cocaine denial with the punchline — is the specific register of someone who has fully processed the worst thing that happened to them. You cannot fake that register. It takes years of actual work.
His account of what happened to his father is coherent and worth hearing even if you disagree with it. His criticisms of Democratic establishment figures are the kind serious people across the spectrum have been making for years. None of that becomes wrong because he's the one saying it.
The question isn't whether Hunter Biden deserves sympathy. The question is whether we're capable of giving it to someone whose name became a political symbol before it became a person again. That's a test of us, not of him.
Things the recovery industry will not tell you:
1. The drug worked. That is why people use it. Not weakness. Not moral failure.
A neurological event so complete and persuasive that any honest account of addiction has to start there.
The problem is not that the drug fails. The problem is that what it does is unrepeatable, and you will burn your entire life to the ground trying to get back to a place that no longer exists.
2. Shame is not guilt. Guilt says I did something bad. Shame says I am something bad. Guilt is appropriate. Shame is a cell with no windows. Most people use the words interchangeably. That mistake is lethal.
3. You cannot shame someone who has already named the thing you are holding over them. Say it first. Say it in plain light. The weapon drops.
4. Guilt can coexist with self-respect. Shame cannot. You can hold the damage and the dignity at the same time. I know because I live there.
5. Radical honesty does not give you back who you were. It hands you the clean slate of who you always wanted to be. The mask comes off. The cartoon other people drew of you stays on the page.
6. Nobody gets clean on a winning streak.
7. You have to be almost self-delusional in your forgiveness of yourself. (Go watch Chase Hughes)
8. The greatest sin was not the chaos. It was the absence. Being unavailable to the people who needed you.
9. Sustainable recovery starts with one thing: honesty with yourself. If you love an addict and want to help, that is the only door in.
10. I am only an expert on my recovery. Nobody is an expert on anyone else’s.
Paul Skenes was driving down Perry Highway in Wexford just past seven o’clock Monday night when the Pirates superstar pitcher made a pit stop. It was a Little League field.
Skenes signed autographs for over two hours, connecting with Pittsburgh's next generation.
For @MLB ⤵️
I’ve been thinking a lot about the extraordinary outbursts of the President of the United States against female journalists... well, actually against journalists in general and journalism. But it feels like he saves his most childlike behavior and irrational language for female reporters, calling them all kinds of names that kids in kindergarten are given times out for. It’s stunning to me to witness such behavior from any leader, any CEO, any person of influence or importance. I’ve never witnessed someone like this raging, this weekend with @meetthepress host @kwelkernbc, just last week in the Oval Office with @cnn’s @kaitlancollins, calling women stupid or piggy, telling them to “smile”, calling them darling, demeaning their credibility. Every good man should denounce this behavior. Every person should be able to stand up for their colleagues and say “No more.”
Imagine this man screaming like this at your daughter, your wife, your sister, your mother... would you stand for it? No, you wouldn’t! And neither should any of us. It’s unacceptable and undignified. Period. End of story.