Riley Kellogg

[Riley Kellogg @rileykellogg]

Dear friends,
My sister -actress, author, animal lover, chef- is facing big health challenges, thus big $$ challenges.
Please read this about her.
Please donate toward medical and living expenses if you can
Please share this fundraiser if you can
Thank you
https://t.co/HVD4R8gvRL

[Riley Kellogg @rileykellogg]

@atrupar She is utterly incoherent

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

I recommend reading the New York Times piece “Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files,” by Haberman and Swan. Briefly, it documents how the Epstein files triggered an internal crisis in the Trump White House: Vance calling it a “huge problem,” senior aides holding repeated Situation Room meetings (often without Trump) over a political scandal, officials pushing transparency moves like unsealing grand jury records that they privately knew would produce nothing new, discussions about deploying the imprisoned Ghislaine Maxwell to publicly defend Trump, and internal warfare between Bondi, the FBI and others over messaging. Throughout, the dominant fear was losing the MAGA base, not anything Democrats might do. 

And here is what struck me reading it. Across all those Situation Room meetings, in a room normally reserved for wars and terrorist attacks, not one item on the agenda was the victims. Not one discussion about fulfilling legal obligations to disclose, not one about identifying who committed crimes, not one attempt to document what actually happened to the girls at the center of the case. The “transparency” strategies were chosen precisely because they would reveal nothing. The one Epstein insider they considered putting in front of a camera was a convicted trafficker, and her job would have been to defend the president.

An entire administration mobilized its crisis machinery around a child sex trafficking scandal, and the only victim anyone in the building was trying to save was themselves.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Glen Carroll @MrGlenCarroll]

The Ultimate Irony Elon Musk Never Saw Coming

Remember when Elon Musk spent $44 billion to buy Twitter, rebranded it to X, fired everyone who knew how to run it, and turned it into a right-wing echo chamber so he could help Trump win?

Yeah. About that.

Because out of the shadows comes Dark Brandon Junior — and he's running laps around the entire MAGA ecosystem.

Hunter Biden (@HunterBiden) marked 7 years clean and sober on June 1. Instead of hiding, he posted a video thanking his recovery community. Then the trolls came for him. And instead of clapping back with anger, he disarmed them with something MAGA doesn't know how to fight: self-deprecating wit, radical honesty, and zero fs given.*

When someone accused him of leaving that White House coke behind, Hunter replied: "It most definitely was not. I would never have forgotten my drugs."

When someone photoshopped a pipe in his mouth, he corrected them: "A crack pipe doesn't have that little bowl at the end. This is why we can't trust AI."

When a user said they'd vote for him if he made a crack joke campaign ad, Hunter fired back: "How about 'Let's take another crack with a Biden.' Needs work but the possibilities are endless."

The result? Even his former MAGA tormentors are apologizing. One user called him "the MAGA whisperer." Hunter's reply summed up the whole damn problem: "Left, right, D or R, we all want the same things. We're being divided on purpose by the Epstein Elite Oligarch class because as long as we're at each other's throats, they get fat and rich off of our misery."

Meanwhile, I posted a side-by-side: Don Jr. looking like he just crawled out of a three-day bender vs. a clean, sober, sharp-witted Hunter Biden. Asked a simple question: Which first son's family would you trust with American democracy?

You know what's beautiful? Elon Musk spent billions to control the narrative. And now Hunter Biden — the man they spent years trying to destroy — is using X to unite Democrats who felt voiceless, shame trolls with humor, and remind everyone what actual redemption looks like.

So here's my message to every Democrat clutching their pearls about "messaging" and "optics":

Stop. Just stop.

Hunter Biden is out here doing more for Democratic morale than half the party's consultants. He's not running for anything. He's not farming for clicks. He's just speaking like the Americans his father and our parents raised — honest, unafraid, and unwilling to let bullies define him.

Meanwhile, the other side nominated a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist and didn't blink. They don't do purity tests. They do power.

So let's be clear: Laugh at the memes. Share the posts. Tag @HunterBiden every chance you get. Because every time you do, you remind people that redemption is real, that sobriety is worth celebrating, and that the party of "family values" spent years attacking a man for his addiction while their own golden boy Don Jr. can't even keep his eyes open in public photos.

Elon Musk, thank you. Without you, we wouldn't have Hunter Biden lighting up your own platform with truth, humor, and the kind of unscripted humanity MAGA can never fake.

#DarkBrandonJunior #MAGAWhisperer #HunterBiden #SobrietyWins #X #ElonMusk #DemocratsUnited #smokefléét

[Gianl1974 @Gianl1974]

A FIFA referee, named the 2025 African Referee of the Year, designated for the World Cup, with diplomatic documents and a diplomatic visa, was turned away at Miami airport, interrogated for eleven hours, held in a cell, and sent back without a clear explanation.

His name is Omar Artan, he's Somali, and he would have been the first Somali citizen to referee a World Cup match.

The worst thing is that all this is happening on the eve of the biggest, richest, most global World Cup ever.

A tournament that boasts about inclusion, diversity, openness, and brotherhood among peoples. But then all it takes is a Somali passport to transform a sporting dream into eleven hours of interrogation and humiliation.

In fact, Artan hasn't been charged with anything specific; his problem is his nationality.

FIFA washes its hands of the matter: it says the host country manages immigration, but Infantino playing Pontius Pilate is simply laughable because Infantino is complicit.

If you organize a World Cup in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, you must ensure that athletes, coaches, referees, and delegations can participate.

Otherwise, you're not really organizing a World Cup. You're organizing a global competition with selective entry, where some are welcome and others must hope not to be treated as suspects simply because of their passport nationality.

It happened to Fabio Cannavaro and the entire Uzbekistan team, searched with metal detectors and drug-sniffing dogs. But there are many cases of senseless checks on staff and players.

Omar Artan said that refereeing at the World Cup was the greatest dream of his life.

That dream was taken away from him at the border, after eleven hours in a cell as if he were a criminal.

And it's a huge shame.

[Rick Wilson @TheRickWilson]

Even. Tommy. Fucking. Tuberville.

[Riley Kellogg @rileykellogg]

@KirstiMiller30 @jk_rowling Thank you for a sane and data-informed post, rebutting ill-informed ideology.

[Bishop Talbert Swan @TalbertSwan]

The same crowd clutching pearls over Jimmy Kimmel today had no problem quoting Psalm 109 when Barack Obama was in office. they made T-shirts, bumper, stickers, and social media memes that said “Pray for Obama Psalm 109:8.”

The passage says this:

“Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places. Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labour. Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children.” - Psalm 109:8-12

They invoked scripture to cloak what was, at its core, a prayer for death, destruction, and generational suffering. Now those same voices want to act morally outraged because a comedian made a joke about Melania Trump being a widow.

Melania was silent about them praying for Michelle Obama to be a widow. She was also pushing her husband‘s racist birther conspiracy. Now she wants to clutch her pearls when the heat comes her way.

You cannot spend years weaponizing the Bible to wish death on a Black president and his family, then suddenly discover “decency” when the target changes.

MAGA are unrepentant racists and counterfeit Christians, who use the Bible as a prop while living in direct contradiction to the Christ they claim to follow.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank.

It just published a 30-year study showing immigrants paid 14.5 trillion dollars more in taxes than they received in government benefits.

Every single year. For thirty years. Without exception.

The country was lied to.

Here is what the study found.🧵

[Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVance]

A little background on who the Southern Poverty Law Center is and what kind of work they’ve been doing for decades makes it clear that DOJ’s indictment (which is of the center, not of any individuals) is vindictive & malicious, an attack on civil rights work itself. https://t.co/o4qZctrA8V

[Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVance]

A tale of two cases: The attempt to vacate insurrectionists’ convictions, while going after a former CIA Director: When a president can make convictions disappear for his allies while leaning on prosecutors to go after his critics, the damage isn’t just theoretical, it’s already happening in front of our eyes. And once that line is crossed, it doesn’t easily uncross itself. It’s on all of us to see it clearly and refuse to look away. https://t.co/2zCIq8vByw

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani just made history.

New York’s first-ever pied-à-terre tax — an annual fee on luxury properties worth $5M+ owned by people who don’t even live here.

Ken Griffin bought a $238M penthouse in NYC.

He doesn’t live here. It sits empty.

While working New Yorkers can’t afford rent.

That changes today. $500M annually — straight to childcare, clean streets, and safer neighborhoods.

This is what governing for people looks like.

[Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVance]

Now do people being held in immigration detention — their conditions are worse.

No facility, federal or state, should violate the rights of people held in its custody. Budgets are moral documents—we shouldn’t incarcerate more people than we can provide constitutionally sufficient conditions for.

[Lois Romano @loisromano]

I have a piece in The @nytopinion today about when men write women's history, they often get it wrong. Not always intentionally—but with consequences that last for generations.
Mary Todd Lincoln is a clear example.
She has been remembered as Abraham Lincoln's unstable, difficult wife for 160 years. That storyline was created almost entirely by men who had every reason to diminish her—biased biographers, political rivals, even physicians who labeled her grief as hysteria rather than recognizing it as the trauma it was.

She helped put Lincoln in the White House, and he was grateful. When he won the 1860 election, he ran home and woke her up: "Mary, Mary—we are elected."

History forgot the "we."

🔗Read it here: https://t.co/hZWy0bTwhu

[Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVance]

It bears saying: We need to be skeptics when DOJ lets word get out that it’s conducting a criminal investigation, especially when the suspect is on Trump’s list of enemies. https://t.co/vPokO5YVSB

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔A researcher invented a fake eye condition called bixonimania, uploaded two obviously fraudulent papers about it to an academic server, and watched major AI systems present it as real medicine within weeks.
The fake papers thanked Starfleet Academy, cited funding from the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation and the University of Fellowship of the Ring, and stated mid-paper that the entire thing was made up. Google's Gemini told users it was caused by blue light. Perplexity cited its prevalence at one in 90,000 people.

ChatGPT advised users whether their symptoms matched. The fake research was then cited in a peer-reviewed journal that only retracted it after Nature contacted the publisher.

My Take
The researcher made the papers as obviously fake as possible on purpose. The AI systems didn't catch it. Neither did the human researchers who cited it in real journals, which means people are feeding AI-generated references into their work without reading what they're actually citing.

I've covered the FDA using AI for drug review, the NYC hospital CEO ready to replace radiologists, and ChatGPT Health launching this year. All of that is happening in the same environment where a condition funded by a Simpsons character and endorsed by the crew of the Enterprise was being presented as emerging medical consensus. The people making these deployment decisions seem to believe the pipeline from research to AI to patient is more supervised than it actually is. This experiment suggests it isn't supervised much at all.

Hedgie🤗
https://t.co/8Kg8FOrgHW

[Riley Kellogg @rileykellogg]

@hell_line0 "I need to teach you..."?? To someone who has clearly broken off contact? A dangerous controlling narcissist, at that.

[Riley Kellogg @rileykellogg]

@JesusChryslerII Do you have a link to the press conference in question?
I really want to see&/or hear this for myself before re-posting.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

This exchange just happened on the Senate floor.
Cornyn: “I don’t understand how the SAVE Act disenfranchises voters.”

Durbin: “Happy to explain. Driver’s licenses don’t qualify under the bill. 50% of Americans don’t have passports.”
Cornyn: “Why not just amend it?”

Durbin: “When’s the last time the Senate actually amended a bill?”

Silence.

The SAVE Act requires passport-level documentation to register to vote.

50% of Americans don’t have a passport.

The people least likely to have passports: the elderly, the poor, rural Americans, young first-time voters.

The people most likely to have passports: wealthy Americans.

This is not voter protection.

This is voter selection.

And when a senator suggested fixing it — his own colleague couldn’t name the last time the Senate amended anything.

That’s the Senate in 2026.

[weird medieval guys @WeirdMedieval]

sneighbourhood, france, 15th century