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The Washington Post tested the AI models behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others using political questions designed by researchers to gauge how chatbots respond to hot-button political issues. The results suggest that chatbots have clear political leanings…

— The Washington Post, “Are ChatGPT and other AI chatbots politically biased? We tested them.”

When former Vox editor Matthew Yglesias read a study showing heavy political bias across multiple AI search tools, including Grok, his humorously nutty response was, “The most advanced technology in the world has progressive views and conservatives’ only takeaway from this is to get mad”:

Yglesias referenced a test of politicized content conducted by the Washington Post, which used material from a study done by Dartmouth College and Stanford University. Sean Westwood, director of Dartmouth’s “Polarization Research” center, told the Post, “These AI tools are not presenting a truly neutral representation of really nuanced policy debates, on average.” The Post printed a graph that went viral:

People like Yglesias really think the “most advanced technology” is making a qualitative assessment of policies and ideology, and concluding that this technology has chosen “progressive views” because they’re better, or something. He doesn’t know how the Internet works, of course.

Mechanized content control has long been an obsessive focus of center-left politicians, who correctly foresaw that information gatekeeping could be automated. The vast complex of NGOs, media-scoring companies, and speech-policing laws introduced over the last decade were all the time laying the foundation for a future quantum leap in content control with AI.

We’re there. Chatbots are creating an endless yin-yang of political orthodoxy, first by policing what people see, and second by creating massive quantities of “correct” content, in a process designed to snowball. The steps that led us here were mostly all reported, but ignored:

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“We’ll extinguish desire: we’ll get drinking, gossip, denunciation going; we’ll get unheard-of depravity going; we’ll stifle every genius in infancy. Everything reduced to a common denominator, complete equality.”

When Brad Pearce and I go on a livestream today at 4:30 PM ET, we’ll be starting with what I think is one of the most dramatic and surprising scenes in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Demons.” In part 2, chapter 8 — “Ivan the Tsarevich” — the two dominant revolutionary personalities collide and argue. Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, the deathly serious, scheming, ambitious son of a never-was pseudo-activist, delivers almost a sermon on the goals and methods of his movement. He is going to “stir up trouble,” but on a grand scale, achieving equality through force. “Only one thing is lacking in the world: obedience,” he says.

Young Verkhovensky is trying to convince Nikolai Stavrogin, the aristocrat whose money and inspirational image is needed to round out the plan. It’s a crossroads moment in the book, but Pyotr’s speech could send chills up the spine of anyone following modern politics — even the politics of last week.

Join us at 4:30 PM ET at:

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You can also find us on X, @mtaibbi or @waywardrabbler. See you soon!

A candidate in Maine drops out, and hypocrisies abound.

Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 07/09/26:

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SJW chic meets the world’s longest Mötley Crüe video in a mystifying summer blockbuster

Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 07/08/26:

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Reminder that Dr. Matt Bivens and I will be doing a livestream at 5:00 PM tonight, going over early Twitter Files material. Matt was in the room with the handful of people given access to the first documents, and upon review, we’re finding a lot of eyebrow-raising material that should have been published a lot earlier. We’re going to go through some of that stuff this evening.

Looking back, it’s important to understand that not only was there a lot of pressure to publish quickly — I was very paranoid about the project being shut down before we got material out, and was continually trying to narrow focus to thread-sized issues so we could push things out the door — but that we also didn’t understand a lot of what we were looking at early on. We didn’t know how shadowbanning worked, didn’t understand who was consulting with what agency, and didn’t know what key acronyms or terms meant. And sometimes, we just missed things, or I did, anyway.

For example, this is from a Slack chat Matt found early on. An employee was hopeful there was “enough” in the words “rigged election” to make a Trump tweet actionable. Upon being denied, on the grounds that Trump was referencing a real story, she wrote, Darn it!

At the time, I didn’t understand how meaningful this sort of thing was. Only later, after seeing dozens of similar exchanges and/or reports about techniques like “prebunking,” would it have been possible to know that this was an early example of how reviewers looked at narratives first, and only later bothered with factuality. We also didn’t understand why labeling mattered so much, nor did we really know how government agencies fit into such discussions, if they did at all. (Hint: they did.) In any case, Matt and I will take you behind the scenes of the first releases, and start releasing a few interesting things. This was a historic story that for a variety of reasons has been underplayed, even by me. More to come. Clink the links below to join us tonight:

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Dr. Matt Bivens, who joined me on a livestream about Russia a few weeks back, will be making time again tomorrow night, to talk about some never-discussed angles of the Twitter Files story. The initial story was reported by two teams of reporters, one associated with Bari Weiss, and a far smaller family affair in the Racket camp. Matt, a former editor of the Moscow Times, was the person who found a key first batch of election-related Slack chats, and helped us settle on a direction early in the process, which was a very fraught time, for a variety of reasons none of us has discussed publicly. We also wanted to clear up some misconceptions and field questions. To join us, tune in tomorrow at 5:00 PM ET at:

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Maine Democrat Graham Platner last night ran a video address staunchly denying a recent flurry of sexual assault accusations, while still dropping out of the race for the U.S. Senate “for the good of the movement.” Platner said farewell to a campaign that he said “went toe to toe with one of the most entrenched political systems in the history of the world” — the history of the world, folks — and won. But now, that same “entrenched system” will not let his run continue, not “if it’s me.” And so, for now, adieu, but like Frankie and Sid before him, at least Graham did it his way:

The ensuing furor is causing unprecedented cancel culture paralysis. To a demographic that’s long used a vaporize-by-numbers calculation for shunning and ruining the lives and careers of the impure, which litmus test takes precedence? Is it more important to be anti-Trump, pro-Palestine, or a feminist ally? Will the majority of Democrats (Platner won 71% of the primary vote) suddenly rediscover a love for due process in the case of Platner, when they said nada in the cases of Eric Swalwell and God knows how many others? Will the party establishment finally face revolt for using dirty tricks to eliminate intramural competition, after voters kept mum while primary challengers were ratfucked away to make way for Joe Biden? Let’s find out!

What a hilarious mess the Democrats have created for themselves. The party has spent the Trump era building a culture of guilt by accusation. Now one group of uncompromising purity-testers will duke it out with another, in a battle pitting moralizing New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his strategist Morris Katz against imperious insiders like Chuck Schumer and #MeToo influencer like Cheyenne Hunt. Is there a way for everyone to lose? As the great Terrell Owens said, “Getcha popcorn ready”:

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Box office analysts on Sunday noted an uncomfortable truth: Female-led superhero movies have been rejected almost uniformly over the past five years or so, perhaps reflecting a resurgent misogyny among the core fan base, which is largely male.

— The New York Times, “Supergirl’ falters at box office, testing DC studios reboot”

Supergirl opens on the planet Holzherr, which orbits a red sun. Since Kryptonians derive their superpowers from the yellow sun, the atmosphere dulls the heroine’s constitution to the point where she can get drunk. Nightly, the titular character played by slackerish Australian Milly Alcock crawls bars and passes out in an interstellar space trailer.

Early, a Bane-like villain named Krem who has dieselpunk face studs shoots her superdog Krypto with poison. A shawl-wearing “Healer” with huge eyes who gives off an Alien Susan Sarandon vibe tells her Krypto has three days to live, and she must chase after Krem, who alone carries the antidote. Supergirl is forced to leave Planet Substance Abuse on a space bus, and soon learns news of Krem might be on a frontier planet called Bilquis.

Supergirl is fine until she reaches Bilquis. Not good, or even coherent — it’s not clear why she’s so miserable being a beautiful superhero, why her head doesn’t explode when pushed into space without her powers (even she thought she needed a helmet), or why Supergirl is 23 but her sexual radar signature is zero — but until Bilquis, Supergirl is a normal, cliché-filled action movie. After… It’s hard to put into words. Remember the remake of The Fly, when Jeff Goldblum tries for the first time to send a live baboon through his teleportation device?

Splat! That’s what happens to the script of Supergirl fifteen minutes in. See if you can follow this:

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