TikTok has banned a video — citing a &#8220;violation of Community Guidelines&#8221; — that challenges the narrative suggesting that Massachusetts mother Lindsay Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she killed her three young children.
Very few people appear to have mixed feelings about the murder trial of Massachusetts mother Lindsay Clancy: most either believe that she&#8217;s guilty and knew exactly what she was doing, or that she was out of her mind due to postpartum psychosis and did not fully comprehend her own actions. But it&#8217;s the ones who have declared their support for Clancy — even taking to social media to claim that her husband was the guilty one — who were the target of the video in question.
Former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt laid out the case in a video posted across multiple platforms on Sunday, arguing that the wave of people defending Clancy were suffering from &#8220;mass psychosis&#8221; — and he traced its origins to well before the Clancy trial, tracing the origins instead to the COVID-19 pandemic and the rules that must be obeyed but never questioned.
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Credit: @spencerpratt/X.com
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&#8220;Our institutions completely eviscerated their own reputation and dignity,&#8221; Pratt said, adding, &#8220;If you went paddleboarding, alone in the middle of the ocean, you needed to be arrested for killing Grandma. But of course, if you riot with 500,000 people, that&#8217;s totally fine, because viruses take a timeout when it comes to social justice.&#8221;
The constant bombardment of narratives that objectively did not make sense, Pratt said, did more than breed mistrust: they rewired the way people processed information — and even reality. Every tragedy started to look like a conspiracy — and people who fed on conspiracy quickly capitalized on that for profit.
He pointed to the &#8220;fans&#8221; who&#8217;d emerged when Luigi Mangione gunned down United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in cold blood — and then pivoted to address Clancy. In her case, he said, it was a mass hijacking of maternal instinct and unconditional love &#8220;reallocated towards whatever group the algorithm has designated as the vulnerable class.&#8221;
Instead of feeling empathy for the three small children who were strangled to death by their own mother — or for the father who came home with takeout for dinner and discovered his babies unresponsive and near death — the empathy was being directed solely toward the woman whose actions had been the source of that pain.
Popular movies and television shows had primed the population for the redirection of empathy, taking objectively awful characters — like a chemistry teacher who became a drug kingpin and destroyed his own family — and making them sympathetic.
Disney’s “Maleficent” held up a character who embodied evil for the sake of evil in the original “Sleeping Beauty” and portrayed her as the betrayed lover who only took the wrong path because she was in pain. “Wicked” turned the good-vs-evil narrative on its head. “Dexter” made a wide audience identify with a sociopathic serial killer. And those are just a few examples among thousands, all designed to qualify — and thus minimize — objective evil, making it more difficult to identify.
While that trend is certainly problematic, it’s also protected as free speech and free expression. The real problem arises when challenges to the narrative are censored — or, in the case of COVID, targeted as “misinformation.”
TikTok moved to do just that when the platform banned Pratt’s video — which also should have been protected as free speech and expression.
“Child-murderer supporters on TikTok are mass-reporting my video on the Clancy insanity. It&#8217;s wild to see the allergic reaction people have to truth. It&#8217;s like when a demon gets sprayed with holy water,” Pratt responded on Tuesday.

Nurse practitioner who treated Lindsay Clancy testifies about Duxbury mother’s desperation to improve amid postpartum struggles

TikTok Nixes Video That Challenges Popular Narrative Around Lindsay Clancy

TikTok Nixes Video That Challenges Preferred Narrative Around Lindsay Clancy

Lindsay Clancy

Media

Murder

murder trial

Politics

postpartum depression

Social Media

Spencer Pratt

TikTok

President Donald Trump joined the crowds in the nation&#8217;s capital on Sunday for the Freedom 250 race — but he didn&#8217;t tell the drivers to &#8220;be safe.&#8221;
The president told reporters his advice to Sunday&#8217;s drivers boiled down to two words: have fun. Dwelling on safety, he argued, was more likely to make a driver hold back — and less likely to help them win.
&#8220;Have fun,&#8221; he said, adding, &#8220;I don&#8217;t wanna say sort of &#8216;be safe&#8217; because it&#8217;s sort of a negative thought. Right? They don&#8217;t wanna think about that, because if they do, generally speaking, you&#8217;re not gonna win when you start thinking that way.&#8221;
&#8220;But they&#8217;re great,&#8221; he said of the drivers slated to race on Sunday. &#8220;I know many of them through name &#8230; but it&#8217;s a great sport.&#8221;
Trump also said on Sunday that Indianapolis Motor Speedway and INDYCAR owner Roger Penske had been trying to pull off a race in Washington, D.C., for some time — but that until the Trump administration came along, it had looked like an impossibility.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
🚨 PRESIDENT TRUMP JUST NOW: &#8220;They&#8217;ve been trying to do this for 20 years&#8230;when he came to see Trump, it got done in about 15 MINUTES!&#8221;
&#8220;So many people wanna come! 300,000+, they closed the bridges. Bigger and better!&#8221;
&#8220;I was hearing it&#8217;s gonna rain. I said, no it&#8217;s not!&#8221; 🔥 <a href="https://t.co/dnTWNWykek">pic.twitter.com/dnTWNWykek</a>
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) <a href="https://x.com/EricLDaugh/status/2091562405872439450?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 23, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
&#8220;Well, Roger [Penske] told me they&#8217;ve been trying to do it for 20 years,&#8221; Trump explained. &#8220;And he&#8217;d come down — I think he said he was down 211 times to try and get it done – and when he came to see Trump it got done in about 15 minutes and it&#8217;s turned out to be much bigger than we ever even thought possible.&#8221;
&#8220;They actually closed the bridges,&#8221; Trump continued, estimating the crowd to be between 300,000 and 350,000. &#8220;It&#8217;s turned out to be I think bigger and better, and the weather is beautiful. You know, I was hearing about rain all week long, it&#8217;s gonna rain, it&#8217;s gonna rain. I said, &#8216;No, it&#8217;s not.&#8217; And this is as nice a day as I&#8217;ve seen in Washington in a long time.&#8221;
Pre-event estimates from organizers and local outlets had put expected attendance closer to 140,000, though Trump&#8217;s Sunday estimate ran considerably higher.
The festivities also included a number of flyovers featuring U.S. Air Force bombers and fighter jets — some of which were so low and loud that they reportedly set off car alarms in the area.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
🔥 LMAO! Multiple USAF bombers and fighter jets with FULL afterburner just RIPPED over DC, and it was so loud that CAR ALARMS are going off
If the leftists weren’t ALREADY mad about the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, they’re PIPING mad now 😂🤣
The sound of FREEDOM, BABY! 🇺🇸 <a href="https://t.co/mkVo97SEtL">pic.twitter.com/mkVo97SEtL</a>
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) <a href="https://x.com/nicksortor/status/2091553133507858788?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 23, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Prior to race time, the president took a lap around the track in his own armored vehicle, best known as The Beast.

Washington DC Hosts First Freedom 250 Grand Prix Weekend

Trump Has A Message For Freedom 250 Drivers — And It’s Not ‘Be Safe’

Trump Reveals Why He Won't Tell Freedom 250 Drivers To 'Be Safe'

Auto racing

Donald Trump

Freedom 250

Former First Lady Jill Biden is still wondering whether someone could have slipped something into then-President Joe Biden&#8217;s drink ahead of his disastrous 2024 debate with now-President Donald Trump.
Biden sat down with Jamie Kern Lima on her eponymous <a href="https://youtu.be/Vg83Xxndc_k?si=RZrJyR27HDWvstm_">podcast</a>, and the conversation turned to that moment — the moment that even the president&#8217;s staunchest allies and defenders had to admit that something was not right with his cognitive function.
&#8220;Still to this day, you don&#8217;t have a gut instinct on what — what was that moment?&#8221; the host asked.
&#8220;No,&#8221; Biden replied. &#8220;I mean, there&#8217;s all kinds of theories — you know, he had been traveling. I know he was tired, he didn&#8217;t feel well that day when I saw him, but there was nothing definitive that I could point to.&#8221;
&#8220;And I had been on the road for two weeks up until that moment, so I wasn&#8217;t with him. I didn&#8217;t see him days before, weeks before,&#8221; she added. &#8220;I saw him maybe one hour before.&#8221;
&#8220;And there&#8217;s no way anyone could have, God forbid, laced his drink or something —&#8221; Kern Lima suggested.
&#8220;Who knows? Who knows?&#8221; Biden answered.
&#8220;Who knows?&#8221; Kern Lima repeated.
&#8220;Right? Who knows?&#8221; Biden said again.
Kern Lima also asked the former first lady what she might say if embattled former First Son Hunter Biden ever decided to run for office — or even for president.
&#8220;You know, I do have a funny answer for that,&#8221; Biden said, adding, &#8220;I would say, &#8216;Run.&#8217; But then you take that how you want to &#8230; So, you know, Hunter&#8217;s got to find his own path. And whatever he decides to do — I feel that with all our kids &#8230; whatever they decide to do, we will support them. We&#8217;ll support them, 100%.&#8221;
Biden went on to say that she&#8217;d felt the same way about supporting her husband no matter what, claiming that she&#8217;d found it &#8220;daunting&#8221; when he decided to run for president, but her desire to &#8220;support&#8221; him ultimately won out.

Jill Biden

Jill Biden Has New Theory About Joe’s Debate Disaster … It Involves A ‘Roofie’

Jill Biden Can't Be Sure Joe Wasn't Roofied Before Debate Disaster

Debate

Joe Biden

After 11 years as a sports columnist at The Seattle Times, Matt Calkins has resigned from the paper, saying editors refused to publish a column arguing that opposing biological males competing in women’s sports does not make someone “transphobic.”
The columnist <a href="https://x.com/Matt_Calkins/status/2090483833057751064">announced</a> his resignation Thursday, saying the decision was entirely his own but came after the newspaper declined to run his piece on the debate over biological males competing in women’s sports.
“The impetus was the Times declining to run a column I wrote from the perspective of two female student athletes who were opposed to competing against biological males,” Calkins wrote. “It was one of several pieces of mine that had been spiked, and I no longer felt like I could properly do my job as a columnist.”
The decision came after Calkins interviewed 16-year-old Ahnaleigh Wilson, a student-athlete who had lost to a biological male in a track race and attended a matchup between the Indiana Fever and the  Seattle Storm carrying a sign reading, “Thank You, Sophie For Speaking Up For Girls!” Wilson’s experience at that game became the catalyst for Calkins’ unpublished column.
During the game, Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/wnba-co-owner-accused-of-cursing-out-teen-girls-over-xx-xy-shirts">confronted</a> Wilson and another teenage girl who were supporting Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham, who has publicly opposed biological males competing in women’s sports. 
Keaton allegedly called the girls “f***ing insane” and told Wilson, “I hope Jesus can forgive you,” leaving the teenager in tears. The WNBA subsequently <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/wnba-co-owners-tirade-at-sophie-cunningham-fans-ends-in-fallout">suspended</a> Keaton from attending five home games and fined her over the incident.
For Calkins, the episode raised a question he believed deserved to be addressed by a sports columnist: Why should a teenage girl who believes women’s sports should remain female-only automatically be treated as hateful or bigoted?
Wilson told Calkins that she did not hate transgender people and simply believed girls should have their own sports. Another Washington student-athlete, Frances Staudt, told him she had faced verbal abuse at school after refusing to play against a biological male.
Calkins ultimately published the rejected column on his Substack under the title, “<a href="https://substack.com/home/post/p-211906384">Agreeing with Sophie Cunningham’s stance doesn’t make you transphobic.</a>”
“Some people saw bigotry. I saw bravery,” Calkins wrote of Wilson. “I saw a teenage girl speaking up on an issue that so many adults shy away from.”
The column argued that the separation of male and female sports exists precisely because of biological differences in physical performance, and that supporting that separation does not necessarily amount to hostility toward transgender people. But the Seattle Times declined to publish it.
Calkins <a href="https://substack.com/home/post/p-212028578">said</a> he initially submitted the column to his editor on July 31 and was told that editors were reviewing it. Several days later, he said, he was informed that the piece would not run because he had failed to notify his editor in advance that he was working on it.
“I didn’t buy this reasoning,” Calkins wrote. “If that were the case, the piece would have been killed on the spot, not passed through the hands of multiple editors over several days.” 
He resigned immediately afterward.
The decision was not, according to Calkins, simply about one column. He said the Times had previously spiked columns questioning whether the U.S. women’s soccer team was actually the victim of discrimination in its equal-pay lawsuit, criticizing cancel culture in sports, and defending a black high school basketball coach who urged Americans not to stereotype police following George Floyd’s death.
Calkins said the common thread was that the pieces challenged narratives that he believed a columnist should be willing to question.
 “I’ve always thought that it was a columnist’s duty to generate discussion on the most hot-button issues,” he wrote. “To avoid such topics was to leave the reader shortchanged.”
“I guess in the end, I just didn’t feel like I could do my job properly anymore,” he wrote.
Calkins acknowledged that leaving a long-established newspaper job without another position lined up was frightening. He said he has no idea what his career will look like in the coming years and joked that he could even end up working as a dental assistant.
But he said the uncertainty was preferable to self-censorship.
“To be honest, I’m scared sh—tless right now,” Calkins wrote. “But that fear beats the indignity of being muzzled.”

Indiana Fever v Seattle Storm

Sports Columnist Breaks Up With Paper Over Biological Reality

Censorship

Free Speech

Freedom of the Press

Indiana Fever

Media Bias

Seattle

Seattle Storm

Sophie Cunningham

Transgender

Transgender Athletes

Women's Basketball

Women's sports

xx-xy athletics

FBI agents surprised disgraced former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) when he arrived at the San Francisco airport on Saturday, slapping him with a search warrant.
Sources familiar with the law enforcement action confirmed to The Daily Wire that Swalwell&#8217;s phone and other electronic devices were seized by agents at the airport.
Federal law enforcement officials also <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/08/20/us-news/fbi-confronts-eric-swalwell-at-airport-seizes-electronics-in-sexual-misconduct-probe-report/">served and executed</a> search warrants on Swalwell&#8217;s residence in Washington, D.C., where additional electronic devices were seized. Several sources confirmed that the seizure was related to an ongoing criminal probe into the 45-year-old former California lawmaker stemming from a number of accusations of sexual misconduct and even rape.
The FBI seizure report comes just days after newly <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/new-fbi-files-blow-open-swalwells-long-running-fang-fang-mystery">declassified</a> documents shed light on Swalwell&#8217;s repeated dalliances with Chinese spy Christine Fang (&#8220;Fang Fang&#8221;). He has not responded to the new document dump.
Swalwell, according to the <a href="https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16066819/Eric-Swalwell-FBI-San-Francisco-seize-electronics-sexual-misconduct.html">reports</a> first published by The Daily Mail, cooperated with federal agents when they greeted him at the airport on Saturday, and neither he nor his wife or children were present at the D.C. residence when agents entered the premises.
The former gubernatorial candidate faced a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/new-accusers-the-fbi-yacht-girls-things-go-from-bad-to-worse-for-swalwell">slew of accusations</a> from several women who accused him of inappropriate sexual behavior — and one former staffer who claimed that he raped her twice when she was too inebriated to have given her consent — and ultimately dropped out of the race in California before the primary election. He resigned from Congress days later.
Swalwell has <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/swalwell-wont-drop-out-despite-his-metoo-era-kavanaugh-demand">maintained his innocence</a> throughout, consistently claiming that the accusations against him were politically motivated. Before the women went public, he was leading the field in the gubernatorial primary – but because California uses a &#8220;jungle primary&#8221; system that advances only the top two candidates overall, Swalwell claimed he was targeted in order to keep him from splintering the Democratic vote. His exit, he maintained, was strategically designed to prevent a general election matchup that locked out the Democratic Party entirely.
The Department of Justice opened an <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/swalwell-under-federal-investigation-for-alleged-sexual-assault">official investigation</a> into Swalwell in April, and he&#8217;s stayed relatively quiet in the weeks since.

Eric Swalwell

FBI Surprises Eric Swalwell At Airport, Seizes Key Evidence

FBI Surprised Disgraced Rep. Swalwell At Airport, Seized Electronics

Sexual Misconduct

Bill Rasmussen, the visionary founder of ESPN who helped transform sports from a programming category into a round-the-clock television industry, died Tuesday at his home in Florida. He was 93.
Rasmussen died from complications related to Parkinson’s disease, according to <a href="https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/49649281/espn-founder-bill-rasmussen-dies-93">ESPN</a>. He revealed in 2019 that he had been diagnosed with the disease five years earlier. 
After working as a sportscaster in Massachusetts, Rasmussen joined the New England Whalers of the World Hockey Association in 1974. He was fired as the team’s communications director in 1978, just months before he and his son Scott began developing the idea for a 24-hour sports network.
To make it happen, Rasmussen took an enormous financial risk. He maxed out his credit card and used a $9,000 advance to secure satellite capacity. He and Scott, along with Ed Egan, incorporated the company in 1978 and began pitching the idea to investors, cable operators, and professional sports leagues. 
On September 7, 1979, the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, ESPN, went on the air.
The first broadcast featured a 30-minute edition of “SportsCenter,” followed by a college football preview and slow-pitch softball game. About 1.4 million households initially had access to the network.
 Rasmussen’s gamble soon began to reshape the sports landscape. ESPN secured a deal with the NCAA to televise college sports and aired 23 games from the 1980 NCAA Basketball Tournament, giving viewers access to far more tournament action than had previously been available nationally.
The network would eventually grow into a global sports media empire, fundamentally changing how Americans consume sports. Rasmussen, however, did not remain at the company for long. He and his son were forced out by Getty Oil in 1980, barely a year after ESPN launched. He later pursued other media ventures, wrote “Sports Junkies Rejoice: The Birth of ESPN,” and became a motivational speaker and entrepreneurship advocate.
Despite his brief tenure, Rasmussen remained closely associated with ESPN&#8217;s origins. 
“Bill was a remarkable man — a visionary and an innovator who conceived the idea of a network entirely devoted to sports,” ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro wrote in a statement on <a href="https://x.com/ESPNPR/status/2089740690108408200/photo/1">X</a>. “Quite simply, none of us would be here today if it wasn&#8217;t for Bill&#8217;s passion and all the hard work and entrepreneurial spirit he put into building ESPN in the late 1970s.”
Longtime ESPN anchor Chris Berman, who joined the network just three weeks after its launch, previously called Rasmussen “the George Washington of ESPN.”
In the years since Rasmussen’s departure, ESPN has also undergone dramatic changes, and its relationship with sports fans has become increasingly strained, especially <a href="https://awfulannouncing.com/espn/vibes-brand-perception-all-time-low.html">recently</a>. The network remains a dominant force in sports media, but carriage disputes, failed ventures such as ESPN Bet, streaming complications, and increasingly polarizing on-air personalities have contributed to a perception that the network is a far cry from the ESPN of its heyday. Critics have increasingly questioned whether the “Worldwide Leader in Sports” still occupies the same place in the culture that Rasmussen helped create.
Rasmussen was born in Chicago in 1932, attended DePauw University, served in the U.S. Air Force, and earned a master&#8217;s degree in business from Rutgers University. He was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 2025.
Rasmussen is survived by his sons Scott and Glenn, daughter Lynn Van Hollebeke, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. His wife of nearly 56 years, Lois, died in 2011.
For a man whose original idea was dismissed by many as impractical, the legacy is difficult to overstate: Rasmussen didn&#8217;t merely start a television network; he helped create the modern sports media industry.

New York Yankees v Boston Red Sox

Man Who Founded ESPN Dies At 93

College basketball

ESPN

March Madness

NCAA Basketball

Obituaries

Obituary

Sports

Television

After a primary season marked by socialist wins — and a party that can&#8217;t seem to stop the dramatic lurch to the Left — Democrats are losing the public relations game with average voters, and they&#8217;re losing big.
CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten detailed the Democratic Party&#8217;s flagging favorability numbers during a Tuesday morning segment — and although he was also careful to note that President Donald Trump was not faring any better in recent polls, he made it clear that Democrats still had some serious work to do ahead of November&#8217;s midterm elections.
&#8220;Donald Trump&#8217;s political brand ain&#8217;t too hot to trot these days,&#8221; Enten explained, holding his nose for emphasis when he added, &#8220;But I gotta tell you, P-U when it comes to the Democratic brand.&#8221;
&#8220;The net favorability rating of the Democratic Party — you know, back in 2018, when Democrats during the first Trump presidency, right? When they were able to win back control of the House? They were even,&#8221; Enten said.
Enten&#8217;s tone was incredulous as he dropped the comparison to 2026: &#8220;Twenty-five points underwater! Oof. Oof. You know, the Dem brand, it&#8217;s not too good these days, it&#8217;s not too good. It kind of smells like a New York sidewalk in the summer.&#8221;
But what Enten did not address was the wide ideological chasm between the Democrats who ran — and ultimately flipped a number of seats — in the 2018 midterms and the Democrats who have secured primary wins in the 2026 cycle.
Among the 2018 winners were two who eventually switched their party affiliation either to Republicans or independent: New Jersey&#8217;s Rep. Jeff Van Drew — now a Republican — and Arizona&#8217;s former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who declared her affiliation to be independent in 2022. Others, like Reps. Max Rose (D-NY), Antonio Delgado (D-NY), Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-FL), and Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) were somewhat moderate in their voting records.
Just eight years later, the big primary wins have gone to a number of far-Left candidates who openly attack Israel and embrace socialism — and even a few who are card-carrying members of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Michigan&#8217;s Democratic Senate nominee <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/dsa-whistleblower-says-hell-do-everything-he-can-to-elect-mike-rogers">Abdul El-Sayed</a>, for example, proudly campaigned alongside antisemitic communist and Mao Zedong superfan <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/cnn-gives-el-sayed-a-chance-to-renounce-hasan-piker-he-does-the-opposite">Hasan Piker</a> — and he was not the only one to do so. DSA-aligned candidates won primaries in New York on the coattails of Democratic socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
And as more moderate Democrats lose to primary challenges from the far-Left, a number of others have opted to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/panic-sets-in-dems-tailspin-as-they-realize-the-hostile-socialist-takeover-already-started">fall in line</a> in an attempt to save their own skins, defending the rise of socialism by claiming that the Democrat tent is big enough for everyone.

Michigan Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed Holds Rally In Detroit With Sen. Bernie Sanders And Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Dems Are Losing The Public Relations War As Party Lurches Left

The Normies Don't Like Socialism, Dems Hardest Hit: Poll

Democratic Socialists Of America

Democrats

Harry Enten

Polls

Socialism

Chicago Sky guard DiJonai Carrington viciously clotheslined the Indiana Fever’s Sophie Cunningham while Cunningham was driving for a layup during an Aug. 8 WNBA game. The referees called a flagrant foul on Carrington immediately and ejected her from the game. Sports Illustrated decided to frame it, in its headline, as payback: “Sophie Cunningham Got A Bitter Taste of Karma After Drawing Flagrant Foul.” 
What was the “karma” that led to Cunningham’s hardwood tumble? The conservative sports media website Outkick postulated that it came from a late-July ESPN.com profile (“Love her or hate her, Sophie Cunningham Won’t Be Ignored”) where Cunningham spoke out against transgender participation in women’s sports. “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” she said. And maybe SI did mean the headline to act as a callback to that. But the article itself explicitly referred to Cunningham’s own hard retaliation foul on Jacy Sheldon the previous season.
Nevertheless, when the Cunningham profile ran in July, all the progressive media opinions flew out of Pandora’s box. The left-leaning sports and politics site Defector ran a response called “Sophie Cunningham Is About As Edgy as a Beach Ball,” faulting ESPN’s “view-from-nowhere style” and calling Cunningham a “straight blonde woman with tenuous political commitments.” We had every reason to believe the political knives were out for Sophie Cunningham.
So this had me wondering: How did the culturally conservative athlete — and there are a lot of them — suddenly become the rebel in American sports? When did sportswriters become comfortable treating that rebellion as a character flaw, as opposed to a political opinion? I dived into research and arrived at a surprising conclusion. It’s usually been this way. 
&nbsp;
<div id="attachment_938293" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-938293" class="size-medium wp-image-938293" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/GettyImages-2220133971-300x200.jpg" alt="Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham (8) and Connecticut Sun guard Jacy Sheldon (4) interact leading to Cunningham and Sheldon being ejected during a WNBA game between the Connecticut Sun and the Indiana Fever on June 17, 2025, at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, IN." width="300" height="200" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/GettyImages-2220133971-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/GettyImages-2220133971-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/GettyImages-2220133971-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/06/GettyImages-2220133971.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Erica Denhoff/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images</div>
Sportswriters have always simped for the establishment. Old-school sports journalists valued authority, patriotism, and tradition above anything else. “They just wanted to cover sports their way, and a lot of them were highly conservative,” wrote Washington Post columnist Robert Lipsyte, recalling prominent 1960s sportswriters.
But it was more than just encouraging baseball fans to buy war bonds or fly the flag. In 1942, J.G. Taylor Spink, publisher of the Sporting News, America’s self-proclaimed sports Bible, actively spoke out against integrating baseball, saying no good came from “raising the race issue,” claiming that integrationists “run the risk of damaging their own game.” In 2021 during Peak Woke, the Sporting News, now a minor media property, reckoned with its past and supported removing Spink’s name from an annual baseball writer’s award. 
In 1964, prominent New York sports columnist Jimmy Cannon said of Muhammad Ali’s Muslim name change, “I pity Clay and abhor what he represents.” Venerated columnist Red Smith called Ali’s anti-Vietnam protests in 1967 “as sorry a spectacle as those unwashed punks who picket and demonstrate against the war.” In 1965, Cleveland sportscaster John Fitzgerald told running back and future Dirty Dozen star Jim Brown to “pipe down and stick to football” after Brown spoke out about civil rights issues. 
The old sports press enforced the dominant cultural order. But at some point the dominant order changed. 
The key date of American sports media’s leftward shift was January 1, 2012, when John Skipper became ESPN’s president. His tenure responded to trends already occurring in the culture. ESPN had established Bill Simmons’ Grantland magazine in 2011 and had for years been featuring columnist Jemele Hill, who wrote in 2008 that “rooting for the Celtics is like saying Hitler was a victim,” which got her suspended. 
Under Skipper, ESPN highlighted Grantland, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, the female-centered espnW/Nine for IX, and “unique points of view.” Pre-Trump, it gave Caitlyn Jenner the 2015 Arthur Ashe Courage Award, making a major institutional judgment about the social meaning of transgenderism. In May 2016, it launched the Undefeated, built around the “intersection of sports, race, and culture.”
People began to notice. ESPN public editor Jim Brady wrote about a “perceived move leftward” in the organization. He quoted one staffer as saying, “If you’re a Republican or conservative, you feel the need to talk in whispers. There’s even a fear of putting Fox News on a TV [in the office].”
Brady wrote another column in 2017 where he said, “like it or not, ESPN isn’t sticking to sports.” Skipper said in the column that “ESPN is not a political organization … we consider this human, not political.” Skipper was out by the end of the year, resigning to deal with substance-abuse issues, and, he later revealed, a cocaine extortion attempt that he said put his family at risk. 
Meanwhile, Jemele Hill was still at ESPN, tweeting that President Donald Trump was a “white supremacist” while also hosting the 6 p.m. Sportscenter. But the gravity had shifted to the center at the &#8220;Worldwide Leader.&#8221; In 2018, at Football Media Day, ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro said, “When people tune into ESPN, they are not looking for political commentary from us.” 
&nbsp;
<div id="attachment_190654" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-190654" class="size-medium wp-image-190654" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2021/02/JemeleHill-300x200.jpg" alt="THE VIEW - Jemele Hill is the guest co-host today, Wednesday, 2/21/18 on Walt Disney Television via Getty Images's &quot;The View.&quot; &quot;The View&quot; airs Monday-Friday (11:00 am-12:00 pm, ET) on the Walt Disney Television via Getty Images Television Network." width="300" height="200" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2021/02/JemeleHill-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2021/02/JemeleHill.jpg 612w" sizes=" (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />Heidi Gutman/Walt Disney Television via Getty Images</div>
However, the genie had long ago popped out of the bottle. The internet had changed the temperament of sports commentary forever. In 2005, Gawker Media launched Deadspin, its sports website without “favor, access, or discretion,” which provided a needed balm to a sports media that was way too deferential to owners and agents and advertisers. It was snarky and irreverent and an essential read for a new generation of fans. “We were consciously fashioning an alternative to ESPN,” editor Tommy Craggs later said. 
It also was gradually, and then extremely, left-wing. “Deadspin’s already venomous bite was imbued with a political sensibility,” a <a href="https://defector.com/how-we-got-here">retrospective</a> later said. After the collapse of Gawker Media, a private equity firm took over, fired editor Barry Petchesky, and ordered the staff to “stick to sports.” Everyone quit. Writer Drew Magary, the most prominent Deadspin voice and an always-strident anti-Trumper, said, “There is no sticking to sports.” 
The Deadspin refugees formed a site called Defector, which developed progressive sports snark into a fetishistic art form. Once again, ESPN, now out of its progressive cup, was the man that refused to speak truth to power. So to Defector, Sophie Cunningham could be as edgy as a “beach ball.” New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart, who introduced Trump at a rally in May, is an “enthusiastic MAGA freak.”
When Republican-tinged Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker announced an entry into politics, Defector said his PAC “coffers were as empty as his head.” San Francisco 49ers player Nick Bosa wore a MAGA hat after a postgame interview and Defector said he “preened like a jackass.” Would Defector run equally snarky language about a progressive athlete’s racial, feminist, or LGBT politics? Unlikely.
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<div id="attachment_555321" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-555321" class="size-medium wp-image-555321" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/05/GettyImages-1401004524-scaled-e1684781998422-300x205.jpg" alt="A Los Angeles Dodgers hat on LGBTQ+ Pride Night at Dodger Stadium on June 03, 2022 in Los Angeles, California." width="300" height="205" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/05/GettyImages-1401004524-scaled-e1684781998422-300x205.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/05/GettyImages-1401004524-scaled-e1684781998422-844x576.jpg 844w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/05/GettyImages-1401004524-scaled-e1684781998422-768x524.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/05/GettyImages-1401004524-scaled-e1684781998422.jpg 1200w" sizes=" (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" />(Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)</div>
Take, for example, this season’s baseball Pride Night cap controversy. Dodgers players Blake Treinen (so openly conservative that Dodgers fans nicknamed him “MAGA”) and Alex Call wore their regular caps instead of a rainbow-flag Pride Night cap. The gay-themed website “Outsports” concluded that “their refusal gives us a glimpse into the continued presence of anti-LGBTQ sentiments amongst pro athletes, and the need to double our efforts,” but also said, basically, leave these guys alone. 
 A reasonable perspective, unlike what happened when three San Francisco Giants players <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-fans-can-save-baseball-from-the-rainbow-corporate-machine">wore Bible verses</a> on their Pride caps. The Giants blog McCovey Chronicles went with the headline “Bad and bigoted: The Giants told fans exactly who they are on Friday.” As a Dodgers fan, I can tell you for certain that the Giants are bad. Especially this year. But are they really bigoted? Are we really supposed to believe that the Major League Baseball organization in San Francisco tolerates hatred toward LGBTQ people? It seems hard to imagine.
But what I found most striking about that headline, or about Defector’s Cunningham “beach ball” headline, is that they’re actually rarer than one might think. The Sports Illustrated conclusion that Cunningham deserved her flagrant foul was horrific and cruel, but it was also an outlier. SI isn’t the cultural force that it was in previous decades. 
If anything, the boundaries have shifted in sports media again. For a decade or more, snarky blogs and ESPN itself pushed a progressive agenda. Gawker is long gone, Defector is subscriber-only, and the conservative sports site Outkick is booming, with a lead story, as I’m writing this, about former ESPN honoree Caitlyn Jenner <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/outkick-sports/caitlyn-jenner-simple-solution-end-wnba-trans-athlete-debate">speaking out</a> against the WNBA’s reported consideration of allowing trans former NBA players to join the league. 
ESPN does sometimes cover sports political discourse, but much less than it once did. The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, who loves basketball more than any person on earth, said on a recent podcast that the WNBA needs to feature its awesome players, not get strung up in the culture wars, arguing that the league badly needs a commissioner. 
As for the Sporting News, which once said no to Jackie Robinson, it ran a long press release wishing Sophie Cunningham a happy 30th birthday. “Cunningham has become a fan favorite because she rarely hides what she is feeling,” the piece goes. “She plays with visible emotion, supports her teammates and understands how to engage with Fever fans both inside Gainbridge Fieldhouse and on social media.”
Now that coverage is about as edgy as a beach ball.  
***
Neal Pollack, “the greatest living American writer,” is the author of 12 semi-bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction and is a three-time “Jeopardy!” champion.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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The Rebels Of American Sports Have Changed Sides

Harrison Butker

Sports Illustrated

Upstream

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) handed her party a problem it spent Sunday morning refusing to answer when she laughed off a slate of far-left policy positions as the excesses of &#8220;Woke 1.&#8221;
Two of the biggest Sunday shows put Ocasio-Cortez&#8217;s remark to Democratic guests as a loyalty test, and both guests gave a near-identical non-answer. NBC&#8217;s Kristen Welker and CNN&#8217;s Jake Tapper each raised it on &#8220;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EukfmKkYwS4">Meet the Press</a>&#8221; and &#8220;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCBVnEyVdwQ">State of the Union</a>,&#8221; respectively.
Welker put the question to Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) directly, quoting Ocasio-Cortez and asking whether he agreed.
&#8220;She said &#8216;Woke 1 was crazy,&#8217; effectively suggesting some progressive views just went too far in the 2020s,&#8221; Welker said. &#8220;Do you agree with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that Woke 1 was crazy?&#8221;
&#8220;Well, I don&#8217;t know what these labels mean,&#8221; Khanna replied, immediately pivoting to a recitation of his own record: &#8220;I&#8217;ll tell you what I&#8217;ve always stood for. I have never been for defunding police.&#8221; He went on to volunteer that he has &#8220;called for abolishing ICE.&#8221;
Welker followed up by asking about Francesca Hong — the Madison democratic socialist who narrowly lost Wisconsin&#8217;s Democratic gubernatorial primary on Tuesday — and the resurfaced post in which she called for getting rid of Thanksgiving. &#8220;Did that kind of rhetoric hurt the progressive cause?&#8221; she asked.
Khanna refused to give an inch. &#8220;I really feel bad for what happened to Francesca. And I know it&#8217;s fashionable to distance yourself. I am not,&#8221; he said. &#8220;I was proud to endorse her and she&#8217;s far more than the caricature that was presented.&#8221;
Notably, Ocasio-Cortez herself never endorsed Hong. Asked in the same ABC News <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFwAnMLBSOw">interview</a> that produced the &#8220;Woke 1&#8221; line whether she would, she said her focus was &#8220;winning back the Congress&#8221; — putting her in line with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the national Democratic Socialists of America, all of whom stayed out. Khanna did not.
On &#8220;State of the Union,&#8221; Tapper raised an almost identical line of questioning with Gov. Wes Moore (D-MD), referencing Ocasio-Cortez&#8217;s comments and pressing Moore for his view.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Democrat Governor of Maryland Wes Moore plays dumb when asked if Democrats went too far by calling to defund the police:
“I said I don’t know what woke 1 is, but frankly I don&#8217;t know what woke 2 or woke 3 is either.&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/PFVN265qYw">pic.twitter.com/PFVN265qYw</a>
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) <a href="https://x.com/RNCResearch/status/2088985603874463944?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 16, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
&#8220;Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems to have acknowledged the overreach of the 2020 era of progressivism last week. She said, quote, &#8216;Woke 1 was crazy,'&#8221; Tapper said. &#8220;You were asked about that. You said you didn&#8217;t know what Woke 1 was. So I&#8217;ve been trying to figure out how to ask this question. There&#8217;s no official definition. I think Woke 1 generally refers to what are now viewed as excesses of the progressive movement — defund the police, a far-left view of the world that views the world in terms of only oppressor and oppressee, language policing, holiday policing, cancel culture positions that turned off a lot of middle-of-the-road voters. What is your take on that era, even if that wasn&#8217;t part of how you ran or thought or governed — and what does the Democratic Party need to do if they hope to win outside of blue states and congressional districts?&#8221;
Moore took a position almost identical to Khanna&#8217;s, replying, &#8220;Well, it&#8217;s funny, it&#8217;s true — I said I don&#8217;t know what Woke 1 is, but frankly, I don&#8217;t know what Woke 2 or Woke 3 is either.&#8221; Moore then pivoted to gas prices, recounting a conversation with a woman at a Delmarva Shorebirds game who told him she can&#8217;t afford to drive to her doctor&#8217;s appointments. Tapper did not follow up.
Ocasio-Cortez <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/aoc-has-an-excuse-for-the-lefts-most-radical-woke-1-era">further popularized the phrase</a> during an August 9 appearance on ABC&#8217;s &#8220;This Week,&#8221; where she too was attempting to put some distance between herself and the less popular policies of the far left. Anchor Jonathan Karl had asked her about Hong&#8217;s record. The line wasn&#8217;t hers: she borrowed it from New York City Councilman Chi Ossé, a fellow socialist who deployed it in May while explaining away his own 2021 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/09/nyregion/nyc-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-freezing-eggs.html">declaration</a> that &#8220;a cis white man should not be the next speaker of the Council.&#8221;
“I have a local city councilman that has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy,&#8217;” Ocasio-Cortez <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFwAnMLBSOw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">told Karl</a> during an interview. “What’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”
She went on to blame the pandemic for the era&#8217;s excesses while insisting the debates it produced were worthwhile.
&#8220;I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful,&#8221; she said.

Maryland Gov. Moore And Utah Gov. Cox Speak At National Press Club On Bipartisanship

Democrats Suddenly Can’t Define ‘Woke’ After AOC Says It Was ‘Crazy’

Dems Scramble To Break Free Of AOC's 'Woke 1' Label

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Jake Tapper

Kristen Welker

Ro Khanna

Wes Moore

Woke Culture

It is deeply perverse to think that artificial intelligence could learn from the great literature of past times by destroying the books that contain it. It is no surprise that booksellers, collectors, and all others who are concerned about the preservation of cultural history have been angered by <a href="https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books">reports</a> that AI companies are purchasing huge numbers of used books, scanning them, and then discarding the original copies. This worry is especially strong when the books in question are rare, old, or otherwise irreplaceable.
But this controversy raises a significantly more complicated question than whether AI should be allowed to read old books. Simply put, it should. If we believe that artificial intelligence is going to become one of the most important intellectual technologies of the coming century, then it is difficult to argue that we should deliberately deprive it of humanity&#8217;s greatest literature. 
An AI trained exclusively on the disposable &#8220;slop&#8221; of the modern internet would be an intellectual disaster. There is immense value in having these systems encounter Shakespeare, Austen, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Homer, Dante, and the thousands of lesser-known writers whose works have accumulated across centuries.
The problem is not that AI wants to learn from the past. The problem is that we have become so careless about possessing the past that we are willing to destroy its physical record to make a digital copy.
The Italian Futurists understood the danger of treating cultural inheritance as something that exists merely to be worshiped. Filippo Marinetti, in his famous 1909 “<a href="https://designmanifestos.org/f-t-marinetti-manifesto-of-futurism/">Futurist Manifesto</a>,” declared, “Museums: cemeteries!” He raged that the Italian obsession with preserving the past was a kind of cultural paralysis, arguing that art existed to propel humanity forward rather than leave it permanently staring backward. 
Marinetti was right: Culture is not alive just because it has been preserved in an untouched, physical state. A book sitting on a shelf, unread, is technically being preserved. But if nobody ever reads it, learns from it, argues with it, writes in response to it, or carries its ideas into the future, then preservation has become little more than embalming. The book is dead and useless, no matter how old or rare it is. We should not want museums that are mausoleums. We should want living libraries.
That is why there is something almost fitting about artificial intelligence becoming one of the newest readers of humanity&#8217;s oldest books. The machine does not need to replace the reader, but it should become another reader. It can expose forgotten works to people who otherwise would never encounter them. It can help translate, search, compare, and contextualize texts that have spent decades or centuries inaccessible to anyone who did not know where to look.
But that possibility makes the physical destruction of books more troubling, not less. A digital copy is not the same thing as the original, and history has given us plenty of reasons to be suspicious of the idea that digitization automatically means preservation. Once information exists primarily as a digital file, someone has to control that file.
We have already seen what happens when cultural works are revised to accommodate the sensibilities of a later generation. In 2023, Steven Spielberg <a href="https://nypost.com/2023/04/26/steven-spielberg-blasts-revising-old-films-for-modern-audiences/">acknowledged</a> that he made a mistake when he altered the 2002 re-release of “E.T.,” replacing the guns carried by federal agents with walkie-talkies. Spielberg eventually came to regret changing his own film, admitting that “E.T.” was a product of its era and that he should never have “messed with the archives” of his own work.
Roald Dahl&#8217;s books provide another, more <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/02/21/1158347261/roald-dahl-books-changed-offensive-words">insidious example</a>. New editions altered the language from the original texts to make them conform more closely to contemporary sensibilities. Words were changed, descriptions were softened, and new language was inserted, long after Dahl had passed.
The point is not that every digital archive is necessarily untrustworthy, but that a physical copy gives us something a digital copy cannot: an independently existing record. If you own an original edition of a book, nobody can push an update to it. Nobody can change a word while you sleep or aren’t looking. Nobody can alter the file on a server, revoke your access, remove it from a digital storefront or decide that your particular copy no longer complies with the prevailing cultural consensus.
That matters enormously in an age when so much of our intellectual life is moving behind centralized digital systems.
The same principle applies to the increasingly familiar argument over “banned books.” Much of the contemporary political rhetoric surrounding book bans <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-real-book-ban-no-one-talks-about">obscures</a> the distinction between restricting access to a book in a particular institution and making a book literally unavailable. But the technological future presents a much more serious version of the latter possibility.
If a book exists only as a digital file controlled by somebody else, its availability is ultimately conditional. It can be deleted, it can be locked, it can be altered, and it can be disappeared. A physical copy sitting in someone&#8217;s private library is much harder to erase — barring the future envisioned in &#8220;Fahrenheit 451” coming to pass.
This is why the response to AI-driven book scanning should not be an anti-technology crusade. It should be a renewed appreciation for private ownership. We need people to own books. Not merely institutions, corporations, or governments. People.
Private collections, family libraries, used bookstores, church libraries, university archives, historical societies, and collectors all provide redundant repositories of cultural memory. The more copies exist in the hands of ordinary people, the harder it becomes for anyone to erase a work from existence.
That does not mean every book needs to be locked behind glass; quite the opposite, the best form of preservation is use. Read the books, give them to your children, loan them to your friends, and write in the margins. Argue with the great ideas.
The Internet Archive offers a useful model. As outlined last week in <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/heres-a-balm-if-the-idea-of-destroying-books-to-train-ai-breaks-your-heart/">Ars Technica</a>, its scanners have deliberately favored slower, more careful processes for fragile and rare books because the purpose of digitization is preservation, not merely extraction. The goal is to create the digital copy without sacrificing the physical one. That process is less efficient, but it is more civilized.
AI companies are engaged in a technological race, and nobody should be surprised that they are looking for the fastest and cheapest ways to acquire the enormous quantities of high-quality text required to train increasingly sophisticated models. But there are some things for which efficiency is not the only relevant metric. A 500-year-old book is not merely a container of tokens. It is an artifact.
Destroying that object in the name of preserving its contents digitally is not necessarily immoral. Sometimes the trade-off may be justified, but it should never be regarded as inconsequential.
There is also a larger lesson here for those of us who are enthusiastic about the future. Futurism does not have to mean amnesia. We can embrace AI, industrialization, automation, and every other technology that makes the future stronger and more capable while simultaneously becoming more serious about preserving the things worth carrying into that future. Indeed, the two projects should reinforce one another.
Let the machines read the classics. Let them help us discover forgotten authors. Let them translate ancient works, compare texts across centuries, and make the world&#8217;s accumulated knowledge accessible to the people.
But while the machines are reading, let us keep the books, not as museum pieces, not as sacred objects that nobody is allowed to touch. As living things. The purpose of preserving a book is not ultimately to ensure that a particular physical object survives for another thousand years. The purpose is to ensure that what is inside it survives, and the only way to guarantee that the past actually has a future is to keep reading it.
***
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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AI Should Read The Classics. We Should Keep Them Too.

Artificial Intelligence

banned books

Books

Literature

Roald Dahl

Steven Spielberg

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he tried the ketogenic diet once, and it quickly became what he referred to as a &#8220;near-psychotic event.&#8221;
Rubio told podcast host Katie Miller — who is married to White House adviser Stephen Miller — that he&#8217;d tried the popular high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet, and the constant lack of sugar had made him so angry that he often felt like he might snap.
&#8220;I did, one time, maybe four or five years ago, I tried this thing called keto,&#8221; Rubio told Miller. &#8220;You&#8217;ve heard of this?&#8221;
Miller said she had, and Rubio continued, &#8220;And you just eat all this protein, so you go through this massive withdrawal from sugar and carbohydrates for the first 72 hours. It was a near-psychotic event for me.&#8221;
Jeanette Rubio, sitting beside her husband, laughed out loud, confirming, &#8220;It&#8217;s true. It&#8217;s true.&#8221;
&#8220;It&#8217;s like, if I did [keto] in this job, I would be in there, &#8216;Mr. President, we must bomb, you know, Paraguay,'&#8221; Rubio said, adding, &#8220;And it&#8217;s like, why? I don&#8217;t know, I&#8217;m just really mad, I haven&#8217;t had any sugar,&#8221; he laughed.
&#8220;It&#8217;s true!&#8221; Jeanette said again.
Rubio clarified that he wasn&#8217;t saying the diet itself — which focuses on restricting carbohydrates so the body burns fat instead of sugar — was necessarily bad, only that it was most definitely not the right choice for him.
&#8220;I&#8217;m not against this diet. I&#8217;m not asking that we ban it. I encourage people to try it,&#8221; Rubio added with a laugh. &#8220;I&#8217;m just saying it&#8217;s not for everyone. That&#8217;s what I&#8217;m saying.&#8221;
During the wide-ranging interview, the Secretary of State also shared his thoughts on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy&#8217;s diet — and weighed in on the merits of the classic 1975 movie &#8220;Jaws&#8221; compared to the cult classic &#8220;Sharknado.&#8221;

US-POLITICS-DIPLOMACY-RUBIO

Rubio Reveals The Diet Plan That Became A ‘Near-Psychotic Event’

Foreign Policy

Marco Rubio

President Donald Trump turned a long-running joke into a birthday gift for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who turned 55 on May 28.
Trump has already tasked Rubio with several official jobs within the administration — which spawned constant speculation whenever a new vacancy appeared — and a viral meme was born.
An Oval Office photo of Rubio slouched on a couch — wearing an expression that suggests he&#8217;s not thrilled with the way things are going — became the template for hundreds of potential new jobs for the Secretary of State/Acting National Security Adviser/acting administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)/acting archivist of the National Archives and Records Administration.
Trump and other White House staffers capitalized on the popularity of the meme, and put together a collage — featuring dozens of iterations of the &#8220;Rubio realizing&#8221; meme. The finished product was framed in gold and presented to Rubio for his birthday.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
The White House made a Rubio Realizing Meme collage for his birthday (May 28), which the president &amp; others signed <a href="https://t.co/5oVDfTFaed">https://t.co/5oVDfTFaed</a> <a href="https://t.co/S2KsnRta3S">pic.twitter.com/S2KsnRta3S</a>
— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) <a href="https://x.com/MarcACaputo/status/2087694087482704381?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 13, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The central photo, which appears to be the un-doctored original image, has President Trump&#8217;s signature scrawled across it, along with the note, &#8220;YOU ARE GREAT!&#8221;
The other images — 68 in total — each show a different meme version of the original photo, and they all bear the signatures of other White House staffers.
The photo that spawned a thousand Rubios was taken during an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in February of 2025, and Rubio told Lara Trump on her Fox News show &#8220;My View&#8221; that he did not like the picture. He explained that particular couch, without a pillow, often caused people to sink lower than they might otherwise.
But once the photo took on a life of its own, it grew on him, he added: &#8220;It turned into this other thing &#8230; and it&#8217;s funny.&#8221;

Trump Turns Beloved Rubio Meme Into Birthday Gift

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