Monday Morning Dispatch — 08/06/2026

Monday Morning Dispatch — 08/06/2026

Recorded Friday morning, June 5: three days before release, four days after the New York Times piece discussed in this episode, and one day before... well. This is a developing story, and the episode is a snapshot of that morning. What has already changed since recording: Lyndsey Fifield, the woman whose allegations anchor the Times piece, has publicly disputed the paper's handling of her account, saying the Times softened her allegations and omitted corroboration she says she offered. The episode's discussion of the corroboration record reflects the Times piece as published on June 4. Make of the rest what you will. That's sort of the point of the episode. One correction: the Maine Democratic primary is Tuesday, June 9, the day after this episode's release. Not "next week," and it has not already passed. Yesterday the New York Times published a list of grievances, to put it lightly, against Graham Platner: combat veteran, oyster farmer, and presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine. This isn't a defense of Graham Platner, and it isn't a disavowal either. It's an attempt to sit somewhere less comfortable. The episode works through a distinction borrowed in part from F.D. Signifier: voting for a candidate and championing a candidate are not the same act. The white left, in its hunger for a warrior-farmer who reads as what "a real Democrat looks like," collapsed a legitimate political calculation into an aesthetic romance, and made a hero of a man whose record was always going to complicate hero status. The political calculation may still hold, but the hero treatment never should have been extended. Very few people deserve it, if any. From there, the purity politics problem. The left has spent years arguing that a mole and a wart isn't disqualifying, then runs the purity standard against its own when convenient. There's no framework, just vibes, flipping based on who and what is convenient. Where the allegations are serious, the episode takes them seriously; if what Fifield describes is true, it's abuse, full stop. It also refuses to pretend her politics, and the corroboration record as the Times reported it, aren't part of the picture. Both stay on the table, and neither resolves. The host speaks as an addict in recovery who has spent real time in twelve-step rooms and worked with that population. He has seen broken men become something else, and he has seen them not. Recovery is not a narrative that makes the past disappear; it's a practice that coexists with the past. The redemption arc Platner is running is not automatically a lie, and not automatically true. "I was bad then, but I'm good now" is not how it works. "I was bad then, and I'm better now" might be. And the alternative on the ballot is Susan Collins, who, whatever her cultivated maverick image, votes with her caucus when it counts. She is not the feminist alternative for the women in that Times piece. That's the choice, and it isn't a good one. Uninformed Opinions is a (sometimes) weekly radio show at the intersection of politics, philosophy, and pop culture.

Thursday Morning Dispatch — 14/05/2026

Wes Huff calmly tells Steven Bartlett he's going to hell. The grin is the argument. In Episode 4 of Uninformed Opinions, the response is to that clip. Wes Huff — PhD candidate at Wycliffe College, Reformed Baptist, the current most-credentialed face of evangelical apologetics — telling the host of Diary of a CEO, with a slight grin, that yes, he will go to eternal damnation. The episode opens elsewhere. Three weeks ago, an involuntary psychiatric commitment after a manic episode that ended with three police at the door and five days inpatient. The first half of the show is the disclosure: the IVC, the hospital, what theological certainty actually feels like from inside a manic break. It is not background. It is the entry into the second half. The argument: the calm face is the tell. Someone who had truly reckoned with what they were saying — eternal conscious torment, the actual horror of it — could not say it that way. The certainty is the evidence against the claim. From there the episode goes to the texts. Matthew 13: the sower seeds indiscriminately, before any soil is assessed. Matthew 25: the criterion is feeding the hungry and welcoming the stranger, and the righteous didn't know they were doing it. Luke: Father, forgive them — said into a void, before anyone asked. John: God did not send his son to condemn the world. Then the political consequence. Wes Huff went on the Michael Knowles show. Michael Knowles is the man who stood at a CPAC podium and said transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely. Huff decides whose soul registers before God. Knowles decides whose existence registers in public life. Same move, different podium. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 to defend slaveholders' rights to serve as missionaries. The embedding goes to the founding. The episode closes with Pastor Lester, the host's childhood preacher, who used to weep through a bad story about a man alone on an island finding a Bible washed up from a shipwreck. The feeling and the framework were fighting and the feeling won. Uninformed Opinions is a (sometimes) weekly radio show exploring the intersection between politics, philosophy, spirituality, and pop culture in our contemporary society.

Monday Morning Dispatch — 13/04/2026

Episode 3 of Uninformed Opinions: the response is to Amelia Carter — specifically to the introduction of her Mirror Podcast episode titled "The Left Fell For A Long Con." It starts with a clip. Senator Josh Hawley pressing Dr. Nisha Verma, a double board-certified OB-GYN called before the Senate to testify about medication abortion safety, on whether men can get pregnant — eleven times, over five minutes. Amelia uses that clip to open an argument about truth, identity, and ideological subversion. The episode plays more of it than she did. What Amelia is doing with the clip gets named before the argument starts: this is not analysis, it is solidarity installation. The clip is chosen because it is the most viscerally frustrating clip available, not because it is the strongest evidence for her thesis. From there the episode works through her persuasion architecture — a documented four-step sequence that has a name, a research literature, and a known mechanism. Emotional priming. Authority installation. An unfalsifiable framework. A conversion narrative. Each piece is designed to prevent you from critically evaluating every other piece. The authority at the center of it is Yuri Bezmenov, presented as a high-level KGB operative warning the West about ideological subversion from the inside. The record says something different. He was a Novosti Press Agency journalist — a low-level informant. Canadian intelligence files obtained by CBC News describe him, by 1980, as working with "lower level fringe groups of little consequence," drinking heavily, his credibility gone. The 1984 interview was produced by G. Edward Griffin — a John Birch Society chapter coordinator who has publicly defended the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, promoted cancer quackery, and argued the civil rights movement was a communist conspiracy. The interview was produced to confirm a pre-existing worldview, by a man whose entire career was devoted to confirming that worldview, for an audience that already shared it. The framework Bezmenov provides — that demoralized people cannot assess true information, that disagreement itself proves demoralization — is an unfalsifiable closed loop. Karl Popper had a name for claims structured this way. The episode closes with the deep irony at the center of the whole argument: the right-wing media ecosystem that most enthusiastically invokes Bezmenov's warnings about foreign subversion was itself the documented primary target of actual Russian influence operations. The 2024 DOJ indictment of RT employees found nearly ten million dollars funneled to right-wing American content creators. The framework warns about subversion from the left. The documented subversion runs through the right. Does truth matter? Yes. That's actually a serious question. The problem is the framework Amelia uses to answer it. Uninformed Opinions is a weekly podcast at the intersection of film, politics, philosophy, and pop culture.

Thursday Morning Dispatch — 02/04/2026

In Episode 2 of Uninformed Opinions, the case is made for something genuinely difficult: defending the humanity of Ye — not the music, not the art, but the man — in the aftermath of everything. The episode opens sixteen years back, to middle school, a new school, being bullied, and finding in My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy something described plainly as a refuge that kept the host alive. That personal foundation isn't sentimentality — it's the basis for the argument that follows. From there, the episode lays out what it's actually doing: not exonerating, not excusing, but refusing to let the verdict replace the person. The harm is taken seriously — the antisemitism, the public statements, the misogyny embedded in the catalog — alongside the question of what genuine empathy looks like when held next to real damage. Drawing on personal experience with bipolar disorder, addiction recovery, and a traumatic brain injury, the episode asks what we were watching during Ye's public unraveling, and whether the world that monetized it bears any responsibility. The episode moves through Ye's inheritance — from his mother Donda, from Chicago, from the Black American musical tradition — to what capitalism extracted from it. Bully, which dropped three days before recording, frames the conversation: four years of delays, leaked versions, chaos, and finally, album critics are calling it a return to form. What does it mean that after everything, the thing in him that makes music is still intact? The episode closes with the question at the center of the whole project: what do we owe the thing that found us at our lowest moment and told us we were okay? Uninformed Opinions is a weekly radio show exploring the intersection of politics, philosophy, spirituality, and pop culture in our contemporary society.

Monday Morning Dispatch — 23/03/2026

One Battle After Another and Sinners — Two Leftist Films and Why the Oscar Discourse Missed the Point. Is One Battle After Another racist? The discourse says maybe. The camera says something more complicated. In this episode of Uninformed Opinions, we slow down on the most cited scene in the film (Lockjaw watching Perfidia) and ask what the camera is actually doing before we decide what the film is doing. POV shots matter. Who holds the gaze matters. And collapsing those questions into a political verdict without film theory is how we end up with loud opinions and shallow analysis. We also get into Sinners, Ryan Coogler's Irish vampire, why both films are leftist anti-empire art, and why the Oscar discourse around them was mostly a distraction. Uninformed Opinions is a weekly radio show exploring the intersection of politics, philosophy, spirituality, and pop culture in our contemporary society.