Our year-end top five.
stories about kanye, kyle rittenhouse, covid, new york city, and more.
Team —
Welcome to all the new subscribers. Thank you so much for joining.
Harvard president Claudine Gay’s atrocious congressional testimony prompted a flood of new attention for our documentary about Roland Fryer, the genius Harvard economist whose career was cut shot by an opaque sexual harassment case a couple years ago. We specifically named Gay as one of the people who engineered Roland’s downfall, and her odd mix of fashionable radical politics and empty corporate sloganeering was on full display in her viral answer to whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s code of conduct.
I did a spot on Laura Ingraham about Roland’s case, which you can watch in full here.
We’ve got a couple big new projects dropping after the holidays. In the meantime, the top five from our archive:
5. The Trial of Amy Wax: The Last Outspoken Conservative in Higher-Ed is About to Get Canceled
Amy Wax is a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania (which promptly pushed out its president Liz Magill after her own disastrous congressional testimony last week). Wax has repeatedly sparked public controversy with her acerbic critiques of affirmative action, immigration, “inclusivity,” and other progressive shibboleths. Penn has responded by… subjecting her to formal disciplinary proceedings that may result in Wax getting fired and kicked off campus.
4. The Unsolved Mystery of the COVID Pandemic: Why Didn’t We Use Repurposed Drugs?
Directed by Good Kid Productions co-founder and my vigorously mustached foil Josh Oldham, this doc investigates a deep mystery at the heart of our public health response to COVID. Using existing generic drugs to fight new viruses is standard pandemic practice, and yet our government actively discouraged medical researchers from looking into repurposed drugs for COVID and branded physicians that used them as horse-paste-loving quacks. Why?
3. Kanye 2020 was not “Crazy”
A defense of pre-meltdown Kanye. His 2020 run for president was universally derided as an exercise in delusional celebrity narcissism; it wasn’t. Drawing on his extensive public comments, insights from a campaign insider, and interviews with the young god Coleman Hughes and the old god Glenn Loury, the doc argues that Kanye’s campaign offered a comprehensible — and compelling — political program. Kanye rejected the partisan script he’s supposed to adopt as a famous rapper and followed the “simulation"-breaking instincts that have guided his whole career.
2. Does NYC Like Violence?: The True Tale of Jordan Neely
Back in the 70s and 80s, New York City was suffering failed-state levels of violent crime. Then, under Mayor Rudy Guiliani, the city figured out a way to muscle down the murder rate, a simple policy playbook that established the peace that’s enabled decades of cultural and economic flourishing since.
New York City has recently suffered another uptick in violence, but its political leadership refuses to dust off and reuse the 90s playbook. We investigate why.
1. The Broken Boys of Kenosha: Jacob Blake, Kyle Rittenhouse, and the Lies We Still Live By.
Kenosha, Wisconsin has the rare distinction of birthing two separate mega-viral news items in under a week. During the lockdown-pressured “racial reckoning” of the summer of 2020, a black man named Jacob Blake was gunned down by a white police officer. The video of the shooting blew up on social media and Kenosha was flooded with violent protestors. On the third night of riots, a teenager named Kyle Rittenhouse came to Kenosha with an AR-15 and plans to protect a car dealership. He wound up killing two people and shooting a third, prompting another round of national obsession.
These twin tragedies got jammed into the usual pre-packaged partisan narratives, squeezed for maximum media titillation….and then everyone just moved on. We went back to Kenosha to show how everyone missed the core truth of these tragedies, to reveal the shared wound connecting Blake, Rittenhouse, and the men Rittenhouse killed.
Our benevolent tech overlords decided to age-restrict the doc so you’ll have to sign in to watch:
Thanks again for the support. More soon.
-rob