If you don't know Olivia Nuzzi and why she's terrible I'll just submit this glowing profile she wrote of nutjob conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich back in 2017 https://archive.is/FlVCg
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Liz Dye's defense of her, as if this is just an understandable mistake, like Nuzzi was an awestruck teen at the concert of her crush, was disappointing, to say the least.
I would wager that she is funny and charming in person (especially to people in power or who could benefit her).
Those qualities plus conventional good looks & the highly esteemed by the political media quality of “savviness”
have masked character flaws that would have been obvious in other people
I am deeply creeped out by people who others find “charming” and I don’t think I’ve ever been wrong in thinking they should be avoided even if they aren’t Hitler admirers (see: Bill Clinton).
Didn’t read the whole thing but the bit about cernovich building cachet with journalists because he had access to White House gossip says a lot about the elite Washington political press. Explanatory relative to her racist tweets and her social ties to fascists.
Of all the salacious pieces of gossip, innuendo, and fiction to defend, he chose that one? While it was obvious trash at the time, it has aged very poorly.
I have an email from Sagal somewhere in which he copped to running a gag on Wait, Wait (I think it was on the catch the lie segment) that was just completely wrong: "It was one of those stories that was just too good to check." So they didn't.
Mike Cernovich is one of those people that the average audience member can see "oh he's dumb" and he still gets views/clicks/etc he's like the GOP equivalent of the "useful idiot but actually an idiot"
I remember being on John Fugelsang's SiriusXM show back in 2015 and Olivia Nuzzi was leaving as I was coming in. We were making pre-show banter & I remember mentioning how I'd been familiar with her since Anthony Weiner's campaign. Fugelsang was like "oh word?" And she looked uncomfortable and left
that makes this even funnier. apparently Russia has been on a decade-long campaign of making Nuzzi say a bunch of right-wing shit and write glowingly about right-wing figures as part of a long con to take her down with an affair with one of the subjects of her coverage.
I'm not at all pleased to know her better, but I am glad that at least she is not in a position to shape narratives, at least for now. Hope that holds for a while.
To offer a small amount of pushback on this particular point, her M.O. appears to be of someone who said this stuff ironically to drive engagement—not exactly an unheard-of concept in 2014.
I worry that cherry-picking old comments misses that kind of context.
Maybe, but the people she was hanging out with at the time makes me think there's no reason to give her the benefit of the doubt. We're talking literal Nazis and others who love to play the "you can't take a joke" card when the heat is on
I hear ya. No tar buckets. Mostly I always found her to be a nihilistic attention seeker with no core principles at all. To me tho ironic winking bigotry is indistinguishable from the sincere stuff when it comes to the end results.
I saw her on msnbc one evening and she was just cussing up a storm. I was like, is this MSNBC? I thought maybe she was drunk. She's absolutely a shitty reporter and if she can have an affair with a married man while she's engaged, she's just a piece of shit.
Hope this ends her.
Oh, I can’t imagine why you would. I think I did in the beginning because people seemed to think she was a normal balanced person and then she just kept getting retweeted into my feed. She fell in love with Trump in 2016.
There’s grifters and then there’s trad wives who genuinely buy into it and then there’s trad men who are clearly getting off on insisting that their wives deliver their babies without pain medication.
I remember following her and having a vague sense she was good and interesting in the 2010s? Maybe just early 2010s? Truly wondering how I got that impression…
Demure is used a lot nowadays. "Very mindful, very demure" (winking , but complimentary) is a thing people say on tik toks now. It doesn't mean exactly what it used to mean. I believe it started as mocking traditional ideals of femininity, but I suspect Nuzzi is someone who would mean it sincerely.
There are plenty of other reasons to be mad at Nuzzi (friends with Milo, “sexy fascism”, obviously the RFK Jr. stuff) but this feels like grasping at straws.
I'm not sure you've really thought this one through. Yes, she's friends with literal fascists, but all her right-wing tweets are just jokes? I understand that may be how they were supposed to be read by the public at the time, but think about her friends during that era and what you're saying.
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Those qualities plus conventional good looks & the highly esteemed by the political media quality of “savviness”
have masked character flaws that would have been obvious in other people
It’s the human version of elvish glamour
Care to elaborate?
Frightening, really! 🤮
bleh
(Biden, ofc, is fine.)
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:yr2mbe6ftmr7deodaqw7oiu5/post/3l4kquqlhgc24
Got out of bed at all
The morning rain clouds up my window
And I can't see at all
Uhhhhh....says a lot about Nuzzi, none of it good.
I worry that cherry-picking old comments misses that kind of context.
From a post on the same day:
I hope I don’t get tarred and feathered for pointing this out.
Hope this ends her.
They are doing an act for men to watch. They aren’t committed to this shit off camera.
You may not think it’s funny, but it seems perfectly in line with political humor on Twitter circa 2014.