Just Say No. Not Ever.

Plus, This Is How Patrick Mahomes Works His Magic.

Feb 10, 2023

CHARLIE SYKES: A January 6 Exclamation Point (!)
JVL: Banks Loaned Elon Musk $13 Billion So He Could Boost His Twitter Engagement 🔐
SONNY BUNCH: ‘Knock at the Cabin’ Review and VP of Streaming Common Sense.
SECRET POD: Two Wolves 🔐
ATMA: 57 Streamers and Everything On 🔐
SHIELD OF THE REPUBLIC: The Looming Balloon Gap

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R.J. LYMAN: Just Say No. Not Ever.

History has largely forgotten the mid-20th century Prussian Count Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin. But you and I would do well to remember him today.
To the extent to which his name rings any bells, you may recall his role (and that of his son, Ewald-Heinrich) in Col. Claus von Stauffenberg’s 1944 plot to kill Adolf Hitler. But that’s not why von Kleist-Schmenzin is relevant now. (Not least because I’m not proposing any Assassinations.) Rather, he’s relevant today because he was the only center-right politician to oppose Hitler from the start. The only one.
Here is his story.

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The weaponization committee hearing served no purpose and the testimony was all conjecture. Plus, James O’Keefe’s love of musicals, the karma of calling DeSantis a groomer — and Charlie has Covid and he still showed up for your Super Bowl weekend pod with Tim.

New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait helps evaluate the SOTU: politics, visuals, and substance. The group then considers Kamala Harris’s unprecedentedly terrible press.

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CATHY YOUNG: Love and Libertinism: The Endless Fascination of ‘Dangerous Liaisons.’

The eight-episode miniseries Dangerous Liaisons, which ran in November and December on the STARZ cable channel and was billed as a “prequel” to the original 1782 novel and the renowned 1988 film, was—remarkably—the second new Liaisons adaptation to appear on the small screen in the last year. (The first one, a French film that came to Netflix in July, reincarnated the eighteenth-century aristocrats as modern-day high-school-age Instagram influencers.) And these are just the latest entries in a long list of the novel’s retellings and reimaginings over the past 40 years. The Oscar-winning Stephen Frears film, based on Christopher Hampton’s 1985 hit play Les Liaisons Dangereuses, was followed by several other screen and stage versions as well as an opera, at least four musicals, and a ballet. For an almost quarter-millennium-old book written in a practically extinct epistolary genre and set in a world that ceased to exist less than a decade after its publication, Les Liaisons Dangereuses has astonishing vitality.

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DAVID KAGAN: This Is How Patrick Mahomes Works His Magic.

The NFL consensus on how Patrick Mahomes does what he does is simple: Magic. As Philadelphia Eagles cornerback Darius Slay put it on his podcast ahead of Sunday’s Super Bowl, “The man is a magician.”
But Mahomes isn’t magic. There’s a very specific reason the 27-year-old quarterback is able to do what he has done. And it hides in plain sight.

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🚨OVERTIME 🚨

Happy Friday! The famed Rebecca Black song turns 12! Hopefully you tuned in to TNB last night for the great show about 2024, but if you missed it, you can catch up here. If your team is playing in the big game, good luck to you! I’m there for the commercials, but will be rooting for Philly. In case you don’t know when it starts, nearly every outlet on earth posts about it for SEO purposes. (Remember the days of TV Guide? Or newspapers?)

Meet the F-91 smartwatch… The iconic Casio wristwatch housing, transformed into a smartwatch. Will it come to completion?

Overstimulation nation? Matt Labash on how boredom can cure us.

Who Watches the Watchdog? The CJR’s Russia Problem.

In Texas… Disgraced AG Ken Paxton settles.

Does Elon Musk think I’m corrupt? I guess we’ll see if he takes my verified check away. What ever will I do?

“I thought I was saving Trans kids… Now I’m blowing the whistle.”

Rep. Maxwell Frost’s good week. Greg Sargent on young the rising star.

Josh Hawley’s goof. He picked a Kansas-based BBQ chain in his bets with Pennsylvania Democrats. Whoopsie.

The making of Anna Paulina Mayerhofer Luna. George Santos isn’t the only member of his class who has some explaining to do.

That’s it for me. Tech support questions? Email members@thebulwark.com. Questions for me? Respond to this message.

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Editorial photos provided by Getty Images. For full credits, please consult the article.