Uninformed Opinions

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.

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.