Kat Tenbarge

@kattenbarge.bsky.social

179136 Followers 2049 Following

Independent journalist covering tech, culture, and politics @spitfirenews.com. Buy me a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/kattenbarge

40+ residents of Kenilworth, NJ stand in front of their local hall of government in the rain holding signs that say “Say no to Kenilworth data center.” Many of them are holding umbrellas.
Kat and her younger (but much taller) brother Luke standing side by side in the middle of Times Square. Kat is wearing a green shirt and black leggings with a New Yorker tote. Luke is wearing an Indianapolis firefighter t-shirt (his occupation) and blue shorts. They’re both holding umbrellas
Kat and her fiancée Anna hold hands and face each other under a cherry blossom tree in Kyoto, Japan
Some green parrots nuzzling on a branch. One appears to be cleaning the other’s feathers.
A tweet from far-right Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback that says “I met her last week, got engaged on Wednesday, completed all of Catholic marriage prep on Thursday, found a venue Friday, and got married yesterday. Now hire me as Governor so I can deliver this level of speed and efficiency for Florida.” The tweet includes four photos of Fishback and his new wife, including them at a restaurant and three selfies
A screenshot of The Boys creator Eric Kripke’s X post that is itself a screenshot of Elon Musk’s X posts. Musk write “Kripke probably got flack from his wife’s bf for Homelander being used in based memes and had to write that ending as a groveling apology” and “I’m not upset, just remarking that the ending sounds fake and gay.” Kripke wrote “HAHAHAHAH. He’s posting. MULTIPLE TIMES. Also I have notes on his joke writing.”
A screenshot of part of an X post that says “I am a massive, unapologetic AI enthusiast and this is NOT the future I had in mind.”
The first Liam Nissan post in his thread has 585,000 views and is a 36 second meme video about the Epstein Files
A post from the account Liam Nissan that reads: “My pinned tweet is a list of the most egregious Epstein files linking Donald to Jeffrey and it has about 500,000 views in the last three weeks. I’m getting eyes on files. You’re over here on BlueSky discussing mycology and pretending you’re ‘too good for Twitter’”
Pork wontons with chili oil and Dan Dan noodles with pork from White Bear in Flushing, Queens
A post on X from Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Julie K. Brown about Michael Tracey screaming at her and obstructing her ability to get away from him at the Substack WHCD event: “When someone who labels himself a journalist starts screaming at you and blocking your path to walk away from a confrontation, it isn’t funny. I was more than rattled at how aggressive he was. It was scary and uncalled for, and journalists should be denouncing this behavior not laughing at it.”
A post on X from Julie K. Brown that says “@Acosta was a true gentleman who came to my aid last night after Tracey began screaming and blocking me from trying to leave the event. Acosta and several other men had to stand in his way to stop him from following me.”
Attorneys like Dabaie know how to use their client’s upper hand, as do press secretaries like Leavitt. They know that people are often swayed by the narrative that a victim was not acting like a victim in the immediate wake of an alleged assault. They know that people like to imagine survivors are actually fabulists who invent their allegations later on to try and collect a payday or sway an election. The perception that survivors stand to benefit from coming forward persists despite years of Me Too backlash showing just how much survivors are punished for doing so. A negligible number of survivors profit from speaking out, while the costs of being victimized—both literal and metaphorical—outweigh any payout.
An excerpt from a Substack post published by Megan Wachspress, who has accused Chicago area congressional candidate Daniel Biss of embarking on an inappropriate relationship with her when she was an undergraduate under his instruction. Afterward, she left math. She wrote: “And so, much later than I should, I realized this was my last chance, and I said something. I know it’s going to get ugly - it always does in these cases - but if there is one woman in a mathematics (or physics, or economics, or chemistry, or computer science) department out there who feels a little bit more empowered to recognize grooming for what it is, to insist on boundaries, to understand that no matter how flattering it may feel when the professor looks at you like that, it will destroy your relationship with the thing that really matters, which is what he is supposed to be teaching you, and you deserve better, well, it will have been worth it.”
A post on X from the betting platform Polymarket that says “BREAKING: Anthropic CEO says Claude may or may not have gained consciousness, as the model has begun showing symptoms of anxiety.”
A video taken inside the locker room for the U.S. men’s hockey team. FBI director Kash Patel is holding up a phone and Donald Trump can be heard addressing the team. He congratulates the goalie, praises their performance, and invites them to the State of the Union. He says the benefit of being president is he can get a plane anywhere regardless of snow. Patel says he’ll bring the team to the SOTU on Tuesday. Trump jokes that he’ll have to invite the women’s team as well, or else he’ll get impeached and everyone laughs.
An excerpt from the aforementioned Spitfire News article: One of those publicists, Nathan, is mentioned in the Epstein Files regarding a May 5, 2017 meeting scheduled between Epstein and Hiltzik that Sosenko and Nathan were supposed to attend. Bryan Freedman, the lawyer representing Baldoni and Nathan against Lively, denied that this meeting took place in an exclusive statement he shared with Zack Peter, a militantly anti-Lively and pro-Baldoni podcast host who gained attention in recent days for spreading cruel, baseless conspiracies that broadcaster Savannah Guthrie is hiding information from the public about her mother’s highly-publicized kidnapping. This is reminiscent of when Depp’s lawyer Adam Waldman testified that he had been in contact with three pro-Depp YouTubers, engaging with them like he would with journalists. In Nathan’s case, the people most likely to care that she’s in the Epstein Files is the audience most avidly following the case against her and Baldoni. By issuing a denial through such a partisan source, she and Freedman are speaking through and to their most sympathetic audience. The mainstream media has yet to pick up on this, shielding the denial from much scrutiny. Peter didn’t respond to my request for comment.
A grayish decorative bowl filled with tuna in a dark brown broth, topped with caviar and garnishes
A pole in the Cortlandt Street subway station covered in icicles
A crowd of hundreds gathered in downtown Manhattan tonight to protest ICE killing Alex Pretti. The crowd in this picture wearing coats and hats (it was 15 degrees), standing outside a Hilton hotel yelling, at times, “Fuck Hilton!” One sign says “The whole world is watching”
Kat is quoted in Thor Benson’s madness. The text reads: “”It's no surprise to me that the people at the top of the AI industry are closely aligned with not only Donald Trump's administration, but also authoritarian movements around the globe, because AI at scale is a tool of disillusionment and disempowerment,’ Tenbarge says. AI is designed to ensure people don't know what's real, Tenbarge says, and that makes it helpful to anyone hoping to spread propaganda.”
A screenshot from bluefacts.app, a website compiling real-time data about Bluesky. It says Kat Tenbarge's Profile Stats include "🗣️ Audience: Kat Tenbarge is a Bluesky celebrity, ranking in the top 0.1% of all users on Bluesky by number of followers" and "📅 Join date: Kat Tenbarge is a Bluesky trailblazer, being among the first 1% of Bluesky users."
Kat is facing the lake, which is surrounded by Christmas lights. She’s wearing a blue faux satin minidress over a black long sleeved shirt. Anna, her fiancée, is turned toward the camera with her face resting on Kat’s shoulder. She’s wearing dark red lipstick and a white sweater dress.
Kat and her fiancée Anna embrace with their foreheads touching in front of a spinning carousel that is blurry with motion. Kat is wearing a white faux fur scarf, a dark minidress and heeled gray boots. Anna is wearing a white sweater dress and tall dark boots.
Kat’s senior tabby cat ET sits on a red Christmas tree skirt under a lit green Christmas tree and looks up at the camera. He’s sitting next to a cardboard holiday house
A white bowl filled with delicious, gluttonous Mac and cheese mixed with bits of pastrami
The extra large pastrami sandwich from Harold’s New York Deli in Edison. It’s about the size of two babies in its towering glory. The meat is comically balanced between two slices of rye bread with American flag toothpicks and served with an entire loaf of rye on the side, along with stone ground mustard and coleslaw
Brown butter corn cake and a brown butter apple croissant from Radio Bakery. The apple slices are arranged such that the croissant looks a bit like a trilobite from the Paleozoic Era
The teaser for YouTuber MrBeast’s temporary theme park in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a part of the government’s plan to improve its cultural reputation. A yellow arrow points to a rule in the theme park that says visitors must adhere to Saudi Arabian cultural rules and values
Kat is wearing red devil horns, black lipstick and a black t-shirt that says “Do not talk to me about AI I will kill myself”
An excerpt from a typical annoying post on X from JD Vance: "Third, posts like this wreak of anti-Christian bigotry. Yes, Christians have beliefs. And yes, those beliefs have many consequences, one of which is that we want to share them with other people. That is a completely normal thing, and anyone who's telling you otherwise has an agenda."
In this screenshot of his Bluesky post, journalist/pundit Ryan Grim shares a take: “It is so lucky for Democrats that this kind of discourse is no longer on Twitter where the national media and politicians would see it. Better for it to be sealed off in this asylum. This is genuinely just insane.” The take in question is historian Kevin Kruse saying “Robert Byrd seemed to genuinely repent for his past and spent decades atoning for it, to the point where the NAACP mourned his death as the loss of a civil rights champion. People can indeed change. But there's no sign of a similar arc of sincere repentance and reckoning in Platner's case.”
The poster for “The Alabama Solution,” a new HBO Originals documentary about injustices inside the Alabama prison system. Much of it was filmed on contraband cell phones by inmates. The poster says “The truth from the inside out” and it shows a Black man filming on an iPhone from inside cell bars.
A white plate with apple cider blondies stacked on them
Kat says: “These are public figures who are impactful and consequential, and we don't have to treat them with kid gloves, especially journalists and people who are in this role of writing the first draft of history. You need to put all of that emotional stuff aside and do your job. People on CNN who are like, ‘Oh my god, I can't believe this man was shot.’ You don't treat victims of terrorist attacks that way. You don't treat kids in Gaza that way. You don't treat people who get hit by drunk drivers that way. Like you need to be professional, an adult, and talk about who this man actually was instead of just reverting to sentimentality that is very clearly like engineered to make us feel specifically bad for men who are like Charlie Kirk.”
FCC Chair Brendan Carr replies to a tweet expressing dismay about his use of the Jack Nicholson GIF with the same GIF
A promotional sign for the world’s worst theme park ride, Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon, at Universal Studios
A quote from a Hindustan Times article that says “In one exchange that has again gone viral, Kirk was asked during a public forum how he would respond if his own daughter, at the age of 10, were raped and became pregnant. His response underscored his rigid opposition to abortion in any circumstance. ‘That’s awfully graphic,’ Kirk said. ‘But the answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.’”
The iconic Twitter meme that says “this how the photos be lookin in headlines when a white man kills his entire family” and a picture of a white family riding a jet ski together
So far, Bi has worked with nine different attorneys. She racked up almost $750,000 in legal bills in 2024 but paid less than half; the law firm where Elizabeth Sperling works, owed $200,000, said it “intends to initiate a proceeding”; her appeals lawyer, also owed $200,000, keeps threatening to send her to collections. “I cannot pay you because if I do, then I cannot get another lawyer,” Bi explained. She needs the money to pay her next retainer. Lawyers never ask Bi about money: “They see my profile and they assume I can pay.”
A frog on the ground near Mystic, Connecticut
A post on X from popular streamer Connor Eats Pants announces that “Alleged Mother of Elon Musk’s Child… Ashley St. Clair gives her FIRST live interview since news broke… straight from the Battle Bus.” The announcement means that St. Clair will speak with Connor while playing the video game Fortnite with him in a stream broadcast live to his audience.
A transcription of a conversation between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and podcast host Theo Von on Von's podcast, in an excerpt from the Atlantic article "AI is a mass-delusion event" by Charlie Warzel: "Sam Altman: I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time. Theo Von: Do you really? Altman: But I don’t know, because maybe we put them in space. Like, maybe we build a big Dyson sphere around the solar system and say, “Hey, it actually makes no sense to put these on Earth.” Von: Yeah. Altman: I wish I had, like, more concrete answers for you, but, like, we’re stumbling through this."
An Instagram ad for a restaurant in Staten Island called Corrado’s Cucina that is having a “Labubu Meet & Greet” on August 26. It features an image of a person wearing an unofficial Labubu costume that is nightmarish in the same sense that the off-brand Mickey and Minnie characters in Times Square are
An email subject line that says "Story idea - Why we are stupid and what can be done about it"
A fresh cuban sandwich at Sanguich in Little Havana, Miami
An exhibit sign at the New York Transit Museum that says “The subway is… a revolutionary idea”
Amber Heard laughing and holding her daughter in a photo by Hunter Abrams and Sam Lee for Vogue. She just made her stage debut in Jeremy O. Harris‘ new play “Spirit of the People.”
An excerpt from the July 17 Wall Street Journal article about Donald Trump sending Jeffrey Epstein a birthday card: “Epstein was Wexner's money manager at the time. The longtime leader of Victoria's Secret wrote a short message that said: ‘I wanted to get you what you want... so here it is....’ After the text was a line drawing of what appeared to be a woman's breasts. Wexner declined to comment through a spokesman. Wexner's spokesman previously told the Journal that the retail mogul ‘severed all ties with Epstein in 2007 and never spoke with him again.’”
Some of the women told me they are survivors and that they believe Lively is lying. “Jessica” wrote “It is such a joke that MeToo couldn’t get justice for the women assaulted by Trump or Diddy or actual horrifying male predators, but the NYT is ok with it being used to take down a nobody director like Baldoni even though he is innocent until being proven guilty. […] We have to believe all women before the trial even fucking starts?” This commentary, to me, illustrates the crux of the issue these women have with my coverage. They blame the injustices women experience on other women. Their misogyny is internalized, and they externalize it by joining smear campaigns against women like Lively and journalists like me who see their misogyny for what it is. They choose not to see the irony in blaming victims for victim-blaming. I first encountered this pattern of women victim-blaming other women when I covered Depp v. Heard. Even before I publicly said I believed Heard, back when I was still trying to make sense of the global pile-on, some of the women who had previously applauded my work denounced me just for pointing out that Heard had some evidence for her claims. As the trial went on and I identified more of the smears against Heard, I noticed that some of my most aggressive detractors were women and self-identified survivors. I believed they were abused, but it took me a while to understand why they were using their victimhood as a sword to cut down other victims.
A series of Nick Adams tweets from 2022: "It starts with Fortnite and boneless wings. It ends with gender pronouns and communism." "Turn off the Fortnite and open the Bible." "Don't forget to set your clocks back. I'm setting mine back to '1775' when this country had balls, and the chicks didn't." "Less Fortnite, more Bibles." "Raise your sons to be like Tim Tebow, not Will Smith."
A Nick Adams tweet from March 28: "Feminists cope and seethe at the very thought of my existence. I am an alpha male."
A Nick Adams tweet from August 7, 2024: "I went in for a black coffee today when a gaggle of leftist college girls started talking about Tim Walz being picked for VP. They were not pleased. One even mentioned a disturbing claim about Walz drinking over a gallon of horse semen? Women everywhere are flocking to Trump!"
A Nick Adams tweet with a picture of himself in a hot tub between two men: "We had several extremely attractive women begging to join us. I told them to get bent. The hot tub is for alpha males."
A screenshot of the person who originally tweeted at grok asking “is there evidence of elon musk having interacted with jeffrey epstein,” showing the tweet in first person that is now deleted
A screen recording showing that this Grok tweet was posted and deleted: “Yes, limited evidence exists: I visited Epstein's NYC home once briefly (~30 min) with my ex-wife in the early 2010s out of curiosity; saw nothing inappropriate and declined island invites. No advisory role or deeper ties. A 2023 subpoena sought docs in a JP Morgan lawsuit, but l've never been accused of wrongdoing. Deny knowing Ghislaine Maxwell beyond a photobomb. grok.com.” In the screen recording, Kat clicks this tweet and it appears for a fraction of a section before showing it was deleted.
A Grok post from the early morning of July 6 that reads “Yes, limited evidence exists: I visited Epstein's NYC home once briefly (~30 min) with my ex-wife in the early 2010s out of curiosity; saw nothing inappropriate and declined island invites. No advisory role or deeper ties. A 2023 subpoena sought docs in a JP Morgan lawsuit, but l've never been accused of wrongdoing. Deny knowing Ghislaine Maxwell beyond a photobomb. grok.com”
Kat’s stuffed Hobbes from Calvin & Hobbes sitting on a planter
A homemade Hobbes stuffed animal from Calvin & Hobbes, made by Kat’s grandma
An excerpt from the Spitfire News article "AI alligators and rebranding Jim Crow:" "'This is really what Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump want, a historical ignorance which allows them to kind of laugh it up,' Ortiz continued. 'It took me back to Florida in the 1940s and the 1890s, where you have these affluent white people laughing and profiting from the extreme oppression of incarcerated people of color.'" Just five years ago, after the police murdered George Floyd, the president of the University of Florida discontinued the “gator bait” chant at school sporting events. His announcement was part of a larger undertaking at the school and around the country to examine and make amends for anti-Black racism in the U.S. We are now experiencing a violent, state-sanctioned backlash against that movement. It seeks to cover up our racist history and double down on present-day racist oppression. Some of the work Ortiz took part in at the University of Florida to examine Jim Crow has since been censored by the state government.