About

What this is, and where the line is

Hot Takes on Dumb Shit exists because the news is genuinely, verifiably absurd right now, and most coverage either buries that under a flat monotone or leans so hard into outrage that nobody walks away actually understanding anything. The joke gets you in the door, and the explanation is why you stay.

This site exists to report honestly on the state of American democracy — who's protecting it, who's undermining it, and why — regardless of which party controls Congress or the White House. Right now, the primary beat is the Trump administration, because that's where the actual threats to free elections, the rule of law, and the checks that keep power accountable are currently coming from. That's not a partisan starting point; it's where the conduct is. If a future Democratic-controlled government were the one weakening those same guardrails, the same scrutiny and the same rigor would follow the conduct there instead. When a Democrat does something that's a genuine problem, not just a talking point, that gets covered too, with the same "here's why this actually matters" treatment. We judge conduct, not party. What we do promise is that the facts under the jokes are real. We don't tell you who to give money to or how to vote — we lay out what actually happened and let you make up your own mind.

We are not The Onion

Worth being direct about this: we're not doing what The Onion does. The Onion writes fiction — headlines that never happened, because the invented premise is the joke. Nothing here is invented. The comedy comes from how absurd the true version already is, not from making up a fake one. If a piece here reads like satire, it's because the actual news currently reads like satire. We're just the ones pointing at it and writing it down.

The rules we hold ourselves to

Every factual claim traces to real, current reporting. No invented facts, no invented statistics.
No fabricated quotes. If a real person is quoted, it's a real quote, accurately attributed. Everything else is paraphrased.
Hyperbole is always legible as hyperbole — absurd comparisons, not disguised false claims.
Every piece is read by a human before it publishes. The pipeline drafts; a person decides what goes live.
Every article starts as an AI draft, not a human one — see exactly how below. And we're not asking you to just take our word for any of this: around six months after launch, we're open-sourcing the whole thing — the code, the prompts, the Honor Roll rubric — so anyone can verify how these determinations actually get made.

The Honor Roll doesn't take a side

Same principle as above, applied even more strictly: The Honor Roll is not a partisan project. We don't endorse the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, or any candidate, and no one gets a better or worse score for the letter next to their name.

What it scores instead is public conduct — actual votes, public statements, and official actions on election legitimacy, voting rights, judicial independence, oversight, and conduct in office — measured against the identical rubric no matter who the person is. Voting against a specific voting-rights bill counts the same against a Republican as a Democrat; certifying an election you personally lost counts the same for either. The full rubric, the math behind every score, and what the list deliberately refuses to do — rank anyone below the bar, score the legal correctness of a Supreme Court ruling, link to a donation page — is public:read the methodology.

One honest caveat: an identical standard applied to real conduct doesn't promise an even split between parties. If the list leans one way at a given moment, that's what actually happened, scored the same way it would be scored in reverse — not a thumb on the scale in either direction.

Why AI, and where the humans are

We're a small, grassroots operation — no newsroom, no bureau, no research staff. What we do have is AI doing the research, first drafts, and self-editing for every piece, in each correspondent's voice. That's not a secret we're hiding; it's the actual reason a tiny operation can cover this many real stories this often, and we'd rather just say so than have you wonder.

But nothing goes out unread. Every piece is fact-checked and edited by a human before it's published — cutting jokes that don't land, tightening arguments, catching anything that reads as a real accusation instead of an obvious bit, or that just doesn't sound like something we'd actually say. The AI drafts; a person decides what's good enough to publish.

We think this matters beyond just this site. Used carelessly, AI-written content is a lot of what's currently flooding the internet with confident-sounding garbage — the misinformation-and-disinformation problem has a real AI-shaped component to it now. We'd rather be a counter-example: an outlet that uses AI deliberately and transparently, with an actual human checking the work, in service of cutting through that noise instead of adding to it. If that turns out to work, it's a small argument that AI, used responsibly, can make things better and not just cheaper. If it stops working, we'll say that too.

The correspondents

Three recurring voices, all original characters — not impressions of real people.

The Filibuster · Weekly: One long-form deep dive a week on the biggest story — the piece that does the real explaining.
The Deadpan Correspondent · 2–3x / week: The day's most absurd real news, reported completely straight-faced.
The Barstool Realist · 2x / week: What a story actually costs you — your week, your wallet — with zero patience for spin from either side.

Got something better than an AI can write? Send it.

We're genuinely open to running pieces from real journalists and satirists alongside the AI-assisted ones — same beat, same voice guidelines if you want to write as one of the correspondents, or your own byline if not. Everything runs through the same editorial bar either way: real sourcing, no fabricated quotes, satire that stays legible as satire, and a piece that lands on an actual point. Pitch us at [email protected].

Corrections

Got something wrong? That's a real problem for a site whose whole premise is "the facts are true." Tell us at[email protected]and we'll fix it and say so.