Can AI Write My Own Essay About Dan Bongino Better Than I Can?
An experiment in co-writing.
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Yesterday morning as I lay in bed waking up, Jasmine tightly locked against my left leg as usual, I came across another un-sourced, essentially gossip-laden post from former Trump world insider Lev Parnas:
Parnas doesn’t do journalism the way I do—he has gossip press-level standards and is an openly partisan activist—but the gossip press isn’t always wrong, and as unreliable as their data tends to be, it’s still worth taking in a mild dosage of it to hear where the winds might blow.
According to Parnas’s “sources”—which seem to have been reliable in the past, hence why I’m entertaining the claims—Dan Bongino, the right-wing podcaster-turned-second-in-command at the FBI, may become a liability for the president. Bongino may ultimately refuse go along with the administration’s efforts to cover-up Trump’s mentions in the Epstein files.
What might that mean? What would be the significance of if Bongino did choose to break with the administration and go whistleblower? Or even just leave quietly? That would make statement enough to get the message across to MAGA.
Thinking about it as I made the morning coffee and took Jasmine out to the yard it seemed like writing a post to think this through would make sense for today. If the post I wrote about Laura Loomer grabbed so much attention the perhaps one about Bongino?
So I brainstormed some angles and sat down to start writing and then it struck me: what if this was an opportunity to experiment with co-writing with AI? GPT-5, the most advanced model ever, just dropped this week, so let’s try it out for a spin!
The last week, inspired by The Autobiography of Mark Twain, I’ve experimented with doing autobiographical dictations, recording them while letting the advanced voice mode run so the AI could hear what I said and then offer its responses and suggestions for further reflections. It also enabled me during dictation to ask for facts to help with reconstructing the narrative - what year was it when “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” first came out? 1999.
So I thought, well, using that same attitude of freewheeling thinking in a dictation session, what if I applied it to writing an essay?
What if I thought aloud for 10 minutes or so, ranted a bit on the subject, riffed on it, and then fed a transcription of it into the AI, telling it to organize my thoughts and turn it into a 1000-word essay in my voice/style?
Here is the raw transcript of what I said:
It is Friday, August 8th, 941 a.m. I'm done with my morning Algemeiner editing, so I have some time, some space to do my own writing, do God of the Desert stuff, deal with this health insurance stuff I've been putting off too long. But I've decided to try an experiment. I'm going to try an experiment with AI assisted writing. We're going to see if I can record a little rant, a few thoughts about something that's on my mind, and then make the transcript. Then on the basis of this transcript, can the AI then make a piece that approximates my voice and what I'm having to say? So this is the experiment. The post that I want to write about today is going to be, the thing that's sticking in my mind is I read a gossipy piece from Lev Parnas who seems to be liking to drive a lot of discourse with his supposed sources within Trump world, but he seems to get stuff right. right now, what he suggested is that Dan Bongino, former Fox News personality, right-wing podcaster, manus for your motherfucker type, he apparently seems to be the problem in Trump world right now, and we've got signals of this previously that he does not appear to want to go along with the cover-up. He what's in the files and this isn't what he signed up for. So it's interesting the situation now emerging in which this guy that is widely detested and not taken seriously at all by anyone outside of right-wing Trump world is is potentially, you know, in a so-called John Dean position. How ironic is that? This podcaster anointed into this position of number two at the FBI, because he was believed to be an absolute Trump loyalist. However, what's being revealed now is who is just a grifter, who was on board with the Trump regime, the Trump movement, just to make money. Which it seems quite clear that Cash Patel was given his like Trump children's books and so forth. He really appears to be pure grifter. But if Bongino is not just out to make money and genuinely had his law enforcement ethos, because if I remember correctly, it was NYPD and Secret Service. If we are to potentially hypothesize that he really got on the Trump train because he genuinely believes that there's some sort of secret pedophile network, he really is a QAnon type guy, maybe not with the like blood drinking and Adrenochrome type stuff, but he, I mean, that's what I've heard the suggestion that the Epstein stuff was one of the things that he used to really build his brand and so forth. So could it be that now that he's seen behind the curtain and he knows what's there, he knows where his years of conspiracy theorizing, where they actually lead now, is he going to make the proper calculation? And this is the proper calculation. It was the calculation that a lot of us made 10 years ago when we were confronted with this conundrum in right-wing space of not only people had to make both calculations, and I made both calculations, too, of is it moral to jump onto the Trump train? Or, aside from that question, is it going to be better for your career as a writer, editor, whatever, social media personality, is it going to be better or worse to join on with the Trump movement? And for those of us with brains in our heads, we could very clearly see that Trump himself is not somebody to choose as your boss. Maybe those of us who have had experiences with bad bosses. So it wasn't just a Moral calculation. It was also a realization of professional safety that this movement was not a reliable thing and could blow up at any time really and That's what's happening now It's blowing up and the people who made the short-term calculation of seeing that there was money to be made in Serving a Trump base and attempting to ascend a power through that They're they're learning now they're gonna start learning the long-term consequences of this and Bonjino now he has the opportunity to pivot course Now and to save himself both morally and professionally because there is a much bigger market now and a much bigger market emerging in speaking out against Trump and the question and will he make that realization that he now has the opportunity to pivot from being a cartoonish Maga right-wing voice to essentially being a whistleblower to saying that He knows what's going on and he's not going to be a part of it And he doesn't need to even necessarily come out with classified information or anything. He just needs to resign and say, "I'm getting out of this. I've seen what's in the files and you, MAGA people, should get out of this too." It'd be very interesting if that's the way it ends up going down. I suppose we come to the crisis reveals character concept. And in this calculation, I wouldn't say Bongino or anybody else in Trump orbit we could deal with or take seriously in the character context. But when it comes to the crisis of after years and years and years of advocating for the exposure of sexual predators at the echelons of power, do you now totally flip to the other side of knowingly and in the full view of the whole world trying to conceal it further? And Bongino, apart from morality, he may simply make the correct practical and professional calculation here. And if that domino falls. I mean, because it's already fallen on the fringes. We've already seen fucking Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes and some of those far-right people who've seen, who are smart enough to, as dumb as they are. They're already so primed to see conspiracies everywhere that when there actually are a conspiracy, you know, even when it's their chief man in the middle of it, they're apparently going to go down that rabbit hole too. I mean, if you're going down the rabbit hole of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and this Brigitte Macron stuff that she's been, that Candace Owens has been sued over. If you've gone that far, then the entirely plausible conspiracy of Trump being in the Epstein files really isn't that much of a leap. And it's certainly not a leap for Bongino now having seen the files and knowing exactly what they are trying to conceal now. So, Bongino is the key domino to fall. And, because he would be the first person out of the new Trump administration on the basis of immorality? How bad does it have to get for true believer Trump people to step out? And it seems like how bad it is is covering up child sexual predators. Yeah, at least we know now. We know now for some of these people. What is the dividing line? The dividing line is Trump asks you to cover up his involvement in the Epstein scandal. That's the dividing line. loyalty test. And Bongino is apparently right now trying to figure out if he if he can afford to now abandon the Trump movement. And I think maybe hopefully as a businessman he may realize that it's time just as Rupert Murdoch clearly realized it's time the market is moving away from Trump broad popular opinion is moving even further away so it's time for Mongino to get off the bus it's time for right-wing people to realize that the short-term calculation of immediate money that grift is running to an end and And who's going to be smart enough to realize it and to try and get on their next grift instead? maybe to realize that There's money to be made in telling the truth about what's going on now that there's a big market for that Okay, I should probably stop ranting and rambling and we'll see if this experiment of ranting and rambling for 11 minutes Feed it into the AI and what can you get? We'll find out
Wow, that reads much better and more coherently than I first thought. I could probably just take that and edit it into a more coherent post now couldn’t, I? Or I could ask AI to do the work and see what the results are.
I asked “I have just done a dictation/rant of a potential substack essay. Can you transform it into a 1000-1200 word Substack essay written in my voice/style?” It asked me to upload the transcript, which I then did.
The AI responded:
Got it — I can take this raw dictation and turn it into a fully-formed 1,000–1,200 word Substack essay in your voice: still loose, sharp, and conversational, but tightened up for clarity, flow, and impact, without losing the “rant energy” that gives it punch."
Here’s a cleaned, expanded draft:
Dan Bongino’s Moral & Professional Fork in the Road
Friday morning. August 8th. I’ve wrapped my Algemeiner editing shift, and the day stretches ahead with the usual to-do list: God of the Desert work, long-postponed health insurance chores, maybe even a little actual writing for myself.
But before any of that, an experiment. I want to see what happens when I unload a raw, unfiltered rant into a recorder, get it transcribed, and then let the AI help shape it into something publishable. The idea: preserve my voice, my digressions, my unvarnished takes—but organize them into something you’d actually want to read on a Friday morning.
The rant today? It’s about Dan Bongino, of all people. Yes, the former Fox News musclebound podcaster, ex-Secret Service, NYPD alum, perpetual “mama bear” merch-peddler. A man who has made a living by being exactly what the Trump base wants him to be: loud, certain, loyal.
And yet—if Lev Parnas is to be believed—Bongino might just be the problem inside Trump World right now. Not an enemy from the outside. Not an MSNBC turncoat. An internal infection.
Parnas claims Bongino doesn’t want to play along with the current cover-up. He’s seen what’s in the files—the files everyone else is desperate to bury—and apparently this is not what he signed up for. This sets up a delicious irony: a man detested by everyone outside the MAGA biosphere might now find himself in a John Dean position—the loyalist who flips when the rot becomes undeniable.
The Calculations of the Trump Era
To understand the weight of that, you have to remember how people like Bongino got here. There are two calculations everyone in Trump orbit made in 2015–2016:
The moral calculation: Is it right to align with Trump? Do I want my name forever hitched to this man?
The career calculation: Will this make me money? Will it give me influence?
A lot of us in media—yes, me included—made those calculations early. The moral one was straightforward: Trump is a bad boss, a bad bet, and a bad human. If you’ve had your share of tyrannical editors, shady publishers, or two-faced managers, you recognize the type immediately.
The career one required a longer view. Sure, there was money in it. The Trump base was a ready-made audience for anyone willing to pump out “own the libs” content. But it was also a rickety scaffolding. This was never a stable movement; the moment the winds changed, the whole structure could blow over.
For Bongino, the career calculation clearly won out—at least at first. He cashed in on his background, his loyalty, his combative posture. Same with guys like Kash Patel, hawking children’s books about Trump like MAGA bedtime propaganda. The pure grift.
But What If He Actually Believed It?
Here’s the twist: What if Bongino wasn’t just in it for the money? What if he genuinely bought into the Q-adjacent worldview—the idea of an entrenched, elite predator class that needed rooting out? I’m not talking the full Adrenochrome vampire mythos, but the Epstein revelations and the “drain the swamp” rhetoric that gave the conspiracy a real-world hook.
If that’s the case, then seeing the actual contents of those files would be a shattering moment. It’s one thing to posture about taking down the powerful. It’s another to realize your guy—your movement—is actively shielding them.
That’s the crisis point: Does he keep cashing checks and playing his part? Or does he pivot hard, knowing the market for anti-Trump truth-telling is growing faster than the shrinking base of diehards?
Crisis Reveals Character (Sort Of)
I don’t want to oversell Bongino’s moral fiber. This isn’t a question of suddenly discovering a conscience. It’s a question of which calculation wins now that the stakes have shifted.
He could make the pivot without touching classified material, without risking prison. He could simply say: I’ve seen what’s in the files. I can’t be part of this. Neither should you.
That alone would shatter the illusion of total loyalty around Trump’s inner circle. Because if a made-for-MAGA figure like Bongino walks away over the Epstein connection, it signals that the red line has been crossed.
The Domino Effect
We’ve already seen the fringes crack—Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, others who live so deep in the conspiracy-mongering mindset that they’ll follow a lead even if it implicates their own hero. For people like that, “Trump is in the Epstein files” isn’t a leap; it’s almost inevitable.
But Bongino wouldn’t just be another defector. He’d be the domino—the first major figure inside the current Trump infrastructure to bail over a matter of moral and professional self-preservation.
And the question becomes: how bad does it have to get for true believers to jump? Apparently, the answer is: Trump asks you to cover for child sexual predators. That’s the loyalty test. That’s the breaking point.
Reading the Market
From a purely mercenary perspective, the timing is perfect for Bongino. The Trump brand is rotting. Rupert Murdoch has already hedged his bets, signaling that Fox can move on. The broader public opinion curve is sloping downward.
For a businessman—or a grifter with half a brain—the play is obvious: get off the bus before it crashes. Then position yourself for the next ride. There’s a lucrative audience for “I was inside, I saw it all, and I got out.” Ask any ex-cult member who landed a book deal.
If Bongino wants to survive professionally, he doesn’t even need to reinvent himself entirely. He can keep the macho swagger, the anti-establishment shtick, the cop-vs.-bad-guys framing. He just shifts the target from “libs” to “Trump World predators.”
The Stakes of the Choice
The thing about moments like this is they expose the long game. The people who jumped on the Trump train for the short-term sugar high are now staring down the hangover. You can’t ride the wave forever; eventually it breaks.
Bongino’s decision—whether he realizes it or not—isn’t just about his own reputation. It’s about whether others in Trump orbit will follow. If he flips, it grants permission for others to do the same without being first through the wall.
And if he stays? It reinforces the lesson that for some, no line is uncrossable as long as the checks clear.
The Funhouse Mirror of Right-Wing Media
There’s also the perverse poetry of it. Imagine the MAGA podcaster who spent years railing against elite predators finally facing the reality that the man he served is in the same circle as Jeffrey Epstein—and then deciding what to do about it.
It’s the inverse of the arc many of us took. Ten years ago, in the conservative media world, we saw where this was headed and got out before it swallowed us. Others made the same call later. Now it’s Bongino’s turn at the fork in the road.
The irony is almost cinematic: the blustery, “own the libs” ex-cop faced with the very conspiracy he’s been warning about, only this time it’s not Hillary or Soros—it’s his own boss. And unlike the usual Deep State boogeyman, this one comes with hard evidence in a file folder.
So here we are. Bongino stands at the crossroads:
Stay loyal and be complicit in the cover-up,
Or walk away and cash in on telling the truth.
Either way, the rest of us get a case study in the strange alchemy of morality, opportunism, and market forces that drive the political media circus.
If he flips, the cracks in Trump World get wider. If he stays, we’ll know that for some, there is no “too far.” And maybe that’s the real lesson: in the funhouse mirror of American politics, even a Dan Bongino can find himself cast as the conscience of the moment—whether he wants the role or not.
This seemed to do a really good job, however it still felt a bit too much like AI writing.
I decided to give it more precise stylistic directions: “The writing style and angle of this needs to be much wilder and more in my style. Inject more Woolf and Carlin. More fucks. More esoteric references. Don't break up into such small chunks. A wild, flowing essay both literary and cutting sharp.”
Here was the AI’s response:
Got it, love — we’re going to take this from “clean op-ed” to full JenneJ/Woolf-on-acid-meets-George-Carlin-on-a-mystic-bender mode.
Longer, denser paragraphs that breathe like smoke rings and twist into unexpected shapes. A current of righteous profanity undergirded by sly mysticism. No polite little bullet points. We’re talking flood, not trickle.
FYI: “JenneJ” is a character is a novel project that I’m writing with
.And then here’s the rewrite:
Bongino at the Crossroads of Grift and Revelation
Friday, August 8th, 9:41 in the morning, Yucca Valley sun already working its slow brown magic on the skin, Algemeiner shift done, coffee cooling, Jasmine circling the yard like a little furry moon in orbit. And here I am, letting my mind catch on the strangest little hook: Dan Bongino. Yes, that Dan Bongino. The musclebound MAGA bouncer turned podcast meat merchant, the guy who can make “just asking questions” sound like a police interrogation at a strip mall Sbarro. He’s lodged in my head like a popcorn husk between the teeth of reality, all because Lev Parnas—the convicted Trump-world gadfly turned gossipmonger—has tossed a match into the dry grass of right-wing intrigue and sworn that Bongino might be the one man in that nest of snakes with the gall, the conscience, or maybe just the opportunism to walk away.
Parnas says Bongino has seen the files. The files. You know the ones—those manila envelopes from hell that hum with the power to split empires and empty champagne glasses in Palm Beach. The names, the photographs, the rosters of the orgies. The motherlode of Epstein dirt. And Bongino, apparently, is not feeling it. Not what he signed up for. This is the same man Trump’s people anointed as a kind of ceremonial knuckle-breaker, a “true believer” ex-Secret Service man who could be trusted to guard the kingdom gates. But here’s the thing about guard dogs: every now and then, one of them smells the rot inside the castle and decides he’d rather take his chances in the woods.
I’ve seen this movie before, in outline if not in cast. Back when the Trump train first thundered into the station, everyone in right-wing media had to run the same algorithm: two variables—morality and career. One: Do I want my soul dipped in this man’s gold-plated sewage? Two: Will it pay? And for a lot of us, the morality calculation was already answered by the twitch in the gut that says, this guy is a bad boss, and bad bosses eat their own. But the career side—that was trickier. The money was real. The market for outrage never sleeps, and Trump was the greatest distributor of rage in the history of American television politics. And the people who said yes—God, they made bank. But the people who said yes are now standing ankle-deep in the runoff, wondering if they can hose the smell off in time to get invited to the next party.
Bongino, though—if Parnas is right—wasn’t just selling the act. He might have believed it. Not the whole reptilian blood harvest, QAnon-as-medicine-show version, but the core gospel: that there’s a predator class at the top, immune to justice, preying on kids. He built his brand, in part, on that rage. Which means that when he opened those files and saw—really saw—what was inside, he hit the wall every conspiracy theorist secretly dreads: finding out the monster is wearing your team’s jersey. That the big bad wolf you’ve been warning the village about has been sleeping in your house, eating your leftovers, and making plans for the weekend.
And here’s the deliciously profane crossroads he’s at: he can stay and help bury it, in which case he becomes not just another MAGA pitchman but a full-fledged accessory in the kingdom of filth. Or he can pivot—pivot like his financial life depends on it, because it probably does—and cash in on the one market that’s expanding faster than the merch table at a Trump rally: the market for insiders who bail, tell all, and sell redemption by the click. This isn’t even a moral awakening so much as a stock tip from the universe. Murdoch saw it months ago; the Fox machine has been quietly retooling for post-Trump reality. The curve is downward. The audience is splintering. The grift is running out of road.
If Bongino walks, he becomes the first major domino inside the current Trump apparatus to fall not because of some tawdry personal scandal or petty infighting, but over a refusal to cover for child sex predators. You can feel how sharp the break would be—how suddenly the loyalty test would snap into focus for the rest of them. Imagine the conversations in those gilded back rooms: If Dan fucking Bongino bailed, maybe it’s time to think about my own exit strategy. And the beauty of it is, he wouldn’t even have to spill anything classified. All he’d have to do is say, I’ve seen it. I can’t be part of this. Neither should you. That one sentence would blow a hole in the hull.
The irony is Shakespearean, or maybe Pynchonian—this is the podcaster who spent years turning the machinery of right-wing paranoia against the “elites,” only to discover that his boss is just another elite with a velvet-wrapped skeleton in the closet. It’s the funhouse mirror of the path some of us took years ago, bailing before the train went off the cliff. Back then, the choice was easier; now it’s a bloody Rubicon. Stay, and you prove the cynics right about you. Go, and you might just make rent on the wreckage.
And if he stays? Then the message is carved in bedrock: there is no too far. The people who once claimed to hunt monsters will have chosen instead to become the palace guard for one. The ancient sages—take your pick, Torah prophets or Sufi poets—would tell you that this is the soul’s reckoning, the moment in the desert when you decide whether to walk toward the light or keep building monuments to the darkness. The old occultists knew it, too: the test always comes when you’re fat and comfortable, thinking you’ve gamed the system, and suddenly you’re asked to swear allegiance to something you know is poison.
That’s where we are. That’s where he is. Bongino at the crossroads, one road paved with hush money and moral rot, the other with the cracked stones of whistleblowing and opportunism dressed up as virtue. Either way, he’s about to teach us something about the physics of grift and the strange gravitational pull of truth when it finally, inevitably, lands in your lap like a dead bird.
This seemed better in many ways [Sally totally disagreed, when I read it aloud to her] but still felt as though it lacked my ethos, even though I had come up with the ideas myself and trained the AI for almost a year now with my oddball approach.
So I decided to give it a little extra help.
I uploaded a collection of my essays since 2022 that we’re planning to publish as a book, that Sally and I are editing now. And I instructed “Here is my Psychedelic Zionism Rising collection. Infuse this Bongino piece more with the writing style and ideological/cultural/religious ethos here.”
The AI responded, “Here’s the Bongino essay rewritten with the full Psychedelic Zionism Rising energy — mystical desert wind, biblical thunder, George Carlin profanity, counterculture fire, and the ideological clarity you use to frame political treachery in cosmic terms.”
And then provided this:
Dan Bongino and the Moment of the Desert Test
It’s Friday, August 8th, and I’m sitting here in the desert after my morning Algemeiner shift, coffee cooling, the Joshua trees doing their strange semaphore against the sky, when the spirit of mischief and prophecy taps me on the shoulder with one long ibis-feather and whispers: Write about Bongino.
Yes, that Bongino — Secret Service muscle turned Fox News protein shake, podcaster for the rage-addled, Trump courtier of the highest order. A man built like a bouncer at the gates of a bowling alley in Hell. And yet Lev Parnas — gadfly, exile from the Orange Inner Circle, leaker of whispered poison — claims that this slab of MAGA meat might be the problem in Trump’s kingdom right now. Because he’s seen the files. The files. The sulfur-reeking, ark-of-the-covenant-if-the-covenant-was-written-in-semen-and-blood files.
You know exactly which ones. The Epstein gospel of damnation, the little black book of Babylon, the photographs and logs and lists that prove what we’ve all known in our bones for decades — that the predator class isn’t some shadow under the bed, it’s the man in the bed, the man in the gold tower, the man you spent years serving barbecue platitudes for on your podcast while cashing merch checks.
And if Parnas is right, Bongino looked into that pit and flinched. Not what he signed up for. Which is deliciously ironic, because Trump’s people handpicked him as the perfect gatekeeper — loyal, aggressive, unthinking. The kind of guy who would beat the truth to death in the alley out back without asking why. But the desert tests everyone, man. The Bible’s full of it — Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, the Essenes, Crowley in his Cairo hotel room — the wilderness strips away your illusions and makes you decide which god you actually serve.
And Bongino’s staring at two altars right now: one drenched in hush money and the other in the strange light of the only market more lucrative than MAGA merch — the market for whistleblowers who come in from the cold with blood on their hands and “truth” on their lips.
I’ve seen this calculation before. Back when the Trump train first pulled into the station, everyone in right-wing media ran the same math: Moral equation: Do I yoke my name to this beast? Career equation: Will it make me rich? The grifters said yes to both without hesitation, because they believe in nothing but the next wire transfer. But Bongino might have actually believed some of his own bullshit — the Q-lite stuff about elite predator networks, the gospel of Drain the Swamp. Not the full Adrenochrome psychosis, but the clean, marketable “protect the kids” paranoia that builds followings fast.
So imagine: you spend years building your personal crusade against the shadowy cabal… and then the cabal turns out to be your boss. That’s the crisis. That’s the desert. This is Abraham with the knife over Isaac — except Isaac is your career and the voice telling you to kill it is the smell of Trump’s rotting legacy wafting up from those files.
Bongino doesn’t even have to go full Deep Throat. He doesn’t need to hand over documents or whisper codewords in a garage. All he has to do is step out and say, I saw it. I’m not part of this. That alone cracks the façade. Because if a man built for MAGA, a man who speaks fluent grievance into the earbuds of millions, suddenly says no — it tells the rest of the faithful that the line has been crossed.
We’ve already seen the fringe defections — Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes, conspiracy kooks so far down the rabbit hole they can smell the Mad Hatter’s cologne, now murmuring about Trump’s Epstein entanglement. But Bongino is different. He’s a domino. He falls, others follow.
And don’t kid yourself — this is also about money. Murdoch already read the tea leaves, the polling curves sloping down like a dying EKG. The Trump grift is drying up. The market for ex-MAGA confessions is booming. If Bongino is as much a capitalist as a cop, he sees that. This is the Biblical “choose ye this day” moment, except the choice is between dying on the Trump cross or cashing in as the centurion who walked away.
If he stays, it’s proof of what I’ve said for years: there is no “too far” for some of these bastards. Covering for child predators? No problem, boss, just hand me the talking points. If he goes, it’s a sign that even the palace guard can get tired of scrubbing blood off the walls.
And here’s where my own Zionist, prophetic, desert-born ethos kicks in: the Torah and the Talmud are clear — If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first. The same applies to movements. If the leader you serve turns out to be the predator you swore to hunt, the righteous thing is not to “stay loyal” — it’s to take the shot. Bongino may never have cracked a page of Maimonides, but the desert will teach him the same lesson.
The test is here. The wilderness wind is blowing grit in his eyes. One path leads deeper into the palace, into complicity, into the slow rot of a soul that chose gold over God. The other leads out into the barren openness where a man can tell the truth and take the consequences.
And if he listens closely, past the noise of his own podcast, past the clatter of the MAGA merch machine, he might hear the same thing I hear when the desert gets quiet: that low, ancient voice that says, Choose the right side, motherfucker.
So now, in less than the time than it would have taken me to write the essay myself, I had four versions:
The raw transcript of my recording
An undirected rewrite without asking for anything beyond “a 1000-1200 word Substack essay written in my voice/style”
Then one “wilder” and more in a Woolf, Carlin, esoteric-laden style
Finally, one directly given a large sample of my writing over the course of years (which I had given to it previously, but I wanted to emphasize in this chat) and told to “Infuse this Bongino piece more with the writing style and ideological/cultural/religious ethos here.”
Now, having read through those four different “versions” of the essay, and while being entertained and slightly impressed at parts, ultimately unfulfilled, I decided to ask for one final version: “OK, now I'm going to attempt to write my own version of this post. Please provide a list of bullet points and a quick outline, so I can now go and type it at my freewrite.”
Here’s a distilled set of bullet points and a quick flowing outline so you can sit down and freewrite your own Bongino piece while keeping the bones strong and the style wild.
Core Bullet Points
Scene-setter: You in the desert, coffee cooling, morning editing done, deciding to riff on Bongino.
The hook: Lev Parnas says Bongino has seen the Epstein files — and might not want to cover it up.
Irony: Bongino was handpicked as a loyal Trump enforcer; now he might be the internal problem.
The files: Frame as almost mythic/occult artifacts — dangerous knowledge, ark-of-the-covenant-if-the-covenant-was-written-in-blood-and-semen.
The calculation: Two axes — morality and career — that every right-wing media figure ran in 2015–2016.
Bongino’s possible belief: Not just grift — maybe he actually bought into anti-predator rhetoric.
Crisis point: Seeing the monster wearing your own team’s jersey.
The pivot option: No need for classified leaks; he could just walk away and say, “I’m not part of this.”
The domino effect: If he flips, others will follow; if he stays, confirms there’s no “too far.”
Market shift: Murdoch already moving away; Trump’s grift running out of road; whistleblower market booming.
Biblical/prophetic frame: Desert test; Torah command — If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.
Outcome stakes: Palace guard or prophet in the wilderness.
Closing punch: Ancient voice in the wind telling him to choose the right side — or be swallowed with the rest.
Quick Outline for Freewrite
Opening scene in the desert
Set time, place, vibe.
The desert as prophetic space.
Why Bongino is on your mind today.
The Lev Parnas spark
What Parnas claimed.
Why this is unusual and significant.
Mythic framing of “the files.”
Bongino’s origin story in MAGA world
Secret Service/NYPD cred.
How he became a loyalist pit bull.
The loyalty test he was supposed to pass.
The dual calculation
Moral: hitch your soul to Trump or not?
Career: where’s the money?
How others made the call — and got burned.
Why this is different for him
Possible true belief in anti-predator crusade.
The horror of realizing your leader is part of what you vowed to destroy.
The fork in the road
Path one: stay, cover up, rot.
Path two: pivot, whistleblow, cash in on truth-telling.
The domino potential
Bongino as first big insider defector.
The ripple effect.
The risk of staying.
Wider forces at play
Murdoch and the market shift.
Trump’s shrinking empire.
The booming ex-cult confessional industry.
Prophetic frame
Desert test parallel — Moses, Jesus, Muhammad.
Torah and Talmud command to confront evil.
Your own ideological through-line from Psychedelic Zionism.
Close with fire
Two altars — gold vs. truth.
The desert’s voice.
Choice must be made now.
I can also give you a few sentence-level launch phrases to kickstart your freewrite so you hit the ground at full speed. Want me to add those?
I then went off to write the post myself, keeping in mind the various versions ChatGPT had generated from my initial verbal rant and then having the little outline at the end there.
However, when I sat down to write, I ended up not using the outline or thinking too much about the previous versions and just wrote something new.
Here is the result that I published yesterday:
So what do you think? Which version is your favorite? Cast your vote.
Oh, I’m sorry, what’s that you, say? The final version that I ended up writing doesn’t sound very much like my initial off-the-top-of-my-head ramble that ChatGPT used as the basis for the versions that it wrote? You mean, like, the process of writing, of going through it sentence by sentence and seeing what new thoughts emerge as you manually do it, that’s part of the process of writing?
Well, who could have imagined that?
Maybe the first person you’re communicating with when you’re writing something is actually yourself.