PhD, Am Religious History, minor Reformation+ history of science; MA, Semitics. Apple fan, LDS, francophile, bibliophile, gourmand, cyclist, husband.
Joined March 2009
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My dissertation is now available! A history of creation/evolution conflict in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 20th century. Honestly, some ground-breaking stuff. benspackman.com/2024/12/diss…
We're exceptional y'all :)
Cutting the Gordian knot (and ironically closer to Old Testament teachings)
It's important to make notes. I've got a sample chapter on note taking what/how/why at docs.google.com/document/d/1…
I joined the Church's of Jesus Christ in January 2024, which happened to be the year for studying the Book of Mormon. I was just revisiting my notes from the first time I read it. It's interesting to see what I thought was worth noting.
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THE most corrupt president of all time.
I have a history PhD from Oxford and try to support all of my historical claims with strong evidence, particularly when regarding the president of the United States.
But based on a comprehensive review of 250 years of American history, it is simply irrefutable that Donald Trump is by far the most corrupt president in U.S. history when it comes to using the office to enrich himself and his family.
Here are the facts, and why there isn’t even a close second.
Trump’s own federal financial disclosure reported more than $1.4 billion in 2025 income from family crypto ventures, including about $635 million from his meme coin and nearly $800 million from World Liberty Financial. Reuters separately estimated that the family added at least $2.3 billion to its fortune from crypto ventures after Trump returned to the White House.
The clearest example of how Trump used the office came in May 2025. The 220 biggest holders of his meme coin were invited to dine with the sitting president at his private golf club. The coin jumped more than 60 percent when the dinner was announced. To get a seat at the table, you had to buy and hold a product that made the president money. Trump turned access to the presidency into a sales pitch.
The foreign dealings raise an even more serious question. Four days before Trump took office, an investment vehicle backed by a UAE national security official agreed to pay $500 million for nearly half of World Liberty Financial. The Wall Street Journal reported that $187 million of the initial payment was directed to Trump family entities.
Trump is clearly not the first United States president to be guilty of corruption, but the size and scale of his malfeasance put him in a league of his own.
Under Ulysses S. Grant, whiskey distillers and federal officials pocketed money by cheating the government out of liquor taxes. Under Warren Harding, Interior Secretary Albert Fall took bribes in exchange for leasing federal oil reserves. Richard Nixon had a personal tax scandal, but his defining abuse of presidential power was the Watergate cover-up, an effort to protect his hold on office. LBJ’s political connections helped turn a small Texas radio station into a family broadcasting empire.
By September 2025, less than eight months into Donald Trump’s second term, he and his family were roughly $5 billion richer than they had been around the 2024 election, according to Forbes. In comparison, a reasonable estimate is that all 44 other U.S. presidents combined added about $250 million to their wealth while in office, adjusted to today’s dollars. That puts the Trump family’s gain at about 20 times the estimated combined total for all other presidents over the course of two and half centuries.
The election results were, at least in part, a clear repudiation of this staggering and historically unprecedented corruption. Congress now has a mandate to investigate, follow the money, pursue the recovery of all ill-gotten gains, and enact enforceable safeguards so that no president can ever again use the White House as a vehicle for personal enrichment.
"Republicans got their clocks cleaned this week because they made Trump the center of their universe, as if Congress did not exist other than as a presidential pom-pom squad. Unleashed, Trump has governed like a lunatic." nationalreview.com/2026/11/t…
Ben S retweeted
Your baby loves repetition.
Your baby loves repetition.
Your baby loves repetition.
It’s true. Routines and rituals help your child to feel safe and secure.
And predictable patterns not only help your little one to make sense of the world - but gradually assume roles of their own.
Watch this fantastic video, edited together by alliewojciak on IG.
Each day as they arrive home from preschool, Allie greets her son in the same way as they get out of the car: a dramatic door open that reveals her smiling face and a tender “Hi.”
You can tell this is a beloved ritual.
Watch her son’s expectant face in videos shot across multiple days. He knows just where to look and what’s coming next - greeting mom with the same delighted grin each and every time.
After enough repetitions, he begins beating her to the punch - taking responsibility for the daily “Hi!”
Isn’t it lovely? Mom has made the whole thing possible by making this interaction so predictable.
As adults, endless repetition can sometimes be a little maddening (when your little one wants to read the same book for the 20th time this week, for example) but know that the routines you are establishing are a normal part of development - and provide not only comfort, but a familiar foundation from which your toddler can begin inserting themselves into the process.
So cool!
Ben S retweeted
1/ I'll explain exactly how this happened because I'm the person at Forbes who calculates these numbers.
This is going to take some unraveling, but here's a spoiler: The president's answer here is nonsense.
Ben S retweeted
Ok, I didn’t expect a story time on Saturday, but here we go. What I’m about to write is TRUE. It is insane, stupid, and very dumb, but it is true. Earlier today Donald J Trump, the p[resident of the United States, posted that he had offered the job of Press Secretary to Dana White. Well, it was the wrong Dana White… 🧵
Ben S retweeted
This is wild.
The story keeps getting crazier. To recap everything that has been reported so far:
- The US intelligence community discovered that Jensen Huang, the CEO of the largest company in the world, was sleeping with Alice Huang, a Chinese spy and an executive at Megaspeed. (FT)
- Multiple independent investigations have concluded that Megaspeed is likely a Chinese cutout, which helps Chinese companies access AI chips or circumvent export controls. (NYT and Bloomberg)
- The US intelligence community also concluded that Alice Huang’s goal was to convince Jensen to lobby the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced AI chips. (NYT)
- The intelligence community relayed this information to “a small group of top US government officials” earlier this year. (FT)
- Over the last year, Jensen Huang has repeatedly lobbied the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced chips. @BISgov has done so, not only by permitting the export of H200 chips to China, but also not enforcing export controls that would have required a license for exports of the most advanced Blackwell chips to Megaspeed and Southeast Asia.
- Although @CommerceGov leadership was presumably briefed on this information by the U.S. intelligence community, @BISgov has taken no actions to tighten controls on Megaspeed or Southeast Asia.
- Megaspeed remains a preferred cloud partner of Nvidia, and continues to receive Nvidia Blackwell chips despite employing a Chinese spy who reportedly is romantically engaged with the CEO of Nvidia.
- Tens of billions of dollars worth of AI chips have been exported to Southeast Asia this year alone, and Malaysia and Singapore are now two of the four largest importers of AI chips in the world.
What is going on here??? We need answers. The question of who gets the most advanced AI chips in the world is literally the defining strategic question of our time. And not only does it seem like the MSS may be directly influencing the debate on export controls in the United States, but also @CommerceGov is refusing to listen to the warnings of the IC on this issue. What is a POSSIBLE good explanation for why Megaspeed is still receiving chips? Why is there not a license requirement for AI chip shipments to all of Southeast Asia? This is beyond strange at this point.
The fallout from this story will be massive. Obviously, the motivations underpinning Nvidia’s policy views opposing export controls must now all be questioned. But also, how did @BISgov sit on this information and has still taken no actions? We need answers.
Ben S retweeted
This is a real issue, glad to see it covered in @TheAtlantic
Young boys are being discouraged from getting into reading—and it’s because more books are missing one key element, @sophiah_n reports: theatlantic.com/culture/2026…
Ben S retweeted
My friend Ayako has translated American movies and TV shows into Japanese subtitles for 22 years.
Above her desk, taped to the wall, is a handwritten list.
"American sentences that do not exist in Japanese."
She let me copy it.
1. "I'm good."
Means yes. Means no. Means I'm full, I'm fine, I'm leaving, and please stop asking. She has translated it 31 different ways. She thinks she was right about half the time.
2. "Bless your heart."
She translated it as a blessing for six years. Then a woman from Alabama explained it to her, very sweetly. She had to go back and fix four movies.
3. "Hold my beer."
Japanese has no phrase for the moment right before a man does something stupid for a cheering crowd. She subtitled it "Someone please call an ambulance." Nobody has ever complained.
4. "Love you, bye."
American men say this to their fathers. On the phone. Fast. Like "see you later." In Japanese, "I love you" to your father is a deathbed sentence. The first time she subtitled it, the whole Japanese audience thought the father was dying.
He was asking about the Cowboys game.
5. "Come here."
An American sees someone crying, says two words, and opens his arms. In Japan, we ask "Are you okay?" and look very carefully at the floor.
6. "Proud of you, kid."
Japanese has the words. Japanese fathers just don't use them. Ayako has typed this line more than 400 times. She had heard it in her own house zero times.
Her father is 78. A retired machinist. The quietest man I know. He speaks maybe ten words of English.
Last spring, he went to see a movie she had translated. Alone. He didn't tell anyone.
That night, her phone rang.
He said it in English. Exactly the way the American dad said it on the screen.
"Proud of you, kid."
Then he hung up. Immediately. Before she could say a word.
Japanese fathers have not changed that much.
She sat on her kitchen floor for an hour.
He didn't say it in English because he forgot the Japanese.
He said it in English because in English, it was allowed.
America, you think you're just talking. Love you, bye. Come here. Proud of you.
You've been handing the whole world words we didn't know we were allowed to say.
Some of us are finally using them.
Hart's New Testament is up on pre-publication at Logos! Idiosyncratic but worth reading.
logos.com/product/487647/the…
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Ben S retweeted
“You have placed me on a pedestal so impossibly high and not to honor me. Not to honor me. But to spare yourself the effort of the climb.” -Vision
I think we see this by people in our own faith, unintentionally.
What a lightbulb moment hearing this line. #VisionQuest
Ben S retweeted
You know why non-religious people don't have children?
The answer is simply this:
They don't like kids
They "just didn't want to have kids"
Meanwhile, among older religious folks who don't have kids -- a lot of them wanted to be a parent.
It just didn't happen.
A good assessment of the status quo
1. After President Trump won the 2024 presidential race by sweeping all seven swing states, one of my 19 thoughts on the election was this: “Some free advice for Republicans: Political fortunes change quickly in our country, and the biggest changes often come in the wake of unbridled over-confidence.” Democrats, take note.
2. President Trump and the Republican Party fumbled an unbelievable political opportunity. @stanfordNYC went viral last night for a brilliant summation of the failures, some of which I’ll note here: They had a governing trifecta, had won the national popular vote, swept all seven swing states, and six of nine Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republicans. And yet, two years later, they have very few durable victories. They oversaw one of the least productive Congresses in American history, essentially extended President Biden’s federal budget, passed an unpopular tax bill, and couldn’t even sniff long-term immigration reform. Trump, his family, and his cabinet have openly enriched themselves while Americans struggle. A fresh foreign war, high tariffs, and high deficits now plague the balance sheet. DOGE was a complete and utter failure. Trump’s strongest issue, immigration, became a vulnerability after DHS agents terrorized American towns and killed American citizens on video. Democrats just accumulated more power in a single night than they have in any other election since President Barack Obama’s 2008 victory. It’s hard for me not to feel vindicated, as we’ve criticized the administration for all of these things in Tangle over the past two years and have endured claims that we’re biased or that I have Trump Derangement Syndrome. It turns out that a lot of former Trump voters (and even @JDVance) agree. Now, Republicans will have to endure two years of investigations and gridlock.
3. Worse yet, @POTUS45 seems to have lost all of his best political instincts. He obsesses over ballrooms and the male figure, he refuses to listen to his base on the war, and he deflects cost issues still plaguing the country. He uses his bullhorn to post AI slop, throwing every ally imaginable under the bus, and calls to rename everything “America.” He actually told a rallygoing audience ten days before an election that Americans should accept high gas prices because Big Oil was making money hand over fist. It turns out none of this stuff works on the electorate when you aren’t addressing their needs. Not surprising.
4. Speaking of messaging, the economy is still king. In Senate races in Texas, Ohio and Michigan, Republicans leaned into a closing message of “sorry we screwed up the last two years but trans people and Islamic extremists are worse.” One lesson might be that fear mongering about sharia law and the “threat” of children getting gender reassignment surgery without their parents’ knowledge is not going to eclipse affordability concerns. It got so bad that Republicans started to complain about how many political ads include candidates talking about transgender people, essentially saying the right is now unhelpfully amplifying the issue.
5. Given all this, I think it’s fair to say that voters did something Republicans in Congress refused to do: They stood up to Trump. The president broke a core promise with the Iran war. He’s forced tariffs on Americans without congressional authority. He’s permitted — and very likely participated in — rampant, historic corruption. He has not focused on affordability like he said he would. Congress had the power to address each of these issues if only a quorum of Republicans were willing to exercise their authority, but they didn’t have the courage to do it. So voters did it for them.
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