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Bulwark Takes

The Story Riley Gaines Doesn't Want to Tell (w/ Pablo Torre)

Bulwark Takes

The Bulwark

News, Society & Culture, Politics, News Commentary

4.71.2K Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Tim Miller and Pablo Torre break down how Riley Gaines went from a college swimmer to a full-blown MAGA political figure—how her story was reshaped by conservative media, why her rhetoric escalated, and why severe abuse allegations inside her own program barely get mentioned.

Read the full story at Mother Jones: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/11/riley-gaines-anti-trans-lia-thomas-ncaa-trump/

Watch PABLO TORRE FINDS OUT on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PabloTorreFindsOut

..and subscribe to PABLO TORRE FINDS OUT on Substack: https://www.pablo.show

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hey, everybody. It's Tim over from the Bullwark. I'm here with my buddy, Pablo Torre. If Pablo

0:03.7

Torre finds out the only millennial doing more content than me out there right now.

0:08.6

I mean, dude, where do you find the time? How many hours are in your day?

0:14.9

All you got to do, the key to making more content as an elder millennial is to ignore your

0:19.9

daughter. And so when you do

0:21.9

that, Tim, you might consider that the ultimate life hack is being a bad father. Okay, I'm not ignoring

0:27.1

my daughter. So I don't know. That's the competitive edge that I have. Okay, got it. That's right.

0:32.4

You're putting a few more hours in. That's okay. There'll be time on the back end. There's always

0:36.9

time for parenting and love.

0:38.3

I'm told that generally speaking, podcasting is what people regret on their deathbed. They didn't do

0:43.3

more of it. I didn't podcast enough. Living up to that aphorism. You have a bunch of like kind of politics

0:48.7

adjacent pots. People don't know. Pablo is of ESPN fame and has just gone out on his own, struck out on his own, so to speak.

0:56.9

And Pablo Troy finds out it's investigative reporting, it's sports, it's news.

1:03.6

I mean, you've been on the page before.

1:05.0

But for new people, you get, you know, sometimes it's really sportsy and other times you're getting into other stuff.

1:11.1

Yeah, it's journalism solving mysteries. They tend to be about sports, but they tend to also take

1:16.2

us into squarely political topics in which sports happens to be, Tim. I don't know if you've noticed

1:20.4

this, the crowbar that a certain political party is way better at using to pry open

1:26.6

wallets and votes. And so in that regard,

1:29.5

it ends up inevitably being a story about the time we are living in it. Speaking of how much

1:35.1

better that political party is at using sports, like, boy, being in Tiger Stadium the weekend

1:40.3

after Charlie Kirk's assassination was really something. I mean, it was just, I haven't, like, it was great. I truly insane. I was sitting up, like, I'm the only person in the section that knows Charlie Kirk, actually, and I think, I don't know, maybe one other guy has been to a TPSA thing. And the whole crowd was just wrapped by the honorific that led the football game.

...

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