straight-up

"It is very rare that I've got a straight-up 'no' from somebody - I always get an awkward laugh or, like, a 'why?'."

I honestly cannot tell you what exactly was my justification for maintaining a Twitter/X presence, even as I explored other social media outfits and publicly acknowledged that Musk’s regime was repelling masses of tweeters, boosting easily debunkable disinformation, shedding all of X’s remaining utility for journalists, bullying transgender users, spreading straight-up white-supremacist rhetoric, and influencing CEOs in every other field to become as domineering and unapologetic as Musk is, whatever the backlash.

The information vacuum is being filled with disinformation, conspiracy theories, and straight-up nonsense, which, thanks to the Trump-era line that legitimate news outlets are the “enemy of the people,” has left millions of Americans with no trusted facts-based news source.

“History and tradition is extremely capable of being subject to uncertainty, even more so than a straight-up history test, because tradition is even less specific than history.”

In other situations, straight-up embarrassment got the better of me.