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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comA mom in Texas wanted to know which corporations were making money off Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. So she did the least dramatic thing imaginable: she started digging through public records, government contracts, and corporate filings, put it all online, and handed Americans a map of exactly who was profiting from ICE.And then people used it. They protested. They organized. They yanked their money out of a bank financing private detention companies. Cities moved hundreds of millions of dollars. And eventually Citizens Bank announced it was cutting ties with two of the biggest private detention contractors working with ICE.That’s how this is supposed to work. You see your government doing something you think is wrong, you find out who’s enabling it, and you use your rights to peacefully push back. It worked so well that the Department of Homeland Security took notice — and according to USA Today, circulated a secret intelligence bulletin to law enforcement that specifically flagged this woman’s website in connection with potential domestic terrorism.So let’s line that up. Americans peacefully protested, boycotted, moved their own money, and used public information to expose who’s cashing in on the deportation machine — and the woman who helped them do it landed in a federal intelligence bulletin. Yeah. We need to talk about this.Follow the moneyHer name is Laura Berlin — a Texas mother of two who started digging after watching people get flown to a prison in El Salvador. Her question was simple: who’s making money off this?She researched ICE contractors and built an interactive map of the companies involved in detention, transportation, surveillance, the whole apparatus. Two names sat near the top: GEO Group and CoreCivic, which per USA Today were awarded nearly a billion dollars combined by ICE in the first year of the crackdown. She kept pulling threads and found that while some major banks had pledged to stop working with private detention companies, Citizens Bank was still financing them. So she posted that too.That’s where it gets good.People realized they had leverageActivists found Berlin’s research and did the math: if Citizens Bank wanted to bankroll companies profiting from the crackdown, its customers could decide they didn’t want Citizens holding their money. A coalition started organizing. What began as an obscure campaign exploded after two fatal shootings involving federal immigration officers poured fuel on the anger — Berlin’s site went from a few thousand visits to nearly 10 million hits.By March, activists had 70 protests planned at Citizens Bank branches. By June, 140 protests across 17 states. Individual customers pledged to pull $25 million. Then local governments joined in — Jersey City announced it would move $265 million out of Citizens Bank; Montclair, New Jersey voted to pull another $90 million.Now we’re talking real money. And then Citizens announced it would stop financing GEO Group and CoreCivic. The bank insists this was purely a business decision, “changing commercial circumstances,” nothing to do with the pressure. Sure. Maybe hundreds of millions of dollars strolling toward the exit was just a happy coincidence. Either way the result’s the same: people found where the money went, organized peacefully, applied economic pressure, and the bank walked.This is what fighting back is supposed to look likeI want to sit on that, because there’s been so much rage around ICE — and this is the model. Nobody has to attack an agent. Nobody has to burn down a building. You investigate. You organize. You protest. You boycott. You vote. You expose where the money goes. You use your constitutional rights.That’s not terrorism. That’s democracy. And you’d think the United States government would know the difference.Apparently not.DHS knew — and did it anywayPer USA Today, DHS circulated an intelligence bulletin in February that specifically singled out Berlin’s website, warning that anti-ICE actors — including what it called “local anarchist extremists” — could escalate peaceful action into vandalism or violence.I’m a former cop, so let me be precise about where the line is. If there’s credible intelligence someone’s planning violence, investigate it. If someone threatens an agent, investigate it. If someone’s plotting an attack, stop them. That’s the job. But there’s a canyon between investigating a specific person because you have evidence of a crime, and hoovering up intelligence around lawful political activity because somebody adjacent to the broader movement might, someday, turn violent.And here’s the genuinely disturbing part: the bulletin reportedly acknowledges — in red letters — that some of what it describes involves First Amendment-protected activity. They knew.Publishing public records isn’t terrorism. Protesting outside a bank isn’t terrorism. Boycotting a company isn’t terrorism. Taking your own money out of your own account is definitely not terrorism. You don’t have to agree with a single one of these protesters — support ICE, support Trump’s policies, think everyone outside Citizens Bank is full of it. They still have rights. That’s the entire point of rights. The First Amendment was never built to protect people saying what the government likes. You don’t need protection when you’re agreeing with the government. You need it when you’re pissing it off.Intelligence resources aren’t Trump’s security detailThis is where my old job makes it especially infuriating. Law enforcement intelligence exists to protect the public from real threats — not to shield Donald Trump from opposition, not to shield ICE from criticism, and sure as hell not to shield private corporations from Americans finding out who they do business with. Peaceful protesters don’t become violent extremists just because they’re mad at the same agency. Once you start treating a movement or an ideology as inherently suspicious instead of focusing on actual criminal conduct, you’ve crossed a very dangerous line.And it’s not a one-off. USA Today points to a pattern — pressure on Apple over an ICE-tracking app, DHS scrutiny of left-leaning labor and climate groups, an investigation into a man who emailed the ICE director. Over and over, opposition to this administration’s immigration policy keeps getting translated into the language of threats and extremism.She followed the political money too — and named her own sideBerlin didn’t stop at the contractors. She followed the campaign cash, and her database found more than 450 candidates around the country who’d taken contributions from the biggest ICE contractors. And here’s where she earns real respect: she didn’t make it a partisan hit list. There are Republicans on it — Trump, Greg Abbott, Katie Britt. There are Democrats on it too.Good. Expose all of them. If you’re an elected official taking money from corporations that profit off government policy, the public has every right to know. Don’t want people finding out who funded you? Don’t take the money.There’s a word for people who oppose the government without committing crimesThat’s what gets me most. Laura Berlin didn’t have a giant organization behind her. She was one mom with a laptop asking where the money was going. Then Americans saw it and realized they had power — not imaginary internet power, actual power. They protested. They organized. They moved their money. They leaned on their local governments. They made doing business with ICE contractors more expensive and more toxic. And it worked.Then her website turned up in a federal terrorism bulletin. Maybe that’s a coincidence too. But this part isn’t up for debate: the government should be extraordinarily careful before it collects or circulates intelligence on Americans engaged in lawful political activity. Because there’s already a name for people who oppose government policy without breaking the law.Citizens.And if the administration thinks dragging peaceful activism under this kind of scrutiny will scare everyone quiet, this story says the opposite. Berlin says she’s not stopping — she’s still digging, now into the companies that gather the data used to find and locate immigrants. Good. Keep following the money. Keep publishing public information. Keep protesting peacefully. Keep voting. And if corporations decide profiting off the crackdown isn’t worth losing customers and watching hundreds of millions walk out the door — that’s not intimidation. That’s the free market.They found out who was profiting from ICE. They followed the money. They fought back peacefully. And it worked.Maybe that’s exactly why the government is so nervous.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comI’ve heard a lot of things come out of people’s mouths mid-arrest. Two decades on the job will do that. But “I am a single white female” — screamed like it’s a legal defense — that one’s new.Here’s how it got there. Police say a grocery delivery driver reported that a woman grabbed her face, damaged her glasses, followed her back to her car, threw things at it, and hit the vehicle. So officers go to the woman’s house to hear her side. And almost immediately, she starts telling them exactly what happened — just not on purpose.“She should speak English”Watch what the cops actually do here, because it matters. They’re not screaming. They’re not throwing anyone to the ground. They’re investigating a reported assault and trying to get the suspect’s version of events.That’s most of the job, honestly. When you roll up on something like this, you usually didn’t see it happen. You’ve got a complainant saying one thing and a suspect saying another, so you ask questions, compare the stories, look for physical evidence, talk to witnesses — and you pay close attention to what the suspect volunteers.And this woman cannot stop volunteering. The officer asks whether she grabbed the driver’s glasses. No. He asks whether she asked the driver if she spoke English. And out it comes: “She should speak English.” The officer, calmly: it’s not illegal to drive without speaking English. Doesn’t matter — she’s already told him where her head is.Telling on yourself, in real timeThen comes the moment that makes any cop’s ears perk up. She blurts, “Number one, I did not chase her.” And the officer says the most damning thing he can say: “Who said anything about chasing?”That’s the tell. If I haven’t laid out the allegation yet and you start denying specific pieces of it, I’m filing that away. And a beat later he asks, “Did you jump on her car?” Her answer isn’t “No.” It’s “Do you have video of that?” Look — you have the right to remain silent. Sometimes you really should use it.From there she keeps trying to reframe what’s happening. In her telling, four cops showed up because she was sleeping. No. They showed up because someone said they’d been assaulted. Then she tries to make it about the driver’s English again. No, lady — it’s about whether you put your hands on somebody.What normal policing actually looks likeHere’s the part people miss when they’ve been trained to see any police contact as a beating waiting to happen. Before the arrest, the officer asks if she wants to put on shoes. She says no. He offers to go inside and get them for her. That’s it. You can arrest a person and still treat them like a human being — that’s the job done right.But once he tells her she’s under arrest, the negotiation is over. And this is where she makes everything dramatically worse for herself. An arrest requires physical control, and before anyone goes in a patrol car, they get searched — that’s not excessive force, that’s procedure. When she says “thanks for feeling me up,” the officer’s response is exactly right: “I’m not feeling you up, I’m searching you.” The contact still has to be reasonable for what she’s doing — and watching the whole thing, it is.The victim she inventedBy the end, she’s completed a full transformation. She’s the one accused of attacking a delivery driver who doesn’t speak English. She’s made that driver’s English the centerpiece of her whole “explanation.” She’s resisting the officers trying to get her into the car. And somehow she’s the victim now — because she is, in her words, “a single white female,” and apparently the mayor and the whole “progressive city” need to hear about this injustice immediately.Lady. They offered to get your shoes.Why the full tape mattersShe ended up charged with battery, resisting an officer, and aggravated assault on a police officer, and was later released pending her first court date. But the reason the whole encounter is worth watching isn’t the meltdown. It’s the process.The cops didn’t show up and cuff her on sight. They knocked. They asked what happened. They listened. They pushed on the holes in her story. They gave her chance after chance to explain herself. And then, once they’d built probable cause and made the arrest, she’s the one who turned a battery charge into a prolonged physical fight.That’s exactly why bodycam is valuable — and exactly why you should never let somebody hand you an edited five-second clip and call it the story. Give me the whole interaction. Because context is everything. Sometimes the context is a misunderstanding that good, patient policing untangles without anyone getting hurt. And sometimes the context is a woman screaming “I’m a white girl” from the back of a squad car after the officers offered to grab her shoes.I’ll let you decide which one this is.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comWe’re a little over two months from the midterms, and the Trump administration is trying to rewrite the rules for voting by mail. Not for 2028. Not for next year. Now.The Postal Service has finalized a sweeping new rule on mail-in ballots that could make voting by mail meaningfully harder for millions of Americans. A federal judge has temporarily blocked it, and the administration is appealing — so nothing I’m about to describe is currently in effect. But you need to understand what they’re reaching for.What the rule actually doesUnder it, states would have to push voter information through a new federal Postal Service portal. Ballot envelopes would have to meet new federal requirements. And here’s the kicker: states that refuse to hand over the required voter data could lose USPS handling of their election mail altogether. Translation — cross this new federal system and your citizens’ ballots might not get mailed at all.There’s a small problem with the timing: that federal portal reportedly isn’t even up and running yet. So election officials would be asked to tear down and rebuild systems that took years to construct, with a few weeks left on the clock. Officials from both parties are warning that trying to do that could create chaos — and they’re right.This hits more people than they realizeThis isn’t a minor bureaucratic tweak. More than 30 percent of Americans voted by mail in 2024. Older voters lean on it heavily. So do rural voters. And in several of the states that will decide control of Congress, mail voting is woven into how people actually participate.Michigan’s a clean example: in the 2022 midterms, 57 percent of ballots for Democratic candidates arrived by mail, versus 37 percent of Republican ballots. California mails a ballot to every voter. Washington has scrapped traditional Election Day polling places entirely. And Arizona — about 80 percent of voters there got mail ballots last midterm, and it is not a partisan thing: an estimated 62 percent of Arizona Republicans voted by mail in 2024.So start yanking on the mail-voting machinery this close to Election Day and you don’t even fully know whose votes you’re going to screw up. This isn’t swapping a menu item. It’s tampering with the infrastructure millions of people use to exercise a constitutional right. And it’s worth noting the president has spent years trashing mail voting and pushing bogus fraud claims — while, this month, voting by mail himself in Florida’s primary.Don’t take the baitHere’s the part I most want to land. Yes — Republicans are going to try to make voting harder. Trump and his allies will keep floating whatever scheme they think helps them hold power. We’ve all seen what he does when he loses a free and fair election and refuses to accept it. I was on those Capitol steps. I don’t need to be convinced this is serious.But there’s a real danger in narrating every new attack as though the outcome is already decided. It isn’t. An obstacle is not a locked door. An inconvenience only becomes disenfranchisement if you let it stop you from voting.So don’t.Make your plan now — not November 2ndIf you’re eligible to vote in November, start now. Today. Find out exactly how voting works where you live. Check your registration. Know your deadlines. If your state offers early voting and that’s your comfort zone, use it. If you vote by mail, learn your state’s rules and don’t sit on your ballot until the last minute. If you’d rather vote in person on Election Day, know your polling place and have a plan to get there.Because if the goal is to manufacture uncertainty around voting, the worst possible response is procrastination. Make voting top of mind and keep it there.What happens at the polls — a cop’s concernSomething else worries me from twenty years in law enforcement: don’t assume every local department in this country has a tidy, coordinated plan sitting in a binder for what happens if people show up at polling places to threaten or intimidate voters. Real election security takes coordination — between election officials, state and local government, prosecutors, and police. Officers need clear guidance on what counts as voter intimidation, what their authority actually is, who owns what, and how to respond without themselves trampling someone’s right to vote. And the message has to be unmistakable: intimidate voters, threaten election workers, or illegally interfere with an election, and there are consequences. Ambiguity is exactly what people looking to cause chaos will exploit.We also need to be thinking now — not after the fact — about what happens if this administration tries to interfere with the election itself in some illegal or unconstitutional way. What do state officials do? Election officials? Prosecutors? Local law enforcement? Hoping everybody improvises it in real time is not a plan.Show up while we still canSo what do you do if you actually give a damn about keeping free and fair elections in this country? You show up while we still have them. And voting is just the start. Got legal expertise? Find a legitimate voting-rights group that needs pro bono help. Got time? Volunteer. Got money? Fund the people doing the work. Got a car and a neighbor who can’t get to the polls? Give them a ride. Got some other skill that helps people participate? Use it. You don’t have to be a lawyer, a cop, or a political operative. You have to be a citizen who gives a s**t.And then vote for people who are actually willing to hold public officials accountable when they abuse their power. I don’t want to hear that we should let bygones be bygones. We tried that with Merrick Garland. We tried it after Reconstruction. We tried it with Nixon after Watergate. Accountability isn’t vengeance — if someone used the power the American people handed them to break the law or the Constitution, investigate it; if the evidence supports charges, bring them; if they’re convicted, hold them accountable like anyone else.Because people love to file “democracy” in one drawer and “kitchen-table issues” in another. They’re the same drawer. You cannot seriously fix affordability, corruption, health care, or housing if the people running the government can abuse their authority without consequences.So take what Trump’s administration is trying to do with this election seriously. But don’t let it freeze you. Make your plan. Help somebody else make theirs. Show up. Vote. And make it really, really hard for anyone who wants to take that right away from you.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comHere’s how the justice system is supposed to work: you bring your case, you get a judge, the judge applies the law, you win or you lose.Here’s how Trump’s Justice Department apparently thinks it should work: you bring your case and you lose. You bring it somewhere else and you lose again. You keep losing. And then you find a courthouse in Texas where you’ve got a pretty good idea which judge is going to be sitting on the bench before you ever file the paperwork.Welcome to the Northern District of Texas. According to new reporting from the New York Times, the DOJ has been steering major pieces of its agenda into this one district, where an unusual case-assignment system lets litigants effectively predict who’ll hear them. And one name keeps coming up: Judge Reed O’Connor.How you pick your own judgeO’Connor is a George W. Bush appointee, the district’s chief judge, and one of the most reliably conservative jurists on the federal bench. That alone isn’t the story — plenty of judges have strong views. The story is the plumbing.Most federal district courts spread cases randomly across their judges. Northern Texas doesn’t always. Cases get assigned by the courthouse where they’re filed, and several of those courthouses have exactly one judge. So if you know who the only judge in a given courthouse is, and you file there — congratulations, you just picked your judge. Four of the district’s seven courthouses funnel every case to a single Trump-appointed judge. Another sends everything to O’Connor. And in Fort Worth, 90 percent of cases split between O’Connor and Trump appointee Mark Pittman.That’s not “find a conservative jurisdiction and hope.” That’s knowing the name before you print the cover sheet.They lost five times, then went to TexasWatch how DOJ actually used it. The administration has been trying to pry loose medical records tied to transgender care for minors. Federal judges in Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Seattle either rejected or sharply limited those demands. Five cities, five walls.So they went to Fort Worth. Never mind that the hospital whose records they wanted was in Rhode Island, or that Texas had already banned the very care being investigated. DOJ argued its nationwide investigation was being run out of Northern Texas — which put the case in front of O’Connor, who granted the request, clearing the way for Rhode Island Hospital to hand over personal information including the names and Social Security numbers of minors who’d received treatment.Sit with that sequence. Courts all over the country tell you no. You relocate to a courthouse where you have a strong hunch who’ll hear you. Suddenly it’s yes.A judge in Rhode Island called it “dirty pool”A federal judge in Rhode Island, Mary McElroy, saw exactly what was happening. She accused DOJ lawyers of running a “crusade to obtain transgender children’s medical records” and bolting from her court for a distant venue they considered friendly. In a hearing she called the tactic “dirty pool,” and told a Justice Department lawyer to his face: “You chose Judge O’Connor in Texas. Let’s just admit that.”That’s a federal judge saying that to the United States Department of Justice.And they were warned about this exact thingHere’s the part that really gets me: the judiciary already saw this coming. In 2024 the Judicial Conference of the United States recommended that big cases challenging federal or state policy be assigned randomly across judges — specifically to deter judge shopping and protect public confidence in an impartial court. Reasonable.The Northern District of Texas refused to adopt it. Later that year, O’Connor personally went after the policy in a speech to the Federalist Society, framing critics of his district as trying to undermine the judiciary. So this was never some hidden loophole. The system flagged the problem, proposed a fix, Northern Texas said no — and now the DOJ is exploiting the precise mechanism everyone was warned about.You don’t get to have it both waysThere’s a rich hypocrisy underneath all of this. Trump and his allies never stop howling about “rogue judges.” Any federal judge who blocks him becomes an activist, a radical, an enemy of democracy. But a single district judge wielding enormous power is apparently only a threat when the judge tells Trump no. When the judge hands him what he wants, suddenly everyone’s a champion of judicial independence.And O’Connor has a record worth knowing. He struck down the entire Affordable Care Act in 2018 — a ruling the Supreme Court later reversed 7-2. The Court has tossed other decisions of his on gun regulation and Native American adoption law. Holding conservative legal views doesn’t disqualify anyone from the bench; that’s not the point. The point is what happens when litigants know those views and can choose where to file to all but guarantee that particular judge hears the case.This isn’t a Republican problem — it’s a power problemLet’s be honest about something: judge shopping isn’t exclusively a GOP move. Democratic administrations and liberal groups have gone looking for friendly ground too. But there’s a real difference between choosing a jurisdiction where the pool of judges might lean your way, and choosing a courthouse where you can name the individual judge in advance. One is forum shopping. The other starts to look a hell of a lot like picking the referee.That’s why this should bother you no matter your politics — because eventually the judge being handpicked won’t share yours. If Democrats retake power and start deliberately routing major cases into courthouses where they know they’ll draw one specific progressive judge, Republicans will lose their minds. And they’d have a point.The whole thing only works if people trust itI’ve spent most of my adult life around the justice system, and it only functions if people believe the rules apply the same regardless of who walks through the door. You don’t get to choose the cop who investigates you. You don’t get to choose your jury. And you shouldn’t effectively get to choose your judge just because you know which courthouse to walk into. Justice can’t mean shopping for the government official most likely to agree with you.That’s what makes this bigger than one judge in Texas. Trump doesn’t need to abolish institutions to break them. You hollow them out. You exploit the loopholes. You smear the judges who rule against you as corrupt while quietly seeking out the ones who keep ruling in your favor. Do that long enough and people stop believing any of it is impartial — and a justice system the public believes is rigged isn’t much of a justice system at all.If we want these institutions to outlast Trump, and whoever comes after him, the rules can’t bend to whoever happens to hold power. So assign the cases at random. Because you shouldn’t get to pick your judge. Period.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comTrump has apparently decided the thing America needs most right now is a nationwide sales pitch for Donald Trump.The plan: with the midterms bearing down and his numbers in the basement, send Cabinet officials out to promote his “accomplishments,” farm some friendly local coverage, and remind voters how great everything supposedly is.I love this strategy. Genuinely. Please keep doing it. Because every time one of these people leaves Washington to explain how successful the administration has been, they run smack into actual Americans who’d like to know why their own lives feel so much worse than the press release.The roadshow keeps hitting potholesEnergy Secretary Chris Wright went to New Hampshire to talk up natural gas pipelines and got peppered about four-dollar gasoline. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins went to Iowa to rally farmers and wound up defending Trump’s plan to import hundreds of thousands of tons of foreign beef while American ranchers are furious about it. RFK Jr. went to Florida to talk school nutrition and ended up in a fight with Governor Josh Shapiro over a Pennsylvania measles outbreak and whether it killed two people. Even Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is reportedly catching skepticism from his old Wall Street crowd about pieces of the agenda.See the pattern? They show up with a slideshow about how great Trump is, and somebody in the room raises a hand: okay, but what about this disaster?America First — except for the beefThe Rollins trip might be the funniest of the bunch. Trump spent a decade branding himself on “America First”: American workers, American products, American farmers, stop letting foreign countries screw us. Then he decides the way to bring down grocery prices is to import 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef and sell it at a discount. And American cattle ranchers, reasonably, want to know what the hell happened to America First.So the America First president’s own Agriculture Secretary gets sent to Iowa to fire up farmers — and has to explain why the boss is flooding the market with foreign beef while the people who raise American cattle are livid. And Rollins didn’t exactly bear-hug the policy: she defended the goal of lower prices but admitted she hadn’t actually discussed the specific plan with the president. Hell of an endorsement.And the base still isn’t satisfiedHere’s the kicker. Trump’s also getting hammered by the people who think he isn’t going far enough. The White House keeps bragging about record ICE arrests — you’d figure immigration hard-liners were the one group he didn’t have to sell. Nope. Some are reportedly furious with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin because deportations and raids aren’t fast enough for them; Steve Bannon called Mullin a “squish” and said the administration should hide him.So take inventory. Ranchers angry that America First now includes foreign beef. Consumers still angry about prices. Wall Street guys skeptical of the economics. And immigration hard-liners angry that the most aggressive deportation push in modern history still isn’t aggressive enough. Good luck with the bus tour.You can’t b******t somebody about their own lifeThis is the thing Trump has always been elite at: building his own reality. Everything’s the greatest, the biggest, the most successful. Anything that goes wrong was somebody else’s fault. Bad numbers are fake numbers. Critics are losers or RINOs or whatever the word is this week. And it works beautifully — behind a podium, into a camera.It works a lot worse when your Cabinet secretary is standing in a field in front of a cattle rancher. You can tell that man he’s living in the greatest economy in the history of the universe, but he knows exactly what he’s getting per head. You can call energy policy a triumph, but he can read the number on the pump. You can insist everything’s affordable, and then people go buy groceries. You cannot b******t somebody about their own life.And remember — this is on purpose. These aren’t rogue officials who wandered into Iowa. It’s the actual midterm strategy. One Republican strategist from Trump’s own first term told Politico he’s not sure blanketing the country with Cabinet members helps at all — that instead of reassuring anyone, they keep surfacing the administration’s problems and creating new divisions.I’m with him. Keep sending them. Send everybody. Matching jackets, a fleet of buses, get Eric and Don Jr. in the rotation. Let’s see how many states we can hit before Election Day.He wanted a victory tour and booked a reality tourThat’s the joke at the center of this. Trump wanted his Cabinet crisscrossing the country telling people what he’s accomplished — and instead they’re getting a firsthand tour of what he’s accomplished.Sure, some stops go fine. Hegseth got good reviews at a GOP event in Iowa. RFK still has his devotees. Strategists still like Bessent as a messenger. But that was never the problem. The problem is that no messenger, however slick, can make the contradictions vanish. You can’t run on America First and expect ranchers to cheer foreign beef. You can’t claim you fixed affordability while your Energy Secretary is getting grilled about gas prices. And you can’t build the harshest immigration regime in memory without discovering there’s a wing of your own movement that will always demand more.Trump built a movement on anger. Now a good chunk of that anger is swinging back around at him.So please, fellas — keep talking. Keep walking Cabinet secretaries into rooms full of people who can ask about prices, about ruined farms, about the America First promises that didn’t survive contact with reality. Because reality is the one thing Trump has never managed to control. He can call the polls fake, blame the Democrats, blame the media, fire off another list of his own accomplishments — but eventually people just look around at their own lives and decide whether they believe him.And Trump has apparently concluded the smartest way to win the midterms is to send his Cabinet out and hand voters the chance to do exactly that.Go with God, Donald.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comNancy Smith spent fifteen years in prison for a crime she always said she never committed. And when you look at how the investigation was built, this case should rattle anyone who claims to believe in the system.There was no physical evidence. Her school bus wasn’t late. The mileage showed no mystery trip. The kids initially told investigators nothing happened. And one of the central figures in the accusations — a bus aide named Joseph — didn’t exist.She was convicted anyway. Thirty to ninety years.How you convict an innocent personSmith was a school bus driver in Lorain, Ohio, accused in 1993 of taking preschoolers somewhere and abusing them. These were horrific allegations — and that’s exactly the moment investigators are supposed to be at their absolute best, because the pressure to find a monster is overwhelming.They weren’t at their best. A medical exam found no signs of abuse. Records showed no late runs, no unexplained mileage, no suspicious absences. When there turned out to be no aide named Joseph, police arrested a man named Joseph Allen — who had a prior record but had never worked Smith’s bus. She said she’d never laid eyes on him.As the panic spread, small children were interviewed over and over with techniques experts later called coercive — capable of manufacturing not just false answers but false memories. Parents were allowed to coach and contradict them. One boy denied anything happened for nine months before his story changed. Another described something that plainly couldn’t have occurred.Every one of those red flags should have stopped the train. As a former cop, that’s what makes me furious: your job isn’t to prove your theory. Your job is to find out what happened. Those are not the same thing. Decide who’s guilty first, and every new fact just gets bent to fit the answer you already picked. When cops and prosecutors do that, somebody loses their life. Nancy Smith lost fifteen years of hers.The system admitted it — then some people refused to accept the admissionEventually it fell apart. The Ohio Innocence Project took the case, and the jury turned out to have never heard the half of it: that the children’s first accounts contradicted their testimony, that most of them failed to pick Allen out of a lineup video, that Smith’s own lawyer never presented the mileage and attendance records or called the actual bus aides who said she’d done nothing wrong.In 2022 a judge granted new trials. The Lorain County prosecutor at the time, J.D. Tomlinson, backed the decision, dismissed the charges, and apologized for what he called an “ill-conceived prosecution.” After nearly three decades, Nancy Smith was exonerated.That should have been the end — the rare moment a system says we got this wrong, we can’t give the years back, but we can tell the truth. Instead the fight kept going. Tomlinson, a Democrat, lost reelection to Republican Tony Cillo, who calls Smith’s exoneration “one of the most flagrant frauds upon the entire state of Ohio.” Ohio’s Republican Attorney General, Dave Yost, is fighting her bid for wrongful-imprisonment compensation. Some of the people she’s suing are trying to unwind the exoneration itself.She’s 69. She lives on less than $500 a month. And she’s still fighting.So let’s actually talk about “law and order”I’m a former cop, so let’s have this conversation honestly. If you demand accountability when a person commits a crime, you have to demand it when the government gets the wrong person. You don’t get to pick one.Backing the blue can’t mean defending every investigation forever. Supporting prosecutors can’t mean a prosecutor is never allowed to say another prosecutor blew it. And accountability can’t be something that only ever happens to the defendant. We can take your freedom, put your face on the news, tell your whole town you did something monstrous, and lock you in a cage for decades. That power comes with one obligation above all others: get it right. And when we don’t, the accountability has to point back at us too.The hard part is that the system is wired against admitting error. A prosecutor gets credit for the big conviction. Police get credit for closing the horrible case. Then twenty years later the evidence curdles — and now admitting it means lawsuits, compensation, wrecked reputations, and uncomfortable questions about every other case those people touched. So an institution built to find the truth suddenly has every incentive to defend the past instead. That’s the whole reason independent review and innocence work exist. The question can never be “how do we protect the conviction?” It has to stay “did we convict the right person?”This keeps happeningSmith was swept up in the daycare-abuse hysteria of the ‘80s and ‘90s — a moral panic that has since produced more than 60 exonerations across 13 states. Once a society convinces itself that hidden monsters are everywhere, asking for evidence starts to look like defending the monster. We’ve seen that pattern over and over in American history, and we’re watching versions of it in our politics right now. Fear and outrage are powerful, and politicians and social media both know it. The most important question — is this actually true? — is the first one to get drowned out.That’s the job. A cop isn’t there to validate what the public desperately wants to believe. He’s there to establish what the evidence actually proves.What accountability really meansNancy Smith missed weddings, graduations, births. Her daughter had a miscarriage while she was locked up and called her saying “I need you.” She couldn’t go. You don’t hand those years back.So when a politician waves “law and order” around like a slogan, understand what it should actually mean. Not automatically believing cops. Not automatically believing prosecutors. And definitely not shielding the government from embarrassment. It means following the evidence wherever it goes, holding people accountable when the proof is there — and having the guts to admit it when the government destroyed the wrong life.Because if accountability only ever applies to the people the government prosecutes, that isn’t accountability. That’s just power. The goal was never to protect the system. It was to make the system worth protecting.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comLet me get the cheap shot off the table first, because I’m not interested in it.Donald Trump has put on a good bit of weight. And no — I don’t think being overweight makes anybody a bad person, and I’ve got zero interest in fat-shaming an 80-year-old man. If Trump wants to eat McDonald’s three meals a day and never set foot in a gym, honestly, that’s his business.Except for the one detail that changes everything: he’s the President of the United States.The numbers, and the caveat that comes with themA new Washington Post report says doctors are increasingly uneasy about Trump’s weight — not on its own, but as one piece of a bigger picture around the health of the oldest man ever to hold the office. At his May physical he weighed 238 pounds. His 2023 Georgia booking record listed him at 215. That’s a 23-pound jump, though it’s worth being honest that the reliability of that original booking number is genuinely in question. The administration’s own account is cleaner and still notable: 14 pounds gained between his two most recent annual physicals.At six-foot-three, 238 puts him right at the edge of the clinical obesity line.And again — so what? If this were some anonymous retiree in Florida, nobody outside his family should give it a second thought. But Trump isn’t anonymous, and he isn’t retired. He’s got the nuclear codes.The weight is a symptom of the real question, not the story itselfHere’s why this actually lands. The weight isn’t happening in a vacuum. We’ve already had questions about the bruising on his hands. The swelling around his ankles. Moments of apparent drowsiness. And now his own White House physicians have reportedly told him to drop weight, fix his diet, and start moving.Let me be clear about what that does and doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean the man is dying. It doesn’t mean he’s secretly incapacitated. And it sure as hell doesn’t mean I can sit here squinting at photos and news clippings and diagnose the president with anything. I can’t, and neither can you.What it means is there are legitimate questions — and I want to be careful here, because we just spent four years watching the entire country lose its mind over Joe Biden’s age. Some of those questions turned out to be completely fair. Others turned into unhinged internet theater every time the guy stumbled on a word or walked stiff for three seconds. We shouldn’t now run that exact same play in reverse just because the party in the White House flipped.The standard ought to be simple and it ought to be blind to party: if you’re asking Americans to hand you command of the military and the most powerful office on earth, they’re owed honest information about whether you can physically and mentally do the job. That was true for Biden. It’s true for Trump. It’s true for whoever comes next.The tell is in how the White House answersThe White House says Trump’s doing great — points to his schedule, the public appearances, the golf, what they call extraordinary stamina, plus positive markers on cognition and overall functioning. Fine. That’s real evidence and it belongs in the conversation.But when the Post asked specifically about the weight, the White House didn’t actually answer. Instead it put out a statement praising Trump’s energy and — because apparently no one in that building can discuss Trump’s health for ten consecutive seconds without pivoting — accused Democrats and the media of covering up Biden’s decline.That’s where I get off the bus. “Joe Biden was old” is not a response to a question about Donald Trump. Biden isn’t the president. Trump is. When the answer to “how’s his health?” is “well, the other guy was worse,” that’s not an answer. That’s a dodge wearing a flag pin.They also wouldn’t say whether Trump’s ever used a GLP-1 weight-loss drug. Trump says he hasn’t. The White House previously denied he was the unnamed older patient the administration reportedly helped fast-track access to an experimental Eli Lilly weight-loss medication. There’s no evidence he received it — so don’t spin that into a conspiracy. We don’t know. That’s the whole point: we keep landing on “we don’t know.”Do I feel bad for him? Not entirely.There’s one part of this I’ve got limited sympathy for. This is a man who has spent years using other people’s bodies as punchlines — Chris Christie, JB Pritzker, Jerry Nadler. Just last month he was cracking jokes about Christie and Nadler fighting over a cheesecake.So am I going to clutch my pearls now that the conversation has swung around to him? No. You don’t get to spend years mocking people for their weight and then demand everyone suddenly mind their manners the moment it’s your turn.But here’s the distinction that actually matters, and I want it on the record: I don’t care that Trump gained weight because I want to dunk on how he looks. I care because he’s 80 years old and he’s running the country. This was never about appearance. It’s about fitness for office.Why “he’s fat” is the wrong frameOne of the doctors the Post talked to made the smart point: BMI isn’t the whole story, especially for someone that age. Body composition, cardiovascular health, mobility, metabolic health, day-to-day function — any of those can matter more than an arbitrary number on a scale. Which is exactly why turning this into “Trump is fat” is both cruel and dumb. It misses the actual question, which is whether we’re getting an accurate picture of the president’s health at all.Because every president has enormous incentive to project strength. Every White House staff has enormous incentive to shield the boss. Every political party has enormous incentive to insist everything’s fine. We have watched this exact movie, recently, with the last guy. And I don’t care whether there’s a D or an R after the name — real questions about the health of the person in the Oval Office deserve real answers. Not memes. Not living-room diagnoses. And not a press release ranking your guy against the previous one.Just tell us the truthFor what it’s worth, Trump has admitted for years that his weight is something he ought to watch — back in 2016 he talked about wanting to drop 15 or 20 pounds, his first-term doctor recommended weight loss, and his weight later climbed to 243, then 244, before coming down ahead of the 2024 campaign. Now it’s headed back up.Maybe that’s all this is. Maybe he’s just an 80-year-old who likes cheeseburgers, hates the treadmill, and put some weight back on. Could be that simple.But given everything else stacked next to it, the American people shouldn’t have to guess. Release accurate medical information. Answer reasonable questions. Stop treating the president’s health like proprietary political property.Because after what this country just went through with an aging president, we should have learned the lesson by now: the health of the President of the United States isn’t a partisan issue, it isn’t a punchline, and it isn’t something the White House gets to wave off just because they’ve decided, on our behalf, that everything’s fine.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comTrump’s entire strategy depends on you folding. Canada didn’t.For years, his whole political identity has run on one idea: make the threat big enough and eventually the other guy caves. Countries cave. Companies cave. Republicans sure as hell cave. His second-term trade playbook is exactly that — threaten massive tariffs, spook everyone’s businesses, then offer a way out, provided you take the terms he puts in front of you.Then, with less than an hour before a midnight deadline, Prime Minister Mark Carney told his negotiators to walk away rather than sign a deal he considered bad — a deal Trump had already announced was basically done. Apparently nobody told Canada. When Trump’s new 50 percent tariffs hit roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods, Carney said Canada would retaliate dollar for dollar starting September 8, and told his country, bluntly, that America was trying to break them so it could own them.Americans should pay attention to this — not because it’s a story about Canada, but because it’s a story about how you deal with a bully.Understand first that Canada didn’t walk away from some obviously insane offer. There was a real deal on the table. Days earlier, the two sides looked close; Reuters reported the U.S. was weighing cutting tariffs on Canadian cars and trucks from 25 to 15 percent, and steel and aluminum from 50 to 25 under a quota. Canada was still pushing for more. Then, according to Carney, the U.S. dropped in last-minute demands — including restrictions on Canada’s ability to set its own tariffs in trade with other countries. His answer was essentially: no.And this is a genuinely consequential call, because Canada leans hard on the United States. These aren’t two countries that occasionally sell each other things — their supply chains are fused, with parts crossing the border several times before a finished product rolls off the line. The new tariffs hit about $20 billion in goods, roughly 5 percent of Canada’s annual exports to the U.S., everything from food and furniture to clothing and hockey gear. Carney isn’t pretending it won’t hurt. It will. Canadian businesses and workers take a hit, and when Canada retaliates — on American steel, dairy, electronics, farm equipment, pulp and paper, appliances — Canadians pay some of that too.That’s how tariffs work. They’re taxes on imports. When Trump slaps 50 percent on Canadian products, Canada doesn’t cut him a check — American importers pay, and the cost rides the supply chain to American consumers and businesses. That’s why trade wars are so stupid. You can use tariffs strategically; governments always have. But when tariffs become your answer to every disagreement, you end up taxing your own economy to prove you’re tough. Canada’s response is simply: if you’re willing to make us hurt, we’re willing to make you feel some of it.Here’s where it gets interesting. Trump’s style needs the other side to believe two things: that he’s willing to hurt you, and that you’re not willing to hurt him back. That’s the whole game. He’s spent years treating Canada like an economic dependent — floating the “51st state” line, describing the country as basically living because America lets it. Think about how insane that is to say about one of your closest allies, a neighbor you share the longest border on earth with, whose economy and communities and families are woven into ours. Trump looked at that relationship and saw leverage. So now Canada is starting to treat that much dependence on the U.S. as a national security problem in itself.And Carney didn’t dream this up last week. At Davos he argued the international order has fundamentally shifted — that countries like Canada can no longer assume the U.S. will always be the stable center of the Western alliance. Since taking office he’s been diversifying, chasing deeper ties in Europe and Asia and striking a trade deal with China; the Associated Press reports Canada has signed more than 20 new agreements over the past year to cut its exposure to American pressure. That’s the part Trump ought to sit with. You can bully allies into concessions, but eventually they start building a future where they don’t need you — and once they do, the leverage doesn’t just come back.Look at who folded elsewhere. The European Union accepted a framework with a 15 percent U.S. tariff across a wide range of goods, selling it as better than an escalating war even while admitting it wasn’t what they wanted. Canada looked at that model and ran a different math: maybe eating the bad deal buys stability today, but what happens the next time Trump wants something? That’s the trouble with paying a bully — you don’t buy peace, you just set the price of the next threat.And Trump may have badly misjudged one more thing: he’s handed Canada a common enemy. Carney’s move drew support across the spectrum — Ontario’s conservative premier Doug Ford backed him, British Columbia’s progressive premier David Eby backed him, and plenty of people who never voted for him rallied around not being dictated to by Washington. Trump thinks pressure produces submission. Sometimes it produces solidarity.I won’t oversell it. I don’t know if Carney’s gamble works, and anybody promising you it’s a guaranteed win is lying. Canada could get hurt badly — the U.S. has the bigger economy, and Canada needs American trade more than the reverse. That’s reality. But leadership sometimes means seeing that the cheapest option today becomes the most expensive one tomorrow. Carney decided there was a line past which keeping the relationship on Trump’s terms was worse than absorbing the cost of saying no. Whatever the economics, I respect the principle — because I’ve watched a decade of people deal with this man. Republicans humiliating themselves for him. People he personally insulted turning around to flatter him. Institutions convincing themselves that if they just give him this one thing, he’ll finally be satisfied. He never is.So maybe the lesson runs past tariffs. Trump’s power has always leaned on the belief that resisting him costs more than giving in. Carney just decided to test that. Maybe Canada wins this fight, maybe Trump does, maybe — as usual — ordinary people on both sides pay for politicians measuring themselves against each other. But something bigger is happening: one of America’s closest allies is restructuring its future because it no longer believes it can count on us. That doesn’t make America stronger. It gives away one of the greatest advantages we’ve had for generations — allies who actually trusted us. And if the answer to that is another tariff, another threat, another joke about annexation, we’re going to learn something Trump apparently hasn’t: you can only weaponize a relationship for so long before the other side decides they’d rather not have it at all.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comNobody disputes that Lindsay Clancy killed her three children.Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. She strangled them inside their home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, then tried to take her own life by jumping from a second-story window. Her lawyers aren’t claiming someone else was in that house. So you might wonder why there’s a trial at all.The reason is that the question in front of this jury isn’t whether she killed her children. It’s whether she was legally responsible when she did. The defense says she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and couldn’t appreciate the criminality of her actions or conform her behavior to the law. Prosecutors agree she was mentally ill — but say she wasn’t psychotic, and knew exactly what she was doing. Under the law, that distinction is everything.I spent twenty years as a cop. I’ve dealt with people in mental-health crises and people who’ve done horrific things, and one thing you learn fast is that figuring out what someone did isn’t the same as figuring out why. Here we know what happened. The hard question is what was happening inside her mind when it did.On January 24, 2023, Lindsay was home with the kids when her husband, Patrick, left to pick up dinner and medication. When he came back, he found her outside, then found the children. All three eventually died. Lindsay survived, paralyzed. Under Massachusetts law, once criminal responsibility is properly raised, prosecutors have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was responsible — because being mentally ill doesn’t automatically make you legally insane. You can be severely depressed, or suicidal, or carry a psychiatric diagnosis and still understand what you’re doing and that it’s wrong. The question is whether Lindsay crossed that much higher legal line.There’s a lot for the jury to weigh, and it cuts both ways.For months beforehand, she was telling people something was wrong. Debilitating insomnia. Intrusive thoughts. Suicidal thoughts. She sought therapy, went to emergency rooms twice, attended a day program, entered a residential psychiatric program, called a suicide hotline. According to the Times, she was given 30 prescriptions involving 13 medications. At one point she messaged her psychiatric nurse practitioner three words that are hard to read now: “I really need help.” Patrick testified that months earlier, she had disclosed thoughts about harming the children. None of that proves she was legally insane on January 24th. But as an investigator, you can’t ignore it — this isn’t a case where a perfectly healthy woman suddenly killed her kids out of nowhere. There’s a documented trail of a woman repeatedly telling people something was seriously wrong.Then there’s the prosecution’s case, and it’s substantial. They argue she deliberately created the chance to be alone with the children — sending Patrick out for food and medicine. People who spoke with her around that time didn’t describe someone obviously detached from reality. Prosecutors introduced digital evidence — phone activity, searches, Apple Watch data — to reconstruct what she was doing in the house. Patrick testified he spoke with her from the pharmacy and thought she sounded like she might be in the middle of something but otherwise normal; prosecutors say that call happened during the window the children were being killed. Their argument is simple: she could communicate, she could plan, she waited until he left, she moved through the house, she interacted normally. Those facts matter.But they don’t necessarily settle the question — and this is where a lot of people watching go wrong. We carry a Hollywood picture of psychosis: someone screaming at the walls, incoherent, incapable of ordering dinner. That’s not always how it works. Defense experts testified that a person in psychosis can still perform ordinary tasks. Psychologist Paul Zeizel testified she suffered from bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis and wasn’t criminally responsible; forensic psychiatrist Phillip Resnick reportedly described her as “frankly psychotic.” The prosecution’s psychiatrist, Avram Mack, testified he believed she had major depression but wasn’t psychotic and retained criminal responsibility. Qualified experts, same woman, opposite conclusions. Welcome to an insanity case.And there’s something I can’t get past. Lindsay Clancy repeatedly asked for help. That doesn’t absolve her, and it doesn’t prove she was psychotic — and three dead children should never become footnotes in a conversation about their mother. But we can hold two things at once. Cora, Dawson, and Callan were the victims of a horrific act. And before that act, their mother moved through a mental-health system telling people something was badly wrong — hospitals, treatment, a suicide hotline, intrusive thoughts, I need help — and no one diagnosed postpartum psychosis before those children died. From a public-safety standpoint, that should scare the hell out of us. Cops usually arrive at the end of these stories: something terrible has already happened, someone calls 911, and we show up to piece together what occurred. But work backward through a tragedy like this and you often find warning after warning — and the real question becomes how many chances there were to keep anyone from ever making that call.This has since become a culture war. Hundreds of women in pink have gathered outside the courthouse in support; others are furious that anyone could sympathize with a woman who killed her children. I understand both reactions, but neither one tells you whether she’s criminally responsible. She doesn’t need to become a feminist symbol, or a symbol of everything wrong with modern medicine, or a monster. She’s a defendant, and that’s how a jury has to see her. Criminal trials aren’t decided by online polls for a reason.We’ve been here before. In 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five children in a Texas bathtub. She had a history of severe psychiatric illness and psychosis; she was convicted, the conviction was overturned, and at her second trial she was found not guilty by reason of insanity. One of the psychiatrists who supported the Yates insanity defense, Dr. Phillip Resnick, is now testifying for Clancy. Cases like these force an almost impossible question: is an act this horrific proof someone deserves the harshest punishment possible — or can an act become so incomprehensible that severe mental illness becomes part of how it happened at all? The law doesn’t ask you to answer that philosophically. It hands twelve people a standard and tells them to apply the evidence.With my law-enforcement hat on, I’d be looking for intent, planning, concealment, awareness, cognition — why Patrick left, what she did before he did, what she searched, what she said to people, what she did afterward, whether her statements matched the physical and digital evidence. But here’s the thing planning can’t do by itself: it doesn’t disprove psychosis. A person in the grip of a delusion can plan and carry out a series of steps. The question is what they believed those steps were accomplishing. That’s what makes this so hard.I’m not going to tell twelve jurors what verdict to reach before they’ve heard the case — that’s their job. But this trial exposes something our debates are terrible at holding: two things can be true at once. We have to take mental illness seriously without turning it into an excuse for every crime, and we have to face the horror of a crime without pretending mental illness doesn’t exist.Three children were killed. No diagnosis and no verdict changes that. Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. They should be alive. The jury’s question isn’t whether what happened to them was horrific — everyone knows it was. It’s whether their mother committed murder in the legal sense, or was so profoundly ill that the law says she can’t be held responsible. And after the verdict, the rest of us are left with another one: how does a person tell the people treating her, over and over, that something is terribly wrong — and no one understands how wrong until three children are dead?Because by the time cops are called to a scene like that, prevention is already over. All that’s left is figuring out what happened, and living with it.This piece discusses suicide and severe mental illness. If you or someone you know is struggling, you can reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988 in the U.S. For pregnancy- and postpartum-related mental health, Postpartum Support International’s helpline is 1-800-944-4773.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comThere’s an old line in Washington: personnel is policy. Right now, some of Donald Trump’s personnel are getting out.Karoline Leavitt is leaving as press secretary. James Braid, Trump’s top liaison to Congress, is leaving. White House counsel Dave Warrington is leaving. So is Ed Martin, the pardon attorney and longtime ally. Four very different jobs, and I won’t pretend they’re all walking for the same reason — there’s no evidence of that. People leave White Houses all the time, especially near a midterm. And Leavitt gave a completely understandable one: she just had her second child and says she can’t be the mother she wants to be while doing one of the most demanding jobs in the city. Take her at her word.So I’m not here to tell you everyone leaving is fleeing a sinking ship. But according to people around this White House, at least some of them are looking at what comes after November and asking a simple question: do I really want to be here for this? One former official told Politico that people are seeing exactly that — “the writing on the wall.”Look at the timing. Trump is heading into what could be the roughest stretch of his second term. Republicans are fighting to hold narrow majorities. The war in the Middle East is still hanging over the building. The next Republican presidential primary is starting to take shape. And if Democrats take Congress, this White House will face a level of scrutiny it hasn’t dealt with this term. One analyst quoted by Politico called what’s coming “choppy waters,” “treacherous waters.” Some people have apparently decided they’d rather be off the boat before it hits.And here’s the part I found most revealing. One person close to the White House summed up the calculation in a single word: marketability. If you’re a senior Trump official thinking about your next move, your value downtown depends partly on the relationships you have right now — you know the White House, you know congressional Republicans, you know who runs the committees. Lobbying shops and corporations pay real money for that access. But if Republicans lose, some of those relationships aren’t worth as much. So the advice, roughly, was: if you want a good job downtown, bounce now, while there are still relationships to trade on. Cash out before November.That’s about as Washington a sentence as exists. But it tells you something. People at this level don’t wait until Election Day to start thinking about the day after. They’re constantly calculating where power is going and where they want to be standing when it gets there. So when the people inside start making big career moves before the vote, it’s worth noticing — not because they know what’s going to happen, but because they’re betting on what might.It matters more in this White House than it would in most. Trump built his second administration to be the opposite of his first. The first term was a circus — hirings, firings, resignations, leaks, everyone going on TV to trash everyone else. This time he surrounded himself with a tighter circle that knows what he wants and, above all, that he trusts. That’s made the operation more disciplined and more effective at pushing his agenda. But there’s a trade-off: when you concentrate everything in a small group of fiercely loyal people, losing one of them hurts more. You can fill a job title. You can’t instantly replace years of trust. As one former Bush official put it, when someone is loyal, good at the work, ideologically aligned, and won’t leak, finding another person who checks every box isn’t easy.Which gets at the thing that actually fascinates me here. Trump has demanded extraordinary personal loyalty from everyone around him for years — cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, lawyers, staffers, vice presidents, all of them. And loyalty is cheap when it comes with power, influence, and a good job. The real test comes when staying becomes the worse career move — when you might be staring at congressional investigations, when you might need your own lawyer, when the administration drifts toward lame-duck territory and everyone’s already maneuvering for the next campaign, and when that private-sector job available today might not be there in six months. That’s when you find out who was loyal and who was just standing close to power because proximity paid.Now, I’m not going to be one of those media voices declaring the presidency is collapsing because four people changed jobs. That’s nonsense. Republicans could win in November, hold both chambers, and Trump could replace every one of these people with someone perfectly capable. Trump has survived roughly nine thousand supposed “beginnings of the end,” and I stopped counting a long time ago.But people in this town don’t make decisions only on what they know — they make them on risk. And the people inside an administration see things most of us don’t: internal polling, conversations with members and donors, what campaigns are actually worried about, the stuff that never makes the paper. That doesn’t let them predict the future. It lets them read the room. And right now, some of the people closest to Trump are reading a room that looks a lot less comfortable after November — including the possibility that a Congress under new management comes after them for what they did in Trump’s name.Power has a gravitational pull. When people think you’re gaining it, everyone wants to be your friend. When they think you’re losing it, the calls come back a little slower — and eventually people start heading for the door. Loyalty is easy when the boss controls everything. The interesting part is what happens when they start wondering whether he won’t.Inside Trump’s own White House, the exits are getting crowded.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comI’ve worked some strange cases in my life. This one might be the strangest I’ve ever written up.Start with the exchange: Zondacrypto, formerly BitBay, which claimed more than a million customers and hundreds of millions of dollars in assets. Its website went dark, customers couldn’t pull their money out, and its token collapsed by more than 99 percent. Polish prosecutors are now digging into how the whole thing was built and run. Before anyone sends me a lecture on blockchain — I’m not saying crypto is inherently criminal. I’m saying it has features that make it extraordinarily attractive to criminals, and this is about as spectacular a demonstration of that as you’ll find.The founder was Sylwester Suszek, a coal miner’s son the Polish press dubbed the “crypto king.” He lived like one — luxury apartment, Porsches, a Ferrari, his own helicopter. When regulators started asking questions, BitBay moved its operations from Poland to Estonia, which was busy branding itself as a crypto-friendly hub. Then Estonian authorities looked under the hood and found widespread anti-money-laundering failures across the industry — with Zondacrypto among the companies that hadn’t filed a single suspicious-transaction report in the window they examined.And here’s a detail that tells you everything. A company claiming around 1.3 million customers and hundreds of millions of dollars ran its official Estonian headquarters out of a tiny second-floor office above a kitchenware store, next to a nail salon. When reporters showed up, the mailbox was stuffed with months of unopened mail, and the people next door said they basically never saw anyone go in. If you tell me you’re safeguarding hundreds of millions for over a million people and your global HQ looks like where you get your eyebrows done, I’m going to have questions.But the empty office turned out to be the least strange part.Suszek had grown afraid for his safety. Someone attacked his Ferrari with an axe — smashed the windshield and left the axe embedded in the car. According to his sister, he blamed an early business partner he believed had ties to criminals in Katowice. He moved his family to Switzerland for a while, came back to Poland, and in March 2022 he vanished. Police traced his last phone signals to a fuel depot, where investigators say he’d gone to meet a close associate. That associate was later charged with belonging to an organized-crime group, large-scale tax fraud, money laundering — and with unlawfully depriving Suszek of his liberty in connection with the disappearance. And then that man disappeared, too. Suszek’s sister started getting terrifying messages, including one supposedly from her brother saying his captors were threatening to cut off his fingers. She believes he was murdered. His body has never been found.After he vanished, his lawyer and deputy, Przemysław Kral, took over. The company didn’t exactly go quiet — it went bigger, plastering its name on sponsorships, from soccer clubs to the Polish Olympic Committee, even helping finance a CPAC gathering tied to the American right. Meanwhile, customers started asking a simpler question: where’s our money? By December they were complaining publicly about delayed withdrawals. Kral said everything was fine, blamed a website upgrade, promised the money in days. The deadlines kept moving. By April, the company froze withdrawals entirely.Then Kral released a video telling people not to panic — the company had 4,500 Bitcoin in reserve, worth more than $330 million at the time. Great. Where is it? According to Kral, there was a catch: only one person knew the codes to unlock the wallet. Sylwester Suszek. The man who’d been missing for four years. So customers are asking a financial institution where their money went, and the answer is essentially: don’t worry, we have $330 million, the password’s just locked inside the head of a guy who disappeared in 2022. Crypto experts reportedly poked holes in that story and in the wallet Kral pointed to. He put out one more video asking for time.Then Kral disappeared too. There have been unconfirmed sightings in Israel, Botswana, and Dubai, and nobody seems to know where he actually is.Line it up. The founder vanishes after fearing for his life. A man charged in his disappearance vanishes. The successor says hundreds of millions exist but only the missing founder can reach it. Customers get locked out. The license gets revoked. Then the successor vanishes. I’ve heard enough probable cause in my life to think somebody ought to take a very close look at this — and they are. Polish prosecutors have opened an investigation, and the prime minister has publicly alleged the company had ties to Russian intelligence, organized crime, and right-wing political interests. Those are allegations, not established facts, and that distinction matters. We don’t know yet what happened.But here’s what the whole saga actually exposes. Crypto was sold partly on killing the middleman — no bank, no government, no giant institution between you and your money. I get the appeal; banks and governments have burned plenty of people. But sometimes the middleman is also the guy making sure the person holding your money actually has it. Crypto didn’t invent fraud or money laundering. It just built an incredibly efficient way to move enormous value across borders through structures where ownership and accountability can be almost impossible to untangle — and of course criminals figured that out. That doesn’t make everyone with Bitcoin a criminal. But pretending crooks aren’t drawn to a system designed to bypass the traditional financial guardrails is delusional. And crypto isn’t a niche internet hobby anymore — politicians court it, institutions are in, governments are folding it into the financial system. Fine. But if you want the legitimacy of traditional finance, you eventually have to accept the accountability that comes with it.If you’re holding someone’s life savings, people deserve to know where the money is, whether the assets you claim even exist, who controls them, and what happens if you disappear tomorrow. Maybe investigators find a legitimate company that collapsed. Maybe fraud. Maybe organized crime. Anybody claiming they already know is getting ahead of the evidence. But the customers are locked out, the token is worthless, the license is gone, and everyone who was supposed to be trustworthy keeps vanishing.At some point, “trust us” stops being a business model.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comPicture opening your mailbox and finding a notice from your state. It says that as of tomorrow, your driver’s license is void. You didn’t break a law. You didn’t flunk a test. Nothing expired. The government has simply decided there’s something about you it will no longer acknowledge.That’s not a hypothetical. It’s what landed in the mailboxes of hundreds of transgender people in Kansas.One letter, one day’s noticeOn February 25, a 41-year-old woman named Siobhan Kirchstein got a letter from the Kansas Division of Vehicles ordering her to hand over her license. A new law took effect the very next day voiding any license where the gender marker didn’t match a person’s sex assigned at birth. No grace period. Invalid immediately.Kirchstein had transitioned in 2023 and done everything by the book — legally changed her name, updated her gender marker with Social Security, on her passport card, on her Kansas license. She cleared every bureaucratic hurdle the state ever put in front of her. And now the state was telling her all of it counted for nothing.She thought about ignoring the letter. But according to M. Gessen’s reporting in the New York Times, she looked into the risk of getting caught driving on a license the state now called invalid — a possible fine, up to five days in jail, and the threat of longer stretches for repeat violations. As a trans woman, she was also frightened of what could happen to her if she landed in a cell. So she complied. A friend drove her to the DMV. She surrendered the license she’d lawfully earned. They handed her a new one with an “M” on it, and she walked out crying.And remember where this is. This is Kansas. Outside a few pockets, you need a car — to get to work, to buy food, to see a doctor, to pick up your kids. Stripping someone’s license there isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a wall around their whole life.The law is bigger than licensesSenate Bill 244 didn’t stop at IDs. It redefined “gender” under state law as sex at birth. It ordered agencies to revoke and reissue driver’s licenses and birth certificates that had been changed. It restricted bathrooms, locker rooms, and dressing rooms in public buildings by biological sex.Then it added the part that should turn your stomach: it lets private citizens sue people they suspect of violating the bathroom rules and collect up to $1,000. Sit with that. The state didn’t just write a rule — it put a bounty on it and deputized strangers to police each other’s bodies for cash.Why this one gets under my skinFor almost everyone reading this, none of it touches your Tuesday. You’ll wake up, drive to work, use a restroom without a second thought, maybe flash your license to buy a beer or check into a hotel. It will never once occur to you to wonder whether your ID matches how the person across the counter sees you.For a trans Kansan, every single one of those ordinary moments is now a potential run-in with the government.The Times found a trans man who reportedly lost his job after leaving his state building to find a restroom he was permitted to use. Another trans man now uses the women’s room because the law demands it — and has to explain himself to startled strangers so nobody panics when a man walks in. That’s the theater of the absurd this creates, except the people living it aren’t laughing.Same person, three governments, three “sexes”Then there’s Olivia Perdue. She’s a veteran — joined the Army in 2016, served as an officer, began transitioning in uniform. Afterward she went through Kansas State’s aviation program and became a certified flight instructor. She’d legally corrected the gender markers on her documents.Then Kansas kept moving the goalposts. A separate law defined sex as binary and biological. Attorney General Kris Kobach went to court to stop agencies from honoring changed markers. Perdue managed to get an “F” restored after an appeals ruling — and then SB 244 passed, and she got the same surrender-your-license letter as everyone else. She complied again. Her Kansas ID now says “M.” Her Social Security record says female. Her federal aviation record says female. One person, and the paperwork can’t agree on the most basic fact about her, because one government decided to overrule all the others.Perdue eventually left for Missouri. And she said the thing everybody should hear: Kansas is a test case.When the rules get incoherent, that’s not an accidentBecause this was never really about a single license. It’s about assembling a legal apparatus that makes daily life quietly, grindingly harder for one specific group of citizens — and the enforcement is a mess by design or by indifference, it barely matters which.Gessen reports only about 1,700 people got the letters, apparently a fraction of the Kansans who’d changed their markers. Some got the letter more than once. Others never got one. Some who tried to proactively comply couldn’t.And then there’s Kris Ripper, pulled over in May for not having her headlights on in the rain. An officer kept pressing her about why her license said male. She explained: Kansas law requires it. Nearly two months later she found out she’d been charged with driving without a valid license. Read that twice. She changed her ID to obey the law — and was then threatened with prosecution because the ID the law forced on her was supposedly invalid. The charge was eventually dropped, but the point stands.As a former cop, that scenario is a nightmare. Laws are supposed to tell people what they’re allowed to do. Officers are supposed to be able to understand what they’re enforcing. Nobody should need a lawyer in the passenger seat just to know whether their license is good.It’s absurd all the way to the topMeet Abi Boatman — a member of the Kansas House, and transgender. Which means the very building where she helps write the state’s laws has a bathroom problem for her. She uses the Capitol’s single-occupancy restroom, which doubles as a lactation room. During one session there was a call of the House and she missed it, because she was a floor away waiting for the one bathroom she’s allowed to use. A colleague then criticized her for being absent. Her answer was simple: she was using the only restroom the Legislature said she could. You could not write a sharper illustration of how ridiculous this gets.Except it stops being funny fast, because Kansas isn’t an outlier. Republican-run states have spent years ratcheting up restrictions on trans Americans, the Trump administration has made them a centerpiece of federal policy, and states are learning exactly how much of a person’s life you can control through the most boring machinery imaginable. A license. A birth certificate. A bathroom rule. A personnel policy. A form. A letter. That’s how government actually reaches into your life — not with tanks, with paperwork.Where I land, and where you should tooI don’t care where you sit on every argument about gender. You don’t have to understand someone else’s life or agree with them about anything. But there’s a floor we all ought to share: the government should not deliberately engineer someone’s ordinary existence into a daily obstacle course because a politician found them useful as a wedge.One person in this story called what’s unfolding a “state-created refugee crisis.” Groups in Colorado are now helping trans people relocate out of states where they no longer believe they can safely or practically live — one says it’s assisted hundreds, including people fleeing Kansas. But plenty can’t leave. They have jobs, families, kids, lives. And they shouldn’t have to.One more thing about Kansas. Less than ten minutes from the statehouse sits the old Monroe Elementary School — Brown v. Board of Education, the case that ended legal segregation in America’s schools. Kansas has been ground zero before for the question of who counts as a full citizen. It’s having that fight again.Nobody knows how this ends. Courts will weigh in. Elections will matter. Some of these laws may hold; others may fall. But don’t mistake this for another throwaway culture-war item. For the people getting those letters, the debate is finished. The state came to them, voided their identification, dictated which restroom they may enter, and handed strangers a financial incentive to enforce it. Some concluded the only sane move was to pack up and go.That’s not small government. That’s not freedom. And whatever your politics, when a government starts deciding one category of citizen should find everyday life intentionally harder just for being who they are, pay attention — because the day you’re fine with it happening to someone else is the day you lose the standing to be shocked when it comes for you.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comBrent Jindra pulled the lever for Donald Trump three separate times. He cheered the border crackdown. He called himself a MAGA patriot and meant it. When the president promised to haul away the people who had no right to be here, Jindra nodded along — because in his head, “those people” were always somebody else.Then he walked off a plane in California with his wife, and fifteen minutes later she was in cuffs.This keeps happening for a reasonWe’ve watched this exact movie run over and over: someone who backed the crackdown because they were sure they understood the target list discovers that government power doesn’t politely stay inside the box a campaign drew for it. Jindra just became the latest to learn it the hard way — in a terminal, in real time, watching it happen to the person he loves.His wife is Galina Bobreneva. She’s Russian, and she did not sneak in anywhere. She arrived legally on a tourist visa in 2021, extended it twice after Russia invaded Ukraine, and filed for asylum in 2022. She met Jindra in 2025. They fell for each other, married by December, and in April he filed to sponsor her for a marriage-based green card. The government took the application. She got fingerprinted. They bought a house in Cleveland and started planning the move.Read that again: this is not someone dodging the authorities. The government had her prints, her paperwork, her address. It knew exactly who and where she was.Fifteen minutesThe trip was supposed to be a birthday gift — wine country for Bobreneva’s 40th. On July 13 they flew San Francisco to Burbank, where Jindra also had client meetings. They got off the plane. A young guy in a brown hoodie walked up and told her she’d been picked for “secondary screening.” For a beat they thought it was a scam. Then the ICE badge came out.They took her into a back room. Jindra got their immigration lawyer on the phone immediately; the agents wouldn’t talk to him. Inside, Bobreneva was told she’d overstayed her visa. She explained the pending green card, showed her documents, and kept insisting there’d been a mistake. Then the cuffs came out. She asked if she could hand her husband her engagement ring and jewelry before they walked her off.And that was it. Jindra stood in an airport and watched federal agents load his wife into an unmarked car with no idea where it was headed. His words afterward: a U.S. citizen just watched his wife get dragged away and didn’t know where she was going.The legal fight — and why it isn’t the real storyThere’s a genuine dispute here, and I’m not going to fake being an immigration lawyer to settle it from a desk. DHS says Bobreneva overstayed her visa and was therefore here illegally, and that a pending green card application doesn’t by itself confer legal status. Her attorney says she was never out of status. That’ll grind through the courts.But the courtroom question isn’t the part that matters most. Here’s what matters: she has no criminal record. She came in legally. She had an active case. She married a citizen who was actively sponsoring her, and the government had accepted that petition. And according to the New York Times, people in precisely that position — legal-process immigrants with expired visas and open cases — have become a whole new hunting ground for the administration.Earlier administrations mostly left those people alone. This one wants numbers — a target somewhere around 2,000 arrests a day. And once you set a quota that big, the math takes over.“Mass” was never a metaphorThis is the part Jindra didn’t think through, and I don’t say that to dunk on him — I say it because it’s the whole lesson. He told the Times the “allure” of the campaign was about illegal entries and criminals, and that there was never a mandate to “turn the barrel of the gun” on people who came legally.But that’s not how enforcement power works. You don’t get to hand the government an enormous machine and then personally decide where it stops.Trump didn’t campaign on hiring thousands of agents to sit around waiting for murderers. He promised mass deportation. Mass means mass. When you demand thousands of arrests every single day, you run out of violent gang members almost immediately — there simply aren’t enough to hit the quota. So the net widens. It has to. And eventually it closes around a Russian asylum-seeker with a pending green card who was in California for her birthday. As Jindra put it, his wife didn’t jump a wall or swim a river — she walked in through Trump’s “beautiful, big front door.” She got 16 days in federal custody anyway.What 16 days looked likeThe first night, Bobreneva says, she slept on the floor of a cold basement holding cell in downtown LA under a foil blanket, and watched an elderly diabetic woman beg for insulin. About 18 hours later she says she was shackled at the wrists, waist, and ankles, loaded into a van, and hauled through the heat to the detention center in Adelanto. “I felt like a piece of meat, not like a human.”At Adelanto she described the lights that never went off, radios crackling all night, filthy conditions, and roughly 120 women sharing seven showers — four of them working. She said clean water was scarce and sick detainees struggled to get care. The GEO Group, which runs the place, pointed questions to ICE; DHS strongly disputes the conditions claims and says detainees get proper food, water, and medical treatment.She spent her 40th birthday in there. Not the hotel suite and the three vineyards and the driver they’d booked — a cell, sharing commissary chocolate with Russian-speaking women from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Armenia. She got a bond hearing after more than two weeks and walked out on July 29. Bond: $35,000. Plus an ankle monitor.The archetype problemHere’s why this lands harder than one immigration case. Americans think about enforcement in cartoons. Politician says “illegal immigrant,” you picture someone slipping across the desert. Says “criminal alien,” you picture a gang tattoo. Promises mass deportation, and supporters picture those guys getting removed — not their coworker, not their neighbor, and definitely not their wife.Jindra was a MAGA patriot right up until the cartoon walked out of the frame and became the woman he married. Now he says they’re living in fear in their own country. And Bobreneva said the line I can’t get out of my head: “I never thought that it was so easy to take freedom from anyone.”Yeah. It is. That’s the entire reason civil liberties, due process, and oversight exist — and it’s exactly why you should think hard before you cheer a politician promising to point government power at people you’ve decided you don’t like. Government doesn’t run on vibes and good intentions. It runs on statutes, quotas, databases, warrants, handcuffs, and human beings making calls about other human beings. Build the machine, and the machine gets used. It doesn’t stop to ask who deserves it.It’s not overBobreneva is out, but she’s wearing the ankle monitor, boxed into a limited radius, with a case still pending and a first court date October 22 — and ICE has already told her to check back in September. After her release the couple went to the beach, and Jindra joked that his wife was enjoying her freedom. “All 75-mile radius of it.”So here’s the takeaway, and it’s not complicated. You can want a secure border. You can want the laws enforced. You can want serious criminals with no right to be here removed. None of that requires you to switch off your judgment about how that power actually gets used — because it will not always be aimed where you assumed.Brent Jindra spent years certain the crackdown was meant for somebody else. Then he watched his wife vanish into an unmarked vehicle, and the abstraction became a person in about fifteen minutes.That’s the thing about handing government a weapon this big. It’s a lot easier to applaud when you’re sure it’s pointed at someone else.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comIf you want a clean demonstration of exactly what “standards” mean in the Republican Party right now, here it is.Not long ago, Republican leaders were sounding the alarm to Texas voters about a congressional candidate named Brandon Herrera. Too extreme, they said. GOP-aligned groups poured millions into excavating his record and putting his greatest hits in front of voters — the Nazi jokes, the crack about veteran suicide, the whole ugly pile. Trump was against him. Mike Johnson was against him.Then the Republican incumbent dropped out. And overnight, Mike Johnson discovered that Brandon Herrera is the “common sense” choice.Who this actually isIf the name’s new to you: Herrera is a 30-year-old gun YouTuber with more than four million subscribers, now the Republican nominee in a giant West Texas district that runs from near San Antonio almost to El Paso. Online he’s “The AK Guy.” He owns a company that restores historical firearms, films himself reviewing and shooting weapons, and built his following on a deliberately offensive, middle-finger-to-the-establishment style of humor.And when I say offensive, I’m not talking about a slightly cringe tweet somebody unearthed from 2011.He’s joked about a Nazi-era submachine gun being the “original ghetto blaster” and “Hitler’s street sweeper.” He’s owned and shown off a 1939 English-language copy of Mein Kampf — which he says is part of a historical book collection. Democrats have passed around clips of him joking about Nazi atrocities against Jews. There’s an old bit making light of veterans who die by suicide. And a 2022 video resurfaced in which he used graphic, sexualized language to go after Shannon Watts — the woman who founded Moms Demand Action after Sandy Hook.Herrera says these are jokes. He flatly denies being antisemitic, and an Orthodox Jewish Second Amendment activist who’s known him for a decade told the Times the notion that he’s an actual Nazi is “preposterous.” Herrera also argues there’s a gap between the provocateur he plays online and how he’d behave as a congressman. Fine — you can decide for yourself whether you buy that.Here’s the genuinely funny partYou know who was hammering Herrera with all of this before the Democrats got around to it?Republicans.Herrera first challenged GOP Congressman Tony Gonzales in 2024. During that primary, the Republican Jewish Coalition spent millions spotlighting his material. One ad zeroed in on the veteran-suicide joke and landed on a line that couldn’t be more definitive: “Fools like Brandon Herrera who mock veterans do not belong in Congress or Texas.”Does. Not. Belong. In. Congress. Hard to be clearer than that.Then Herrera ran at Gonzales again this cycle. Same story — the establishment didn’t want him. Johnson opposed him. Trump opposed him. Gonzales and his allies dumped millions into painting him as an extremist.And then the ground shifted. A sexual-misconduct scandal drove Gonzales out of the race and, eventually, out of Congress. Suddenly the man the party had spent a fortune branding as too dangerous for the House was the party’s nominee.So the GOP did what the GOP does now. It fell in line. Last month Johnson flew to San Antonio, stood next to Herrera in a barbecue joint, and told voters he was the “common sense” pick — the same guy his party had just spent millions trying to keep out of Washington.The story isn’t the jokes. It’s the flip.I’m not going to burn a page pretending to clutch my pearls that a YouTuber whose entire brand is saying outrageous things has said outrageous things. That’s the least surprising fact in this whole saga.The part worth your attention is watching the Republican Party prove, one more time, that its moral outrage evaporates the instant power is on the line. When Herrera was a threat to a sitting Republican, his jokes were disqualifying. The moment the party needed him to hold a seat, those same jokes became “common sense.” Nothing about Herrera changed. He didn’t recant. He didn’t apologize. He didn’t move an inch. Only the political math changed.And they care this much for a reason. On paper this is red turf — Trump carried it by 15 in 2024. But Herrera’s nomination has Democrats sniffing an opening, and they’ve added the district to their target list. His opponent is Katy Padilla Stout, who’s making his online history the center of the race. She says she jumped in specifically because she didn’t want a gun influencer representing a district that includes Uvalde.Yeah. That Uvalde — where nineteen children and two teachers were murdered at Robb Elementary in 2022. Herrera is essentially a gun-rights absolutist who opposes new restrictions, including red-flag laws. Padilla Stout says her own family hunts and owns firearms but backs age limits and mental-health checks.To be fair about the other side of itNone of that guarantees a Democratic win. It’s still a Republican-leaning seat. Herrera says the voters he meets care a lot more about groceries and gas than videos he made years ago, and some Republicans who’ve met him in person insist he’s more measured than his internet character. Maybe the district decides that’s good enough. That’s how this is supposed to work — it’s still, in theory, a democracy.But Republicans are clearly nervous. Some moderates quoted by the Times are openly weighing a vote for the Democrat because they think Herrera’s too far right. And Herrera, to his credit, isn’t pretending to be somebody he’s not. He says he doesn’t need to moderate. Honestly? I almost respect that. At least the guy isn’t faking it.The people faking it are the Republican leaders standing next to him — the ones who need you to forget what they were saying a few months ago, and who now have to explain how a candidate goes from “too extreme for Congress” to “common sense” without changing a single position.This is the whole party nowIt’s not a Herrera quirk. It’s become the defining reflex of the GOP in the Trump era: there’s always a line — right up until crossing it becomes useful.Trump insults your wife? You endorse him. Trump humiliates you in public? You confirm his nominees. Trump ends your career? You still fall in line. Your own candidate makes jokes you call unacceptable? Spend millions attacking him — then, when he wins the nomination, book the flight to Texas and go campaign for him.That’s why it’s getting impossible to take Republican condemnations seriously. If something is genuinely disqualifying, it should stay disqualifying when the circumstances change. So what changed here? Did the joke change? Did Herrera apologize? Did the party decide its own attacks were unfair? Or did they just need the seat?We both know the answer. And the seat matters, because control of the House could come down to a handful of districts — which is how you end up with the Speaker of the House in a shotgun marriage to an anti-establishment gun influencer whose entire brand is built on trashing establishment politicians exactly like Mike Johnson.Maybe Herrera wins. Maybe the voters there genuinely don’t care about his channel and agree with him on guns and the border and the economy, and they send him to Washington. That’s their call to make. But nobody gets to rewrite the history. Republicans knew precisely who Brandon Herrera was. They watched the videos. They combed the jokes. They spent millions telling Texans it mattered — that this man didn’t belong in Congress. Then the circumstances flipped and all of it vanished.That’s not principle. It’s not standards. And it sure as hell isn’t “common sense.” It’s a party deciding the only thing that outranks who you are is whether there’s an R next to your name when the votes get counted.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comI’ve got one question for Hunter Biden, and I mean it without a drop of sarcasm: what the hell are you doing?I’ve been watching his media tour, and honestly, a lot of it I liked. After years of being narrated by everyone but himself — his addiction, his relationships, his finances, the laptop, the photos, every humiliating frame of his worst years plastered across the internet — of course the guy finally wants to grab the mic. Of course he wants to say: you’ve all spent a decade telling the country who I am; now I’ll tell you myself. I’d want the same thing.And he’s committed to it. Per the Wall Street Journal, he’s sat with everyone from Gavin Newsom to Benny Blanco. He’s got a Substack north of 65,000 subscribers. He’s talking about recovery, his father’s presidency, the pardon, the money, the family, the people he thinks treated all of them like garbage.But he’s also sat down with Tucker Carlson. With Candace Owens. And then, somehow, Hunter Biden ended up in a motel room across from Nick Fuentes.That’s where he lost me.The idea is fine. The messenger he chose is not.I understand the argument, or at least the version of it Hunter seems to be making. The country’s split into sealed-off bubbles. Nobody listens to anybody they disagree with. Maybe if we actually faced each other and talked, we’d find the person across the table isn’t the monster we pictured. That’s a genuinely good instinct. I believe in it. I do it constantly.Nick Fuentes is not the guy you use to prove the point.We’re not talking about a Republican congressman who wants lower taxes. Not a conservative voter in Ohio. Not even some die-hard MAGA guy who’s convinced the 2020 election was stolen. We’re talking about Nick Fuentes — a man who has praised Hitler, denied the Holocaust, pushed racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories, showed up at Charlottesville, and talked openly about turning America into an authoritarian Christian state.And that’s not just me disliking his politics. Last year dozens of U.S. senators put forward a resolution that named Fuentes outright as a white supremacist leader and Holocaust denier and laid out years of his own words. He isn’t hiding any of it. So what, exactly, do we learn by treating him like he’s just the far end of a normal political spectrum?Here’s the trap: Fuentes needs Hunter far more than Hunter needs FuentesSit with the math for a second.Hunter Biden is the son of a former Democratic president — one of the most recognizable political names in the country. Love him or hate him, he walks into any room carrying the weight of someone who’s lived at the dead center of American public life.Nick Fuentes has spent years trying to crawl out of the fringe and into the mainstream.So when Hunter sits across from him — jokes with him, spars with him, hunts for common ground with him, treats him as one more voice in the great American conversation — Fuentes collects something he could never buy: normalcy. He gets to look like just another spicy political commentator instead of what he is.And this isn’t hypothetical. Tucker Carlson already ran this play. When Tucker interviewed Fuentes, the blowback didn’t come only from the left — plenty of conservatives, including Republican senators and right-leaning writers, tore into him, and it kicked off a real fight on the right about whether a Holocaust denier belongs anywhere near mainstream conservatism. Now here comes Hunter Biden — the son of the president those two spent years savaging — helping finish the makeover. You may think you’re confronting these people. They think they’re laundering themselves through you.And why is it always the worst person in the room?If the actual goal is understanding the other side, Hunter has tens of millions of people he could call.Talk to the Trump voter who watched his plant close. Talk to a conservative cop. Talk to an evangelical pastor, a Republican vet, somebody who pulled the lever for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024. Talk to a young guy who got swallowed by the MAGA corner of the internet and ask him how it happened. Hell, talk to an elected Republican who actually has to stand behind these policies. Those conversations might teach us something real.But Fuentes, Carlson, Owens? There’s this rot in the media where extremism becomes interesting precisely because it’s extreme, so the most outrageous person keeps getting the invitation while the 70 million ordinary people who simply disagree with you never get asked a single question.Why I actually understand the impulse — probably better than mostThe Journal quotes people close to Hunter describing him as liberated. The family’s out of the White House. The old constraints are gone. He spent years watching strangers autopsy the darkest stretch of his life, and now he’s doing it “on my terms, not yours.”I feel that one in my bones.Most people know me from the worst day of my life. A life that, ever since, keeps getting flattened into a single afternoon — the one where the whole world watched me, in vivid detail, clawing to stay alive, powerless and alone in a crowd of rioters who wanted me dead.People still assume that because I was at the Capitol on January 6th I was Capitol Police. No matter how many times I say it, most of them never register that I spent nearly two decades as a deputized plainclothes narcotics officer — undercover work, major cases, helping federal agencies go after some of the biggest drug-trafficking operations in modern American history. To most pundits and most of the political establishment I’m still just “the January 6th guy,” wheeled out whenever a January 6th story comes up, like some sick Groundhog Day where I get to relive the worst trauma of my life for the millionth time. You would not believe how hard it is to get anyone to see you as more than a single-issue trauma victim.And because what happened to me became a political football, I’ve eaten countless death threats aimed at me and my family, gotten trolled by the right on a loop, been accused of every conspiratorial thing you can imagine — when all I ever wanted was to keep being a cop, a dad, a friend, and otherwise a blissfully anonymous nobody.So yeah. When Hunter Biden talks about being reduced to a caricature of his worst moment, I don’t just nod along politely. I get it.But here’s the line I won’t let him blurHe’s an addict in recovery. He’s talked openly about smoking crack in motel rooms, torching relationships, nearly ending himself — and then watching the whole ordeal repackaged as political entertainment. So maybe when he looks at people the public has branded irredeemable, some reflex in him thinks: I know what it’s like to be written off.That’s human. It might even be decent. But there is a canyon between addiction and ideology. Addiction is something that happens to a person. White supremacy is something a person chooses to believe. You don’t help somebody recover from Holocaust denial by treating it like one more colorful point of view.And to be clear — I want Hunter to succeed. Genuinely. He survived the thing that kills most people. He’s rebuilt real pieces of his life. He’s willing to say out loud what most of us would spend our lives burying. There may be something valuable he can bring to this country’s conversation.But if you’re going to build your second act on radical honesty and talking to people no one else will, you’d better learn to spot when you’re the one being used. Because Carlson and Fuentes know precisely what Hunter Biden is worth to them. A photo is valuable. A friendly exchange is valuable. A two-hour hang where everybody laughs and argues and lands on “we’re all just Americans trying to understand each other” is priceless — because the next time somebody says Fuentes sits outside the bounds of decent politics, he points to the former Democratic president’s son beside him and says: apparently not.An open invitation, HunterI’m all for talking to people you disagree with. We need more of it, not less. So if you’re watching this — reach out to my team, name a time and place, and I’ll sit down with you myself. I’ll say my piece, you say yours. I mean it.But this particular strategy — cozying up to the far right in the name of dialogue — is dangerous. Disagreement and extremism are not the same animal. You don’t heal a fractured country by pretending every idea has earned an equal seat at the table. And you sure as hell don’t beat extremists by helping them scrub the very history that made them extremists.Hunter says he’s finally speaking on his own terms. Good. But you’d better figure out whose terms everyone else in that room is playing by — or you’re going to get played, and the whole country eats the cost.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comLet me tell you what a badge is not. It is not a lifetime membership card that entitles you to permanent public trust. It’s not a credential you earn once and then cash in forever on YouTube. And it is definitely not a substitute for knowing what you’re talking about.Brandon Tatum has built an entire career pretending otherwise.First, credit where it’s dueTatum’s rise is genuinely a story. He played football at Arizona, didn’t make the NFL, and joined the Tucson Police Department — where, by his own account, he worked SWAT, did field training, got crisis-intervention certified. Real cop stuff. Then in 2016, still on the force, he went to a Trump rally, posted a video about it, and the thing went off like a rocket. Fox & Friends booked him. He told the country Trump was the guy who’d make America great again. He left policing, plugged into Turning Point USA, and never looked back. Today TPUSA lists him as a contributor and specifically sells his law-enforcement background as giving him “credibility and insight” on policing.Millions of people follow him now. And to be clear about what my problem is not: it’s not that he’s conservative. There are conservative cops I respect. It’s not that he backs Trump. Believe whatever you want.My problem is narrower and it’s this: he uses the authority of the phrase “Officer Tatum” to dress up partisan opinion as objective law-enforcement analysis. The badge isn’t part of the résumé. The badge is the product.And credibility built on a badge only works until the moment someone asks you a real question.Enter Nancy Grace, and the question he couldn’t answerYou may know the Nolan Wells case. Eighteen years old, disappeared after a July Fourth boat trip to Horn Island, Mississippi, with a group of friends. His body was recovered later. The circumstances are unresolved, the theories are flying, and social media has been busy trying the whole thing before investigators have finished doing their jobs.Tatum didn’t cover that story from a distance. He inserted himself into it — traveled to Mississippi, interviewed one of the young men who’d been with Wells, and teased it to his audience by promising the footage would “shock” them and that people were going to owe these boys an apology.Stop there for a second. That is not how anybody presenting himself as the seasoned investigator in the room approaches an open death case. You don’t announce the verdict in the trailer.But the wheels really came off with Nancy Grace. Tatum had been leaning on lie-detector testing as proof the young men were credible. Grace — who does this for a living — pressed him on a simple point: what test, exactly, did they take?And the confident former cop suddenly got very vague. Because it turned out this wasn’t a standard polygraph at all. It was a voice-stress analysis. And Tatum’s move was to wave off the difference as basically semantics.No. It is not semantics. And any cop holding himself out as an investigative authority should be embarrassed to say it was.Here’s the part that should end the conversationSet aside the polygraph-versus-voice-stress fumble. Pretend, for the sake of argument, these guys had sat for a real, textbook polygraph and “passed.”That still wouldn’t prove they were telling the truth. That’s not a hot take. That’s the first thing anyone serious learns about the machine.A polygraph measures your body — breathing, heart activity, sweat — and then a human being interprets those squiggles. There is no truth sensor inside it. Courts have fought over its reliability for decades; plenty of jurisdictions bar it or fence it in tightly. The Supreme Court, in United States v. Scheffer, flatly recognized there’s no scientific consensus that polygraphs are reliable and upheld a rule keeping them out of military trials entirely. The Justice Department itself has warned prosecutors that this evidence can be unreliable and misleading and is often best kept away from juries.So “they passed a lie detector” is not a fact that settles anything. A former cop should know that cold. That’s Polygraphs 101, and he flunked it on live television.Why this is bigger than one bad interviewLook at the branding again, because it’s the whole game. He isn’t billed as “Brandon Tatum, commentator.” He’s Officer Tatum. The bio leads with the badge. The organizations that promote him lead with the badge. Every booking introduces him with the badge. And the implicit message to millions of people is: this man understands law enforcement, so when he tells you what happened in a case, weight his judgment accordingly.Sometimes that’s fair! Real experience is worth something. But experience curdles into something dangerous the second you use it to launder speculation and partisan takes into the appearance of professional authority.And the conservative media machine knows exactly what it has in a guy like this. Former cop. Black. Conservative. Aggressively pro-Trump. That’s a five-tool player for a movement that keeps getting hammered on race and policing. Now every criticism of cops can be met with the Black former cop. Every accusation of racism can be met with the Black conservative. Every law-enforcement controversy gets Officer Tatum on stage explaining why the right was correct the whole time.I’m not saying he doesn’t believe it. Maybe he believes every word. People are allowed to change their politics; Black Americans are allowed to be Republicans; cops are allowed to support Trump. That’s not the argument. The argument is that movements love a validator — and a validator who happens to carry a badge is worth a fortune. You can build a very lucrative career being that person. He has.What credibility actually costsHere’s the standard, and I hold myself to it because I have to.When I talk about police use of force, people don’t hear some guy with a channel. They know I did this job for two decades. That doesn’t buy me a pass — it buys me an obligation. To be more careful, not less. When the evidence helps someone I can’t stand, I have to say so. When a cop is in the wrong, I have to say the cop is in the wrong. When I don’t know what happened, I have to say I don’t know.That’s the whole difference between an analyst and an influencer. An analyst’s job is to help you understand the evidence. An influencer’s job is to keep you watching. Tatum has gotten extraordinarily good at the second one — millions of followers, a radio show, TPUSA, Fox hits, a media company — all resting on those two words.Good for him. But a former badge doesn’t obligate the rest of us to permanent deference. So the next time somebody tells you to trust their conclusion because they used to be a cop, don’t look at the title under their name.Watch how they handle the evidence. That’s where the truth is — and it’s exactly where Officer Tatum came up empty.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comFor a decade now, we’ve been playing the same game with Trump world. We scan the room for the secret adult. The one who privately thinks this is insane. The one who’s quietly uncomfortable and, any day now, is going to step in and restrain the person with real power.We are almost always wrong. And the newest place we’ve been telling ourselves that fairy tale is JD Vance’s marriage.The story we wanted to believeYou know the version. Here’s Usha Vance — daughter of Indian immigrants, summa cum laude at Yale, a Cambridge master’s, clerkships for Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts, a real legal career — standing next to a man who went from privately calling Donald Trump “America’s Hitler” to becoming maybe the most aggressive MAGA enforcer in the country.And a lot of people looked at that mismatch and decided she must secretly hate all of it. She’s trapped. She’s biting her tongue. She’s the moderate hostage.A new Vanity Fair profile takes that comforting little story and puts a pin in it. One of the Vances’ own Yale Law classmates says it flat out: “It’s patronizing to say that she’s been silenced. She has chosen this.”She wasn’t dragged into the transformation. She was there for the construction.Here’s the part the “trapped wife” narrative can’t survive.When JD Vance showed up at Yale Law in 2010, he wasn’t the polished operator you see now. He was a kid from Middletown, Ohio, raised largely by his grandparents, dropped into an elite world he didn’t have the map for. Usha had the map. And according to Vanity Fair, she became something like his guide to that world.JD himself has written about her teaching him which fork to use at formal dinners. Friends say she literally kept a spreadsheet — things she thought he should try that would make him more cultured, more polished, more able to move through rooms he hadn’t grown up in. It sounds charming. It’s also telling. She was building the operating system, and he was a very eager student.Then Hillbilly Elegy hit, JD got famous as the guy who could “explain” working-class Trump voters to the coastal set, and — this is the part everyone forgets — he didn’t even like Trump. Reprehensible. An idiot. “America’s Hitler,” he told a former roommate.And then he decided he wanted power. Peter Thiel wrote the checks. Trump gave the blessing. The Never Trumper became the warrior. We’ve picked that hypocrisy apart plenty of times. What this profile adds is the question nobody was asking out loud: where was Usha for all of it?Their own classmates started a group chat about itThat’s not me being cute. Vanity Fair reports that members of the Vances’ Yale Law cohort were so floored watching this couple’s political metamorphosis that they spun up a private Signal group just to compare notes.And you can see why it scrambled their brains. Usha was once described as “leftish.” Her mother worked on diversity initiatives at UC San Diego. Usha herself worked at a firm that publicly bragged about hiring women and underrepresented lawyers — while her husband was busy making the war on DEI and “wokeness” the spine of his entire political identity.There even seem to be personal lines. A friend once told The Washington Post that Usha was disturbed by Trump’s incitement of January 6th. JD went the other direction entirely — defending Trump’s conduct, attacking the investigation, hammering Mike Pence for certifying the election.So what happened between those two people? Honestly, we don’t fully know. Usha turned down Vanity Fair’s interview request, and nobody should pretend to narrate the inside of a stranger’s marriage. But here’s the thing: we don’t need the private thoughts. We have the public choices.The public record of a woman with agencyShe helped prep him for the vice-presidential debate. When the “childless cat ladies” comments blew up in his face, she didn’t hide — she went out and publicly defended him, insisting people just needed the “context.” She walked away from her legal career the moment Trump put JD on the ticket. She’s stood at his side as he became one of the load-bearing figures of MAGA.And she told NBC something revealing earlier this year: when something’s bothering JD, “that’s when I come into the picture.” She admitted she doesn’t always agree with him or the administration — but that everyone around them knows how deeply she’s invested in his success.That’s not a hostage. That’s a partner with agency. And honestly, treating a 40-year-old Supreme Court–clerk attorney like a helpless prop standing mutely behind her husband is its own kind of insult. She’s brilliant, disciplined, ambitious. She knows exactly what she’s doing.The Fuentes line — and the choice not to draw itHere’s the ugliest wrinkle, because Usha has personally been a target of the exact forces her husband’s movement has fed.White nationalist Nick Fuentes went after her for being Indian American — sneering about how JD could champion “white identity” while married to an Indian woman. If there were ever a moment where you’d expect JD Vance to draw a hard line, it’s an open racist attacking his wife.Instead, when MAGA later fought about whether to push people like Fuentes out, JD came down against “purity tests.” At a Turning Point USA event he said he wasn’t carrying around a list of conservatives to denounce, and that the movement should welcome pretty much anyone who loves America.And one of the couple’s Yale classmates read that decision and drew the obvious conclusion: Usha must have been fine with it. The logic is brutal in its simplicity — JD is fiercely protective of his family. If she’d demanded he condemn Fuentes, he would have. As the classmate put it: “The choice not to criticize Nick Fuentes and people like him in the Republican Party — that is a choice.”Disagreement isn’t resistance. Silence isn’t opposition.That word — choice — is the whole thing.JD chose to trade everything he’d said about Trump for a shot at power. And Usha has made choices too. She chose to leave her career. She chose to campaign. She chose to defend him on camera. She chooses, still, to stand beside him as he leads a movement whose fringe aims racist attacks at her personally.None of that requires her to agree with every word out of his mouth. Married people aren’t a hive mind, and she clearly doesn’t share every MAGA belief. But at some point the interesting question stops being what does she privately think and becomes what is she publicly willing to enable.Because that’s the trap in the story we keep telling ourselves. We’ve spent a decade hunting for the secret moderate inside Trump world — the one who’ll finally apply the brakes. Maybe Usha Vance really is more complicated than the movement. More moderate than her husband. Maybe she genuinely can’t stand some of the people orbiting him.But disagreement isn’t resistance. And silence isn’t opposition. When you’re helping someone climb, defending them when they’re hit, prepping them for the big stage, and standing beside them while they carry a movement you supposedly have reservations about — the gap between what you believe and what you’re building quietly closes to nothing.She’s not trapped. She’s not naïve. And according to the people who knew her before any of us had heard the name JD Vance, she is definitely not powerless.She helped build this man. And whatever comes next, she’ll be right there beside him, cutting the ribbon.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comPicture a standard pair of black patrol gloves. Now picture a switch on the wrist. Flip it, press the glove against someone’s skin, and it sends an electrical pulse through them — enough pain to make them stop whatever they’re doing and comply.The Trump administration wants to put thousands of these on the hands of ICE agents, at a cost of up to $20 million.They’re called the G.L.O.V.E. — Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter — made by a Kentucky outfit called Compliant Technologies. Per the AP, ICE is chasing what could be a no-bid contract worth $10 to $20 million, running potentially into 2027. And the sheer size of that buy tells you everything: this isn’t a niche gadget for a handful of tactical guys. AP reports ICE may be looking to strap these onto most or all of its officers.Let me be honest about where I start on thisI’m a former cop, and I’m not reflexively against less-lethal tools. Give me a choice between an officer shooting somebody and an officer using a device that causes temporary pain without lasting injury, and I’ll take the less-lethal option every single time. That’s not a close call.And that’s essentially the administration’s pitch. Border czar Tom Homan went on Fox and framed the gloves as one more rung on the ladder before deadly force — cops can’t leap from zero to a hundred, so slot this in alongside pepper spray and Tasers as another way to end a fight without a bullet. ICE says it’s still writing policy and training, so the gloves aren’t hitting the street tomorrow.Fine. On paper, that’s a real argument. Here’s why it falls apart in practice.A less-lethal weapon is exactly as safe as three things: the rules for when you’re allowed to use it, the training of the person wearing it, and the accountability that lands afterward if they screw up.And we’re talking about ICE.This is not the agency you hand an invisible weaponRight now, ICE is already buried in use-of-force questions. According to numbers the agency gave Congress last month, there have been 56 excessive-force complaints since the administration began its crackdown. Out of all 56, lawmakers say exactly one officer was even referred for possible discipline — with no confirmation that discipline actually happened. At least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration agents during this push, and recent fatal shootings in Maine and Texas have only sharpened the questions about training and oversight.So this may not be the ideal moment to hand every agent a weapon that’s practically impossible to see.And that invisibility is the crux of it. Point a Taser at someone and you can see the Taser. Deploy pepper spray and there’s residue and reaction. Swing a baton and the bodycam catches it. But this thing looks like a glove. An agent flips a switch on the wrist and delivers the current through plain skin contact — and AP reports that, unlike a Taser, it doesn’t leave burn marks or contact wounds. No probe, no barb, no trace.That is precisely why civil-rights advocates are alarmed, and they’re right to be. Pain compliance has always demanded hard limits. You don’t get to hurt somebody because they’re irritating you. You don’t get to hurt somebody because they mouthed off. You don’t get to inflict pain as punishment because your ego took a hit.Even the company that makes them says all of thisHere’s the part that should stop everybody cold: the manufacturer’s own guidance says the device shouldn’t be used as punishment, shouldn’t be used for torture or horseplay, and shouldn’t be used just because somebody’s being verbally defiant. It even warns against using the gloves on high-risk groups — small children, pregnant women, the elderly, people with severe disabilities.Now think about who ICE actually runs into on a daily basis. Families. Pregnant women. Older people. People with disabilities. People who don’t speak English. People who may genuinely not understand the command an agent is barking at them. And the agent laying hands on them might be wearing a glove that can shock.What could go wrong? We don’t have to guess.The Kentucky caseAP found a pending lawsuit over a 43-year-old man who died in 2024 after an encounter at a Kentucky jail where these gloves were used.I’m going to be careful here, because the lawsuit does not establish that the gloves killed him. But according to court records AP reviewed, the man was allegedly shocked 27 times with the gloves and another 13 times with a Taser. An internal investigation found two of those glove applications ran 45 seconds and 99 seconds.The manufacturer’s recommended maximum is 15 seconds.That same internal review concluded the applications inflicted unnecessary pain and raised the risk of serious medical complications. AP found two other suits alleging glove-related injuries; both were dismissed.And that’s the whole ballgame right there. You can write the most beautiful use-of-force policy in the history of law enforcement. The weapon can’t read it. The officer can. And the easier you make it to inflict pain, the more the oversight has to carry the weight.The oversight is going the wrong directionWhich brings me to the timing. ICE is rolling out body cameras nationwide, and that’s genuinely good — I’ve said for years that cameras protect the public and the cops, because they show when someone lies about an officer and they show when an officer blows it.But ICE’s new policy says footage from serious incidents gets released promptly only when leadership decides it’s in the agency’s “best interests.” They can delay it. They can withhold it.So put the two pieces together: a weapon that hurts people without leaving marks, handed out at the same moment the agency is reserving broad discretion over whether the public ever sees the footage of how it was used. That’s not an argument to ban the technology outright. It’s an argument to get some real answers before you drop $20 million on it.The questions you ask before you buy, not afterWhat counts as enough resistance to justify activating it? How long can an agent hold it on someone? How many times? Does every single activation get automatically logged and reported as a use of force? Does the device keep its own electronic record? Will a supervisor review every deployment? What happens the first time it’s used on somebody who turns out to be a U.S. citizen? What happens when the person doesn’t speak English and never understood the order they’re supposedly refusing? And when an agent breaks the policy — who, exactly, is holding them accountable?None of those are anti-cop questions. Those are the questions. They’re what you ask before you put a new weapon in anyone’s hands.And stop calling it “de-escalation”The company brands this a “conductive distraction and de-escalation device.” Words matter, so let’s be precise. De-escalation is talking somebody down. Creating distance. Slowing things. Calling for backup. Giving a person the room to comply on their own.Electricity delivered through your hand is force. Maybe justified force. Maybe, in some situations, meaningfully safer than the alternatives. But it is force, and you should call it what it is.Because there are absolutely scenarios where I can see the value — somebody actively fighting officers, somebody lunging for a weapon, somebody violently resisting inside a jail where the alternative is five guys dogpiling him or pepper spray in a closed room. Study it. Train for it. Write strict policy around it.But ICE isn’t mainly a corrections agency managing violent inmates in a controlled building. Its agents are increasingly working parking lots, job sites, homes, and streets, as part of the biggest immigration enforcement operation in modern American history. That changes the entire equation.Former acting ICE director John Sandweg warned the gloves are simply too easy to misuse on someone who poses no real threat. And a law professor who studies use of force raised the most human concern of all: when the weapon is literally attached to your hand, do you start reaching for it before trying anything gentler? That’s not cynicism. That’s behavior. If the tool’s already on, you’re more likely to use the tool.“Trust us” is not an accountability systemWhen you’re talking about government agents with the power to detain people, load them into vehicles, and remove them from the country, “trust us” doesn’t cut it.Maybe ICE eventually proves these gloves reduce injuries. Maybe they head off shootings. Maybe they spare somebody from getting slammed onto concrete. If the evidence shows that — and shows it’s safe — I’ll listen.But you build the safeguards first. Require a report every time the electrical function fires. Require the bodycam to be rolling. Set hard limits on duration and repeat shocks. Make misuse a disciplinary offense with teeth. And release the footage when something goes wrong.The question was never whether cops should have tools to safely control genuinely dangerous people. Of course they should. The question is whether we’re about to give thousands of federal agents the power to inflict invisible electric pain with a touch — and then ask the country to just trust they’ll use it right.Given everything we’ve watched from ICE this past year, that is one hell of a lot of trust to ask for.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comThere’s a specific kind of bodycam video I can’t look away from. Not the violent ones. The ones where somebody who has spent years certain that the police are only ever a problem for other people suddenly hears the words “you’re under arrest” — and it’s about them.This is one of those. And it’s a hell of a thing to watch.The stopMeet Lisa Fleischmann. She’s 53, lives in Illinois, and owns a business called the Trump Truth Store — shirts, flags, mugs, posters, the whole MAGA merch catalog. By her own account, she “woke up” after the 2020 election and started a journey to “seek the truth.” She’s said, out loud and proudly, that part of what she loves about Trump is that he “triggers people.”On May 26, police near Carpentersville pulled her over for a plate problem — no front plate, rear plate bent or blocked. Routine. Boring. The kind of stop that ends with a ticket ninety-nine times out of a hundred.It went sideways in about ten seconds. She didn’t have her license. Didn’t have another ID. And instead of just giving her name, she started interrogating the officer about whether he was even allowed to pull her over. At one point he tells her, flatly, that she’s wasting his time — and he’s got all day to waste hers right back.Then they run her name. And this stops being a traffic ticket, because there’s an active warrant out of DuPage County.What the warrant was actually aboutHere’s the backstory the footage doesn’t give you. Court records reported by local outlets show Fleischmann got cited in late 2024 for driving without a valid license and some related violations. She went to court on it more than once — then missed a hearing in December 2025, and a judge did what judges do when you don’t show up: issued a warrant. She disputes how the whole thing was handled and says she thought she’d cleared it up.Maybe she did think that. Doesn’t matter on the side of the road. As far as those two officers know, DuPage County is telling them the warrant is valid. Which means they don’t have a choice anymore. She’s getting arrested.Watch the cops, not just the meltdownI’ve made a lot of arrests. I’ve been on the other end of a lot of arrests. So trust me when I say these officers were being patient.They tell her she’s under arrest. They tell her why. They walk her through what’s about to happen. One of them literally says, “I’m begging you — please step out of the car.”And Lisa wants to negotiate. She needs her cash. She wants to lock the car. She wants to call her daughter. She wants to know what the warrant’s for.Some of that is completely human. I get it. But here’s the thing nobody wants to hear in that moment: once you’ve been told you’re under arrest on a valid warrant, you’re under arrest. The shoulder of the road is not a courtroom. You don’t get to argue the warrant from the driver’s seat — that fight happens later, in front of a judge.Eventually she gets out. Cuffs go on. And that’s when it goes from tense to genuinely unhinged.Two things I want to keep separateBecause this part matters, and I’m not going to be lazy about it.She says the cuffs hurt. Repeatedly. The officer says he can fit a finger between the cuff and her wrist, and both cops keep telling her she’s tensing up while they try to search her. I can’t tell you from footage exactly how much pain somebody’s in — so I’m not going to sit here and call her a liar about her own wrists. If cuffs are genuinely hurting someone, cops should take that seriously. Full stop.That’s one thing. The other thing is what she does with it. She’s screaming. Demanding the sheriff. Threatening the media. Accusing the officers of punishing her. At one point she announces, “I can’t wait for this to go on the media.”Well. Here we are, Lisa.And then the detail you could not scriptLater, in the back of the car, she tells the officer what business she owns.The Trump Truth Store.And she promises them it’ll make national news.You cannot write it better than that. Because this isn’t some random person who votes a certain way. This is somebody who built an entire storefront around Donald Trump and the whole “law and order” brand — a self-described gathering place for “patriotic Americans.” And she just ran face-first into the one lesson that brand never prepared her for:The government does not care who you voted for. There’s a warrant with your name on it, the cops confirm it, and you’re going to jail. All that tough talk about law and order lands very differently when it’s your wrists in the cuffs.Here’s the part that actually got meAfter she got out, Fleischmann described her time in custody as “horrific.” She complained about the handcuffs, the jail procedures, the food, how detainees were treated, what she watched happen to other people locked up over minor stuff. She questioned why anyone should sit in a cell over a traffic case and a missed court date.And — I mean this — some of those are good questions.Should somebody lose days of their life in jail over a missed traffic hearing? How are police supposed to handle people with chronic pain or a disability during an arrest? How fast should someone picked up on a warrant get in front of a judge? What should conditions look like for people who haven’t been convicted of anything yet?Those aren’t “gotcha” questions. Those are the questions. That’s the entire criminal justice reform conversation — the one a lot of people only discover exists on the day they’re the one in the cell.Welcome to it, Lisa. We’ve been over here for a while.“This is a punishment.” “It’s not a punishment.”That exchange — her insisting it’s a punishment, the officer insisting it isn’t — is the whole story compressed into six words.Because that argument, when does law enforcement stop being process and start being punishment, is one Americans across the entire political spectrum have been having for years. When does an arrest cross the line? When does pretrial detention become a penalty for something you haven’t been convicted of? When do the ordinary gears of the system grind somebody far harder than their actual conduct ever warranted?Those questions don’t stop mattering because the person finally asking them sells Trump T-shirts. But they also shouldn’t have to wait until it’s your body on the pavement to feel important.What I actually hope she took homeShe was booked at the local PD, moved to the DuPage County Jail, held overnight, and released the next day after seeing a judge. New court date. That’s it. In the scheme of things, she got off easy.But I hope something stuck. I hope the next time she hears somebody say the cuffs were too tight, she doesn’t assume they’re faking. The next time somebody says a small legal problem blew up their whole life, she remembers how fast hers did. The next time somebody questions whether locking people up before trial is unnecessarily cruel, she remembers what that cell felt like when she hadn’t been convicted of a damn thing.Because that’s what equal justice is supposed to mean. Not that the system should treat everybody like garbage. That everybody gets held to the same standard — and that the power to arrest, cuff, and cage a human being deserves scrutiny every single time.Not just when it’s aimed at a Trump supporter. Not just when it’s someone you know. And not just when you’re the one in the back seat screaming that the handcuffs hurt.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comA cop got one character wrong. An innocent man paid for it — his window, his car, and more than a year of his life.On July 4, 2024, two SFPD officers, Jonathan Zepeda and Vinesh Govindbhai, spotted a Honda Accord they believed was stolen. The belief came from a license plate an officer had typed into a computer with one character wrong. They followed the car until the driver, 47-year-old Matthew Ludwig, stopped behind traffic at a red light. According to the Public Defender’s complaint, the officers didn’t recheck the plate. They didn’t turn on their lights. They didn’t tell him to pull over. They didn’t even try the door.One of them went straight for the window.The body-camera footage is brutal. Govindbhai smashes the driver’s window with a baton, grabs Ludwig by the hood of his sweatshirt, and drags him out onto the pavement, where his head is driven into the ground. Ludwig is saying, “I wasn’t doing nothing, bro.” Then an officer pepper-sprays him in the eyes at close range. He starts wheezing and says, over and over, that he can’t breathe. According to the public defender, it was Ludwig trying to de-escalate — “Be cool,” “Take it easy” — and the officers who kept escalating.I spent two decades as a cop, so hear me on this. Officers absolutely face situations where force is necessary. Sometimes you’ve got seconds and incomplete information. That’s exactly why procedure matters. You verify. You communicate. You give commands when you can. You reassess. And the more force you’re about to use, the more certain you need to be about why.These officers didn’t even have the right plate. Per the complaint, they realized after Ludwig was already cuffed that it had been entered wrong. The entire reason they thought they’d found a stolen car was false.They arrested him anyway.And that’s where this stops being a story about two cops screwing up and becomes a story about a whole system refusing to fix it. Ludwig was charged with reckless driving and resisting arrest, and prosecutors pushed those charges for more than a year — over an encounter that only began because police typed the wrong plate. Meanwhile, he couldn’t afford the impound fee to get his car back, so the city sold it at auction. His public defender says he lost virtually everything he owned, including an RV he shared with his girlfriend that got towed days later. Prosecutors even offered him a deal to avoid a conviction if he’d take responsibility. His public defender’s answer was simple: he hadn’t done anything wrong.Two years after the arrest, San Francisco’s Department of Police Accountability concluded the officers used excessive force and violated multiple department policies — including the close-range pepper spray and drawing a firearm without justification. Accountability matters. But it also raises the question of why it took this long to admit what the footage apparently made obvious.And Matthew Ludwig isn’t here to see it. He survived the encounter and lived another 14 months. In September 2025, while the charges were still pending, he was found dead in a park in Morehead, Kentucky, at 47. Local authorities said no foul play was suspected and described it as an apparent suicide.I’m not going to tell you the arrest caused his death, because we don’t know that. Suicide is complicated, and nobody should turn a man’s death into a convenient argument without evidence. But we do know what those final 14 months held. He lost his car. His public defender says he lost nearly everything. He spent more than a year as a criminal defendant over an encounter that started with a police mistake. And he died before the agency investigating it publicly admitted the officers used excessive force against him. That’s tragic, full stop.I want to say something to other cops here, because the instinct in this job is to hear criticism of an officer and immediately go looking for the explanation — what happened before the video, what did the officer perceive. Those are fair questions. I’ve asked them myself. But sometimes the officer is just wrong. And if you actually care about policing, you have to be able to say that out loud. Good policing isn’t defending every cop every time. It’s holding the standard that lets the public trust the badge. When an officer screws up, the next officer shouldn’t inherit it. When an arrest is bad, prosecutors shouldn’t try to salvage it. The goal shouldn’t be finding some other charge to make it look justified after the fact. The goal should be correcting the mistake.That’s what eats at me about this. The typo was human error — cops make mistakes, I made mistakes. But everything after they discovered the mistake was a choice. Once the officers saw the plate was wrong, there was a chance to stop. Once prosecutors understood how the arrest began, another chance. Month after month, more chances. Instead, Matthew Ludwig stayed the defendant.As his public defender, Brian Cox, put it: nothing justified the amount of violence used on Ludwig, especially when it stemmed from the officers’ own mistake. The Accountability office will now recommend discipline, and where that goes is up to the department and the Police Commission. Whatever happens, accountability isn’t anti-cop. It’s how you preserve policing. Because when you hand someone a badge, a gun, and the power to take another person’s freedom, the standard has to be higher than everybody makes mistakes.The typo was a mistake. What happened to Matthew Ludwig afterward was a series of decisions — and every institution involved had a chance to make it right before it was too late.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comThey told us it wasn’t about race. Then the bodycams came out.For over a year, the administration insisted its immigration crackdown was targeted — that agents weren’t stopping people for being Latino, and that profiling claims were, in a DHS spokeswoman’s words, “disgusting, reckless, and categorically false.” Now there’s footage. And based on the evidence, what these agents are doing looks disgusting, reckless, and categorically true.A New York Times investigation reviewed court evidence from more than a dozen cases across the country — body-camera footage, bystander video, text messages, court filings — 169 hours of video across 459 clips. What comes out of it is a disturbing picture of how these sweeps actually ran.In multiple court filings, agents referred to targets as “tonks” — a derogatory term for Mexican immigrants that, per the Times, is meant to evoke the sound of a flashlight hitting someone in the head. Other footage catches an agent calling a man “wet,” short for the slur “wetback.” Another, in a Southern California operation, flagged people he considered suspicious as “older Hispanic males.”Now, I spent two decades in law enforcement, and anyone who tells you cops never say ugly things behind closed doors is lying to you. But there’s a difference between someone saying something offensive and that language showing up right next to evidence that it’s shaping who gets stopped. That’s where this stops being a bad joke and becomes a constitutional problem.In San Bernardino, a driver said in a sworn declaration that an officer told him he’d been pulled over because he looked like a “paisa.” Then there’s Angel Santiago Tafolla, a U.S. citizen working at a carwash in Anaheim. According to his declaration, agents chased him — a dark-skinned Latino man — while ignoring his lighter-skinned coworkers. An agent arced a Taser in front of him while his clothes were still wet from work. They cuffed him and loaded him into a van. And the whole time, he kept telling them the thing that should have ended it: “I’m American.” According to his account, they told him he was Latino, that his documents were fake, and that he should stop talking.Sit with that. A citizen tells federal officers he’s American, shows his papers, and they tell him the papers are fake — because they’ve already decided who he is. Based on what?That’s the question at the center of these lawsuits, and it isn’t one man. According to filings reviewed by the Times, at least 65 U.S. citizens were stopped, questioned, or detained during these operations. Many were Black or Latino. Some said agents refused to accept passports or valid licenses. Several were threatened with Tasers, tackled, or handcuffed. Some were held for hours.And civil rights lawyers think they know why it keeps happening: quotas. Court filings describe agents under enormous pressure to run up arrests — the national target reportedly as high as 3,000 a day. That changes everything about how you police. Real investigation means you develop information, identify a person, build reasonable suspicion. But if someone tells you to produce 3,000 bodies today, you’re not investigating anymore. You’re doing volume. So roving teams converged on the places they expected to find Latino workers — carwashes, construction sites, Home Depot lots — and leaned on broad traits: looks Latino, darker skin, an accent, day-laborer clothes. Footage from Los Angeles, civil rights lawyers say, shows agents walking past people who appeared white to approach Latino men nearby, masked and armed, chatting about targets and tallying how many they’d grabbed.That is not how professional law enforcement works. Race can be part of a suspect description — if I’m looking for a specific 35-year-old Latino man in a blue jacket, ethnicity is obviously in the mix. But “Latino guy outside Home Depot” is not a suspect description. For more than 50 years the constitutional rule has been that immigration agents need a specific factual basis to stop someone and can’t use ethnicity as the sole factor. A 1975 Supreme Court decision let ethnicity count as one factor in certain situations — not the only one. Even that line is now being tested: Justice Brett Kavanaugh gave provisional support to broader consideration of characteristics including ethnicity while the litigation continues. It wasn’t a ruling on the merits, but legal experts say it may have emboldened agents in the field.The government denies any agencywide profiling policy — says the operations are targeted, that isolated offensive language doesn’t establish policy, and that agents can briefly question people they reasonably suspect are here illegally. Fine. Then explain the evidence. Explain why citizens’ passports and licenses weren’t accepted. Explain why a man was told he was Latino after he said, over and over, that he was American. Explain footage that appears to show agents skipping white people to approach Latino men. And explain why federal officers on official duty were driving around calling people “tonks” and “wet.”Here’s the part both sides should be able to hold at once: you can support deporting people who are here illegally and demand that federal law enforcement follow the Constitution. Those aren’t in conflict. I’ve said it before — give someone a badge, a gun, and the power to take away another person’s freedom, and the standard goes up, not down. When leaders demand enormous arrest numbers and celebrate aggressive sweeps, don’t act shocked when quantity replaces investigation. That’s how innocent people get swept up. That’s how citizens get handcuffed. That’s how “he looked Latino” becomes law enforcement intelligence.These cases are moving through courts across the country, and some may end up back at the Supreme Court. When they do, the justices won’t be weighing a hypothetical. They’ll have body cameras, text messages, sworn declarations, and citizens who were detained. That’s exactly what the cameras are for — they don’t care what the press release says. They show what happened. And now we can hear what some of these agents were saying when they thought the only people listening were each other.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comTrump’s personal criminal defense lawyer now runs the Justice Department.Todd Blanche isn’t just some conservative attorney Trump plucked to lead the DOJ. This is the man who sat next to Trump at the defense table and fought his federal criminal charges. Then Trump put him inside the department, and once he was running it in an acting capacity, he moved hard to advance Trump’s agenda. Now the Senate has handed him the keys for good — by a vote of 50 to 49.Every Democrat voted no. Two Republicans, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, voted no. Everybody else folded. And it’s who folded that tells the story.Take Bill Cassidy. He voted to convict Trump after January 6th, and Trump never forgot it — Cassidy lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger, and his Senate career is ending. Trump already got his revenge. If any Republican was ever free to say “fine, I’ll vote my conscience, the man already ended me,” it was Cassidy.Nope. Cassidy became the decisive vote that put Blanche over the top. And listen to his reasoning: this “is not a referendum on President Trump,” he said — and maybe the fact that Blanche once represented Trump personally would make him better at pushing back on Trump’s worst impulses. Read that again. We’re supposed to want Blanche as attorney general because Trump trusts him enough that he might occasionally tell him no. That’s where the party is.Then there’s Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, who nearly derailed the nomination over that $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” Under Blanche, the DOJ had announced a settlement creating a pot of money to compensate people who claimed they’d been mistreated by the justice system — including January 6th defendants and other Trump allies — plus provisions designed to shield Trump and his family from IRS audits. Tillis and Cornyn balked. Blanche backed down, rescinded the fund in writing, and agreed to rein in the tax provisions. That was enough. Nomination moves forward, and we’re all supposed to feel better.I don’t. Because remember who this is. Blanche defended Trump in the New York hush-money case and against the federal prosecutions. Trump made him deputy attorney general, then acting AG, and when Pam Bondi was fired he took over and pushed harder. Per the Associated Press, under Blanche the department accelerated investigations into Trump’s perceived enemies — moving to indict former FBI Director James Comey over a ridiculous social media post with seashells arranged to read “86 47,” and appointing Joseph diGenova to investigate whether former law enforcement and intelligence officials conspired to undermine Trump.And this is the man we’re supposed to trust because he wrote a letter killing a slush fund? Maybe he keeps that promise. I hope he does. But if you think a piece of paper turns Todd Blanche into an independent attorney general who’ll stand between Trump and whatever he demands next, you’re far more trusting than I am. So was Murkowski, who voted no and said the country needs an attorney general “who will check the worst impulses of this administration.” That’s the job. Not Trump’s lawyer. Not Trump’s fixer. Not Trump’s enforcer.Here’s the bigger thing, and it’s the part that actually explains all of it. Cassidy’s career is over. Tillis is leaving. These are exactly the men who should have the least left to fear from Trump — and they still won’t cross him. Why?Because leaving office isn’t the same as leaving Republican politics. There’s a whole ecosystem waiting after Congress — corporate boards, law firms, think tanks, lobbying shops, speaking fees, book deals, cable contracts, consulting. And to stay a Republican in good standing in that world, there’s still one ring you’re expected to kiss. That’s the power Trump has built. It’s not just fear of a primary anymore. It’s fear of exile from the entire professional world around the party.Which makes it even more pathetic, because what would Cassidy actually have lost by voting no? Trump already beat him. What does Tillis have to fear? He’s out. If there was ever a moment to stand up for the institution you serve, this was it.Instead, Blanche got 50 votes. Republicans will tell themselves they extracted concessions, point to the letter, say maybe his bond with Trump means he can restrain him. We’ve seen this movie. They convince themselves that this time there’s a guardrail, this time someone in the room says no, this time the institution holds. Then Trump pushes, and they move.Todd Blanche didn’t confirm himself. Trump didn’t have 50 votes — Republican senators did. And even the ones with nothing left to lose couldn’t say no. That’s not loyalty, and it’s not principle. It’s submission.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comSuddenly, Lauren Boebert believes an accusation isn’t a conviction.Her 21-year-old son, Tyler, has been arrested again — this time on five felony charges, three of them tied to the alleged sexual exploitation of a child. Let me say the important part first and plainly: these are allegations. Tyler Boebert has not been convicted. Prosecutors will have to prove their case, and he’s entitled to the same presumption of innocence as anyone. Hold onto that, because it matters to where this is going.Here’s what’s on the record. Tyler was arrested in Garfield County, Colorado, after an investigation by the sheriff’s office and a felony review by the district attorney. The counts: sexual exploitation of a child by inducement or enticement, sexual exploitation involving possession with intent, sexual exploitation involving video, and two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Authorities say the alleged conduct dates back to January 1, 2024. They haven’t disclosed much more, because the investigation is ongoing. He was booked into the Garfield County Jail, released the same day on a $10,000 bond, and is due back in court August 19.And these aren’t even his only open cases. Tyler is already awaiting sentencing in two others — one child-abuse case stemming from an incident involving his young son, and a 2024 vehicle-trespassing and theft case in which he pleaded guilty to attempted identity theft. At 21, he’s already got a remarkable history with the justice system.His mother, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, responded to the new arrest by saying, “I love my son,” that the family takes the allegations “very seriously,” and that they’re praying for everyone affected.And that’s a perfectly reasonable response from a mother whose adult son has been accused of a serious crime. Take it seriously. Don’t prejudge. Let investigators investigate and prosecutors present evidence. Let the process decide.There’s just one problem. Lauren Boebert has spent years extending exactly none of that restraint to other people — whenever an accusation about children was politically useful to her.Remember when Republicans decided everyone they disliked was a “groomer”? Boebert was one of the loudest voices doing it, and she never needed anyone to actually be accused of anything. In 2022, a North Carolina teacher used LGBTQ-inclusive flash cards in an elementary classroom — illustrations of different kinds of families. No allegation of abuse. No allegation of exploitation. Boebert looked at that and declared, “The Left is grooming our kids.”Think about how heavy that word is. Grooming isn’t a synonym for “teaching kids something Lauren Boebert doesn’t like.” It describes the manipulation of children for sexual abuse. That’s one of the most serious accusations a person can make — and she turned it into partisan slang. She did it again that year going after Tyra Banks, an executive producer of a reality show about teenage drag performers, with “Siri, define grooming.” No evidence. No criminal allegation. Just association she could weaponize.And it was part of a much bigger campaign — LGBTQ people, drag performers, teachers, Democrats, providers of gender-affirming care, all tarred with the language of child predation. Then five people were murdered at Club Q, an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, in November 2022. When people confronted Boebert about the rhetoric she’d aimed at that community, she called it “disgusting” that anyone would connect her words to hostility.See the machine? When it’s someone else, a teacher’s flash cards become proof “the Left is grooming our kids.” When it’s her, connecting rhetoric to consequences is irresponsible. And now that her own son is facing real felony charges involving the alleged exploitation of a child, the response is careful, restrained, wait-for-the-process.That is how she should respond. The hypocrisy isn’t that Lauren Boebert loves her son. It’s that she clearly understands nuance perfectly well when she needs it. When it’s your family, an allegation isn’t a conviction. When it’s your family, words matter and the situation is complicated and painful. We even saw it before — when Tyler faced that separate child-abuse case after his young son wandered from a family home, she called it a “miscommunication.” Maybe it was, and he was entitled to have the circumstances weighed instead of being branded a monster.That’s the whole point. Extend that same courtesy to everyone else.Because this is what makes the “groomer” rhetoric so poisonous. Child sexual abuse is real. Grooming is real. The exploitation of children is real, and those crimes destroy lives. When politicians grab those words and slap them on teachers, LGBTQ people, and opponents without a shred of evidence, they don’t make a single child safer — they turn the gravest accusations imaginable into a Twitter insult.Tyler Boebert deserves the process. The alleged victim or victims deserve a serious investigation. And if prosecutors prove these charges beyond a reasonable doubt, he should face the consequences. That’s how justice works — for him, and for everyone his mother ever pointed at.Maybe she remembers that the next time she sees a rainbow flag and reaches for the word “groomer.”🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comBelieve in God. Don’t. Go to church every Sunday or never set foot in one. That’s your right — and that’s the whole point.Let me be clear up front, before half the internet loses its mind: this isn’t about whether Christianity is good or bad, and I’m not here to tell anyone what to believe about God. This is about the difference between a religion and a political weapon.Congressman Jared Huffman of California has a new book out — No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy From Christian Nationalism. He’s unusual in Congress: the only member who publicly calls himself a humanist. And his argument isn’t that Christianity threatens American democracy. It’s that Christian nationalism does. Those aren’t the same thing. Christianity is a faith. Christian nationalism is a political ideology that wants to use government power to privilege one version of Christianity and bake it into American law. And Huffman says that movement has become extraordinarily influential inside the Republican Party and inside the Capitol itself.He describes pastors working the halls of Congress almost like lobbyists — approaching lawmakers and staff on the way to votes, handing out cards, inviting them to Bible study. If members want to hold a Bible study, fine; they have the same religious freedom as anyone. But Huffman says some of these operators aren’t there to pray. They’re there to push doctrine into public policy.That’s the line, and that’s where the problem starts. The First Amendment doesn’t just protect your right to practice your religion. It protects my right not to practice yours. You believe what you want, I believe what I want, and neither of us gets to use the government to force it on the other. That’s the deal, and it’s a good one.Huffman points to Ralph Drollinger, founder of Capitol Ministries, who runs Bible studies for government officials — calling him one of the most extreme religious activists operating around Washington and arguing his access to powerful people should concern us. For his part, Drollinger disputes that characterization and says his work is about accurately teaching scripture, not pushing personal opinion. Fair to note.But the bigger point isn’t one pastor — it’s the ecosystem around power. And nobody illustrates it better than Speaker Mike Johnson.Johnson has never hidden how central his evangelical faith is to his politics, and by itself that isn’t the problem. Raphael Warnock is a Baptist pastor and a U.S. senator. James Talarico is running for Senate in Texas and talks openly about his Christian faith. There are devout Democrats and Republicans everywhere. Huffman actually praises Warnock and Talarico — because, in his view, they speak authentically about faith without trying to use the coercive power of government to impose it. That’s the distinction. Mike Johnson can believe abortion is a sin, pray about it, preach it, and vote his conscience like anyone else. But when a leader starts presenting government policy as God’s will, we’re somewhere else entirely.After Republicans passed Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” Johnson said he’d been on his knees praying every day and called its passage God’s will and God’s plan. Think about that coming from the Speaker of the House. That’s not a sermon — it’s legislation governing hundreds of millions of Americans, Christian and Jewish and Muslim and atheist alike, and one of the most powerful officials in the country is framing his party’s win as the will of God. Huffman notes Johnson also moved the Congressional Prayer Breakfast into Statuary Hall and launched a National Gathering for Prayer and Repentance at the Museum of the Bible, where lawmakers gathered to repent for what they called national sins, abortion among them.Any one of these you can wave off. A prayer breakfast, who cares. A politician thanking God, they’ve done that forever. Huffman’s point is that you have to look at all of it together — and when you do, the wall between church and state starts looking a lot less solid.There’s one more piece I can’t let go of: January 6th. I was there on those steps. And Christian imagery was all over parts of that crowd — flags, crosses, prayer. Huffman says the January 6th Committee actually considered addressing the role Christian nationalism played in the radicalization around the attack, and that Adam Kinzinger believed there was a responsible way to tell that story while making crystal clear the committee wasn’t attacking Christianity. But Huffman says the material got cut from the final report — he believes Liz Cheney worried it would let Fox News paint the committee as anti-Christian. Cheney didn’t respond to The New York Times about the claim, so take it as his account. But it points to a real Democratic problem: they’re so afraid of sounding anti-Christian that they’ve managed to make religious and nonreligious Americans feel unwelcome at once.Here’s what people miss. Separation of church and state isn’t hostile to Christianity — it protects it. If you’re Catholic, it shields you from a government run by Protestants. If you’re Protestant, from one run by Catholics. If you’re Jewish or Muslim or Hindu, from a majority deciding your faith counts less. And if you don’t believe at all, it covers you too. Nobody has to win. The government doesn’t get to rule on whose God is right. Because the day you hand government the power to impose religious doctrine, you’d better be dead certain the people running it will always believe exactly what you believe. Someday they won’t.That’s why I don’t care whether Mike Johnson prays. I care whether he thinks his convictions hand him a mandate to use the United States government to impose them on the rest of us. Those are very different things — and you can say so without insulting the millions of Christians who believe just as hard in religious freedom.This isn’t believers versus nonbelievers. It’s religious freedom versus religious power. You have the right to worship God, to worship differently, or to worship no one. The moment the government starts telling Americans which of those is correct, we haven’t protected religious freedom. We’ve destroyed it.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comHere’s a phrase I want you to stop trusting: settled law.Americans got told for two generations that Roe v. Wade was settled. Untouchable. Precedent stacked on precedent. And then one day it wasn’t — because a movement spent fifty years quietly building the lawyers, the judges, the scholarship, and the Supreme Court seats required to unsettle it. They didn’t win an argument. They changed what an argument even was.I’m bringing that up because the exact same machine just turned to face the Fourteenth Amendment. And the people running it are not being subtle about it.Start with the loss, because it’s the part everyone misreadsIn June, Donald Trump lost on birthright citizenship. Not to a protester, not to some district judge he could rage-post about for a week. He lost at the Supreme Court — six of whose nine justices were appointed by Republican presidents, three of them by Trump himself.The Court’s answer was about as clean as these things get: if you’re born in the United States, with a few narrow historical exceptions, you’re a citizen. That’s what the Constitution says. Trump tried to erase it with an executive order. The Court told him no.For a normal president, that’s the end of the story. You lost at the highest court in the land, on your home turf, with your own appointees on the bench. You move on.That is not what happened. And the reason why is the actual story here — bigger than one executive order, bigger than Trump.The tell is that they’re bragging about the timelineA few weeks after the ruling, conservative lawyers, former Trump officials, and immigration activists gathered near Capitol Hill — people tied to America First Legal, the Heritage Foundation, state attorneys general offices — to map out what comes next. Per POLITICO, one of the voices in the room belonged to John Eastman. Yes, that Eastman — the lawyer who helped engineer the scheme to overturn the 2020 election, and who’s also spent decades arguing that everyone’s understanding of birthright citizenship is wrong.And Eastman didn’t treat the Supreme Court loss as a loss. He called it a win — because the argument is now mainstream. It’s being debated. It’s on the table.Sit with that, because it’s the whole playbook in one sentence. You don’t begin by winning. You begin by making something that was settled feel debatable. Then you write the law-review articles. You hold the conferences. You draft the model legislation. You teach it to law students until a generation of young lawyers grows up believing there’s a live controversy here. You start asking judicial nominees where they stand. And you wait.Do that long enough and a fringe theory hardens into “one side of a legitimate constitutional debate.” That is precisely the road Roe traveled, in reverse. Mike Davis, who runs the Trump-aligned Article III Project, said the quiet part into a microphone: the Court just turned birthright citizenship into the next Roe — a fight conservatives might spend the next fifty years winning. His stated goal, in his own words: “We need nine Alitos on the Supreme Court.”That’s not a conspiracy theory I’m assembling from scraps. That’s them handing out the blueprint.While the long game gets organized, Trump is picking at the locksThe outside-the-White-House campaign is the marathon. Inside the White House, Trump is running the sprint — testing what he can get away with right now.Five weeks after losing, he signed two new executive orders. One goes after so-called “birth tourism” — people the administration says travel here specifically to give birth so their child is a citizen. The others try to carve citizenship away from narrower groups: certain foreign-government personnel, and people the government labels “alien enemies.”Here’s the thing that tells you it’s strategy, not policy: a lot of it isn’t even new. The New York Times reported that a Homeland Security official admitted part of the birth-tourism order changes essentially nothing operationally, because existing law already covers fraud and misrepresentation. So why sign it?Because the goal isn’t the order. The goal is the edges. The Court slammed the front door — you can’t strip citizenship from a kid just because the parents are undocumented or here temporarily. So the administration is now rattling every side door and window, looking for a narrower category where a judge might decide presidential power over immigration gives it more room. And every attempt manufactures a fresh lawsuit, a fresh ruling, a fresh shot at getting some version of this back in front of the justices someday.That’s not flailing. That’s how you keep a “settled” question permanently pried open.Why the June ruling was stronger than the headline numberThe vote was 6-3, but the guts matter more than the tally.Five justices — including Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joining the three liberals — grounded their answer in the Constitution itself: the Fourteenth Amendment protects birthright citizenship for children born here to undocumented immigrants and temporary residents. That’s a constitutional floor.Justice Brett Kavanaugh made the sixth vote against Trump, but on narrower ground — he leaned on federal statute, and pointedly left the door open to Congress changing that law down the line.So the movement didn’t read a 6-3 defeat and shrug. They read the opinions and started cataloging every opening: Congress. Different executive theories. Different categories of people. Future judges. Future justices. And, eventually, a head-on run at the constitutional interpretation itself. When you’re playing a fifty-year game, a loss is just a map of where the walls are.“The babies of slaves” — and the calendar problemTrump keeps describing the Citizenship Clause like somebody scribbled it in the margins right after Appomattox for one tiny purpose that no longer applies. At the White House, he said it was meant for “the babies of slaves.”There’s a small problem: the arithmetic. The Civil War ended in 1865. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868. And more importantly, the men who wrote it didn’t write what Trump wishes they’d written. Yes, undoing slavery and the monstrous Dred Scott decision was the beating heart of the clause. But the words Congress actually chose weren’t “the children of the formerly enslaved.” They were:“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”All persons. Not some. And in 1898, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court applied exactly that — recognizing the citizenship of a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents who weren’t citizens themselves. This isn’t a Biden-era invention or a liberal reading smuggled in last Tuesday. It’s been the law across the entire life of the country.So believe themHere’s what I’ll defend all day: these people are allowed to do this. They can publish, organize, lobby Congress, push constitutional amendments, and campaign for judges who share their view. That’s the system working. Nobody should want it any other way.But the rest of us are allowed to see it clearly — and to refuse the one thing they’re counting on, which is that we’ll file this under “Trump lost, moving on.”He didn’t move on. He signed two more orders five weeks later. His allies are building lawyers, targeting law schools, floating litmus tests for judges, drafting legislation, and openly modeling the whole thing on the decades-long campaign that ended Roe.This was never a four-year project. It may not even really be a Trump project — he won’t be here in fifty years, and neither will most of the people in that room. That’s the point. They’re building institutions designed to outlive every one of them, aimed at a single goal: changing who gets to count as an American.The Supreme Court told this president the Constitution doesn’t mean what he wants it to mean. For almost anyone else, that’s the last page.For this movement, it was the first.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comDonald Trump has spent the last year trying to put loyalists in charge of federal prosecutors’ offices across the country.There’s just been one problem. The law keeps getting in his f*****g way.And now a former federal prosecutor named Roger Rogoff is taking the Trump administration to court in a case that could determine just how much power a president actually has to remove prosecutors he doesn’t want and replace them with people he does.Fired in under an hourThe U.S. attorney’s office for the Western District of Washington had gone more than three years without a Senate-confirmed leader. Federal law provides a process for exactly that situation. The attorney general can appoint a temporary U.S. attorney for 120 days. After that expires, the federal district court can appoint someone to serve until the vacancy is filled.So the federal judges — unanimously — appointed Roger Rogoff, a former federal prosecutor with more than 30 years of public service.Rogoff took the oath of office. Less than an hour later, he got an email from the White House. Donald Trump had fired him.Now, normally, a president firing a U.S. attorney wouldn’t necessarily be remarkable. U.S. attorneys nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate are executive-branch officials, and federal law explicitly says they’re subject to removal by the president.But Rogoff wasn’t appointed by Donald Trump. He was appointed by the federal court, under authority Congress specifically gave the judiciary.And that’s where this gets interesting.Rogoff is suing, and his argument is pretty straightforward: what the hell is the point of Congress giving federal judges the power to appoint a temporary U.S. attorney if the president can just fire that person five minutes later? His lawyers argue that letting Trump immediately can whoever the judges appoint would nullify that entire part of the law.Who holds this authority mattersThis isn’t some obscure personnel dispute. U.S. attorneys are among the most powerful law-enforcement officials in the federal government. They decide which federal cases their offices prosecute. They oversee investigations. They work with the FBI and other agencies. They can bring the full weight of the United States government down on an individual.I’ve spent enough of my life around law enforcement to know that who holds that authority f*****g matters.Prosecutors aren’t supposed to be the president’s personal attorneys. Their job isn’t to protect his friends and prosecute his enemies. Their client is the United States.And that’s why what’s happening across the country should concern people. According to POLITICO, the Trump administration has tried to sidestep the standard appointment process in at least seven federal districts as it works to install preferred prosecutors.The pattern is remarkably consistent. The attorney general appoints someone temporarily. That appointment has a legal time limit. When the clock runs out, the administration finds another title for that same person and tries to keep them running the office anyway. And when federal judges use their statutory authority to appoint somebody else? Trump fires them.We’ve already watched this movieIn New Jersey, Trump tried to install one of his former personal attorneys, Alina Habba, as U.S. attorney. When her temporary appointment expired, the federal judges selected a different prosecutor, Desiree Leigh Grace.Trump fired Grace.The administration then tried to keep Habba effectively running the office under a rotating set of titles. Eventually the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Habba’s appointment was illegal.In New York, the administration tried something similar with John Sarcone in the U.S. attorney’s office in Albany. A federal judge rejected the maneuver and disqualified Sarcone from participating in investigations involving New York Attorney General Letitia James. That case is still being fought on appeal.So Rogoff’s lawsuit isn’t happening in isolation. It’s the next battle in a much larger fight over whether the administration can manipulate vacancies, titles, and removal powers to keep its preferred people running federal prosecutors’ offices — all without ever going through Senate confirmation.Here’s where I want to be carefulBecause the legal question isn’t as simple as saying Trump obviously can’t do this.There’s a federal statute that says, pretty clearly: “Each United States attorney is subject to removal by the President.” And in 1979, during the Carter administration, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded that the president could remove a court-appointed U.S. attorney. That’s a serious argument for Trump’s side.But there’s another legal principle at work: generally, the power to remove an official follows the power to appoint them, unless Congress says otherwise. So you’ve got two principles running straight into each other. Congress gave courts the authority to make these temporary appointments. Presidents, meanwhile, traditionally have broad authority to remove executive-branch officials.And this Supreme Court has been extremely receptive to expansive presidential removal power. That’s what makes Rogoff’s case such a big deal.If Trump wins, presidents could effectively neutralize the judicial appointment process by simply firing any court-appointed prosecutor they don’t like. If Rogoff wins, the courts will have established a real limit on presidential removal power — and protected the mechanism Congress built for when the normal confirmation process breaks down.And there’s another wrinkle. At least three Supreme Court justices have already questioned whether judges should have this appointment power at all. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, suggested in a footnote last year that they had doubts about whether the Constitution even lets courts appoint what they called “inferior executive officers” — which could include U.S. attorneys.So if this reaches the Supreme Court, the administration could make an even broader argument: not only can Trump fire a court-appointed U.S. attorney, maybe federal judges shouldn’t be allowed to appoint them in the first place. And if the Court agrees, you’ve eliminated one of the few checks Congress created for when a president can’t get his prosecutors confirmed.This isn’t about one job in SeattleIt’s about who controls federal prosecution in the United States.The president absolutely has a role. He nominates U.S. attorneys. The Senate confirms them. That’s the constitutional process. But if you don’t have the votes — or you don’t bother getting your nominees confirmed — you don’t get to just invent a new process because you don’t like the f*****g answer.The Trump administration keeps testing that proposition. Courts tell them an appointment scheme is illegal, so they change titles. They fire the replacements. They try another legal theory. And now, for the first time, one of the court-appointed prosecutors Trump fired is standing up and saying: No. You don’t have the authority to do this.Roger Rogoff says he knew there was a good chance Trump would fire him when he accepted the appointment. He took it anyway. And after more than 30 years as a public servant, he says he’s bringing this case because he believes in the rule of law.Good. Because somebody has to find out where the line actually is.A president is supposed to appoint prosecutors. He’s not supposed to own them.And those are two very f*****g different things.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comDonald Trump has made an absolutely staggering amount of money from cryptocurrency since returning to the White House.But there’s one particular $100 million investment into Trump’s crypto company that deserves a hell of a lot more attention. Because until recently, we didn’t even really know who was behind it.The New York Times has now identified the man behind a company called Aqua 1 as Guren “Bobby” Zhou. And according to an extensive investigation into his business history, Zhou went from running failed businesses and a collapsed crypto startup to somehow becoming one of the largest investors in Donald Trump’s primary cryptocurrency business.And here’s where this gets f*****g wild.Aqua 1 purchased $100 million worth of tokens from World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto company. Under World Liberty’s policies, as much as $75 million of that purchase was distributed to a company controlled by Donald Trump and his three sons.So naturally, you’d want to know where this guy’s $100 million came from.We don’t know. According to the Times, the source of the money remains a mystery. And when you look at Zhou’s history, that becomes a pretty important f*****g question.Who is Bobby Zhou?Two years before becoming one of the biggest buyers of Trump’s crypto tokens, Zhou was a failed hardwood flooring retailer in Britain. His businesses had gone into the British equivalent of bankruptcy restructuring. According to court records reviewed by the Times, those businesses owed his father’s company about $5 million.Zhou later moved into cryptocurrency. He launched a project called Caduceus, which raised millions to build technology for virtual metaverses. That didn’t exactly go well either. The Caduceus token hit $2.24 in July 2022. Three weeks later it was worth 22 cents. By 2024 it was effectively worthless. Earlier this year, token holders were told that roughly $7.6 million invested in the project was gone, and the project was basically dead.One former employee summed it up to the Times this way: “We had nothing to show for that money, apart from Bobby’s lifestyle.”But the failed businesses aren’t even the biggest red flag.In 2021, Zhou was arrested in Britain on suspicion of money laundering. He has not been charged — and that distinction is important. But British officials told the Times the investigation remains active, and a court record filed last November accused him of participating with five other people in a laundering operation dating back to 2019.And this wasn’t secret information buried in some classified intelligence report. The investigation was publicly available. So was much of his troubled business history.Then the money showed upZhou leaves Britain, moves to Abu Dhabi, spins up a new web of companies — and suddenly this guy who former associates remembered asking other people for money has access to enormous amounts of capital. According to the Times, former associates were stunned to learn Zhou was capable of purchasing $100 million of anything.Then, days after Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, a company Zhou led called Web3Port announced a $10 million investment in World Liberty Financial and said it planned to invest more. Web3Port itself later got tangled in controversy around another crypto token offering that federal prosecutors in Northern California were investigating.Then a Web3Port entity changed its name: Aqua 1 GP Limited.Two weeks later, Aqua 1 — a company with virtually no public history — announced it was buying $100 million worth of World Liberty tokens. No mention of Bobby Zhou. No mention of Web3Port. Just $100 million showing up to buy tokens from the sitting president’s cryptocurrency business.“We are not a political organization. We are a business.”Now, World Liberty says it followed all applicable laws and regulations and maintains a compliance program that meets or exceeds industry standards. The White House says Trump has no conflicts of interest and acts only in the best interests of the American people. And Zhou hasn’t been accused of any crime related to this $100 million transaction.Those facts matter.But here’s another fact that matters. A cryptocurrency investigator interviewed by the Times said the combination of Zhou’s business failures, his sudden access to enormous wealth, the size of the transaction, and the money-laundering investigation should have raised serious compliance questions about the source of the funds.And when the Times asked World Liberty whether it knew where Zhou’s money came from? Its spokesman declined to say.Think about that. The sitting president of the United States owns a financial interest in a cryptocurrency company. A previously obscure foreign businessman puts $100 million into it. As much as $75 million of that can flow to a company controlled by the president and his sons. The investor has a publicly available history that includes failed businesses and an active money-laundering investigation. And we still don’t know where the $100 million came from.How the f**k is that acceptable?Why crypto is the perfect vehicle for thisBecause here’s what makes cryptocurrency uniquely useful in a situation like this: you don’t necessarily know who’s behind the money.The president’s own financial disclosure showed he collected $1.4 billion from his crypto businesses last year, according to the Times — with the majority coming from anonymous sources.That’s not like somebody buying a Trump tie. We’re talking about potentially enormous transfers of wealth into businesses that directly benefit the president of the United States — where the public may have no idea who ultimately supplied the money, or what they might want in return.And Zhou’s story is a perfect example of why that matters. His companies have repeatedly advertised connections to powerful people and institutions that didn’t check out. His previous crypto company announced a supposed $1 billion venture fund involving China Merchant Securities UK — the company later said that claim was unauthorized and materially false. Caduceus announced backing from the Bin Zayed Group, founded by a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family — the group later said those representations were unauthorized and materially false. More recently, Zhou’s companies announced that retired General Wesley Clark would appear at one of their events.Clark says he didn’t. His office ran a background check on Zhou, found the money-laundering investigation, and declined to get involved.And that’s the part I can’t get past. Other people looked into this guy. They saw the red flags. And they walked away.World Liberty took $100 million.The standard cannot be “trust me”Maybe there’s a completely legitimate explanation for where every dollar came from. If there is — great. Then tell us.Because when you’re president of the United States, the standard cannot be trust me. The American people have a right to know who’s putting enormous amounts of money into businesses that directly benefit their president. Especially when the person writing the check has a history like this one.This isn’t complicated. If somebody can anonymously funnel tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into a company enriching the president of the United States, then every American should be asking the same question:Who the f**k is paying our president? And what do they expect to get for their money?🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comFor years, Republicans had a political weapon Democrats simply didn’t.It wasn’t Fox News. It wasn’t Donald Trump. It wasn’t even Elon Musk. It was something much bigger — an entire media ecosystem that ran almost like a hive mind.Every morning, millions of Americans woke up to the same talking points from dozens of different personalities. Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, Benny Johnson, Steven Crowder, Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson. The message came with a different style, a different joke — but it always pointed the same direction. Democrats are evil. Trump is the victim. The country is collapsing. Stay angry. Vote Republican.That ecosystem didn’t just report the news. It created the news cycle. It told millions of people what to care about, who to hate, and what outrage deserved their attention that day. And for a long time, it worked.Then the numbers started moving the wrong wayAccording to a new analysis from the New York Times, something’s changed. The numbers behind a lot of the biggest pro-Trump influencers are heading in the wrong direction. YouTube views are down. Engagement on X has slowed. Podcasts that exploded during the 2024 election aren’t reaching the same audiences today.Before anybody starts doing victory laps, let’s be honest about what this means. Conservative media isn’t disappearing. These people didn’t suddenly become irrelevant. Most of them still command audiences that would make traditional TV networks jealous. But the trend matters, because politics runs on momentum — and the momentum is changing.The Times tracked a dozen of the biggest conservative creators across YouTube, podcasts, X, and Rumble over several years. Their conclusion wasn’t that everyone’s collapsing. It was that many of Trump’s loudest online allies have stopped growing the way they used to — while some of the people criticizing Trump from the right are the ones finding new audiences. That’s a very different story than the one Republicans have enjoyed for the last decade.How the machine actually workedThink about how this thing operated. During the campaign, every controversy became a coordinated event. One influencer posted a clip. Another reacted to it. A third claimed the mainstream media was covering it up. Someone else turned it into a conspiracy. By dinner, millions of Americans had consumed the same story from six different sources and believed they’d each arrived at the conclusion on their own.That’s how propaganda works in the social media age. It doesn’t have to convince everyone. It just has to convince enough people that everybody already agrees. That’s what made this ecosystem so powerful, and it’s why Republicans poured so much into cultivating online influencers instead of leaning only on television.But governing is a different animal than campaigning. It’s easy to unite people around grievances. It’s a lot harder to unite them around results. When you’re in opposition, every problem belongs to the other party. When you’re in power, eventually the problems belong to you.Reality doesn’t care about your algorithmAmericans are still worried about the cost of living. Still frustrated about housing. Still frustrated about healthcare. And now they’re watching another military conflict overseas — after many of these same influencers promised Trump would keep America out of new wars.That creates tension. The people who built audiences telling hard truths about Democrats suddenly have to explain hard realities under a Republican president. Some stay loyal. Others figure out that criticism gets more clicks.That’s where it gets interesting.The Times points to real fractures inside the conservative media world. After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, disagreements over what happened and who was responsible broke into open conflict among prominent conservative voices. Candace Owens pushed conspiracy theories while others took a more conventional line. Those fights didn’t stay private — they played out in public, in front of millions of followers.Then came Iran. Trump’s decision to go to war opened another divide. Some commentators defended the president. Others accused him of betraying the America First movement. People who spent years attacking Democrats were suddenly spending just as much energy attacking each other. And that’s a problem Republicans haven’t had to deal with in a very long time.Because once an audience realizes disagreement is allowed, something shifts. People stop asking, “what does the movement think?” They start asking, “who’s actually telling me the truth?” That’s a much harder question for propagandists to control.It’s not personalities. It’s incentives.Here’s the part that matters most. This isn’t just personalities chasing clicks. It’s incentives. These influencers don’t get rewarded for being right. They get rewarded for holding your attention. Fear holds attention. Outrage holds attention. Conflict holds attention. And when Democrats aren’t supplying enough outrage to feed the machine, the machine starts eating itself.That’s exactly what we’re watching happen.If you’re a Democrat, don’t misread this as the fight being over. It isn’t. The conservative media ecosystem is still vastly larger than anything Democrats have built online. These creators still pull millions of viewers a week. They can still drive narratives into the mainstream and set the political agenda on any given day. The difference is they aren’t marching in lockstep anymore.And that matters, because Republicans have become dependent on this ecosystem. Local newspapers have vanished across much of the country. Cable audiences keep shrinking. Political identity is increasingly shaped by podcasts, YouTube channels, livestreams, TikTok clips, and social feeds. That’s where voters spend their time. That’s where campaigns spend their money. That’s where narratives are born.For years, Republicans owned that battlefield. Every day brought a fresh outrage. A migrant caravan. A drag show. A school board meeting. A trans athlete. Some campus protest. The specifics changed, but the formula never did — find something emotional, make people furious, keep them scrolling, repeat. The outrage was never the point. The attention was. Because attention became political power.You can campaign forever. You can’t govern forever.Eventually reality shows up, and reality doesn’t care about your algorithm. It doesn’t care how many subscribers you’ve got. It doesn’t care whether your thumbnail screams “SHOCKING” in giant red letters. People know what they’re paying at the grocery store. They know what their rent costs. They know whether they can afford childcare. They know whether another war is dragging on longer than they were promised. No influencer talks people out of their own lived experience forever.That’s one reason experts in the Times say these creators are struggling to manufacture the same outrage now that Republicans control Washington. It’s hard to build a business blaming Democrats when your party runs the government. And at the same time, a new generation of creators mixing politics with gaming, relationships, and internet culture is competing for the exact same audiences.That doesn’t mean every conservative creator is shrinking equally. Some adapted. Candace Owens pushed beyond standard pro-Trump commentary into broader investigative and conspiracy content, and grew around some of those stories. Others pointed to gains on TikTok or Instagram even as YouTube and X slid. So this isn’t one side winning and the other losing. It’s an ecosystem changing.The people who built careers defending Donald Trump now have to decide what comes next. Do they stay loyal no matter what? Criticize him when it’s profitable? Reinvent themselves entirely? Become entertainers first and commentators second? Because make no mistake — this is a business. These people aren’t just activists. They’re brands. Companies. They’re selling ads, sponsorships, memberships, merch, subscriptions, and attention.And attention is a brutal business. If your audience gets bored, they leave. If someone’s angrier than you, they leave. If somebody spins a bigger conspiracy, they leave. It’s an endless competition for outrage, and somebody always has to turn the volume up. That’s how you end up with influencers attacking each other instead of the enemy they spent years pointing you toward.What this means for the midtermsThat’s where Republicans find themselves heading into the midterms. The Times quotes media experts who argue the real battle is already underway, because the messaging war starts long before anybody casts a ballot. If the coalition of online personalities that fueled Trump’s rise is splintering, Republican candidates lose one of their biggest advantages: message discipline.And there’s a lesson in here for Democrats too. You don’t beat propaganda with better propaganda. You beat it by earning trust. By telling the truth consistently. By talking about the problems people actually live every day instead of manufacturing outrage that evaporates the second the next hashtag trends. Because the truth has something outrage doesn’t. It lasts.Donald Trump built one of the most effective political media machines in American history. Nobody should pretend otherwise. It reshaped the Republican Party. It helped him win elections. It changed how politics gets covered. But no machine lasts forever. Not when its audience starts asking harder questions. Not when governing replaces campaigning. Not when the people running the machine start fighting over what’s left.If these cracks keep spreading, Republicans won’t just have a messaging problem. They’ll have an identity problem. Because a movement held together by outrage eventually has to answer one simple question: What happens when people stop being outraged?We’re about to find out.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comElon Musk spent part of this week using the platform he owns — the one he paid forty-four billion dollars for — to promote a movie.And he wasn’t pushing the next Top Gun. He was pushing a tiny revenge picture called Citizen Vigilante, directed by Uwe Boll, about a man who hunts down people the film portrays as immigrants and builds to a graphic attack on a Muslim family in their own home. Critics hated it. Audiences barely registered it. But a slice of the online right suddenly started treating it like the future of entertainment.For those of you lucky enough not to have seen this utter garbage, here’s the plot.It follows a man who takes the law into his own hands, hunting down people the film paints as immigrants — Arab, African, Muslim. It builds to its climax with a graphic attack on a Muslim family in their home, after the family’s son gets accused of a sexual assault. Wife, kids, all of them. That’s the payoff. That’s the movie’s idea of catharsis.And here’s the part that tells you everything. For a film this obsessed with painting immigrants as a threat, it can barely be bothered to show any of them doing anything wrong. Critics caught it right away — the people the main character hunts never actually commit the crimes that are supposed to justify hunting them. They’re guilty because the movie says so. It despises an entire category of people and then can’t build a single coherent story around its own hatred.Sound familiar?This isn’t really about one movieI watched some of it. I read the reviews. And I realized pretty quickly this isn’t about one bad film. It’s about what happens when a political movement spends years promising to build its own Hollywood, and this is one of the flagship products it ends up celebrating.Let’s start with who made this thing.If you’re not a movie nerd, let me explain Uwe Boll. Hollywood has plenty of bad directors. Uwe Boll is famous for being the shining example of one. For most of the 2000s, when critics wanted a name for the absolute floor of filmmaking, his came up before they even finished the question. He made movies out of video games that people walked out of. At one point he challenged his own critics to boxing matches — got in the ring, and fought them. You can’t make this s**t up.I’ve sat through some rough stuff in my life. I’ve watched police training videos with more narrative tension than this movie. And I’m not bringing Boll up to be cruel. I’m bringing him up because it matters who your movement’s flagship artist turns out to be. When the right finally rallies around a film and the man behind the camera is the single most mocked director of the last quarter century, that tells you something about the talent pool.Then there’s the star: Armie Hammer. A genuine leading man a few years ago, who vanished from major films after a wave of allegations of sexual misconduct, emotional abuse, and graphic BDSM and cannibalism fantasies — and who’s now attempting a comeback with the only studio willing to take him on.The empire that promised everythingHere’s where it gets bigger than one bad movie. Because this wasn’t some fringe Kickstarter. Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing told conservatives they were going to build an entertainment empire to rival Hollywood. Movies, television, kids’ programming, animation, streaming — the whole thing. And they raised enormous money doing it, because millions of people genuinely believed Hollywood was about to become obsolete and they wanted to fund what came next.Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying people on the right can’t make good art. Of course they can. There are great films and shows made by people all over the political map, and audiences don’t check a filmmaker’s voter registration before they fall in love with a movie. That’s not the issue.The issue is what all that money and all those promises actually produced.Because look at the results. Years in. The defining cultural moment this movement gets to celebrate is Elon Musk boosting a Uwe Boll picture. Critics on the left and the right are calling it incoherent and amateurish. Even people sympathetic to the politics are quietly admitting the filmmaking is bad. The action doesn’t track. The characters are cardboard. And reviewers caught something almost funny — a movie this obsessed with painting immigrants as dangerous can’t even be bothered to show much crime.And here’s the rich irony of it all. These are the same people who spent years complaining that Hollywood only cared about messaging instead of storytelling. That every movie was a lecture. And then the first film they rally behind is almost nothing but messaging. They became the exact thing they said they were fighting.Propaganda has an expiration date. Stories don’t.So why does this keep happening? Why does a movement with this much money keep producing culture that nobody outside the movement wants to watch? Here’s my read, and it comes down to a difference between propaganda and storytelling that these guys refuse to understand.Think about the movies people still watch twenty and thirty years later.Rocky isn’t really about beating a Russian. The Dark Knight isn’t about hating criminals. The first John Wick isn’t about killing gangsters. Nobody walks out of The Dark Knight arguing about Gotham’s tax policy. They walk out because Bruce Wayne is a wrecked human being carrying something he can’t put down. Every one of those movies starts with a person. Something was taken from them — a wife, a mentor, a dog — and you feel it before any bigger idea shows up. The humanity comes first. The meaning comes later, if it comes at all. That’s the order that works, and it’s why people remember them.Citizen Vigilante does the exact opposite. It starts with who you’re supposed to hate. The main character isn’t grieving anything. He’s just a man who hates. He records manifestos, posts them online, rants about his grievances — and if that sounds less like a movie hero and more like the video a mass shooter leaves behind, that’s because there’s barely any daylight between the two. The film has no human being at the center of it. It just has a target list.Again — sound familiar?That’s the whole tell. When your art starts from “who do we want the audience to hate” instead of “who do we want them to feel something for,” you get a recruitment tape with a budget. Audiences can feel that difference even when they can’t name it, and it’s a big part of why this stuff rarely travels past the people who already agree with it.Distribution was never the same thing as cultureWhich brings me back to Musk, because he’s the distribution engine now. He owns the platform. He can put anything in front of fifty million people by tomorrow morning, and that is real power.But distribution was never the same thing as culture, and this is the part they keep missing.Musk can force you to hear a song. He can’t force you to love it. He can put a movie in front of your face. He can’t make you quote it ten years from now, or show it to your kid, or drive across town to see it again. That gap — between what somebody can make you see and what you actually choose to carry with you — is where culture lives. And nobody has ever figured out how to buy their way across it.They keep treating this like a distribution problem, like the right platform and the right billionaire would finally make the audience show up. But politics can get somebody to buy a ticket once. Only storytelling gets them to buy the second one.So here’s the funny part. The people making this stuff keep insisting audiences have been brainwashed — that the only reason their movies don’t connect is that everybody’s been programmed by the other side. And maybe. Or maybe audiences just know the difference between a story and a sermon. Hollywood has made plenty of terrible movies over the years, and here’s the thing nobody on either side wants to admit: bad progressive movies bomb and bad conservative movies bomb, for the exact same reason. Nobody owes you two hours of their life just because you happen to share their politics. That’s not censorship. That’s not bias. That’s just how entertainment has always worked.You’ve got a movement convinced Hollywood is dead and the culture belongs to it now — one blockbuster away from winning the whole thing. And after all the money and all the promises, the flagship it’s celebrating this week is a Uwe Boll revenge picture its own side can’t honestly call good.So judge the project by what it makes, not by the billionaire promoting it. Because the audience that actually loves you back is the one thing on this earth that isn’t for sale. And until they understand that, they’ll keep spending — and they’ll keep ending up right here.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comRepublicans keep telling young men what it means to be a man. Apparently you need enough testosterone. You have to eat enough steak. Drive the right truck. Say the right things. Make sure everybody knows you’re tough.B******t.Because I’ve known men built like linebackers who’d abandon their own families. And I’ve known skinny guys who’d walk into hell to protect somebody else. If your definition of masculinity is how loud you are, how much you bench, or how many people you can intimidate, then you’ve completely missed what being a man actually is.And that’s exactly why Republicans are working so hard to make a Senate race in Texas about James Talarico’s masculinity instead of Ken Paxton’s record.The strategy is the tellTalarico is running for the U.S. Senate in Texas, and Republicans have decided they don’t want to talk about housing costs, healthcare, inflation, or the price of groceries. They don’t want to defend Ken Paxton. So instead, they’ve made the campaign about whether James Talarico is “man enough.”What a f*****g strategy.According to reporting this week, Republicans have mocked Talarico for once talking about a vegan lifestyle. They’ve attacked comments he made about God being beyond gender. They’ve gone after his appearance, his build, the fact that he’s unmarried — and some have even falsely suggested he’s gay or transgender. One of the first attacks out of Paxton’s campaign implied Talarico has low testosterone. Conservative groups are pushing AI-generated videos making fun of him instead of talking about anything Texans actually care about.Now stop and think about that.Not one thing I just listed lowers your grocery bill. None of it makes healthcare more affordable. None of it helps a family buy a first home. None of it creates a single good-paying job.It’s culture-war noise, designed to distract you from the fact that they don’t have answers to the problems people are living every single day.Somewhere we started performing masculinity instead of demonstrating itHere’s what really gets me. We let politics become a contest over who could perform being a man instead of who could actually be one.I’m not going to stand here and pretend I’m above any of it. I like hunting. I lift. I’ve got tattoos. I drink beer. I watch sports. Those are things I enjoy — but let’s be honest with each other. None of them make me a man.They’re hobbies. They’re interests. They’re not character.Because if I treated people like garbage, abandoned the people who depended on me, lied every chance I got, and only looked out for myself — none of that other stuff would matter. I’d just be another a*****e who happens to like football.That’s the part Republicans don’t seem to understand.What Talarico said — and why he’s rightTalarico answered these attacks in a way I thought was genuinely powerful. Instead of trying to convince everyone he was tougher than the next guy, he talked about his father. He said our culture tells young men that greatness is about tearing people down — trolling, owning, dominating. But his dad taught him something different. He talked about watching his father mow the lawn for an elderly widow in the neighborhood, never asking for credit, never expecting anything back. He said that’s what greatness looked like to him.You know what? He’s right. Because that’s what I remember too.The men I respected growing up weren’t the loudest guys in the room. They weren’t the ones constantly announcing how tough they were. The toughest men I’ve ever known usually didn’t have to tell you. You knew by how they carried themselves. You knew because they showed up when somebody needed help. You knew because they kept their word. You knew because they’d put themselves between danger and somebody who couldn’t protect themselves.That’s strength. That’s courage. That’s what being a man is supposed to look like.Republicans want to sell young men on the idea that masculinity means domination — humiliating your opponents, calling people names, always having the last word, always looking like the toughest guy in the room.I don’t buy it. Because real strength doesn’t need an audience.Now look at who they actually want you to electRepublicans want voters questioning whether James Talarico is masculine enough based on what he eats, what he believes, how he’s built, or that he’s unmarried. Meanwhile, the man they’re trying to send to the Senate is Ken Paxton — a politician whose career has been defined by investigations, ethics scandals, impeachment, and years of legal controversy.Paxton was impeached by the Republican-controlled Texas House on allegations that included bribery and abuse of office, before ultimately being acquitted by the Texas Senate. He faced a Justice Department corruption investigation that ended without charges, and a long-running securities fraud case that was eventually dismissed as part of an agreement.This isn’t about relitigating every accusation against Ken Paxton. It’s about priorities. They want you talking about testosterone instead of trust. They want you laughing at AI attack videos instead of asking whether your elected officials are actually serving the people who sent them there.If we’re going to have a conversation about strength, let’s actually have it.Strength isn’t mocking another man’s appearance. Strength isn’t inventing playground nicknames. Strength isn’t convincing everybody you’re an alpha. Strength is taking responsibility. It’s telling the truth. It’s keeping your word when it’s inconvenient. It’s standing up for someone who can’t stand up for themselves, even when it costs you.I’ve seen what courage actually looks like. I’ve watched people run toward danger while everyone else ran away. I’ve watched ordinary people risk everything to protect complete strangers. Not one of them stopped first to ask whether they looked masculine enough. They just did what needed to be done. That’s character.The real mistake they’re makingI don’t think most men are sitting around worrying about whether some other guy eats enough steak or has high enough testosterone. I think they’re worried about paying the mortgage. About whether they’ll ever afford a house. About the cost of raising kids, about healthcare, about whether they’ll have enough to retire.That’s exactly what the polling in Texas shows, too — men consistently rank affordability, cost of living, economic growth, and jobs among their biggest concerns.So why are Republicans talking about masculinity? Because it’s easier than talking about the economy. It’s easier than explaining why groceries still cost so damn much. It’s easier than explaining why a house feels out of reach for so many young Americans. It’s easier than defending the status quo.Talarico’s campaign has made exactly that point — that Paxton keeps picking cultural fights because he’s got no solutions for the cost of gas, groceries, or healthcare. As one campaign statement put it: “Real men serve others, weak men serve themselves.”You don’t have to agree with James Talarico on every issue to see that something is fundamentally broken about where our politics ended up. Somewhere along the line, too many politicians decided that looking tough mattered more than doing tough things. They confused performance with character, swagger with courage, cruelty with strength.Here’s the truthBeing a man has never been about proving you’re the toughest guy in the room. It’s about being the person your family can count on. Protecting your kids. Taking care of your parents when they get older. Showing up when your friends are in trouble. Admitting when you’re wrong. Keeping your promises. Having enough confidence that you don’t need to spend every waking minute convincing everyone else how masculine you are.Republicans can keep measuring masculinity by testosterone, pickup trucks, the size of a steak, or who lands the nastiest insult online. I’ll measure it by character. By integrity. By who protects the vulnerable instead of preying on them. By who serves their community instead of themselves. By who leaves the people around them better than they found them.Because the strongest men I’ve ever known didn’t spend their lives trying to prove they were men.They just acted like one.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comIn the age of MAGA and Trump, there’s been a rise in a very specific type of a*****e — the man who believes that owning a gun, watching too much right-wing television, and taking an online security course makes him a law-enforcement officer.The guy in the video I just watched was exactly that type. And he wasn’t pretending to be a mall cop or a security guard. He was pretending to be ICE — all while looking like some poor excuse for Batman on a f*****g bicycle. By the end of the bodycam footage, the real police had to sit him down and explain that none of it was true.What happenedThis went down at an apartment complex in Orange County, Florida. Deputies were called after witnesses reported that a man named Steven was riding around the property armed, claiming he was investigating undocumented immigrants.When deputies approached, one of the first things they asked was whether he had a gun. His answer was yes. And then he immediately started lecturing the actual cops about Florida gun law.Let that sink in. The deputy asks if he’s armed, and this guy responds by incorrectly explaining Florida gun law to a Florida sheriff’s deputy. That’s the first warning sign, and we’re barely twenty seconds in.Then the deputy asks what he’s actually doing there, and Steven starts describing his personal immigration-enforcement operation.“It’s not illegal to be Mexican”That is a sentence a trained law-enforcement officer had to say out loud to a 47-year-old armed man.And notice — Steven isn’t describing evidence. He keeps saying “Mexican” as if that itself is the crime. He doesn’t know anyone’s immigration status. He doesn’t know whether anyone broke into anything. He sees Hispanic people in a heavily Hispanic community and decides he’s uncovered a conspiracy.That isn’t police work. That’s racial profiling mixed with paranoia — and the firearm on his hip makes the whole thing exponentially more dangerous.Then a witness tells deputies it went further than questions. According to that witness, Steven walked up to someone, claimed he was a police officer, flashed the gun under his jacket, and demanded access to an apartment so he could remove the “illegals.”So the deputy asks the question that cuts right through the b******t: Who employs you? What agency sent you? Where’s your jurisdiction? Who gave you the authority to enter apartments and detain people?The answer to every one of those was nobody. He was riding a bicycle around a residential complex conducting an immigration raid that existed entirely inside his own head.It gets worseSteven admits he saw an open apartment door and decided to approach it because he wanted to make sure there weren’t, in his words, “20 Mexicans” inside. Then he claims he could tell one man was a criminal just by looking at him.“He looked like a criminal.” Based on what? His clothes? His skin? The fact that Steven decided he looked Mexican?This is exactly why we have standards, training, probable cause, and constitutional limits on police authority. A badge doesn’t let a real cop invent crimes based on someone’s ethnicity. A security certificate sure as hell doesn’t let a random armed civilian do it.But Steven thought he had authority — because he’d finished a course and submitted an application for a Class D security license. He was carrying the paperwork around like it was a federal credential. So the deputies asked him to show it.Where the fantasy collapsesA Class D license lets someone work as an unarmed security officer — when they’re actually employed by a licensed security company and assigned to a specific property. It doesn’t make you a cop. It doesn’t give you statewide jurisdiction. It doesn’t authorize immigration investigations. And it definitely doesn’t let you ride through random apartment complexes flashing a gun and ordering people to open their doors.And here’s the kicker: the paperwork he was waving around only showed that the state had received an application. It wasn’t even proof he’d been licensed, let alone deputized as some kind of government patrol officer.One deputy finally put it in terms even Steven might understand: “You can’t be driving around town, man, being like Batman.”Exactly. You’re not Batman. You’re not ICE. You’re not Homeland Security. You’re not a sheriff’s deputy. You’re an armed civilian who decided that racism, paranoia, and an online course gave you the power to police your neighbors.That deputy, by the way, deserves a raise. He stayed patient. He stayed calm. He explained the law without screaming, using examples the guy could actually follow: if you’re hired to work security at Disney, your authority exists at Disney. Off Disney property, it doesn’t mean jack squat. You don’t clock out and become the statewide Immigration Avengers. That’s not how any of this works.The speech that matteredSteven still wasn’t getting it. He kept insisting he wanted to help fight crime, patrol, stop illegal immigration. And that’s when the deputy delivered the most important thing in the entire bodycam:Everything has a process. Florida lets us carry guns after the academy, field training, constant qualification, and ongoing legal education — because one bad decision with a firearm can destroy multiple lives. You can’t just do an online course and appoint yourself. Do this, and bad things are going to happen.That’s the difference between a responsible cop and somebody playing cop. The deputy wasn’t protecting criminals. He was protecting everyone — the families in those apartments, his fellow deputies who’d have to respond if Steven pulled a gun on the wrong person, and Steven himself from making a life-ending mistake.Owning a firearm doesn’t make you qualified to use one. Watching police videos on YouTube doesn’t make you a cop. Taking an online security class doesn’t prepare you to make a split-second decision about deadly force. Steven wanted all of the authority and none of the responsibility. That’s a terrifying combination.The arrestThen the deputies went back over the witness statements — because this was never just a guy saying weird things. Witnesses said Steven identified himself as law enforcement while trying to get into an apartment to investigate undocumented immigrants. That’s when the conversation shifted from educating him to investigating whether he’d committed a crime.Even in handcuffs, he didn’t get it. He kept asking, “Where’s your proof?” He kept insisting he’d done nothing wrong. He even called himself a cop.And one deputy finally said the thing everyone watching was already thinking: “No. You’re a citizen.”That’s it. There’s nothing wrong with being a citizen. But somewhere along the way, too many people started believing that enough cable news, enough Facebook posts, or one online course somehow deputized them to enforce immigration law themselves. It didn’t.Here’s what actually bothers meImagine you’re a Hispanic family living in that complex. An armed stranger rides up on a bicycle, flashes a gun, says he’s investigating immigration violations, and demands to come inside. You have no idea if he’s a real cop. You have no idea if he’s dangerous. You don’t know whether to comply, run, or defend yourself.That is exactly how innocent people get hurt. And it’s exactly why impersonating law enforcement is taken so seriously — because the badge has to mean something. The public needs to know that when someone claims to be a police officer, they actually are one. Otherwise every criminal, extremist, and wannabe vigilante gets to invent authority for himself.These deputies showed how professionalism is supposed to look. They stayed calm. They explained the law. They gave the guy every chance to understand it. And when the evidence showed he’d crossed into allegedly impersonating law enforcement, they arrested him. That’s how the system is supposed to work.We don’t need self-appointed vigilantes riding bikes looking for people they’ve decided don’t belong. We need trained professionals who understand the Constitution, the law, and the enormous responsibility that comes with carrying both a badge and a gun.The lesson here goes way beyond one bizarre arrest. The most dangerous people aren’t always the ones breaking the law on purpose. Sometimes they’re the ones who’ve convinced themselves they’re the heroes — while ignoring every limit the law places on them. And that’s exactly why those limits exist in the first place.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comFor years, some of the loudest voices in conservative politics couldn’t stop talking about Andrew Tate.They praised him. They interviewed him. They defended him. A few of them argued he was being persecuted.Now the Tate brothers are sitting in a federal jail in Miami, waiting to learn whether they’ll be extradited to the United Kingdom to face dozens of criminal charges.And suddenly nobody wants to know them.That silence tells you everything — because this story was never really about Andrew Tate. It’s about what happens when a political movement decides that winning online matters more than basic human decency.If you somehow managed to avoid Andrew Tate these past few years, congratulations. Seriously. You had a healthier internet than millions of teenage boys did.Who Andrew Tate actually isTate built an enormous online empire selling an image of extreme masculinity — luxury cars, private jets, expensive watches, wealth shoved in your face at every turn. But underneath all of it was something much darker.His message was never about confidence or self-improvement. It was built around degrading women, glorifying domination, and convincing young men that empathy is weakness. He repeatedly called himself a misogynist. He bragged openly about manipulating women. He publicly described building a webcam business around girlfriends he’d persuaded to work for him — while he controlled the money.And over the years, women in multiple countries accused Andrew Tate of rape, assault, strangulation, trafficking, and abuse. He and his brother Tristan have consistently denied any criminal wrongdoing, and that distinction matters. In America, everyone gets due process. Everyone gets the presumption of innocence until they’re proven guilty in a courtroom.But here’s where the story turns. As those allegations became more and more public, Andrew Tate didn’t become politically toxic. He became politically useful.That should have been a giant f*****g red flag.Attention is currencyTate figured out something before a lot of politicians did: attention is currency. It didn’t matter whether people loved him or hated him. As long as millions were watching, he was winning.His audience exploded in the backlash to the MeToo movement. He wrapped the misogyny inside messages about discipline, fitness, making money, becoming a stronger man. Work out. Start a business. Take responsibility. On their own, those ideas aren’t controversial. But mixed in with the advice was something far more dangerous — women as property, strategies for recruiting women into his webcam operation, keeping control of the money they earned.Millions of young men watched. By 2022, Andrew Tate was one of the most searched people on the entire internet.And politicians noticed. Not because they admired him — because they admired his audience. That’s how modern politics works. Somebody has millions of followers, and eventually somebody decides those followers are worth chasing.The connections nobody wants to talk aboutThat’s exactly what happened here.According to the New York Times, Donald Trump Jr. interacted with Tate online, and the two eventually communicated directly. Tate later claimed he visited Trump Tower and met with Trump Jr. The Times also reports that Barron Trump encouraged his father to engage with influencers who reach young men — and that Barron took part in a Zoom call with Andrew Tate that touched on the Romanian criminal case.Let me be crystal clear. That doesn’t mean Donald Trump set policy on behalf of Andrew Tate. It doesn’t prove anyone committed a crime. Those are separate questions. What it shows is something politically significant: the Tate brothers weren’t isolated internet celebrities. They had relationships with people who mattered.And it went beyond media personalities. The Times reports that Richard Grenell, serving as a presidential envoy, discussed the Tate case with senior Romanian officials while the brothers were under investigation there. The White House says it wasn’t involved. But the Times reports Romanian officials believed easing travel restrictions on the brothers would please the Trump administration.Sit with that. Two influencers facing extremely serious criminal allegations overseas, and officials connected to one of the most powerful governments on earth are discussing their situation with foreign leaders. That is not normal.Then came the twistOnce Romania lifted the travel restrictions, Andrew and Tristan Tate flew to Florida. They celebrated online. They acted like they’d beaten the system.Almost immediately, it went sideways. Ron DeSantis said they weren’t welcome. Florida’s attorney general opened an investigation. And then British prosecutors expanded their case, bringing dozens of criminal charges — including rape, sex trafficking, and assault. The brothers deny every allegation. But those charges changed the political math overnight, because defending Andrew Tate wasn’t just controversial anymore. It had become a liability.And that’s when the fascinating part happened. The people who couldn’t stop talking about Andrew Tate stopped talking about Andrew Tate.That’s the part that deserves your attention — not TateFor years, people were willing to overlook almost anything because Tate had an audience they wanted. And if reaching that audience meant pretending not to hear what he was actually saying about women, that was a trade some folks were happy to make.That’s the problem. Because none of this was hidden. Nobody had to dig through secret recordings. Tate said these things out loud — on podcasts, on livestreams, in his own paid courses. This was never a mystery that surfaced after some investigation. The investigation was about the political connections. The misogyny was always right there in plain sight.So when people act shocked now — when they suddenly pretend they never knew who Andrew Tate was — give me a f*****g break.According to the Times, many of the figures who previously defended or amplified the brothers have now declined to comment, denied any ongoing relationship, or just gone quiet. The White House says President Trump has no plans to intervene in the extradition.That’s not a coincidence. That’s politics. When somebody’s useful, they’re your friend. When they turn toxic, you never met them.The bottom lineThere are real people at the center of these allegations. Real women. Real alleged victims. The Tates deny the charges, and they’re entitled to defend themselves in court. Prosecutors carry the burden of proving every allegation beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s how the system is supposed to work.But due process doesn’t require us to ignore patterns. And it sure as hell doesn’t require political leaders to celebrate a man just because he’s got a massive online following. You don’t have to wait for a conviction to decide someone isn’t worth putting on a pedestal.If your movement claims to stand for family values, respect, and responsibility, then maybe don’t build bridges to a guy who built his brand bragging about exploiting women. That shouldn’t be controversial. That should be obvious.Because if your principles only last until the polling changes, they were never principles. They were branding. And there’s a big difference.This story isn’t about cancel culture, or the manosphere, or even really about Andrew Tate. It’s about power — and about people deciding a man with millions of followers was worth embracing despite years of public behavior that should have tripped every alarm in the building. Now those same people are hoping everyone forgets it ever happened.Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t. But this is exactly why the work matters: to document what happened, connect the dots, and remind people that the internet never forgets — even when politicians suddenly do.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comOne anonymous phone call. No name, no evidence, no witness. Armed police at the door inside a day.That’s what happened to Pete Buttigieg and his family, and the details that have come out since should scare every parent in this country — because if the government can do this to someone as famous and scrutinized as him, think about what it can do to everyone else.Here’s the timeline. On June 22, somebody called Indiana’s child welfare hotline with allegations involving Buttigieg. No name. No evidence. No contact information. Just an anonymous accusation. The next day, Indiana forwarded it to Michigan, where Buttigieg lives with his husband, Chasten, and their four-year-old twins.And then armed Michigan State Police troopers, with a child welfare worker, showed up at the family’s home. Buttigieg says he was told he couldn’t be alone with his own children. The twins were removed and spent the night at their grandparents’ while he and Chasten were questioned.Sit in that for a second. Someone knocks on your door. You’re told you can’t be alone with your kids. Your four-year-olds are taken away overnight — all on an anonymous accusation nobody had verified.The children were returned. But that’s not where it should end, because of what investigators learned afterward. According to previously unreported police records obtained by The Washington Post, on June 29 — a full week after Buttigieg had already been separated from his kids — a Michigan child welfare worker learned from Indiana investigators that the likely source was described internally as “a mentally unstable woman in Indiana.”Read that again. They figured out who the accuser probably was after the emergency intervention. Only then did anyone start asking the questions that should come first: Who’s making this allegation? Do they have firsthand knowledge? Is there any evidence at all?It gets worse. The Post tracked down the apparent caller — living in Alabama. Confronted by reporters, she couldn’t provide basic details supporting her own accusation, and accused the reporter of colluding with Buttigieg. She claimed she’d encountered him in Florence, Alabama; his travel records reportedly show he wasn’t there during the period she described. And weeks before she ever called a child welfare hotline, the same woman had publicly urged people not to vote for him.Then the experts looked. Vivek Sankaran, one of the country’s leading child welfare law scholars at the University of Michigan, reviewed the records and called it “incredibly poor investigative work.” He saw no indication a child was in imminent danger. And he said the thing every parent should hear: “It should scare all of us.”He’s right. Michigan State Police defended their response — they moved fast because protecting kids requires immediate action. And nobody disputes that authorities should move fast when a child is in genuine danger. But speed doesn’t cancel out basic judgment, especially when what’s on the table is pulling children away from their parents.Here’s what sticks with me, and it’s the whole point: this isn’t really about Pete Buttigieg. He’s famous, wealthy, well-connected, has the best lawyers and a platform to tell millions of people what happened to him. Most people have none of that. Most parents don’t get national headlines when an agency gets it wrong, and most families don’t have The Washington Post digging through records to reconstruct the truth. If an anonymous accusation with no corroboration can trigger this, the average family has far less protection than he did — not more.And you can’t ignore the history hanging over it. Would this have unfolded the same way if Buttigieg weren’t openly gay? Nobody can answer that for certain. But for decades gay men have been falsely cast as threats to children — from Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” crusade in the 1970s to today’s reflexive “groomer” smears — and those stereotypes have consequences. Buttigieg is one of the most scrutinized politicians in America: mayor, presidential candidate, Cabinet secretary, years of opposition research. If anyone had real evidence of criminal misconduct, we’d have heard it long ago. Instead, an unverified tip put troopers on his porch and his kids in another house for the night.Whether bias played a role, people will debate. Here’s what shouldn’t be up for debate. The government has enormous power — to search, to investigate, to separate parents from children — and that power comes with an obligation to verify facts and tell a credible report from a baseless one before acting. Because once kids are taken, even for a night, the fear of that doesn’t just get undone.Every American — left, right, gay, straight — should want a child protection system that’s aggressive about real danger and disciplined enough not to act on garbage. That’s not partisan. That’s basic justice.Michigan’s attorney general has opened an investigation into how this was handled. Indiana State Police opened one into where the tip came from. We’ll see if either produces anything.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comYou don’t picture a Secret Service agent charged with attempted manslaughter.You picture someone guarding the President, working financial crimes, moving in a national emergency. Not felony charges tied to a fraternity hazing ritual. But that’s exactly what prosecutors in Florida say happened — and one alleged victim needed skin grafts, another a breathing tube, and prosecutors say both could have died without emergency care.Here’s the case. A U.S. Secret Service agent out of the Miami Field Office — 29-year-old Marquez Christopher Pinder — has been charged alongside two other men, Jared Lamar James and Elijah Delano Dyous. All three face attempted manslaughter, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, and hazing with a deadly weapon. The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s office says it played out over four nights in April, at an apartment and a home in the area.The arrest warrant describes Pinder as a “dean of pledges” for a Miami chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi. But the University of Miami says he has no connection to its campus or that chapter, and the fraternity says he holds no official role and no authority to run anything on its behalf — Kappa Alpha Psi told NBC News it’s a non-hazing fraternity that doesn’t condone this. So one open question is how a 29-year-old federal agent ended up in that role at all.The two victims aren’t abstractions. One was a University of Miami undergrad who started attending interest meetings and is now a graduate law student there. The other works for Miami-Dade Fire Rescue.According to the warrant, both men were repeatedly struck with canes and paddles for failing to answer questions about the fraternity’s history correctly. The paddling ran over several nights, and one session reportedly ended only after blood soaked through a victim’s pants. Then, police say, the men were told to strip, bag their clothes, and leave.What came next is why the charges are this serious. One victim developed severe pain, vomiting, and fever, and doctors found injuries requiring skin grafts plus kidney damage that, per the warrant, would have led to renal failure and death without treatment. The second was hospitalized and had a tube placed in his windpipe — investigators say the intubation was necessary to keep him from deteriorating further and dying.Now the part I won’t skip: these are allegations. The three men are charged, not convicted, and like every defendant in this country they’re presumed innocent until proven guilty. Pinder’s attorney, Justin Beckham, told the New York Times the charges are “grossly overcharged” and that his client served honorably in the military and the Secret Service. Pinder was granted bond at $75,000, put on house arrest with GPS monitoring, and barred from contacting the victims or his co-defendants; he’s since posted bond and faces arraignment on September 24. The Secret Service says he’s been employed there since September 2023, has been on administrative leave since the moment they were notified, and that the agency is fully cooperating.I spent two decades on the job, and the thing that never left me is that the badge doesn’t put you above the law — it demands a higher standard. People hand federal agents extraordinary authority, and that trust comes with responsibility. If prosecutors prove what this warrant describes, that’s not horseplay or roughhousing. It’s violence.And the lesson reaches past one defendant and one fraternity. Every few years America has the same conversation about hazing — someone is badly hurt, sometimes someone dies, everyone agrees it never should have happened, organizations promise reform. Then another case comes along. Florida knows the pattern: the state strengthened its anti-hazing law in 2005 after University of Miami freshman Chad Meredith drowned during a fraternity initiation in 2001, to make clear that hazing causing serious injury or death is a felony, not a rules violation. That’s the law now at the center of this prosecution.No institution is immune from bad actors — not a fraternity, not a police department, not the Secret Service. The real test isn’t whether an organization can prevent every act of misconduct. It’s how it responds when credible evidence surfaces. Putting the accused agent on leave and cooperating is the right first step. From here, prosecutors carry the burden of proving it, and the defense gets every chance to fight it. That’s how the system is supposed to work.But whatever the verdict, one thing shouldn’t be up for debate. Violent hazing isn’t tradition, and it isn’t leadership, and it isn’t brotherhood. If the allegations hold up, it was criminal violence dressed up as initiation. No organization gets stronger by tolerating conduct that lands people in intensive care — and accountability can’t depend on your title, your profession, or the badge you carry. It has to apply to everyone, or it doesn’t mean anything.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comThe ones warning that ICE is falling apart are ICE officers who voted for Trump.New reporting from the Washington Examiner has current and former agents describing an agency in a full morale collapse — burnout, canceled leave, and, most alarming, recruits being turned loose on American streets before they’re ready. And it’s landing in the middle of a string of deadly encounters.If you follow this channel or my Substack, you already know the recent run: two ICE traffic stops that ended in the fatal shootings of people who weren’t even subject to active immigration enforcement — one in Maine, one in Texas — and a third death in Florida, where a man was struck and killed by a tractor-trailer while fleeing an operation.Here’s how the people doing the job describe it. “We’re being pushed to a breaking point. I don’t know where it will go, but it’s nowhere good.” Another: “No one is happy. If you hear Tom Homan saying, ‘Morale’s stronger than ever,’ I say, No, it’s not. I’ve been out in the field. I see it.” And an officer with more than a decade on the job: “Many on the right will think this is an attack on Trump. I voted for Trump. I believe in immigration enforcement. But man, it’s so disorganized and chaotic.”When a Trump-voting ICE agent is the one calling it chaos, something is badly wrong.So what’s driving it? In May 2025, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller reportedly told ICE leadership he wanted 3,000 arrests a day. The administration has since touted roughly 900,000 arrests this term — call it about 1,600 a day. And the roughly 6,000 officers handling interior enforcement say that pace is simply unsustainable. Days off have become the exception. “They constantly call us into work on our days off,” one told the Examiner. “They get on our case about working only eight hours a day.” One Texas office reportedly doesn’t even have a working restroom — agents walk to nearby businesses, past protesters, to use the bathroom.But here’s the part that should worry you no matter where you land on immigration: the training pipeline is broken.On top of those 6,000 officers, ICE has around 10,000 new hires somewhere in the training process. And according to officers and a retired senior official still in contact with leadership, many of those recruits are being pushed into American cities before they’ve cleared background checks or received security clearances.That’s insane. You don’t hand a badge and a gun to someone whose background check isn’t finished and send them into the highest-stakes encounter there is — a stranger, a car, a split-second decision.And you get exactly what you’d expect. Go back to that Maine shooting. A voicemail the ICE shooter left on his ex-wife’s phone surfaced, and here’s what’s on it: “every single female in your bloodline is nothing but a disgusting, fat ass. All of you should have your throats slit.” That’s a man the administration handed a badge and a gun.So which is worse — the pipeline that put him on the street, or what happened next? After that shooting, the DHS Secretary announced a pause on traffic stops. One day later, Trump overruled it on social media and declared ICE would keep running traffic stops, and pursue them just as aggressively. The administration is courting death.Strip the politics out for a second. Undertrained — in some cases genuinely unhinged — recruits are being dropped into high-stakes encounters. Experienced officers are burned out and worked to the bone. Nobody’s getting a day off. That’s a powder keg, and frankly it’s a small miracle there haven’t been more killings.And the wildest part is who’s telling us. Not activists. Not sanctuary-city politicians. ICE officers — people who voted for Trump and believe in what they were hired to do — saying out loud that it’s a disaster.This doesn’t stop with more funding, more recruits, or Tom Homan going on Fox to insist morale has never been higher. It stops when someone in Washington admits the quota is the problem. I’m not holding my breath, because an armed, aggressive ICE has always been Stephen Miller’s dream — and a man who dreams that dream isn’t the one who pumps the brakes.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comMichael Whatley wants a Senate seat. First he owes an answer.He’s running for the United States Senate from North Carolina with Donald Trump’s endorsement, the backing of the Republican establishment, and a pitch built on conservative values. But new reporting has put a hard question on the table about his years running the state party — because while he was chairman, he appointed a man with a criminal record involving minors to leadership inside it.And the man at the center of it says he told party leaders about his past from the very beginning. His name is Harvey Lee West Jr.So the question is simple: what did Whatley know, and when did he know it?Here’s the record. In 1999, West was a police officer in North Carolina. That year he was charged with statutory rape involving three teenage girls — 14, 14, and 16 years old. West was 28. He was a cop; they were kids. In a 2000 plea deal he pleaded guilty to five counts of taking indecent liberties with a child, including a victim under 16. He served six years, was released in 2006, and had to register as a sex offender.Years later, West got into Republican politics. And according to the Asheville Watchdog and other outlets, he climbed into party leadership while Whatley was chairman.Whatley ran the North Carolina GOP from 2019 to 2024, before going on to lead the Republican National Committee. During that stretch, the Watchdog reported, he appointed West to two positions. One was chairman of the party’s 1st Congressional District committee. The other was the Plan of Organization Committee — and that one matters, because it effectively controls the rules for the entire state party. That’s not a ceremonial seat. That’s real power over how the party runs.And West says leadership knew exactly who he was. In an interview he said he was open about his history from the start — the charges, the prison time — and gave party officials the chance to decide whether they wanted him involved. If they didn’t, he said, he’d walk. “I’ve never hidden the fact that I have a past.” He wasn’t removed. He kept rising.Here’s what makes the “distant association” defense impossible. This wasn’t one signature Whatley could claim he forgot. The two appeared together at Republican events for years — photographs of them smiling, posing, embracing on stage. In 2024 West posted a picture with Whatley from the Republican National Convention and called it an emotional, unifying moment for the North Carolina delegation. This was a working relationship across multiple election cycles.It went past appearances. West became part of the money operation — his Down East Judicial Picnic turned into a stop on the state’s fundraising circuit, tickets running as high as $1,500, and a Republican who was there says Whatley himself promoted it. And when other Republicans tried to act, the door got shut: activist Michele Woodhouse says she backed a resolution to bar the party from holding events at a venue owned by a convicted felon, and it was killed at Whatley’s direction.The state GOP didn’t even dispute that Whatley appointed West to the Plan of Organization Committee. And here’s where it gets worse. In June, a reporter asked him directly, and Whatley said he did not appoint West. But the rules of that committee say the chairman appoints all of its members. So either his own party’s rules are wrong, or the man who ran that party for five years is betting you won’t read them.Let me be clear about what this is and isn’t. It isn’t about whether someone who served their sentence can rebuild a life — that’s a real and separate conversation. This is about judgment. Leadership is who you choose to put in positions of trust, the standard you set, and whether you’ll answer for it when the decision gets scrutinized.I spent twenty years on the job, and I know the difference between a man who quietly paid his debt and rebuilt a life out of the spotlight, and a man who got walked into the rooms where the rules get written — over the objections of people in his own party who knew better. This is the second one.Whatley is asking North Carolina to send him to the Senate. Voters get to decide whether his explanation is enough. But they deserve the answers first — because every leader is judged not just by what they do, but by who they choose to elevate. Right now Michael Whatley is being asked to explain why Harvey Lee West Jr. was one of those people. His silence is its own answer.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comPay up, or lose your hurricane relief. That was the deal.For months it’s felt like Trump plays offense while everyone else scrambles — executive order after executive order, another fight over immigration, another fight over elections. Then two dozen Democratic attorneys general finally flipped the script.While the country watched the latest noise out of Washington, twenty-four of them quietly filed what could become one of the biggest legal challenges of Trump’s second term. They accuse the administration of holding disaster relief hostage — refusing the money unless states agree to change how they run their elections and help federal immigration enforcement. If they’re right, this isn’t just another lawsuit. It’s a direct hit on one of Trump’s core governing strategies.Look at the pattern first, because it’s been building. The administration keeps using federal money as leverage to force states onto its priorities — education grants, transportation dollars, immigration enforcement. The message never changes: want the money, get on board with the agenda. Federal judges have already blocked some of it. One court said the administration couldn’t tie transportation funding to immigration enforcement. Another blocked an attempt involving Homeland Security grants.So instead of backing off, they went bigger. This time it’s disaster money — the funding communities depend on after hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and terrorist attacks. That’s the line two dozen states decided not to cross.Here’s what’s actually in the complaint.FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, the suit says, are requiring states to accept new election and immigration conditions before they can get billions in disaster and homeland security grants. States are told to move toward paper ballots, run manual audits of their elections, verify the citizenship of registered voters, and cooperate more closely with immigration enforcement. Refuse, and they risk losing at least twenty percent of certain Homeland Security funding.Think about what that money actually is. Not campaign cash. Not discretionary spending. It’s funding to prepare for terrorist attacks, defend against cyberattacks, strengthen emergency response, and help towns rebuild after a disaster. The attorneys general argue Congress already decided how it gets spent — and a president can’t bolt brand-new political conditions onto it after the fact.Rhode Island’s AG, Peter Neronha, accused the administration of using public safety as leverage to make states surrender their constitutional authority. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro called it an attempt to hold homeland security funding hostage to take over election administration. If anything, that’s the understatement of the century.FEMA sees it differently — it dismissed the suit as partisan pushback and argued election security is national security. So that’s the fight. Nobody disputes that election security matters. Nobody disputes that disaster funding matters. The question is whether the White House can legally chain the two together and make one contingent on the other.Here’s why it should worry you no matter how you vote. If a president can staple new conditions onto disaster funding today, what stops the next one from doing it with education money tomorrow? Or health care. Or law enforcement grants. Or infrastructure. This is bigger than FEMA, bigger than immigration, bigger than election policy. It’s about whether Congress controls federal spending, or whether presidents get to rewrite the rules after the money’s already approved.Now the part that matters to me.For a long time I’ve watched Democrats fail to meet this moment — unable to rally, unable to act decisively while democracy itself is on the line. This time they’ve got their act together. It isn’t easy to line up twenty-four state attorneys general as a united front. But it should be. Trump keeps steamrolling the Constitution and holding taxpayer money hostage, and everywhere you look — corporations, universities, law firms, newsrooms — people have been folding, acting like there’s no way to band together and stop him.Well, here’s the answer: you can. This is exactly what resistance looks like. Everybody needs to get on board, or we don’t stand a chance this year or in 2028.And filing a lawsuit isn’t the same as winning one — the administration gets its day in court, and it’ll argue these are reasonable conditions tied to national security. The states will argue they blow past presidential authority. A judge decides. But the conversation already changed. Instead of another week reacting to Trump’s latest move, the administration is the one on defense, having to justify this in front of a federal judge while the country hears the case laid out over the limits of presidential power.That’s the part I care about. Democrat, Republican, independent — it doesn’t matter. Every president should have limits. Every administration should be accountable. And when there’s a serious constitutional dispute, this is exactly where it belongs: in a courtroom, not a press release.Whether it ends in checkmate is up to the courts. But this is the most direct hit anyone’s landed on a defining strategy of Trump’s second term.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comThe Trump signs are gone.What got my attention wasn’t a headline or a cable panel. It was a voter — a dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding-red conservative — telling Marjorie Taylor Greene, to her face: “We’ve always voted Republican, but that is about to change.” Then this: “There were Trump signs everywhere. Those signs are gone. There is not a Trump sign in this county anymore. People feel betrayed.”She didn’t say disappointed. She didn’t say frustrated. She said betrayed. And the numbers back her up — Trump’s approval has sunk to a second-term low around 37%, with even Republican support sliding, down into the low 80s from where it started.It’s not one thing. Start with prices, because that’s the one you can’t spin.The 2024 pitch was simple: day one, prices come down. Groceries, gas, housing. People getting crushed at the checkout heard that and voted on it. What did they get? Tariffs that work as a tax on everything they buy. Beef at record highs. Coffee at record highs. Electricity bills through the roof. You can spin a foreign policy blunder. You can spin a court fight. You cannot spin a grocery receipt.Then Iran. A big chunk of the MAGA coalition came to this movement on one promise — no more forever wars, no more Middle East entanglements, America First means America first. Then they watched bombers head toward Iranian nuclear sites and asked the obvious question: how is this what I voted for? Tucker Carlson asked it. Steve Bannon asked it. Half the online right melted down asking it. The anti-war promise was a load-bearing pillar of the whole thing — and when you spend a decade screaming “the establishment lied us into wars” and then launch strikes yourself, people notice.And then the Epstein files — the purest example, because it was entirely self-inflicted.For years the message to these voters was: there’s a list, there’s a cover-up, the elites protect each other, and we’re the ones who’ll blow it open. People built their whole worldview around that promise. Then the administration gets the keys to every file cabinet in the federal government, and the message flips to: nothing to see here, case closed.You cannot spend years telling people the deep state is hiding the truth, and then — the moment you are the state — tell them to drop it. They believed you. That’s the part the political class never gets: the base wasn’t playing a game. They meant it. And when the answer came back “move along,” even Marjorie Taylor Greene broke ranks, because she could hear her own voters — a fight that ended with her announcing she’d leave Congress altogether.Let me be careful, because I don’t do wishful thinking. Is every Republican jumping ship? No. Are most of them pulling the lever for a Democrat? No. Plenty of them are exactly as angry and dug-in as they’ve always been.But you don’t need a mass conversion to change the math. You need erosion at the margins — the two, three, five, ten percent who are done, plus the ones who just lose the will to show up. Elections here are decided in the margins, in a handful of counties, by people exactly like that woman. And when she says the signs are gone — the cheapest, proudest form of political expression there is — that’s enthusiasm gone. Nobody pulls a yard sign because they’re mildly annoyed. They pull it because they don’t want the neighbors associating them with it anymore.We’ve already seen it hit real ballots — the off-year and special elections where Democrats keep overperforming in places they have no business being competitive.Here’s the deeper problem, and it’s the thing about every movement built on grievance: grievance is a great engine for winning power and a terrible one for holding it. Out of power, everything wrong is somebody else’s fault — the prices, the wars, the cover-ups, all of it belongs to the other guys. But once it’s your Justice Department sitting on the files, your tariffs hitting the shelves, your bombers in the air, there’s nobody left to blame.I’ll end honestly: I don’t celebrate this. A country where half the electorate feels conned isn’t a healthy one — it’s volatile and dangerous. I saw that up close on January 6th. Betrayed people don’t calmly drift to the middle. Sometimes they check out. Sometimes they try to burn it all down.What I hope — and what that voter’s words say is at least possible — is that some of them do the older, simpler, more American thing. They look at the promises, they look at the results, and they vote accordingly. Not out of tribe. Out of self-respect.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comHe tore my badge off while a mob was beating me. Now he’s back in a courtroom.On January 6th, 2021, I was a D.C. Metropolitan Police officer doing my job outside the Capitol. By the end of that day I’d been dragged into the crowd, tased over and over, beaten, and nearly killed. And while I was pinned down fighting to stay conscious, one of them reached in and pulled the badge and radio right off my tactical vest.That man was Thomas Sibick, of Amherst, New York.If you followed the January 6th cases, his name might ring a bell — he was one of the more notorious arrests out of that day. Court filings say he later posed for a photo holding a stolen Capitol Police riot shield. When the FBI caught up with him, he changed his story more than once: first he was trying to help me, then he’d pressed the radio’s emergency button to call for backup. Prosecutors weren’t buying it — the emergency signal wasn’t triggered until sixteen minutes after other cops had already pulled me to safety. Eventually he admitted the truth. He’d buried my badge in his own backyard.In 2023 he pleaded guilty to a felony count of assaulting officers, plus theft. Fifty months in federal prison. That should’ve been the end of it.It wasn’t. In January 2025, Trump signed a blanket clemency order covering roughly 1,500 people tied to January 6th — Sibick among them. He walked out of federal prison and went home to Western New York.Here’s where it gets interesting.First, he was arraigned in Amherst Town Court — nothing to do with January 6th, a misdemeanor criminal mischief charge for allegedly smashing a victim’s cellphone. It didn’t meet New York’s threshold for bail, so he was released on his own recognizance, and the court issued a temporary order of protection for the alleged victim.That could’ve stayed a small local court item. It didn’t.Days later he was back in the same courthouse, this time facing six counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon — all class D felonies. Prosecutors say he illegally had three assault rifles and three large-capacity magazines. This time he was remanded into custody.Let me be clear about the two threads here, because they’re easy to blur. Thread one is January 6th: convicted, sentenced, pardoned. As far as the federal government is concerned, that chapter is legally closed — that’s what a pardon does. Thread two is new: fresh, alleged conduct, none of it proven in court yet. He’s presumed innocent, and I mean that.But the reason this story travels isn’t the gun charges in New York. It’s that the name attached to them belongs to a man whose violence got wiped clean by Trump.And Sibick isn’t an outlier. The watchdog group CREW has tracked at least 40 pardoned January 6th defendants who’ve since been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for other crimes — roughly a dozen of them allegedly reoffending after the pardons took effect.Some of it is stomach-turning. Andrew Paul Johnson, pardoned in January 2025, was convicted in February 2026 of child molestation and sentenced to life, with prosecutors saying some of the abuse continued after his release. Zachary Alam was convicted of grand larceny and burglary within months of his pardon. Ryan Nichols was charged in May 2026 after allegedly threatening someone with a gun in a church parking lot. Daniel Ball — who prosecutors say attacked police with an explosive device on January 6th — was rearrested within days of his pardon on illegal weapons charges tied to a prior domestic violence record.Weapons cases like Sibick’s aren’t unusual in the pile either. CREW counts at least five other pardoned defendants facing firearms charges, and once you add the DUIs, assaults, and fraud allegations, the pattern runs across dozens of names.None of that proves anything about Sibick’s pending charges. He’s still presumed innocent, and this all has to be tried. But it does mean this isn’t a one-off. It’s a pattern that’s been documented, case by case, for more than a year.Trump turned his own private militia of losers loose on the country, and they’ve been wrecking havoc ever since.Talk about making America great again.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comMissed the live? Pour one and catch the replay. This week’s BYOB sat me down with veteran journalist Joy Reid and comedian Suzanne Lambert for the kind of loose, no-script conversation these nights are made for — politics, the stuff nobody else will say out loud, and plenty of tangents in between. If you weren’t there in the chat, you missed a good one.…

Michael chats with writer Peter Rothpletz, political commentator Francesca Fiorentini, and the Jolly Good Ginger about the death of Lindsey Graham, the Democratic Party’s reaction to his passing, yet another ICE killing, and the Platner disaster in Maine. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelfanone.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comHe forgot the camera was still rolling.Martin Siller was on duty, in uniform, gun on his hip, working a January 30 protest against ICE outside the old federal building in Eugene, Oregon. Federal officers had tear-gassed the crowd. The city had declared a riot. And Siller sat in his vehicle passing the time on the phone with an old cop buddy back in Utah — bodycam running the whole time.Here’s what’s on the tape. “Just so you know, I’m a big supporter of ICE.” Then: “F** the Somali and Latino communities. I’m about the American communities. I’m about America, son.”*Sit with that sentence. Somali and Latino on one side. “American communities” on the other. Thousands of Oregon citizens written out of their own country in a single breath — by a man being paid, that very minute, to protect them.He wasn’t done. The two of them got onto Black people and ran the greatest hits. The buddy said they can’t swim. Siller said they like to be “grounded with their watermelon and fried chicken.” Eugene’s independent police auditor called the whole thing “highly offensive, racist in their nature and simply put, disgusting.”I was a cop for two decades. I’ve heard every flavor of locker-room talk this profession produces, and I won’t pretend cops sound like social workers when the doors are closed. But I know the difference between a guy blowing off steam after a bad call and a guy telling you exactly who he is. “F*** the Somali and Latino communities” has no setup and no punchline. That’s a worldview.And here’s what should keep you up at night. A cop’s real weapon isn’t the gun — it’s discretion. Who you stop and who you wave through. Who gets a warning and who gets charged. So ask how a man who talks like that used twenty-seven years of it. How many stops, how many arrests, how many reports with his name at the bottom — and how many of those people were Somali, or Latino, or Black. Every defense attorney in two states should be pulling those files.Now look at how the tape even got out, because the department sure didn’t show you. A local documentarian named Tim Lewis was facing a misdemeanor from that same protest, and the footage landed in his lawyer’s discovery file. His team flagged it. He posted it in early May. It went viral in a day, and Siller resigned — the auditor says if he hadn’t quit, he’d have been fired.That’s the part that matters, and it’s the part I keep coming back to. Siller is already gone. The scandal isn’t him. It’s everything the department did next.Chief Chris Skinner started strong — called Siller an “equal opportunity racist,” said the remarks were “completely inconsistent” with the department’s values. Fine. Then his people reviewed roughly 270 bodycam videos from that same night and found, in his words, “a few” that were “concerning.” And then the vocabulary changed. Those weren’t racist, he decided — they were “attempts at some fairly dark humor.” Siller’s video “stands alone.” He has “no plans to release” the rest, because he’s decided they don’t rise to the level of “significant community concern.”Hold on. The chief gets to decide what concerns you? This is the same department that told you nothing about the first tape — it only surfaced because a defendant tripped over it in his own case file. Now they’re asking you to trust their judgment about the tapes they’re keeping in the drawer.And Siller said all of it to another cop who stayed right there on the line. The auditor is now investigating whether other Eugene officers knew and never reported it — a violation of its own.The community sees it clearly. One resident called it “an infestation of rotten culture protected by a system of impunity.” The local NAACP said what disturbed them most was how comfortable he sounded. Another told the council, “Your only leverage over the police is to fire the chief. It’s time to pull that lever.”I’ll leave the chief’s job to the people of Eugene. But take this from someone who wore the badge: the danger was never one loudmouth with a camera he forgot about. It’s a department that got caught by accident, and is now working hard to make sure the next accident doesn’t happen. The question every community should be asking — Eugene first — is simple. What’s on the tapes they won’t let you see?🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comAn ICE officer killed a father of three, and one of his sons watched it happen.Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was 52. On the morning of July 7 he did what he did every workday — headed out through Houston’s East End to pick up his crew and drive to a job site. He’d lived in this country close to 35 years. A wife, three sons, his own construction business, and a search of Texas records that turns up no criminal convictions.Within minutes of leaving, he was shot dead by an ICE officer on a residential street in Magnolia Park — the historic heart of Latino Houston. His son saw him die. A coworker was sitting in the vehicle when the officer fired.ICE says Salgado Araujo tried to ram an ICE vehicle, ignored commands, and tried to run over an agent who fired in self-defense. The agency’s press shop says he “weaponized his vehicle.”Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe.Here’s the problem. No video has surfaced that corroborates one word of it. And ICE has told this exact story before — more than once. The last two times anyone got to check it against a camera, the feds turned out to be lying.I spent two decades as a cop, and shooting at a moving vehicle is one of the most restricted uses of force in American policing. Most departments train you to get out of the way, for an obvious reason: bullets don’t stop cars. A dead driver just turns a rolling vehicle into an unguided missile. When this happens at a city department, there’s a protocol — the officer is named, an outside agency investigates, the bodycam comes out within days. Not one piece of that is happening here.Look at the pattern, because it’s the whole point.In March 2025, on South Padre Island, an immigration officer shot and killed Ruben Ray Martinez, a 23-year-old from San Antonio there for his birthday. DHS said he tried to run over agents. Then the body-camera footage came out — his car moving slowly past officers, brake lights on. As the local station’s analysis put it, the video “does not support that at all.”In January, in Minneapolis, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old American citizen who was filming their operation. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced he’d approached Border Patrol with a 9mm handgun and “violently resisted.” Then at least four witness videos came out, verified by NBC News. They showed agents tackling him, taking away the firearm he was legally carrying, and shooting him.This isn’t two bad nights. The Wall Street Journal counted at least 13 instances of immigration officers firing at or into civilian vehicles since July 2025. Federal immigration officers shot 14 people in six months.And here’s why there may never be video from Magnolia Park. Houston ICE agents weren’t required to wear body cameras, because in 2025 Trump signed an executive order rescinding the federal bodycam requirement for immigration agents. Fewer than one in four ICE agents even has a camera. Congress put $20 million in the DHS budget to buy them — and specifically declined to require anyone to wear them.Now look at who’s investigating what. The FBI opened an investigation — into the dead man, for possible assault on a federal officer. The shooting itself is being handled by the DHS Office of Inspector General. So the government is investigating the government. Houston police weren’t part of the operation and only showed up afterward to direct traffic; LULAC’s national chairman called that a dereliction of duty. The officer who fired hasn’t been named. DHS hasn’t explained why Salgado Araujo was targeted at all.So the sum total of the accountability here is this: the shooter’s agency is grading the shooter’s homework, while the FBI builds a case against the man in the morgue. LULAC is offering a $5,000 reward for evidence — which means private citizens are crowdsourcing the records their own government refuses to produce.I’ve been on the wrong side of a use-of-force investigation. It’s miserable, and it’s supposed to be, because that scrutiny is the price of carrying a gun on behalf of the public. Cops in every city in America pay it every day, and the good ones understand why. What ICE is claiming is armed government power with none of it.A man who spent 35 years building houses in Texas is dead. His son watched. And the only official version of what happened is the one told by the people who killed him. His family asked the public for exactly one thing — don’t share the images of his final moments. So don’t. But don’t let his name disappear either.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comThe research didn’t get updated. It got deleted.The administration pulled taxpayer-funded gun violence research off government websites and bet you’d never notice. After two decades carrying a badge, I’ve watched plenty of politicians talk tough on crime. This isn’t that. This is making sure you never see the crime, so they can gut gun safety while you’re in the dark.Start with the number they’d rather bury: roughly 44,000 Americans died from guns in 2024. About 120 a day. And around 60 percent of those deaths are suicides — not gangs, not armed robbery. People in crisis, turning a weapon on themselves.That one fact wrecks the whole tough-on-crime script. If most gun deaths are suicides, then more raids and more National Guard don’t touch the biggest part of the problem. So what did they do with the programs that actually reach those people?They cut them. There’s a program that embeds counselors in hospital trauma centers — when a gunshot victim comes in, someone steps in to break the cycle before that person is back in the ER or the morgue. It works; cities like Baltimore and Chicago saw real declines. The administration slashed the funding. One national group had to lay off a fifth of its staff. Another lost $150 million — redirected to law enforcement.Think about that logic. You take money from the people stopping the next shooting and hand it to the people who show up after. I believe in good policing. But a badge can’t talk a suicidal veteran off the ledge, and it can’t sit with a kid in a hospital bed and talk him out of going back for revenge. That’s different work, done by different hands — the exact hands they’re cutting off.Then there’s the erasing. After the bipartisan gun bill passed in 2022, the government commissioned a report on red flag laws — the ones that let a judge temporarily pull firearms from someone deemed a danger. It went up on a federal site. Trump took office, and it vanished. The surgeon general’s advisory calling gun violence a public health crisis? Gone too. The report’s own lead author, a Duke researcher, only learned his work survived because a nonprofit had quietly reposted it. Nobody explained why it was pulled.A Georgetown health-law expert called it the purest form of political control over scientific integrity — and said taking the material down may have broken federal law on how agencies share public information.Connect the dots. Shut the prevention office. Cut the trauma programs. Move the money to policing. Fund no new research. Then scrub the research you already paid for. Every move points the same way: less in your hands, fewer questions to answer, and a gun industry getting exactly what it’s wanted for decades.The health secretary — a man whose own father and uncle were both shot dead — told Congress he doesn’t see gun violence as a public health problem. Say that to the 120 families who lose someone every day.Here’s the tell. A government confident its policies work publishes the data. It shows the receipts. It doesn’t scrub the site and hope you’re not paying attention. They took the reports down because the reports told the truth, and the truth is expensive for a powerful set of interests.You paid for that research. You’re allowed to see it. And the fact that they’re betting you won’t go looking tells you exactly who these policies protect.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comHe told a federal agent it was all a joke.Free speech. He said it on his own front porch, with the FBI standing right in front of him, and he kept saying it right up until the night they came back and put him in handcuffs.After twenty years in law enforcement, I can tell you “it’s just a joke” is the most predictable sentence in this entire business. I’ve heard it from people who genuinely meant nothing by it. I’ve also heard it from people who were one bad day away from doing something that leads the news for a week. The whole job is telling those two apart. So let me walk you through what the Bureau was actually looking at, because once you see it, the joke defense falls apart pretty f*****g quickly.Here’s the timeline. In October, the FBI got a tip about an Instagram account posting what they classify as RMVE — racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism. They traced it to a nineteen-year-old in Edgewater, Florida named Lucas Nevcherlian.Before I lay out the case, I want to be transparent. He’s pleaded not guilty, the case is still open, and he’s still presumed innocent in the eyes of the law. Everything here is in the public record and the police file. Draw your own conclusions.This was not one edgy post. The account was literally called Incel Revolution Soon.According to the file, in private messages he wrote that the sight of women filled him with rage. He wrote about getting a gun and going to a public area. He praised Elliot Rodger, the man who murdered six people in 2014 because women wouldn’t date him. He praised Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who killed seventy-seven people, most of them kids at a summer camp. He wrote that Breivik lit his fuse of hate too early — and that they all needed to light their fuses together, for one enormous explosion.Let me tell you what a cop is actually looking at in a pile like that. We’re not grading vocabulary. We’re not policing opinions. We’re looking for a few specific things.Is there real intent behind the words. Is there a target. Does the person have the means. And are they fixated on people who have already done it.This kid checked every box. He named a weapon. He named a place — a public area. And he named his heroes, and his heroes happen to be two of the worst mass murderers of the century. That’s not a teenager being provocative online. That’s a threat assessment lighting up like a switchboard.His father shows up partway through, and on one point the man isn’t wrong.You do have a First Amendment right. You can hate any group you want. You can say the ugliest, most repugnant thing about a religion or a race or a sex, and the government can’t lay a finger on you for the opinion itself. I’ll defend that line all day. But there’s a point where speech stops being an opinion and becomes a threat — and the moment you write that you’re going to get a gun and kill people in a public place, you’ve blown right past it. In Florida, a written threat to kill is a second-degree felony. Fifteen years. That’s not the FBI inventing a crime because they didn’t like his worldview. That’s a statute on the books.And watch how this nineteen-year-old — a legal adult — handled the one chance he was given. An agent is standing on his porch practically begging him to say it was stupid, that he got carried away, that he didn’t mean it. Instead he lectures federal agents about the Patriot Act and calls them terrorists. He wants everybody in that driveway to know the real victim here is him. A white guy who supposedly can’t catch a break.That grievance — that self-pity dressed up as persecution — is the engine. It’s the exact thing that takes a lonely, angry, chronically online kid and turns him into somebody the Bureau has to open a file on.His own friends couldn’t fully vouch for him, and that’s the detail that should stick with you. One of his buddies gets asked, point blank, do you think he’d actually act on this. “Truthfully, I don’t know.” That’s the answer. That’s the answer every single time — from the neighbor, the classmate, the guy in the group chat — after it’s already happened. He was quiet. He posted weird stuff. We figured he was joking. We’ve all read that news story a hundred times. The only reason we keep reading it is that somebody decided the jokes weren’t worth taking seriously until it was too late.I have sympathy for the parents in that driveway, I do. Nobody wants to believe their own kid is capable of this. But the mother’s line about how he never gets in trouble, and the father quietly moving the guns to his shop while the kid films it and laughs, tells you everything about the house this happened in. A young man with access to a Glock, a shotgun, and an AK, writing about shooting up a public area — and the adults around him had spent who knows how long treating it as nothing.Here’s the rare case where the system did its job. Somebody saw it and said something. The Bureau took the tip seriously. An agent knocked, assessed it, built the case, got a warrant signed by a judge, and made the arrest at night without a single person getting hurt. That’s threat assessment working exactly the way it’s designed to. The alternative to that knock on the door is the version of this story where I’m reading you a body count instead of a case number.So the next time somebody tells you this was just a kid, just a joke, just free speech — remember that every one of those words was technically true right up until the second it wasn’t. The whole job of the people who do this work is to act before you find out which kind of person you were dealing with. I did that job for decades, and I’ll tell you plainly: I’d rather knock on a hundred doors and be wrong ninety-nine times than miss the one.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comFor more than a year, the anti-vaccine movement had its perfect martyr.A young mother in Idaho. Two healthy eighteen-month-old twins, a boy and a girl. A routine checkup — and within days, both babies dead in a shared bed. RFK Jr. and his people at Health and Human Services rushed to make her the example they needed to sell their anti-vax b******t to the country.Her name is Andrea Shaw. Days after those two children were found dead, she was sitting on a podcast produced by Children’s Health Defense — the anti-vaccine organization RFK Jr. founded and ran for years, the same man who now runs the entire Department of Health and Human Services and sets vaccine policy for this country. On that show, she told the world the shots did it. Three vaccines at an eighteen-month well-baby visit, and her twins were gone.They didn’t stop at the podcast. Children’s Health Defense put her name on a federal lawsuit against the American Academy of Pediatrics, accusing the doctors who write the childhood vaccine schedule of defrauding families. There was a fundraiser bolted onto it — ten thousand dollars and counting, pulled from people who believed every word they were handed.Here’s what those donors weren’t told.On June 29, a grand jury in Idaho indicted Andrea Shaw on two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of those same two children. Police picked her up in Boise, booked her into the Ada County Jail, and held her on a two-million-dollar bond. And according to the reporting out of Boise, the indictment doesn’t mention a vaccine anywhere. It alleges she suffocated them.Now I want to be careful here. Andrea Shaw has been indicted. She has not been convicted. She is entitled to a trial and to the presumption of innocence, and the official cause of death still has not been released to the public. That is how this is supposed to work. You investigate. You gather the evidence. A grand jury weighs it. And a jury decides. Nobody should get ahead of that, including me.But look at what that careful process exposes — because it’s the exact thing the anti-vaccine movement refused to do.They didn’t wait for the medical examiner. They didn’t wait for the investigation. They didn’t wait for one confirmed fact. Two babies were dead, and days later these people had a culprit named, a lawsuit drafted, and a donation link live. The vaccine did it. Case closed. Send money.That’s the whole problem with these people, right there. They decided the answer before they ever looked at the question.I spent years working cases. I watched what happens when somebody walks onto a scene already certain they know who did it and how. They stop seeing what’s actually in front of them. They bend every fact to fit the story they carried in the door. That’s not an investigation. That’s blind faith. And faith is a beautiful thing inside a church — it’s a catastrophe when you’re writing federal health policy with it.Watch how they built it. In their own lawsuit, they point to an ER visit a week before the twins died, where the intake was coded as a reaction related to a recent immunization. And they wave that around like a verdict. But anybody who’s ever sat through a death investigation can tell you an intake code is not a cause of death. It’s a note about why somebody walked into the ER that day. Figuring out what actually killed a child is the medical examiner’s job — it takes weeks, sometimes months, and it’s exactly the work these folks skipped so they could get to the fundraiser faster.Now understand where this movement lives. This isn’t a fringe message board. Children’s Health Defense is the organization Robert Kennedy built with his own hands. And Kennedy isn’t a podcast guest anymore. He’s the Secretary of Health and Human Services. He oversees the CDC. He removed the sitting members of the federal vaccine advisory committee and replaced them with his own picks.The instinct on display in this Idaho case — blame the vaccine first, never revisit it — is the same instinct now sitting at the very top of American public health.Think about what that means for a regular family at a pediatrician’s office. A movement that will look at two dead toddlers and reach for a vaccine story before the bodies are cold is now writing the rules for which shots your kids get and what your doctor is even allowed to tell you. When measles came roaring back and children died, that was the cost of this thinking. When they’re wrong about the next thing, children pay for that one too. This isn’t a debate club. There are real consequences, and American kids are the ones paying.And here’s the piece that sends it over the top. Her own attorney — even now, with his client indicted for the murder of those two babies — is still going on the record telling reporters he believes the vaccine did it.That’s how deep this runs. The story is load-bearing. They can’t put it down, because the story raises the money. It beefs up the lawsuits. It drives the clicks. It helped get a man confirmed to run HHS. The facts were never the point of any of it.So the next time somebody in this administration parades out a vaccine victim, ask them the one question they never ask themselves. Where’s the proof? Where is the actual evidence? Because in Idaho, once the professionals finished the work this movement raced right past, the story didn’t hold. A grand jury looked at the same two deaths a podcast had already ruled on — and reached a very different conclusion.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.comThe party’s on fire, and its would-be leader went quiet.There’s a real fight tearing through the Democratic caucus, and the man who wants to be the next Speaker of the House looked at it, watched his own members go at each other’s throats, and decided the smartest thing he could do was keep his mouth shut.Here’s how it happened.There’s an amendment on the table from a Republican — Thomas Massie of Kentucky — that would cut off aid to Israel and slash more than three billion dollars in foreign military aid on top of it. It was headed for a vote before Republicans blew up their own agenda and sent everyone home early for the holiday. But before they cleared out, that amendment cracked the Democratic caucus wide open.On one side, progressives who want to vote for it. On the other, moderates and leadership types who say the bill is written so badly it could choke off humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the process. That’s a genuine disagreement. Nobody’s faking it.So what did Hakeem Jeffries do to lead his people through it? He booked two closed-door meetings, let everybody vent for an hour apiece, and then told reporters he’d share his own position later — once a vote is, in his word, “confirmed.”When POLITICO asked him flat out where he stands, he said a lot needs to happen to get to a just and lasting peace, and that everyone should focus on a two-state solution once and for all.In other words, he reached for something so vague it could’ve come out of a fortune cookie.I’ll be fair, because there’s a version of this his supporters sell as a virtue. Some members came out of those rooms happy. They liked the space to talk it through. A few called it a model for how he’d run things as Speaker — he listens, he doesn’t bash heads, he lets everybody have their say.And fine. Listening is a skill. Making your people feel heard is a real part of earning their respect.But listening isn’t leading, and somewhere along the way this party started confusing the two.Leadership is the part that comes after you hear them out. You take in the facts, you weigh both sides, and then you plant your feet and say: here’s where I stand, here’s why, and now I’m going to go convince the rest of you I’m right. That last part is the job. That’s the entire job. Jeffries does the easy ninety percent and quietly skips the ten percent that actually costs him something.And this has been his MO from day one.Go back to the fight over renewing a massive government surveillance power — one of the biggest civil-liberties votes of the year, the kind you build a reputation on. Where was he? In the background. He let two other members make the case for and against and stayed out of it. The caucus split right down the middle, ninety-four to eighty-five, and the leader was a spectator to his own party’s biggest argument.Now, the man can flip the switch when he wants to. When Trump tried to install a MAGA loyalist to run national intelligence, Jeffries rallied damn near the whole caucus to block it, and he did it fast. So he’s capable. He knows how to lead. He just chooses to do it when it’s safe. When the whole room already agrees and there’s zero cost, he’ll step out front and wave the flag. When it’s genuinely hard — when picking a side might cost him something inside his own tent — he goes quiet and waits to see which way the room breaks.That’s not leadership. That’s reading the weather.And this isn’t some inside-baseball process story. The party is getting torn apart from the inside right now over exactly this issue. Look at the 2026 primaries: incumbents getting knocked off by challengers hammering them for taking pro-Israel money. The ground is moving under everyone’s feet at once. And into that moment, with his own members desperate for someone to point a direction, the top of the party’s answer is to schedule another meeting that could’ve been an email.One of his own members said it plainly: the people who aren’t foreign policy experts, who don’t have a fixed position, are looking for guidance. That’s the whole tell. Grown members of Congress are begging the top of the party to just tell them where to stand, and they’re handed a suggestion box and a whole lot of I’ll decide my opinion once my opinion is decided.This is what wears on me about Democratic leadership. When the s**t hits the fan and every single person is looking to whoever’s in charge, nobody’s home. Nobody will stand up, meet the moment, and make a damn decision until it costs them nothing to make it. The reflex is to duck, dodge, and wait for a consensus to form on its own so no one ever has to own the call.You don’t beat what this party is up against by playing it safe. The Republican Party is a spineless cult of personality — but their leaders will back whatever unconstitutional thing Trump tells them to, get their people in line, and then run at you at full speed. And the plan to answer that is to gather your team for a group therapy session?I don’t need Hakeem Jeffries to agree with me on every issue. Democrats don’t need a leader who makes everyone feel warm and gooey inside. They need conviction. They need action. They need a fighter. Instead they’ve got a guy who can’t even say this is what I think.🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for lifeYou’ll get the link in your welcome email.GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!