This administration is quickly becoming a Gordion Knot of lies, conspiracies, propaganda and corruption. It’s all coming from every direction; the White House, Pentagon, Justice Department, and it’s all starting to blend together into one immense crime scene. I’m coming apart with every new revelation, both of the complexity of this situation, the fear of what is going to happen TO the election or after it to add to the pile-on. Every day is crazier and crazier. Every day is more and more unbelievable and more unmoored from our Constitutional precepts and laws. My only hope lies in believing that somehow we SHALL get through the election with our republic intact, even if a victory means the fight to regain what is left of our shredded democracy and belief in it is just beginning. Aren’t you just exhausted??
Yes, I certainly am. And I'm frightened to death by what could happen between now and the period immediately following Election Day. I urge everyone who possibly can to vote early. I plan to vote on the first day of early voting here in Texas, and vote a straight Democrat ticket. God (not Trump's God, BTW) help us! 🙏🏻
I desperately want to believe that the mid-term election will change things. But trump, hegseth, blanche, patel are doing everything illegal and treasonous to make sure that doesn't happen; they all are trashing every law, concept and rational thinking. I'm glad you keep hammering this home; I just wish more knowledgeable writers, speakers would shout this loud and clear. Unless people counter this treachery, they win! And it looks like more than words are needed now. Action by the courts can only go so far. Even No Kings rallies - do they make a difference? I sure hope so, but everything is so fragile now....
This is my abject terror. Everyone I know is staking all their hope on this election, in an age where it seems absolutely certain that what you describe here will be exactly what occurs. Please! Somebody! Tell me just one thing that gives me a shred of hope that there exists a way out, if this is how things go south? Please...? PLEASE TELL ME.
I’m aghast and dizzy after reading the lengthy - but critical to read - imbedded articles on Trump and on Hegseth’s insane speech.
*Thank you though for including them.
The questions posed in the Time article were impressive. I’m surprised Trump tolerated them.
The Hegseth speech you included was …… full of…. I am at a loss of an appropriate descriptive term for the decisions revealed in it.
It’s difficult to select the most disturbing from his megalomaniacal diatribe which included a request for 350 billion.
I hope everyone reads it.
If I have to call out just one of the new that chills me … and I copied many….its this one, which I loosely labeled, “Robots and Things:”⬇️
…”First, today at my direction, we are announcing the creation of Autonomous Warfare Command, or AutoWarCom. A new 4-star combatant command, with service-like authorities, built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the Joint Force in the fastest peacetime shift in modern military history.”
And worse who will be overseeing this?⬇️
“…And that's why today, at my direction, I am announcing Project Meridian, an effort led by America's best minds to study the future of warfare.
Under the leadership of the Department's Chief Technology Officer, Emil Michael, Project Meridian will be co-led by three of our nation's best minds:
♦️Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich, all of whom are in the audience with us today.”‼️
(I mean, what could go wrong ?)😳
I urge your readers to read Hegseth’s explanation of his “FORTRESS” plans.
But,
Thank you for discussing a bright gem of hope: David Hearn absolved of Trumps false accusation of damaging the seal of the Reflection Pond”
“…This is why Judge Edelman concluded that he needed a ruling that would ensure this case was finished.
Really finished. In other words, with prejudice. “This case must be dismissed with prejudice, and the government must thus be barred from re-instituting this charge against Mr. Hearn.”
Hegseth has removed centuries of experience of our flag officers, and is determined to remove even more of them. His emphasis on “lethality” is dangerous not only to our own country, but to the world. He must be impeached and removed for the security of the people of the United States. He is like a small boy playing with plastic soldiers, he has no respect for the most powerful military in the world before he got his sweaty little hands on the controls.
Thanks Steven: I wonder what the new military recruits think when they see the Little Pete Hegseth , the Secretary of Defence ranting like a raped rooster and quoting scripture, which he got wrong.
When the prophet Isaiah said, "Here am I; send me" (Isaiah 6:8), he meant that he was fully willing and ready to volunteer as God's messenger after experiencing God's holiness and personal forgiveness. I'm sure it meant to send love and forgiveness. Hegseth used it to say, "Send me to wipe out the radicals, the muslims. Send me to fight the Redcoats. Send me to fight the Communists. Send me to fight the Islamists.
Mr. Hegseth is nothing but a White Supremacist, Christian Nationalist, who uses scripture to foment violence and his desire to destroy democracy.
I’m sorry but we’re all looking in the wrong direction. We need our rearview mirrors that’s why we didn’t see this coming. Drumpf’s DOJ has a new focus: Investigating the Watergate Investigators.
From the writer Craig Calcaterra and perhaps of interest to you: A good reminder why I got off Substack
Like lots of people, I've been following the story about the 2024 gang rape of an incapacitated woman at a Cornell University fraternity house. For those who don't know, a Jane Doe plaintiff filed a civil lawsuit against her attackers and the university last month alleging that she was drugged with ketamine, marijuana, and alcohol and sexually assaulted by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity over a seven-hour period in October 2024. The suit claims fraternity members used a group chat to invite others to join the assault.
Prosecutors declined to file any charges at the time the rape was reported and Cornell imposed surprisingly light discipline to the perpetrators. In light of the lawsuit, however, prosecutors have reopened the case and New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced an independent outside investigation into the university's handling of the matter. The New York Attorney General’s office is also reviewing Cornell’s response.
All of this has, not surprisingly, kicked off major discussions in the online spaces where people have major discussions these days. And, predictably, the sorts of people who routinely come out of the woodwork to blindly defend rapists and abusers and attack women are doing the usual odious things.
Earlier this week Michael Tracey, a particularly odious right wing commentator, launched an effort to publicly identify the victim of the crime despite her legal protection under rape shield laws and as a Jane Doe plaintiff. On Wednesday the white supremacist, misogynist and – somehow – Boston Globe columnist Richard Hanania decided to wade into this and blame the victim of a gang rape during which she was rendered helpless by drugs given to her without her knowledge:
Richard Hanania @RichardHanania X.com Watch me discuss the Cornell rape controversy with Michael Tracey. I think the lesson of this is that women do not want to have casual sex with men they don't know well. They'll end up hating themselves, being hated by other women, and even seen with contempt by the men involved. This is why these situations turn bad. Maybe she was assaulted. Maybe not. Either way, it was a terrible decision to make. Women need to be told the truth.
Scumbags are gonna scumbag, I realize, but Hanania inserting himself into all of this provides a good reminder why I quit Substack and why anyone who still uses that platform in supporting this sort of cruel and hateful commentary.
Back in 2023, an investigative report was published in the Atlantic which revealed that Substack was hosting and actively monetizing dozens of explicitly white-supremacist and neo-Nazi newsletters. In the wake of that I joined over 240 other Substack writers who had organized themselves under the name "Substackers Against Nazis" and published a public open letter addressed to the company's co-founders, Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, and Jairaj Sethi, asking them why they were platforming and profiting from these people. One of those Substack writers was Hanania. But in his case he wasn't just kicking back 10% of the revenue of his hate-filled tracts to Substack. To the contrary, the company was actively engaging with him and platforming him, with Hamish McKenzie hosting Hanania on an official Substack podcast as a means of promoting his work.
I had developed a correspondence with McKenzie when I launched my Substack in 2020 and because of this I emailed him, separate and apart from the open letter to the company, to ask him why they were working with Hanania. His response was basically "we don't like his views but we're not gonna censor anyone." Which was a dodge for many reasons and a cowardly one at that. It boiled down to "white supremacist money is still green." It told me everything I needed to know about Substack and the people behind it and when, a couple of days later, they offered a terrible response to the open letter, I made the decision to leave the platform, which I did three weeks later.
Substack's work with Hanania has helped whitewash his reputation. It's part of why he has been able to land columns in respectable newspapers and why he's routinely quoted as some sort of authority on all manner of topics in reputable outlets. Meanwhile, he was one of the thought leaders behind Project 2025 and, as seen above, spends his free time blaming rape victims for being raped. And he's not alone. There are a lot of other hate monger Substackers who, by virtue of their association with the company, are presumed to be somehow more respectable than they are.
I know that Substack dispute is now pushing three years old, but that company continues to hum along, platforming and enriching odious people like Richard Hanania. And, somehow, a lot of writers – including some for whom I once had a great deal of respect – continue to give ten percent of their considerable revenue to that company which, in turn, promotes hatred.
I understand that Substack's free hosting is hard to beat for writers who do not have the money to pay for it, and because of that I tend to cut true amateur and hobby writers who don't make much if any money from their work some slack for staying on the platform. I mean, practically speaking, you're not underwriting the Richard Hanania's of the world if you're not paying the company anything. But I've run the numbers – I had to when I was publishing there – and it's a deadass fact that anyone who makes more than $10,000 from their newsletter is better off financially going to a different platform. $15,000 max, if you want a Cadillac hosting suite for a high number of subscribers. If your newsletter revenue exceeds that, you're staying there for the love of the game.
I know that, as the saying goes, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. The world is full of greedy and exploitative people and you're always making compromises of some kind or another just to get through the damn day. But where writers choose to host their written work, particularly if it's their primary outlet and source of income, is not the same thing as owning a small electronic device or using an app created by a problematic company. It's going into business with the platform and it's a major statement about one's values. I'm reminded of that whenever I see someone like Richard Hanania spreading his brand of toxicity. And I'd hope that anyone who continues to publish on the platform that enables him will, at long last, choose to stop doing so.
If you're one of them and switching seems daunting, please feel free to reach out to me and I'll happily help you do it. I did it twice, actually, and I can tell you that moving to either Ghost or Beehiiv is way easier than you think. I'm a friggin' moron and I figured it out, so you can too. You'll sleep way better at night if you do.
If big-subscription writers move away, it would say something to Substack about what content is acceptable. Those “A-list” writers’ subscribers would follow. And like Calcaterra says, the writers who aren’t giving 10% to Substack aren’t the issue anyway. Because Substack has become just another algorithm-user, engagement-chasing site, I do worry about where writers can find their audiences. I am glad that it’s there, but I don’t like seeing it slip.
I seriously doubt a move to "Ghost or Beehiiv" is a serious way to change any of this. Substack and Bluesky are 2 platforms that have "serious" people writing, getting us involved. I don't know either of the platforms you mention. And I doubt they have people who will change much of anything either.
This administration is quickly becoming a Gordion Knot of lies, conspiracies, propaganda and corruption. It’s all coming from every direction; the White House, Pentagon, Justice Department, and it’s all starting to blend together into one immense crime scene. I’m coming apart with every new revelation, both of the complexity of this situation, the fear of what is going to happen TO the election or after it to add to the pile-on. Every day is crazier and crazier. Every day is more and more unbelievable and more unmoored from our Constitutional precepts and laws. My only hope lies in believing that somehow we SHALL get through the election with our republic intact, even if a victory means the fight to regain what is left of our shredded democracy and belief in it is just beginning. Aren’t you just exhausted??
Yes, I certainly am. And I'm frightened to death by what could happen between now and the period immediately following Election Day. I urge everyone who possibly can to vote early. I plan to vote on the first day of early voting here in Texas, and vote a straight Democrat ticket. God (not Trump's God, BTW) help us! 🙏🏻
I’m going to do the same, Linda…to vote on the first day of early voting. No Republicans shall enjoy the privilege of being chosen by me!
This is not new. Same behavior for years.
Same behavior, but no sane intervention by anyone in his administration.
Exactly!
I desperately want to believe that the mid-term election will change things. But trump, hegseth, blanche, patel are doing everything illegal and treasonous to make sure that doesn't happen; they all are trashing every law, concept and rational thinking. I'm glad you keep hammering this home; I just wish more knowledgeable writers, speakers would shout this loud and clear. Unless people counter this treachery, they win! And it looks like more than words are needed now. Action by the courts can only go so far. Even No Kings rallies - do they make a difference? I sure hope so, but everything is so fragile now....
Election results will all be contested. Trump will declare war. Declare adverse results fraud.
This is my abject terror. Everyone I know is staking all their hope on this election, in an age where it seems absolutely certain that what you describe here will be exactly what occurs. Please! Somebody! Tell me just one thing that gives me a shred of hope that there exists a way out, if this is how things go south? Please...? PLEASE TELL ME.
Good Morning
I’m aghast and dizzy after reading the lengthy - but critical to read - imbedded articles on Trump and on Hegseth’s insane speech.
*Thank you though for including them.
The questions posed in the Time article were impressive. I’m surprised Trump tolerated them.
The Hegseth speech you included was …… full of…. I am at a loss of an appropriate descriptive term for the decisions revealed in it.
It’s difficult to select the most disturbing from his megalomaniacal diatribe which included a request for 350 billion.
I hope everyone reads it.
If I have to call out just one of the new that chills me … and I copied many….its this one, which I loosely labeled, “Robots and Things:”⬇️
…”First, today at my direction, we are announcing the creation of Autonomous Warfare Command, or AutoWarCom. A new 4-star combatant command, with service-like authorities, built to scale autonomous and robotic capabilities across the Joint Force in the fastest peacetime shift in modern military history.”
And worse who will be overseeing this?⬇️
“…And that's why today, at my direction, I am announcing Project Meridian, an effort led by America's best minds to study the future of warfare.
Under the leadership of the Department's Chief Technology Officer, Emil Michael, Project Meridian will be co-led by three of our nation's best minds:
♦️Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich, all of whom are in the audience with us today.”‼️
(I mean, what could go wrong ?)😳
I urge your readers to read Hegseth’s explanation of his “FORTRESS” plans.
But,
Thank you for discussing a bright gem of hope: David Hearn absolved of Trumps false accusation of damaging the seal of the Reflection Pond”
“…This is why Judge Edelman concluded that he needed a ruling that would ensure this case was finished.
Really finished. In other words, with prejudice. “This case must be dismissed with prejudice, and the government must thus be barred from re-instituting this charge against Mr. Hearn.”
…
1 month 1 Day
VOTE
💙🇺🇸💙
Hegseth has removed centuries of experience of our flag officers, and is determined to remove even more of them. His emphasis on “lethality” is dangerous not only to our own country, but to the world. He must be impeached and removed for the security of the people of the United States. He is like a small boy playing with plastic soldiers, he has no respect for the most powerful military in the world before he got his sweaty little hands on the controls.
Thanks Steven: I wonder what the new military recruits think when they see the Little Pete Hegseth , the Secretary of Defence ranting like a raped rooster and quoting scripture, which he got wrong.
When the prophet Isaiah said, "Here am I; send me" (Isaiah 6:8), he meant that he was fully willing and ready to volunteer as God's messenger after experiencing God's holiness and personal forgiveness. I'm sure it meant to send love and forgiveness. Hegseth used it to say, "Send me to wipe out the radicals, the muslims. Send me to fight the Redcoats. Send me to fight the Communists. Send me to fight the Islamists.
Mr. Hegseth is nothing but a White Supremacist, Christian Nationalist, who uses scripture to foment violence and his desire to destroy democracy.
We get to choose the future we want. We must stop giving our agency to others, unwittingly or not. The enemy is us, in so many ways.
https://albellenchia.substack.com/p/freedom-and-choice?r=7wk5d
I’m sorry but we’re all looking in the wrong direction. We need our rearview mirrors that’s why we didn’t see this coming. Drumpf’s DOJ has a new focus: Investigating the Watergate Investigators.
https://substack.com/@annsharon/note/c-351142098
From the writer Craig Calcaterra and perhaps of interest to you: A good reminder why I got off Substack
Like lots of people, I've been following the story about the 2024 gang rape of an incapacitated woman at a Cornell University fraternity house. For those who don't know, a Jane Doe plaintiff filed a civil lawsuit against her attackers and the university last month alleging that she was drugged with ketamine, marijuana, and alcohol and sexually assaulted by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity over a seven-hour period in October 2024. The suit claims fraternity members used a group chat to invite others to join the assault.
Prosecutors declined to file any charges at the time the rape was reported and Cornell imposed surprisingly light discipline to the perpetrators. In light of the lawsuit, however, prosecutors have reopened the case and New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced an independent outside investigation into the university's handling of the matter. The New York Attorney General’s office is also reviewing Cornell’s response.
All of this has, not surprisingly, kicked off major discussions in the online spaces where people have major discussions these days. And, predictably, the sorts of people who routinely come out of the woodwork to blindly defend rapists and abusers and attack women are doing the usual odious things.
Earlier this week Michael Tracey, a particularly odious right wing commentator, launched an effort to publicly identify the victim of the crime despite her legal protection under rape shield laws and as a Jane Doe plaintiff. On Wednesday the white supremacist, misogynist and – somehow – Boston Globe columnist Richard Hanania decided to wade into this and blame the victim of a gang rape during which she was rendered helpless by drugs given to her without her knowledge:
Richard Hanania @RichardHanania X.com Watch me discuss the Cornell rape controversy with Michael Tracey. I think the lesson of this is that women do not want to have casual sex with men they don't know well. They'll end up hating themselves, being hated by other women, and even seen with contempt by the men involved. This is why these situations turn bad. Maybe she was assaulted. Maybe not. Either way, it was a terrible decision to make. Women need to be told the truth.
Scumbags are gonna scumbag, I realize, but Hanania inserting himself into all of this provides a good reminder why I quit Substack and why anyone who still uses that platform in supporting this sort of cruel and hateful commentary.
Back in 2023, an investigative report was published in the Atlantic which revealed that Substack was hosting and actively monetizing dozens of explicitly white-supremacist and neo-Nazi newsletters. In the wake of that I joined over 240 other Substack writers who had organized themselves under the name "Substackers Against Nazis" and published a public open letter addressed to the company's co-founders, Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, and Jairaj Sethi, asking them why they were platforming and profiting from these people. One of those Substack writers was Hanania. But in his case he wasn't just kicking back 10% of the revenue of his hate-filled tracts to Substack. To the contrary, the company was actively engaging with him and platforming him, with Hamish McKenzie hosting Hanania on an official Substack podcast as a means of promoting his work.
I had developed a correspondence with McKenzie when I launched my Substack in 2020 and because of this I emailed him, separate and apart from the open letter to the company, to ask him why they were working with Hanania. His response was basically "we don't like his views but we're not gonna censor anyone." Which was a dodge for many reasons and a cowardly one at that. It boiled down to "white supremacist money is still green." It told me everything I needed to know about Substack and the people behind it and when, a couple of days later, they offered a terrible response to the open letter, I made the decision to leave the platform, which I did three weeks later.
Substack's work with Hanania has helped whitewash his reputation. It's part of why he has been able to land columns in respectable newspapers and why he's routinely quoted as some sort of authority on all manner of topics in reputable outlets. Meanwhile, he was one of the thought leaders behind Project 2025 and, as seen above, spends his free time blaming rape victims for being raped. And he's not alone. There are a lot of other hate monger Substackers who, by virtue of their association with the company, are presumed to be somehow more respectable than they are.
I know that Substack dispute is now pushing three years old, but that company continues to hum along, platforming and enriching odious people like Richard Hanania. And, somehow, a lot of writers – including some for whom I once had a great deal of respect – continue to give ten percent of their considerable revenue to that company which, in turn, promotes hatred.
I understand that Substack's free hosting is hard to beat for writers who do not have the money to pay for it, and because of that I tend to cut true amateur and hobby writers who don't make much if any money from their work some slack for staying on the platform. I mean, practically speaking, you're not underwriting the Richard Hanania's of the world if you're not paying the company anything. But I've run the numbers – I had to when I was publishing there – and it's a deadass fact that anyone who makes more than $10,000 from their newsletter is better off financially going to a different platform. $15,000 max, if you want a Cadillac hosting suite for a high number of subscribers. If your newsletter revenue exceeds that, you're staying there for the love of the game.
I know that, as the saying goes, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. The world is full of greedy and exploitative people and you're always making compromises of some kind or another just to get through the damn day. But where writers choose to host their written work, particularly if it's their primary outlet and source of income, is not the same thing as owning a small electronic device or using an app created by a problematic company. It's going into business with the platform and it's a major statement about one's values. I'm reminded of that whenever I see someone like Richard Hanania spreading his brand of toxicity. And I'd hope that anyone who continues to publish on the platform that enables him will, at long last, choose to stop doing so.
If you're one of them and switching seems daunting, please feel free to reach out to me and I'll happily help you do it. I did it twice, actually, and I can tell you that moving to either Ghost or Beehiiv is way easier than you think. I'm a friggin' moron and I figured it out, so you can too. You'll sleep way better at night if you do.
If big-subscription writers move away, it would say something to Substack about what content is acceptable. Those “A-list” writers’ subscribers would follow. And like Calcaterra says, the writers who aren’t giving 10% to Substack aren’t the issue anyway. Because Substack has become just another algorithm-user, engagement-chasing site, I do worry about where writers can find their audiences. I am glad that it’s there, but I don’t like seeing it slip.
I seriously doubt a move to "Ghost or Beehiiv" is a serious way to change any of this. Substack and Bluesky are 2 platforms that have "serious" people writing, getting us involved. I don't know either of the platforms you mention. And I doubt they have people who will change much of anything either.