Democracy Doesn't Die in Darkness. It Dies in HR.

BYOB with Jolly and Francesca Fiorentini

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 [https://michaelfanone.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Racist Cop Forgets His Bodycam Is On — What He Says Ends His Career

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] He 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 life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

Michael Fanone on how Lindsey Graham deserves to be remembered!

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 [https://michaelfanone.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

ICE Just Killed Another Unarmed Man. There’s No Video. Here’s Why.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] An 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 life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!

🚨 Trump’s Gun Secret Just BLEW WIDE OPEN

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] The 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 life You’ll get the link in your welcome email. GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!