They Called Her a Patriot. She Killed a Mother of Two. This Is Who Trump Called a "Hostage"

They Called Her a Patriot. She Killed a Mother of Two. This Is Who Trump Called a "Hostage"

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] Trump called her a hostage. She killed a mother of two. For four years we’ve been fed a story about January 6. The people who stormed the Capitol weren’t rioters, they were patriots. Not criminals — political prisoners. On a rally stage in Ohio in March 2024, Trump saluted while an announcer had the crowd rise for the “horribly and unfairly treated January 6 hostages.” He played a recording of them singing the anthem from jail. He called them unbelievable patriots. He called January 6 a day of love. And he promised that on day one he’d set them free. He kept it. On his first day back in office, he signed a blanket clemency order covering nearly 1,600 people. Almost all of them got full, unconditional pardons. The trespassers and the people who tried to kill me on the Capitol steps walked free, as if none of it happened. So let me introduce you to one of these patriots. Then you tell me if that’s the word you’d use. Her name is Emily Hernandez. You’ve seen the photo even if you don’t know the name — she’s the one inside the Capitol holding a broken nameplate torn off the door of the Speaker of the House. That image went viral and became one of the defining pictures of the day. She pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor, entering and remaining in a restricted building, and served thirty days. By the standard of what happened that day she wasn’t one of the worst, and the judge gave her a light touch. When Trump signed his order, Emily Hernandez got her pardon along with everybody else. A patriot, cleared. A political prisoner, freed. That’s the story they want in your head. Here’s what the word patriot is covering for. On January 5, 2022 — almost a year to the day after she trespassed into the Capitol — Emily Hernandez got behind the wheel drunk. Her blood alcohol was .125. The legal limit is .08. She was well past it. And she drove the wrong way down an interstate in Missouri. Sit with that. Headlights coming straight at her, and she keeps going. Then she crashed head-on into another car. Inside it were Victoria and Ryan Wilson, a married couple out celebrating their fifteenth wedding anniversary. A truck driver who saw it said the crash looked like an explosion. Victoria Wilson — thirty-two years old, a mother of two — died of her injuries. Ryan survived with a foot injury that left him disabled. Fifteen years of marriage, and the anniversary ended with one of them dead on a highway and the other one widowed and broken. In November, Emily Hernandez pleaded guilty in Missouri state court to two counts: DWI causing death, and DWI causing serious physical injury. Her own attorneys asked the judge for 120 days. Four months. They wrote that she felt remorse, that she was ashamed, that she’d carry the grief forever. The judge wasn’t moved. Ten years for Victoria. Another seven for what she did to Ryan, served at the same time. Outside the courthouse, Victoria’s mother told the cameras there’s an empty hole in her heart that will never close. Two kids are growing up without their mother because a drunk driver pointed a car the wrong way down an interstate. Now hold both pictures of Emily side by side. This is the person the President stood on a stage and called a hostage. This is the political prisoner whose so-called persecution was supposedly a stain on the country. This is one of the “unbelievable patriots” — a woman who killed a mother of two driving drunk the wrong way down a highway, and whose own lawyers begged for four months. Unbelievable, all right. You don’t need to be a cop to know a patriot doesn’t smash into the Capitol to stop the lawful counting of votes. A patriot doesn’t rip a piece of the Speaker’s office off the wall and pose for the cameras. And a patriot sure as hell doesn’t get loaded, drive the wrong way down an interstate, and leave two kids without their mom. That word is supposed to mean something. Love of country. Sacrifice. Service. When you’ve spent a career actually serving and you watch people drape it over criminals and derelicts, there aren’t words for the level of betrayal it provokes. Here’s what the blanket pardon really tells you, and it’s the thing to walk away with. When you sign one order cutting loose 1,600 people, you are not making 1,600 careful judgments about who deserves mercy. You’re not separating the nonviolent trespasser from the man who maced a cop. You’re not separating the kid swept up in a crowd from the woman who’d be convicted of killing someone behind the wheel. You throw the doors open and stamp “patriot” on every single one of them, sight unseen. That’s the tell. That’s how you know the label was never honest. If January 6 was really about patriotism, you could afford to look closely — this one was nonviolent, this one assaulted an officer, this one is a genuine danger. A real reckoning survives scrutiny. But they didn’t look closely, because looking closely destroys the story. Emily Hernandez destroys the story. Victoria Wilson’s empty chair at the dinner table destroys the story. So they don’t look. They just keep saying the words. Hostages. Patriots. Political prisoners. Day of love. They say it until history gets rewritten and criminals go back to their lives while the truth gets erased — the truth of the cops beaten on those steps, the officers who died in the days after, and a thirty-two-year-old mother who had nothing to do with January 6 and is dead because one of these “patriots” got behind the wheel drunk. Calling them patriots doesn’t honor this country. It doesn’t even honor them. It spits on the people they hurt, and on every real patriot who laid down their life for this place. Emily Hernandez got a pardon for January 6. She’s spending the next ten years in a Missouri prison anyway. And the only reason the word patriot ever got near her name is that somebody needed her — and 1,500 others — to prop up one big fat lie. 🟧 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 Made $2.2 BILLION Off the Presidency Last Year. His Own White House Filed the Proof.

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] Two point two billion dollars. That’s what Donald Trump made last year — not his companies in some abstract sense, him, personally. And the reason we know the number is that his own White House dropped his annual financial disclosure with his signature at the bottom. The year before he returned to office, his businesses brought in $622 million. One year back in the White House, that number more than tripled. Go line by line through where the new money came from, and almost all of it traces back to people, industries, and foreign governments that need something from his administration. This is the most corrupt administration in American history, by a long shot — and don’t take my word for it. Presidential historians who study this for a living looked at 250 years of records and couldn’t find a single president who started new businesses on his way into the White House and then kept personally cashing in on them while he governed. One called it completely unprecedented. Another called it one of the greatest betrayals of the American social contract since the founding. So let me take you through it piece by piece, because each story is bad on its own, but you only understand what this really is when you see them stacked together. Start with crypto, because that’s where the bulk of it came from. To date, Trump has pulled roughly four billion dollars in a single year out of the family’s crypto ventures — and remember, this is a man who used to trash crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers. Right up until he stood to gain. Once he saw the upside, the family launched World Liberty Financial right before the election, built so the house always wins: seventy-five percent of every token sale flows to a Trump entity after expenses. He gets paid whether the coin goes up or down. That one company put $799 million in his pocket last year. Meanwhile his administration spent the same year pulling back crypto enforcement and gutting the rules. Then he pardoned Changpeng Zhao — the Binance founder, the richest man in crypto, and a business partner of his family’s own venture. The president of the United States used the pardon power on his business partner. Say that sentence out loud and tell me it isn’t as corrupt as it gets. Now look at who else is paying. Days before the inauguration, an investment firm tied to the government of the United Arab Emirates bought forty-nine percent of World Liberty. A foreign government, buying half the president’s company. Months later the Emiratis got something they wanted badly — approval to import advanced American AI chips, over the objections of our own national security officials. Our people said don’t do this. They lost. The chips are moving, and the filing shows investments that generated more than $200 million for Trump. Then the memecoin. He launched Trumpcoin three days before the inauguration, and the industry threw a party in Washington they called the Crypto Ball. Weeks later the SEC announced that memecoins don’t fall under its oversight, reversing the position it held under the last administration. The coin made him more than $600 million. And here’s the part his supporters need to hear: the price has collapsed about eighty percent. He got paid on the way up. The ordinary people who bought in because his name was on it ate the loss. That’s not a conflict of interest. That’s a con job. Then the real estate. First term, the family publicly swore off new foreign deals. This time, no such promise. New licensing deals in Saudi Arabia — including one involving the Saudi government itself — and in Qatar, which also handed the United States a Boeing jet that Trump now flies as Air Force One. In Vietnam, officials fast-tracked a Trump golf development while their country was desperate to talk him out of steep tariffs. Middle East deals alone brought in at least $35 million. None of these governments is confused about what they’re buying. Access to the American presidency is for sale, and they’re paying the man who holds it. Then the media money. After January 6th, Meta and other platforms banned him. They’ve now settled his lawsuits and agreed to pay him millions. ABC settled. Paramount paid him millions over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview. And while those checks were clearing, his FCC chairman was threatening broadcasters’ licenses and his Justice Department cleared the merger putting CBS News and CNN under one owner. These companies need his government’s permission to operate. They paid him first. Call it a settlement if you want. I call it offering their god a sacrifice they know will get his attention. His defense, when he got asked about it, is ridiculous. He said he never speaks to the people who run the money, then said you know why I’m profiting? Because the stock market is going up. The Times reported he meets with his financial advisers for updates — but set that aside, because the bigger problem is simple math. The stock market didn’t buy half his crypto company. The stock market didn’t pay him for his name on a Saudi tower. A rising market doesn’t explain a foreign government wiring money into your family business four months before you approve its chip deal. His own defense doesn’t survive contact with his own disclosure. The sons-run-the-business line is just as hollow. Sure, Eric and Don Jr. manage the operations. But the trusts they control exist for one beneficiary — their father. The money lands in his account every single time. Here’s what every other president understood. Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm in a trust run by an outside trustee. A peanut farm. George W. Bush sold his stake in the Texas Rangers before he ran. Lady Bird Johnson handed her radio stations to an independent trust. For 250 years the standard was that you don’t just avoid corruption, you avoid the appearance of it. Historians say holding office usually cost presidents money. Trump looked at that entire tradition and saw suckers. Eric Trump said it plainly before the election: we can’t just sit out in perpetuity, and I won’t. There’s the whole philosophy. The presidency isn’t a public trust anymore. It’s the family’s biggest asset. And he’s not even hiding it. That’s what the disclosure proves. He put every dollar on a government form, signed his name, and handed it in — because he’s decided nothing and nobody will stop him. So far he’s been right. Whether this is happening isn’t up for debate anymore. He documented it himself. The only real question left is what we do with a president who’s openly for sale — and whether we’ve quietly decided to live with it, and be taken for the fools he thinks we are. 🟧 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!

The Study Trump Doesn't Want You to See: The National Guard Did NOTHING

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] They told you it was about crime. It wasn’t. That was the whole pitch — armed soldiers on the streets of the capital, M17 pistols and M4 rifles, posted at Metro stations and the Lincoln Memorial, because Washington was supposedly so dangerous it needed a military response. Trump called DC one of the most dangerous cities in the world, declared a crime emergency, and sent in the troops. Now we have the receipts. The Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank, studied what nearly a year of National Guard deployment actually accomplished. On violent crime — the robberies, the assaults, the thing they sold you on, the stuff that makes people afraid to walk home — the report found no measurable effect. None. What did move was the small stuff. Property crime and car break-ins fell about 24 percent. So if your worry was somebody jiggling a door handle on a parked Honda, congratulations, the United States military was on it. Violent crime was already trending down before Trump took office, and the Guard made no measurable dent in it. And the study explains why. The researchers found the Guard was deployed in “the wrong places for the wrong types of crime.” Think about where you actually saw these troops — tourist corridors, transit hubs, the Mall, the shopping blocks of Georgetown. Exactly the spots where a uniform deters a smash-and-grab. But real violence doesn’t happen on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It happens between people who already know each other, on their own turf, away from the cameras. They put the soldiers where the tourists were, not where the danger was. Here’s the line the White House wants buried. Asked for comment, the administration dismissed the study as out of touch, called the authors keyboard warriors, and claimed Trump turned DC into a safe and beautiful haven. No data. No evidence. Just the word “beautiful” doing a lot of heavy lifting. Now the cost — and it’s your money, wherever you live. Start with one soldier: about $607 a day. A Metropolitan Police officer — an actual trained cop with arrest powers — runs $384. So we paid nearly double per head for people who legally can’t even make an arrest. Scale it up and the Congressional Budget Office puts the DC operation at roughly $1.5 million a day. A Senate report projects the full year north of $600 million. That number eclipses the entire budget of the Metropolitan Police Department and its 4,900 real officers. We spent more parking soldiers next to monuments than we spend on the whole professional police force of the city. And the study’s kicker: a smarter, data-driven deployment of actual police could have gotten comparable or better results for a fraction of the cost. We didn’t buy safety. We bought a big-budget blockbuster with a garbage script. Now the part that doesn’t get enough airtime, and should make every American sit up regardless of party. These aren’t federal robots. The troops came from DC and more than a dozen states — and the staffing tells the story. Early on, 98 percent of the troops flooding the District came from states with Republican governors. Military historians called the scale of that without precedent. Six red-state governors volunteered their people: West Virginia, Ohio, South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana. Think about what that means back home. You pull a guardsman off their job, their family, their actual state readiness mission, and ship them to Washington to pose with tourists. The ACLU of West Virginia sued to block its own governor from sending three to four hundred troops, arguing he’d exceeded his authority. And the Guard already learned this lesson the hard way — after January 6th, when 25,000 troops flooded DC, the Army National Guard warned the diversion drained money from real training and readiness. That’s the burden nobody puts on the invoice. Every soldier standing on a quiet Metro platform is a soldier not training, not available for a real emergency, not home. And the states exporting them have cities with worse violence than Washington. Shreveport, Louisiana has a higher murder rate than DC. The governors sending troops to fix the capital are stepping over crime in their own backyards to do it. Here’s where it goes from wasteful to alarming. They’re not winding this down. They’re scaling it up. The administration requested another 1,500 troops ahead of the country’s 250th birthday, pushing toward a force of 5,000. Trump has said there are no plans for the Guard to leave the capital anytime soon — and we now have a study proving the first round didn’t move the one thing they claimed to care about. So ask the question the data forces. If the Guard didn’t touch violent crime, and it costs $1.5 million a day, and it drains readiness from a dozen states, and the answer to all of that is send more — then crime was never the point. The presence was the point. Getting Americans used to armed soldiers on their own streets was the point. A retired general who ran the National Guard Bureau called it exactly that: desensitizing the public to military patrols in American cities. I spent twenty years policing this city. You fight crime with cops who know the blocks, not soldiers posed for a photo op. The study is the proof. The cost is the receipt. The surge is the confession. They told you it was about crime. The numbers say clear as day they were lying. 🟧 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!

The GOP Has a Pedophile Problem and Nobody's Talking About It

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 named his child-abuse account after Joe Biden. RJ May was a Republican in the South Carolina House, a founding member of the Freedom Caucus — the hardliners whose whole job was calling other Republicans insufficiently conservative. On the House floor he said, out loud: “We as legislators have an obligation to ensure that our children have no harm done to them.” While he said it, he was using the screen name “joebidennnn69” to distribute 220 files of child sexual abuse material. Videos of toddlers. Videos of young children. He pleaded guilty. In January 2026 a federal judge gave him seventeen and a half years and said the material was among the most severe she’d seen in her career. Read the username back to yourself. Joe Biden 69. He branded his crime with the other side’s name — because that’s the whole trick. Accuse your enemy of exactly what you’re doing, loudly enough that nobody thinks to look at you. It worked for a long time. Let me be straight about what I’m saying and what I’m not. Predators don’t get a political exemption. I don’t care what letter is next to your name — if you hurt a kid, you belong in a cell. Democrat, lock them up. Republican, lock them up. No party has clean hands here, and predators exist everywhere: every church, every school, every statehouse. So this isn’t “Republicans are uniquely evil.” It’s something more specific and much harder to defend. One movement built its entire identity on a single accusation — that the other side runs a secret network of child abusers. They turned “save the children” into a weapon and pointed it at teachers, librarians, drag performers, Democrats, anyone they wanted gone. And the entire time, their own officials were getting arrested, indicted, and convicted of those exact crimes. Go through them. Ralph Shortey — Oklahoma state senator and chair of Trump’s 2016 Oklahoma campaign. Found in a motel room with a seventeen-year-old boy. The FBI found he’d used fake names to trade child porn and hunt for young males — “the younger the better,” in the federal record’s words. Guilty of child sex trafficking. Fifteen years. Tim Nolan — former Kentucky judge and a Trump county campaign chair. Pleaded guilty to nineteen counts of child sex and human trafficking. Nineteen victims, seven of them under sixteen. He handed drugs to addicts and runaways in exchange for sex, then reminded them he was a judge — that no one would believe them over a man like him. Twenty years. Ray Holmberg — North Dakota state senator, forty-five years in office, the longest-serving Republican state legislator in the country. He chaired appropriations, so he ran the state budget. Over a decade he flew to Prague at least fourteen times to have sex with underage boys. He bragged in emails about boys as young as twelve: “No one is ever too young. Remember Prague.” He also approved $126,000 in reimbursement for his own travel on those trips. Guilty of child sex tourism, sentenced to ten years in March 2025. Philip Giordano — Republican mayor of Waterbury, Connecticut, and a U.S. Senate candidate. The FBI was investigating him for corruption when they overheard something worse: he was paying a woman to bring her eight-year-old daughter and ten-year-old niece to him, some of it inside city hall. Thirty-seven federal years, plus eighteen more on state charges. Robert Morris — founding pastor of Gateway Church, one of the biggest megachurches in the country, and a member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board. Pleaded guilty in October 2025 to five counts of lewd acts with a child. The abuse started when the victim was twelve and ran four years. Justin Eichorn — Minnesota state senator, caught in a sting arranging to meet a girl he believed was seventeen. Officers found cash and a condom on him. Days before the arrest, his marquee bill was one to define “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as a mental illness. That was the priority. If you’ve read this far, you already know why this channel exists — to say the thing out loud. We’re closing in on 2,000 subscribers; a free one helps us keep doing it. Now the part that matters more than the crimes — how the movement responds when the predator is theirs. Dennis Hastert. Longest-serving Republican Speaker in history, second in line to the presidency, the man the party put forward to lead its moral crusade against Bill Clinton. A federal judge called him a serial child molester for abusing boys as young as fourteen when he coached high school wrestling. When he was sentenced, forty-one people wrote the court letters of support — including members of Congress, and Porter Goss, a former director of the CIA. The former head of the CIA vouched for a man who admitted in open court to molesting children. That’s not a party policing itself. That’s a party closing ranks. And that instinct is alive right now. When Matt Gaetz was under federal investigation for sex trafficking, the House Ethics Committee found substantial evidence he’d had sex with a seventeen-year-old and paid her $400 she understood to be for sex. The Justice Department declined to charge, citing witness credibility — fine, not convicted. But leadership didn’t push him out. They handed him a seat on the subcommittee investigating the “weaponization” of the federal government, and Trump nominated him for Attorney General of the United States. Then, in July 2025, Trump launched a youth fitness program for schoolkids at the White House — and put Lawrence Taylor next to him. Taylor is a registered sex offender who pleaded guilty after paying for sex with a trafficked sixteen-year-old. A registered sex offender in the Roosevelt Room, helping roll out a children’s program. Trump looked over and said, “There’s nobody like him.” Here’s the test. Take every name and switch the letter. A Democratic campaign chair convicted of child sex trafficking. A Democratic senator who flew to Europe fourteen times to abuse boys. A Democratic Speaker called a serial molester by a federal judge. A Democratic president putting a registered sex offender on stage at a kids’ event. You know exactly what would happen. It would be the only story in conservative media for a year. Hearings, hashtags, merchandise. They’d never let it go. But because these men are MAGA loyalists, the silence is deafening. The same people who saw a pedophile ring in the basement of a pizza place that didn’t have a basement can’t manage one word about the trafficker who ran a presidential campaign. Everything here is in the public record — indictments, guilty pleas, convictions, sentencing documents you can pull up yourself. Not anonymous accusations. Not theories. Facts, established under oath. I’ll close where I always do. Child abuse isn’t a Republican crime or a Democratic one. It’s a human evil that cuts across every line, and nobody gets to stand on a mountain of moral superiority over it. But one movement chose to make the accusation the center of its politics — to point at everyone else and scream predator while refusing to look in the mirror. And the documented record shows exactly who’s been looking away. So the next time someone in a red hat tells you they’re the ones protecting the children, say one word back. Ask them about joebidennnn69. Then watch how fast the crusade goes quiet. 🟧 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 $90M Taxpayer Fair Is Such a Disaster a MAGA Streamer Got Arrested Doing THIS

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] Trump threw America a birthday party. Nobody came. The Great American State Fair is the administration’s big America 250 celebration — sixteen days on the National Mall, June 25 through July 10, to mark the country’s 250th birthday. There’s a 110-foot Ferris wheel they named “Freedom 250.” There’s a nonprofit set up to run it. There’s ninety million of your money holding the thing up. And on opening day it handed us the one story that explains all of it. A 54-year-old man named Gian Rachtelli got arrested behind the stage during a Cirque Mechanics acrobatics show. U.S. Park Police say he was filming the female performers. Three separate witnesses told officers what happened next. He was charged with lewd, indecent, or obscene acts — for masturbating out in the open, at a family event, on federal land. One of those witnesses was the founder of the circus troupe. A woman on stage walked over to the crowd mid-performance because she and the other performers no longer felt safe. Sit with that. Performers stopped feeling safe doing their jobs at a federally sponsored celebration. And a chunk of the internet made the guy a hero. Because Rachtelli isn’t some stranger who wandered in off the Mall. He’s a MAGA livestreamer who goes by “Manny.” He was broadcasting the whole thing — his own stream cuts out the second a cop steps into frame. Within hours the posts were rolling in. “Free Manny.” “His only crime is being a huge Patriot.” A wrongful detention to silence a man for his politics. Not embarrassment. Not distance. A defense campaign. I spent twenty years carrying a badge, and I watched plenty of people rush to excuse the indefensible. But there’s something especially telling about a movement that reads three witness statements and a performer too scared to keep dancing, and decides the politics make it fine. Here’s the part that actually matters, though: this fair was a disaster before anybody got arrested. The administration booked a music slate to carry all sixteen days. Then the musicians started walking. Martina McBride pulled out. Young MC pulled out. Morris Day and the Time. Even the last surviving member of Milli Vanilli. One after another, they looked at whose name was on the event and wanted nothing to do with it. A normal organizer rebooks and moves on. Trump’s ego couldn’t take it. So he headlined the opening himself — the President of the United States became the main act at his own half-empty carnival, because the actual performers wouldn’t put their names next to his. The crowds told the same story. The photos show a Mall that’s mostly bare — thin enough that people joked online everyone got their own personal porta-potty. Reporters counted a sparse crowd around the 110-foot wheel that was supposed to be the centerpiece of a national celebration. Then there’s the bill. D.C. alone expects to spend around ninety million dollars securing this summer’s events, National Guard and federal law enforcement stacked on top. Ninety million of our dollars to protect a patriotic spectacle the performers boycotted and the public skipped. And that’s before the complaints about the food prices, the stripped-down attractions, and the endless flags standing in for anything a state fair is actually supposed to have. At one point the top draw, other than Manny, was a dinosaur’s rib cage. You can’t make it up. And the President’s answer to all of it? He didn’t mention the empty grounds, the dropouts, or the arrest. He got on Truth Social before sunrise to ask whether people appreciate what a fantastic job his team did building and running the fair — then announced that Obama and Biden could never have pulled it off. On that last part, he’s right. Hat’s off, Donald. We could laugh this off and move on. It is funny. But this was supposed to be a real celebration of a real milestone — 250 years. What we got instead is a vanity project on the National Mall with a ninety-million-dollar price tag and a public-indecency arrest for a grand opening. And it’s still running. Right now, through July 10. The wheel is still turning over an empty Mall. The pavilions are still open. The ninety-million-dollar security operation is still burning. You can walk down and see for yourself what it looks like when the people throwing the party can’t tell you why it exists. So the next time somebody says “Freedom 250,” remember the opening. The empty grounds. The dinosaur rib cage. Manny. That’s not what 250 years looks like. And no Ferris wheel is going to make it one. 🟧 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!