Trump's $90M Taxpayer Fair Is Such a Disaster a MAGA Streamer Got Arrested Doing THIS

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!

The $132 Billion War Trump Started for 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] Fifteen weeks. Fifteen weeks that will go down as one of the most costly and moronic wastes of American taxpayer money we’ve ever made — a war that cost thousands of lives, accomplished nothing, and left us worse off in almost every way you can measure. This week the President announced that he and JD Vance had electronically signed a document ending the war with Iran. Then he flew to France and signed it again at the Palace of Versailles — the same room where the world tried to close out World War One a century ago. The symbolism was supposed to feel historic. What it actually felt like was a man staging a photo op to distract from the wreckage he made. So let’s talk about the wreckage, because the numbers are staggering. According to Moody’s Analytics, the war cost American taxpayers at least $132 billion — military spending, higher energy and commodity prices, and the interest rates we’re all living with now. The Pentagon told Congress the military tab alone hit around $29 billion, and that didn’t even count repairing the dozen or so U.S. bases Iran damaged across the region. Two decades around law enforcement teaches you to look past the press conference and ask what the operation actually accomplished. So look at the count. Roughly 3,500 Iranians dead. Thirteen American service members killed. Twenty-six Israelis. Another 3,700 killed in Lebanon after the war widened. On day one, a U.S. missile strike leveled an Iranian school and killed at least 175 people, most of them children. Those are flag-draped coffins coming home to American families. Hold onto one question as we go: what did any of them die for? Because here’s what makes it worse. We’ve been down this road before, and we walked away from a better deal — thanks to the same arrogance that started this stupid war. Back in 2015, the United States and our allies negotiated an agreement with Iran. Hard limits on their nuclear program. Inspectors on the ground. Verification. It wasn’t perfect, but it was holding. Then Trump tore it up because he didn’t like the name attached to it. No replacement. No plan. Just gone. And now, after fifteen weeks of war and $132 billion and thousands of bodies, we’re back at a table trying to claw back something we already had — except the leverage has completely flipped. Iran proved it can choke the Strait of Hormuz, where something like a fifth of the world’s oil passes through. When their military hit commercial ships there, the strait effectively shut down and the global flow of oil seized up. Crude shot to around $120 a barrel. Gas at the pump went from about three dollars a gallon to roughly four. That’s not a theory. Brown University puts the extra fuel cost at about $460 per household, and that number’s still climbing. Every commute, every grocery run, every product that moves on a truck got more expensive — because of a war that was supposed to make us safer. It reaches your dinner table, too: the closure choked the supply of things like sulfur, which goes into fertilizer, and the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization is warning of higher food prices and more hunger worldwide. So Iran now knows exactly what card it holds. It can squeeze the global economy whenever it wants. Which means the old deal is never coming back. They’ll never again accept the 2015 terms, because in 2015 they didn’t have proof they could put a gun to the world’s energy supply. We handed them that proof. I don’t belong to a party, and I’m not here to score points for one team over another. I’m telling you what I see. We spent $132 billion and an enormous number of lives to end up with less security, less leverage, higher prices, and a worse deal than the one we already had and threw in the trash. That’s not strength. Strength is keeping your word so the other side believes you next time. What we showed the world is that an American agreement only lasts until the next election — and that we’ll burn down a region to relearn a lesson we already knew. And the damage isn’t just measured in dollars. It’s measured in trust. With Iran. With allies who watched us shred a signed agreement and then get dragged into a war. With the families at Dover. That kind of damage doesn’t get fixed in a 60-day negotiating window. It takes decades, if it ever happens at all. Fifteen weeks of war. $132 billion. Thousands of lives. And we’re standing in a weaker position in the Middle East than at almost any point I can remember — while Israel has already broken the ceasefire it never agreed to in the first place, just this past week. If that makes you angry, it should. 🟧 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!

They Want You to Feel Alone. You're Not.

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] Let me name the feeling before we get into it. It’s the feeling that this is hopeless. The lawlessness moves too fast. The courts get ignored. Congress rolls over. They come after their enemies and nobody stops them. And underneath it all, the quietest, most dangerous one: that you’re the only one who still cares. That feeling isn’t an accident. It’s the product. An authoritarian movement is strongest when it convinces enough people that fighting back is pointless and that they’re alone in wanting to. There’s a new book out — On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear — whose authors spent a year talking to more than a hundred dissidents across five continents. People who actually beat leaders with no respect for the law. And what they found cuts straight against the despair. American resistance is stronger than you think. That’s not a slogan. It’s measurable. Here’s the part that should change how you see this. Beating an authoritarian almost never comes down to one perfect protest or one clever strategy. It comes down to what the researchers call collective stubbornness — ordinary people making authoritarian behavior more expensive, throwing enough sand in the gears that the machine sputters and stalls. And there’s a number behind it. A Harvard team studied this across decades and countries, and the finding holds up: when at least three and a half percent of a population joins sustained nonviolent opposition, the movement tends to win. Three and a half percent. In a country this size, that’s a number you can picture. The catch is the word sustained. Showing up once and going home isn’t it. As one activist who helped topple a dictator put it, the big rally isn’t the spark. It’s the victory lap. So what’s the work before the victory lap? The stuff that never makes the highlight reel. It’s Minneapolis, where residents organized to shield their neighbors from ICE raids and helped push the agents out of the city. It’s New Haven, where unions and faith groups pressured the money until an airline dropped its deportation-flight contract. It’s quiet networks getting vulnerable people to safety. None of it is heroic in a Hollywood way. It’s a daily, thankless grind, built on community — somebody deciding the circle of people they’re responsible for just got bigger. One story says it all. After the last election, a woman named Stephanie Campos sat in her New Jersey apartment doom-scrolling and, in her words, just raging. Sound familiar? She signed up with a local group, not knowing what she had to offer. Then a volunteer outside an ICE detention center in Newark came looking for anyone who spoke Spanish. She’s bilingual. The lightbulb went on. This is something I can do. She started by translating between the guard and the families at the gate. Then she was driving families in, walking kids in to see their parents. Now she works her nine-to-five and pulls a second shift on nights and weekends — coordinating drivers, getting diapers and formula and grocery cards to households that just lost the person who paid the bills. When detainees launched a hunger strike over the conditions, the volunteers outside ran vigils so the world heard it. When the government barred visitors, they moved to a church down the road and kept handing out supplies. Here’s the thing: the people running a detention center are more afraid of being seen than being sued. Visibility is pressure. And it works. The detainees haven’t won everything, but politicians are demanding entry and calling for the place to close. ICE released some of the kids and some of the pregnant women. The state attorney general is suing to send health inspectors in. All of it traces back to one anxious person on a couch who decided not to stay there. This is how power actually works. Authoritarians target the smallest groups first, on purpose, because a small group can’t bring down a regime alone. The whole game is whether the people who aren’t yet in the crosshairs stand with the people who are. That’s the hinge. That’s everything. And the calendar makes it urgent. The midterms are coming, and we already know what comes with them — more lies about the results, more attempts to treat the will of the voters as a suggestion. The time to build the muscle that resists that isn’t the morning after. It’s now. And we’re nowhere near ready. The networks, the habits, the relationships, the collective stubbornness — you build those in the boring months so they hold weight when the pressure hits. We’ve got our work cut out for us. But it’s not too late. And we’d better keep one eye on 2028 while we’re at it, or we’re really in trouble. One person in the book said something I can’t shake. Authoritarianism, she said, is really about getting us to do less for each other and still feel okay about it. The antidote is the opposite question. What more can we do for each other? So that’s what I’ll leave you with. Not who to be angry at — you know that already. The question is who your community is. And if you know, it’s time to make it bigger, at exactly the moment they’re betting you’ll make it smaller. That’s not naive. That’s the strategy. It’s beaten people like this before, in real countries with real stakes, and it can do it here. Read the book — On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear by Ami Fields-Meyer and Julia Angwin. Then find your version of “this is something I can do,” and go do it. 🟧 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 New Rule of American Politics That Washington Refuses to Admit

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] Look at the candidates breaking through this cycle and they don’t line up. One’s practically a democratic socialist. One’s a moderate who had kind words for some of Trump’s tariffs. One wraps progressive politics in scripture. One’s a buttoned-up senator who barely does interviews. One’s the governor of the biggest state in the country, running flat out for president. Put them in a room and they’d argue about half of what matters. And yet every one of them cracked the same code — the thing that actually decides elections now. Most of the people in Washington paid to understand politics still won’t say it out loud. Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes put a word on it recently. The word is attention. Hayes wrote a whole book arguing that attention has become the ground American politics stands on — the money, the ads, the endorsements all sit on top of it. Once you see it that way, this whole confusing election snaps into focus. So let me walk you through them, because each one is solving the same problem a completely different way. Start with the old rule, the one that ran campaigns for a generation. Find a candidate with a clean biography — a lawyer, a veteran, somebody who rose through the institutions and looks the part. Sit them down and make them dial for dollars seven hours a day, because the money buys TV, TV buys name recognition, and name recognition wins. That was ninety percent of the game. It’s dead now, because what the money was really buying was attention, and broadcast TV no longer delivers it. The candidates breaking through found other ways to earn it. Here’s how. Graham Platner, Maine. He runs an oyster farm that barely turns a profit and sells most of its catch to his mother’s restaurant. A year ago nobody outside his town knew his name. Now he’s the Democratic nominee for Senate, and the sitting governor — Janet Mills, with Schumer and the whole party behind her — suspended her own campaign and never came back. Platner was, in a real sense, cast. A group went looking for someone to run in Maine and ran it like an audition, not a recruitment. They weren’t hunting for the most accomplished person in the state; they were hunting for charisma, the raw ability to grab people and hold them. They found a former enlisted Marine with a populist streak and bet on the talent, not the résumé. It worked, because Platner carries something you can’t fake — a real belief that the system is hollow at the core, that the institutions failed because they failed him. People can feel that it’s real. The catch is real too: when you recruit a guy precisely because he has an anti-institutional life story, you also get a guy who never spent twenty years watching his every step. Out come the old Reddit posts, the tattoo questions, the baggage a cautious careerist never would’ve accumulated. High-risk bet. But remember what the safe choice got them last time — in 2020 they ran the textbook candidate against Susan Collins, clean record, up in every poll, and she lost by nine. The cautious play isn’t safe. It just fails quietly. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan. Almost Platner’s opposite. Not outside the institution — a Rhodes scholar with an M.D. and a Ph.D., a former public health official who taught at Columbia. The brass ring of American credentialing is on his hand. And he’s just as good at commanding attention, which proves the point: this isn’t about being an outsider. It’s about knowing how to own a room. Watch how he rose — he leaned into a single issue that, for an engaged primary electorate, runs like a live wire. When a controversial figure rallied with him, his opponents and outside groups attacked, and in attacking they put the exact issue he wanted at the center of the race. They handed him the spotlight while trying to take it away. That’s the new physics the old playbook never accounted for: an attack is a gift when it plants you on the side of the fight your voters care about most. James Talarico, Texas. He breaks every pattern I just described. Not the furthest left or right, no single explosive issue. A former teacher with fairly standard progressive politics — but they sit inside a Christian moral framework he clearly actually believes. You could cast him as the idealistic young pastor rooting corruption out of a complicated church. Turns out that’s a superpower right now, because what he’s tapping isn’t a hunger for radicalism. It’s a hunger for decency. He beat a viral-video star in his own primary by being authentic instead of performative. His general-election opponents are attacking him for being too nice, too soft for Texas — running cruelty against kindness — and they may be walking straight into the fight he wanted. The appetite for an actual decent human being in the middle of this era is a lot bigger than the cynics think. Jon Ossoff, Georgia. Does the opposite of everyone else. They’re all playing a volume game — yes to everything, everywhere. Ossoff is scarce. Careful. Barely touches the long podcast circuit. He builds anticipation by being hard to get. Here’s what makes him interesting: he used to make documentaries about international corruption, so the man actually knows how to build compelling video about a complicated subject. You know an Ossoff clip the second it starts — the visual grammar is his. Compare that to Raphael Warnock, same party, same state, who everyone assumed would be the rising star and who’s putting out content that looks like a Senate press conference in front of a wall of flags. Completely different command of the medium. Ossoff also figured out how to tell the corruption story — so overwhelming it leaves most of us speechless — by routing it through the system itself instead of one man, and by giving the other side its due inside his own argument. That’s a hard thing to do and a powerful one. Gavin Newsom, California. Playing this game for the presidency. If Ossoff wins by being scarce, Newsom wins by being everywhere. He made one of the most interesting attention bets on this list: omnipresence. Yes to everything. His own podcast, where he’ll sit across from hard-right figures most of his party wouldn’t share a microphone with — going places specifically because it’s strange to see him there. A few years ago I’d have been skeptical; a handsome California governor with a stack of old scandals isn’t obviously what the party’s hungry for. But the reps did their work. He’s gotten better, faster than his rivals, because he’s constantly in rooms where things can go wrong, and that volume builds a comfort you can’t rehearse. Right now the prediction markets have him as the 2028 frontrunner, and a big part of how he got there is that he stopped trying to be the poll-tested version of himself and started showing up as a guy willing to walk into hostile territory and have the argument. He’s reaching for something genuinely hard — to hold two opposite ideas at once: I’ll be your brawler, and we can disagree out in the open and keep talking anyway. He hasn’t fully fused them, and sometimes the big unifying line falls flat. But the instinct — that our fights with each other can be productive instead of disqualifying — is more honest than the alternative, and it travels. Now the counterexample, because attention alone is never the whole story. In Los Angeles, a former reality star named Spencer Pratt ran for mayor and, if you were online, looked like a phenomenon — great ads, impossible to avoid, the talk of the platform. Then he lost badly, underperforming Trump in the same city. Two reasons. First, there was no actual reason for the man to be mayor; the attention had nothing underneath it. Second, a lot of that supposed momentum lived on one platform that’s become a sealed room, where a small, intense crowd convinces itself that whatever’s loud inside is popular outside. It’s the same trap the left fell into years ago when it mistook the most-online opinion for the most popular one. Lethal then, lethal now, and the people inside can’t feel it because everyone around them agrees. Pratt is the proof that attention has to be attached to something real. When it isn’t, it evaporates the second it meets actual voters. Here’s the thread. The public can smell a phony. On the street, in an interview room, across a kitchen table, people know within thirty seconds whether you’re telling them what you actually think or what you think they want to hear. These platforms do the same thing at scale — they sniff out inauthenticity in a way the old institutions never did. The institutions wanted you to file down who you were to fit what they needed. The new ecosystem punishes exactly that and rewards the opposite. That’s what all six share. Platner’s anger is real. El-Sayed’s conviction is real. Talarico’s decency is real. Ossoff’s craft is real. Newsom’s appetite for the fight is real. Wildly different people, wildly different politics, and the one thing they have in common is that each took something true about who they actually are and learned to translate it into the language of this moment — the clip, the post, the connection that travels. The old machine recruited for institutional fit and kept getting blindsided. The consultants who built careers on the dead formula are still selling it and hoping you don’t notice. But the entry ticket now is attention, and you earn it by being some real version of yourself in public and eating the risk that comes with it. The machine is obsolete. The only question left is how long the people running it take to admit it. 🟧 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!

A Trainee Is Dead and 160 Are Sick. Hegseth Owns This One.

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] Keon McDaniel was six weeks into Air Force basic training. His whole career ahead of him. His whole life. On Friday he was rushed to Brooke Army Medical Center after a medical emergency. By Monday he was dead. The Air Force says a full medical review is underway, and we don’t yet know for certain whether his death is tied to the flu. But here’s what we do know. He was training inside a wing where nearly 160 of his fellow recruits had just come down with influenza. And we know exactly why that outbreak was able to take hold. In April, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood in front of a camera and ended a longstanding requirement that service members get the flu vaccine. He called the mandate “absurd, overreaching.” He dressed it up as a fight for religious freedom and medical autonomy and said your body and your convictions are “not negotiable.” It sounds great. It plays well to a certain audience — the people who want government out of their lives. But that mandate was never about controlling anybody. It existed for one reason. Readiness. Healthy troops. You cannot defend this country flat on your back with a 103-degree fever. Don’t take it from me. Take it from Senator Roger Wicker — the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and an Air Force veteran. When Hegseth made this move, Wicker said the requirement was there to enhance readiness, and then he said the thing that should’ve ended the whole debate: you do give up certain rights when you take the oath. It’s just part of it. That’s not a liberal talking point. That’s a Republican senator and a veteran explaining a basic truth about military service that apparently needs explaining to the man running the Pentagon. So look at what Hegseth’s “freedom” actually produced. Before the mandate ended, vaccination among recruits at this base ran close to one hundred percent. After he made it optional, it collapsed to forty. Forty percent. Now picture where these recruits live. This is basic training at Lackland — young people sleeping in open bays, bunk to bunk, eating shoulder to shoulder at communal tables. If you set out to design a perfect environment for a respiratory virus to tear through a population, you couldn’t do better than a basic training barracks. Public health officials have understood this for a century. There’s a reason the line keeps getting repeated this week: nothing in human history has killed more soldiers than disease. Military leaders under presidents of both parties knew that. It took this administration about eight weeks to forget it. And the response tells you everything. The moment the bodies started filling the medical wing, the Air Force quietly issued an exception to Hegseth’s own policy and made the vaccine mandatory again — right there at Lackland. So the same shot that was an “absurd, overreaching mandate” in April became urgently necessary in June, the second it was clear people were getting hurt. That’s the tell. If the policy were really about freedom and autonomy and principle, you’d hold the line when it got inconvenient. They didn’t. They reversed it the instant reality showed up, which means somewhere in that building people knew the original call was wrong. They made it anyway, because it sounded good in a video. And here’s the part I want to sit with, because it’s bigger than one base. This outbreak didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the predictable end product of a years-long project to convince Americans that vaccines are dangerous, that public health is tyranny, that the people telling you to get a shot are the enemy. You’ve got a Health Secretary who built a career questioning the safety of standard vaccines. You’ve got a Defense Secretary turning a routine flu shot into a culture-war trophy. And the message lands. Forty percent. These recruits didn’t decide on their own that a vaccine the military had given safely for decades was suddenly a threat. They were told that, over and over, by people in positions of trust — including their own government. So when the fever finally hit that barracks, these young men and women weren’t making a free and informed choice. They were acting on misinformation handed to them from the top. That’s what makes me angry. Not that people got sick — people get sick. It’s that they were set up to get sick by leaders who knew better and reached for the culture-war talking point anyway. And even now, with a trainee dead and 160 in the medical wing, the Pentagon’s posture is to defend the decision. A spokesman insists it was based on “thorough risk assessments” to maximize readiness and lethality. Read that back against what actually happened. A unit too sick to train is not lethal. A recruit in a hospital bed is not ready. The assessment, whatever it was, was wrong, and the proof is in San Antonio right now. Here’s the bottom line. Leadership means you own the consequences of your choices. Hegseth made a choice. He ended a protection that worked, dressed it up as freedom, and within two months a base full of young Americans paid for it. One of them may have paid with his life. The least this administration owes those recruits — and owes Keon McDaniel’s family — is the honesty to admit this was a mistake instead of hiding behind a press release. 🟧 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!