Trump Just Finished His Purge of the Republican Party

A 14-Year-Old Got Shot In The Back. The Shooter Just Walked Free.

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] A South Carolina jury watched the video: a 14-year-old kid running away, then getting shot in the back. And they cleared the shooter. The kid was Cyrus Carmack-Belton. The man who shot him was convenience store owner Rick Chow. Chow said he thought Cyrus had stolen water. But surveillance footage showed the water never left the store. Cyrus died anyway. Here’s the part I can’t get past, as someone who spent 20 years wearing a badge: Stand Your Ground is giving civilians more legal cover to kill than cops get. If I shoot a fleeing suspect in the back, I’m living inside Tennessee v. Garner—deadly force is supposed to be about an immediate threat, not a hunch, not anger, not “he might’ve done something.” South Carolina’s law (the “Protection of Persons and Property Act”) takes that old duty-to-retreat principle and guts it. It says there’s no duty to retreat in a place you have a right to be, including your business, and it builds in immunity if the shooter claims the right kind of fear. And once the person who got shot is dead—once the only living narrator is the guy holding the gun—“I believed I was in danger” becomes a magic sentence a jury can hide behind. If you’re thinking “that’s not self-defense,” you’re not crazy. Real self-defense is stopping an imminent threat. What we’ve created with these laws is something else: a system where chasing someone down and killing them can get laundered into “reasonable fear,” even when the video looks like a kid trying to get away. And if we don’t face what these laws actually do—case by case, body by body—more families are going to bury kids and watch the shooter walk. 🟧 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!

Six Hours. That’s How Long Their Surrender Lasted.

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] DOJ leadership tried to slam the door on the January 6 payout scheme with one of those courtroom words that’s supposed to end the conversation: “Period.” Acting AG Todd Blanche told Rep. Grace Meng the so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” wasn’t moving forward — and that it was never going to happen. That lasted about six hours. Because once the cameras were off, you could watch the replacement being built in real time. Lindsey Graham immediately started floating a new workaround — paying “weaponization” claims through the Federal Tort Claims Act, which is basically the quietest way possible to move taxpayer money: not one big fund everyone can see, but a bunch of smaller settlements that don’t look like a headline until you add them up later. Then came the tell. Stanley Woodward — the Associate Attorney General, the number three person at DOJ — replied publicly to Graham with “We’re on it.” Present tense. Not “we’ll look at it,” not “interesting idea,” but we’re already moving. And then he deleted it — after journalists screenshotted it, because of course they did. And Trump didn’t help their “it’s dead” story either. In a podcast taping this week, when asked about dropping the fund, he didn’t say I ended it. He said a court stopped it, and that the people it was meant to pay “should be reimbursed.” Translation: the plan didn’t die. It got blocked. So they’re shopping for a new vehicle. That’s the point here: they’re not abandoning the payoff — they’re abandoning the version that was too obvious to survive. Big, loud, easy to freeze in court. The next version will be quieter, messier, and harder to track unless Congress forces disclosure. If you don’t want “period” to become the new magic word for “we’ll do it anyway, just off-camera,” this is the moment to pressure lawmakers to lock down the loopholes — because they just told you, accidentally, that they’re still building 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!

They Look Like Patriots. A Leak Just Exposed What They Really Are.

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] A roster tied to Patriot Front leaked out, and it paints a picture that should make everybody stop pretending this is some fringe problem. Hundreds of members. Spread across basically the entire country. And the part that matters most isn’t the number on the page — it’s the pipeline behind it: how a movement like this keeps finding new recruits in ordinary towns, over and over again. Here’s how they do it. They don’t lead with swastikas and “blood and soil.” They lead with belonging. They wrap the hate in fitness, “brotherhood,” discipline, matching outfits, flags, clean visuals — a whole cosplay of purpose and masculinity. Researchers and reporting have been saying this for a while: Patriot Front operates less like the stereotypical backwoods militia and more like a media-and-recruitment machine built to pull in young men who feel isolated, angry, and invisible. If you’ve ever worked cases that involve recruitment—gangs, crews, trafficking networks—you recognize the pattern immediately. The front door is always something that feels like community. The ideology comes later, once leaving would mean losing the only “team” that finally noticed you. That’s why these leaks matter. They don’t just expose “monsters.” They expose how regular people get turned into threats. So no, the answer isn’t just “arrest them all” and move on. We need pressure on elected officials and law enforcement leadership to treat domestic extremism like the sustained threat it is, not a headline they can ignore until something explodes. And we need communities paying attention to the recruitment tactics — the flyers, the “training clubs,” the sanitized branding — because that’s where this starts, long before it ends up in the streets. 🟧 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!

BYOB Substack Live Q+A with the Fanone Bros.

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The CIA Just Got ROBBED For $40 Million. The Trail Leads Straight To Trump's Pentagon.

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 kicked in the door of a house in Ashburn, Virginia and found a literal Bond-villain stash: 303 gold bars, $2 million in cash, and 35 luxury watches — most of them Rolex. The guy sitting on it? A senior CIA officer, David Rush. And the gold wasn’t “his.” It was U.S. government property. Here’s the part that should stop you cold: this wasn’t some petty theft. Rush allegedly requisitioned gold and foreign currency through internal CIA paperwork over a period of months — signatures, approvals, the whole “official” process — then moved it into a storage space he controlled and out into his home. The CIA didn’t flag it until a later check found the storage area empty. That’s not just one crooked employee. That’s an institutional failure so big it should trigger hearings on its own. And then there’s the connection nobody wants to linger on: reporting indicates Rush had prior contact/history with Stephen Feinberg — the billionaire private equity guy Trump put in as Deputy Secretary of Defense — through Feinberg’s prior role advising on intelligence and his interest in the very CIA directorate Rush worked in. I’m not saying Feinberg helped him steal forty million dollars. I’m saying when a CIA officer can walk out with this kind of value and the oversight systems don’t scream until months later, every relationship and every pipeline around that unit deserves sunlight. Because the real question isn’t just “how did he do it?” The real question is what else could walk out the door when the guardrails don’t work — money, tech, sources, names, methods. If this is the kind of “accountability” we have inside the most secretive agency on earth, imagine how much is breaking in the agencies that don’t live behind a classified wall. 🟧 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!