The CIA Gold Bar Scandal Just Got a New Character — And Her Story Doesn't Add Up

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!

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!