The Most Spineless Flip in Washington Just Got Rewarded

The World Is On Fire And Nobody In Washington Is Telling You Why

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] The deadliest year of war on this planet since the Rwandan genocide just happened, and I’d bet money this is the first you’re hearing of it. Nearly a quarter million people killed. The silence around that number is its own story. The count comes from Uppsala University in Sweden, where researchers track the world’s wars for a living. They’re the gold standard — the people governments and reporters trust to keep the tally honest. Their latest: sixty-five active conflicts, the most since the end of World War II. And the worse number is buried under that one. Wars between actual countries — nation against nation — doubled in a single year. Eight of them, the most since they started counting in 1946. Russia and Ukraine. Iran and Israel. The United States and Iran. Israel and Palestine. India and Pakistan. Thailand and Cambodia. Afghanistan and Pakistan trading fire across the border. The U.S. and Britain against the Houthis in the Red Sea. I’m not going to stand here and tell you the last eighty years of American power were clean. They weren’t. Thousands died because this country lied to its own people, and the world, to drag us into one war after another in the Middle East. I’ve got no interest in pretending otherwise. But here’s the other half of the truth. After World War II, out of the wreckage, we helped build something — alliances, treaties, a United Nations, real institutions with real money behind them. A structure that made attacking your neighbor a losing bet. People called it Pax Americana. It was never charity and it was never perfect, but it worked well enough that a war between countries became the exception instead of the rule. The researchers who count these wars are now telling us that structure is breaking. They don’t hint at it. They name the cause. They quote our own 2025 National Security Strategy and write that the United States is tearing down the institutions it spent eighty years building. Sit with the timing of that. A country founded on tolerance and individual freedom, on the edge of its 250th birthday, has become the country actively pulling the supports out from under peace around the globe. *If you want it straight — no spin, no team jersey — subscribe. It’s free, and it’s reader-supported, which is exactly why I can say all of this.* I’ll be honest about what this study does and doesn’t prove. The lead researcher said it plainly: the data can’t pin this on one president or one policy. The trend’s been building for a decade. This is bigger than any single administration, and I won’t insult you by pretending it started with one party. But twenty years as a cop taught me something about the world that applies here. Chaos is the natural state of things. Order is not. Order is something you build and defend on purpose, every single day, or it rots from the inside. Take the cop off the corner and you find out fast who steps up to fill the space. Right now the corner is the entire planet. And look who’s filling it. Russia and Ukraine is the deadliest war on earth, sixty-two percent of every battlefield death last year. Gaza, where atrocities against innocents have piled up. Sudan, where a paramilitary group overran a city and massacred tens of thousands of civilians — people killed for the crime of going to the hospital or trying not to starve. “Dramatic,” the study calls the surge in violence against people who weren’t fighting anyone. Dramatic doesn’t come close. So what’s Washington talking about while this burns? Ballrooms and “American flag blue.” Trans athletes and DEI hires. Anything but this. Nobody’s standing at a podium telling you you’re living through the deadliest year of war since Rwanda, or that it’s tied directly to choices we are making about our place in the world. You get culture-war noise and whatever manufactured outrage you were handed this week instead. That’s not an accident. A distracted public is an easy public to control. Here’s the part I actually need you to hear. The people taking apart the system that kept war between nations rare are betting on one thing — that you won’t notice. They dress it up as “America First” when the honest name is America Alone. Fewer alliances, weaker institutions, power vacuums, corruption. A world where the strong do whatever they please because nobody’s left with the spine to tell them no. We’ve seen that world. We lived in it in the first half of the last century, and it ended with sixty million dead. We spent the next eighty years building something so it couldn’t happen again at that scale. And the people who count these wars just told us next year already looks worse. The line is still climbing. You can’t end a war in Sudan from your couch. I know that. But you can refuse to be the distracted public they’re counting on. You can learn to tell the difference between a country that walks away from the world and calls it strength, and a country that understands what actually holds the world together. And you can vote like the structure matters — because the data just spelled out, in blood, what happens when it doesn’t. The peace was never free. It was expensive and exhausting and it never stopped being a grind. But one day of it beats one second of war. Somebody built it on purpose. And right now, on purpose, somebody is tearing it down. That somebody is the United States of America. 🟧 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 Tried to Bury Graham Platner. Maine Democrats Just Buried Them.

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] Spend a fortune trying to destroy a candidate and you expect to see it somewhere in the polls. The national party threw everything it had at Graham Platner — an oyster farmer and former Marine running for Senate in Maine — and it didn’t move him an inch. He took the nomination going away. A lot of people in Washington should be rattled by that. I’m not. Let me tell you what they missed. Start with who Platner beat. Janet Mills — two-term governor, the candidate Chuck Schumer personally recruited to knock off Susan Collins — never made it to the ballot box as a real contender. She walked away, and the reason she gave was money. Read that again. A sitting governor couldn’t out-raise a guy who farms shellfish for a living. The polls told the whole story: Emerson had Platner up 55 to 28, and some had it worse. Her name stayed on the ballot out of formality. It changed nothing. What makes it remarkable is the pile of opposition research he carried the entire way and still won. A Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on his chest — he says he got it drunk as a young Marine overseas, no idea what it meant. Hundreds of pages of ugly old Reddit posts. Cheating early in his marriage. The New York Times went and found his exes and printed what they called disturbing behavior. I’m not going to pretend any of that is nothing. It isn’t. But the people who dumped it all on his head misread the room completely. None of it moved a vote. He called the attacks what they were — a weaponizing of his past — and Maine nodded along. Bernie didn’t flinch. Warren didn’t flinch. The whole demolition job slid right off him. Online, this stopped being about Maine ages ago. It turned into a stand-in war over what the Democratic Party is even for, with the press fretting about a civil war on the left. None of that was on the ballot. The people who actually voted weren’t picking a faction. They were picking the guy who’d fight. Put yourself in that booth. On one side, a battered, scarred-up candidate with a file full of bad headlines. On the other, a careful, polished, two-term governor with a clean résumé. Maine chose the scarred one. Not out of recklessness — out of a decision that the only credential that counts anymore is whether you’ll climb into the ring with Donald Trump and throw hands. They looked at Mills, who’d have arrived in the Senate as a 79-year-old freshman, and didn’t believe she would. And don’t write this off as a few keyboard radicals. The man is a combat veteran who grows oysters and sounds like he’s never been within a mile of a political consultant. That’s exactly why the small-dollar checks came in faster than a governor could keep up with — and why the scandals never stuck. You can’t run an oppo campaign against people simply trusting somebody. This is the same fight I’ve been having in print for a while now. I’ve written open letter after open letter to Democrats who had the chance to swing and chose to go quiet. The consultant class keeps selling caution as wisdom. Maine just sent the bill back unpaid. They took the guy with the tattoo over the safe governor because the safe governor never once made them believe she’d actually fight. I’m not going to oversell it. Platner still has to beat Collins, and that race is tightening. The attack ads are coming, and there’s more than enough material to fill them. Nothing here is locked. But forget the oyster farmer for a second, because he’s not really the point. The point is that the appetite for Democrats who throw punches has gotten so strong it’s now surviving the kind of stories that used to end careers overnight. If you’re in the wing of this party that still thinks the answer is to play it safe, that should keep you up at night. Maine made itself clear. It is done being careful. It wants a fighter — and it just sent one to the general. 🟧 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 Most Spineless Flip in Washington Just Got Rewarded

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 man once looked Donald Trump dead in the eye, called him a race-baiting xenophobic religious bigot, and told America to send him to hell. Then he spent the next ten years turning himself inside out to win that same man’s approval. That man is Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. And here’s the part that should bother you: it worked. He won his primary. He’s headed to the general. And the lesson that hands every Republican in the country is the thing I actually want to talk about. Go back to 2015. Trump went after John McCain — said McCain was only a war hero because he got captured. McCain was one of Graham’s closest friends in the world, and Graham did something that looks almost unrecognizable now. He fought back. He told Trump to run for president but not to be the world’s biggest jackass. Trump’s response was to read Graham’s personal cell number out loud to a crowd. It escalated from there. Graham went on CNN and said Trump’s rhetoric disgusted him, that the proposed Muslim ban would be a death sentence for the interpreters and allies who risked their lives next to American troops. And then he delivered the line that ought to follow him into every room for the rest of his life: *tell Donald Trump to go to hell.* One thing the job teaches you is how to tell the difference between somebody who believes what he’s saying and somebody who’s performing. Watch that 2015 footage. That was a man who meant it. The disgust was real. So what changed? Trump won. And the second he won, the math changed for Lindsey Graham. By 2017 there was a make-up lunch. By 2018 they were golf buddies and Graham was one of Trump’s closest allies in the Senate. And here’s the tell. Graham didn’t pretend he never said those things. He went on CBS and owned it: *I said he was a xenophobic, race-baiting religious bigot. I ran out of adjectives.* Then he added that the American people spoke and rejected his analysis. Sit with that. He didn’t say he’d been wrong about Trump. He said the voters disagreed, so he changed his mind. That’s not a man admitting a mistake. That’s a man telling you his principles are for sale and the market just repriced them. There was one last flash of the old Graham. January 6th, 2021. The Capitol gets stormed and he goes to the Senate floor: *Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey. Count me out. Enough is enough.* Sounded final. It lasted about a month. When the vote came to convict Trump for inciting that attack, Graham voted no. Seven Republican senators found the spine to convict. Graham wasn’t one of them. *If you want the receipts kept and the memory long, subscribe. Free or paid — it keeps this beholden to nobody.* And that distinction is the whole story, because of what just played out. You’ve heard me talk about the purge. John Cornyn, gone. Bill Cassidy, gone — both pushed out of their primaries after Trump decided they weren’t loyal enough and bankrolled their challengers. Cassidy especially: the man voted his conscience on impeachment, and the party hunted him out of his seat for it. Graham watched that happen and learned the lesson exactly as it was meant to be taught. Loyalty is the only currency. Conscience is a liability you can’t afford. So when a businessman named Mark Lynch came at him from the right — close to five million dollars in ads painting Graham as disloyal, with Marjorie Taylor Greene out there calling him an “America Last warmonger” — Graham didn’t fight back with his record or his two-plus decades in the Senate. He spent upward of fifteen million dollars on ads that said one thing: Trump likes me. Trump endorsed me. Please notice Trump endorsed me. His actual closing pitch to South Carolina was that if you want somebody who can go to Washington to help Trump, he’s your best choice. Not to help you. Not to represent the state. To help him. And it won. On the eve of the vote, Trump got on a tele-rally and Graham told him, “you’ve been so great to me.” Go to hell, to you’ve been so great to me. That’s the arc. Eleven years of a United States senator’s spine dissolving in real time — and a brand-new term as the reward. I’m not telling you this just to dunk on Lindsey Graham, though he’s earned it. I’m telling you because he was the latest test case, and it worked. Which means the lesson every elected Republican absorbs is simple: the bigotry, the cruelty, the knife in your own friend’s back — none of it costs you anything, as long as you grovel hard enough at the end. You can call the man a bigot on national television and still keep the seat, still get the endorsement, as long as you spend the rest of your career proving you’ll never do it again. Hold onto the 2015 version. The one who meant it. Because Lindsey Graham had principles, whether you liked them or not — right up until the moment keeping them got expensive. And a whole lot of people just watched selling your soul to MAGA pay off. So the next time one of them looks into a camera, tells you exactly what they believe, and then twists into a lying pretzel — call their office and tell them precisely how you feel about 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 CIA Gold Bar Scandal Just Got a New Character — And Her Story Doesn't Add Up

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] There’s a simple tell when someone’s lying about why they quit a job. The reason keeps changing. Hold that thought, because I need to back up to the gold. A senior CIA officer named David Rush — seventeen years at the agency, served two administrations, one of each party — got arrested after the FBI found more than 300 gold bars sitting in his house in Virginia. Forty million dollars in bullion. The affidavit says he was holding it for “work-related expenses.” A retired officer who spent his whole career moving money for the agency told the Wall Street Journal he never once dealt in gold, and he’s right to point it out. Cash leaves a record. Wires leave a record. Gold is what you reach for when you need money no oversight committee will ever trace. That’s the scandal. Now meet the woman who’d like to be the hero of it. Amaryllis Fox Kennedy held three of the most sensitive jobs in government at the same time — deputy director of national intelligence, a seat on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, and a post at OMB watching how the CIA and the rest of the spy agencies spend their money. Nobody hands one person that much power by accident. In her case, the qualification that mattered was a last name. She’s married to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s son. That was the door. She’s not a fraud — she was a real officer, wrote a book about it. But an administration that campaigns against “the swamp” handed a relative the keys to the agency’s checkbook. That is the swamp. They just gave it a flag pin. *This is the kind of thing I dig into here. Subscribe — it’s free, and it keeps me on it.* Now back to the resignation. When she left, the story was family. A daughter heading to college, bills to manage, time to step back. Ordinary stuff. Nobody questions it. Then the gold broke into the headlines — and her reason grew a second act. In the Wall Street Journal she’s no longer leaving over tuition. Now she “couldn’t keep signing the checks.” Now she “would’ve become complicit.” Now she’s the one principled person who saw money and gold moving in the dark and walked away rather than be part of it. Pick one. Either you quit to pay for college, or you quit because you uncovered a corruption you couldn’t stomach. Those are not the same resignation. And here’s what sinks it for me. She had authority over CIA spending right up to her last day. If she was watching untraceable gold flow through the system, almost nobody on earth was better positioned to do something about it. Yet the public record shows she never raised the gold with senior agency staff — not once — and when reporters ask her to name specifics now, she retreats behind “national security.” Watch who she’s careful to protect. The Trump appointees running the place — Ratcliffe, Gabbard, Pulte — she calls heroes “doing the Lord’s work.” The villains are conveniently faceless: career people who were there before Trump arrived. She knifes a ghost and flatters every Trump official by name. That’s not a whistleblower. That’s an audition. A story built so she can kiss the ring on her way out the door — because whatever made a Kennedy walk away from three of the most powerful seats in Washington, it wasn’t the electric bill. The CIA says her claims are flat-out false. Believe that as much as you believe any spy agency talking about its own transparency. So where does that leave us. The arrest is real. The gold is real. And the bigger question — whether the CIA runs money out of sight of the people who are supposed to be watching it — is real, and old. People in both parties have been chasing it since before the Church Committee. It deserves a serious answer. What it doesn’t need is this particular person volunteering as the conscience of the story the moment it got famous, after telling us she left for completely different reasons. She even floated coming back — “first in line,” she said, if the conditions are right. That’s not someone who walked away on principle. That’s a nepo baby keeping a seat warm for the next administration. 🟧 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!

ICE Just CROSSED THE LINE at This Detention Center and Democrats Are FROZEN

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] Outside Delaney Hall in Newark, you’re watching the federal government act like it owns the streets. Tear gas in a residential neighborhood. Flash bangs going off like it’s a war zone. People getting tackled, sprayed, and beaten on camera. Families inside the facility saying conditions are so bad their loved ones stopped eating, and DHS answering with the oldest lie in the book: nothing to see here. And the part that should make every Democrat in this country sick is the response from Democratic leadership in New Jersey: tone policing. “Lower the temperature.” “Don’t give ICE an excuse.” That’s not leadership. That’s a governor admitting—out loud—that she believes ICE will retaliate against her residents if they protest too hard. That’s what it sounds like when elected officials start treating their own federal government like a hostile occupying force they can’t control. Here’s the truth: pressure works. Visitation didn’t come back because somebody asked nicely. It moved because people showed up, stayed put, and forced the issue into daylight. And that’s exactly why the crackdown outside the gates is so aggressive—because the people on the ground are doing the job our institutions are refusing to do: making sure the country can’t pretend it didn’t know. If you want to help, don’t just doomscroll the footage. Call Sherrill. Call Kim. Call your House member. Tell them you expect subpoenas, hearings, and state-level action—not another press conference about “temperature.” Support the legal groups representing detainees and protesters. And keep sharing what’s coming out of Newark, because the only thing these agencies fear is sustained attention. Delaney Hall isn’t “one bad night.” It’s a preview of what unchecked federal power looks like—right here, at home—when the people who are supposed to fight back decide their safest move is to manage you instead. 🟧 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!