There was the time she wrote that 9/11 kicked off the Republican campaign to suppress voters. That Donald Trump, in 2016, won the White House partially by “asserting that white men should dominate women and people of color.” That Trump choosing JD as a running mate, in 2024, showed an ideology of rejecting democracy in favor of Christian nationalism had “taken over the Republican Party.” In September, she wrote that Charlie Kirk was shot by a right-wing, white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family. And that MAGA’s outrage at the shooting was a prelude to an authoritarian takeover. Budget cuts? Those are a prelude to an authoritarian takeover. Recent Supreme Court decisions? A prelude to an authoritarian takeover. Deploying troops to DC, who, as part of their marching orders, picked up trash and spread mulch around the cherry trees? A prelude to an authoritarian takeover.

Who wrote these dispatches, you may ask? An obscure leftist blogger, tucked away on BlueSky, followed by a handful of Portlandia co-op members? Nope.

Heather Cox Richardson may not be a household name, but she’s one of the most influential voices in American media. From her home in Maine, the Boston College professor has built a following of 2.7 million subscribers — that’s 1 million more people than Jimmy Kimmel’s average audience size, and just shy of the left-wing political commentator Hasan Piker’s 3 million streaming followers — who treat reading her nightly Substack, “Letters from an American,” as an act of patriotism.

To her followers, Richardson is the last responsible adult in the room: calm, authoritative, devoted to the hard facts of history. She presents herself as America’s professor, neither a polemicist nor performer. Yet the history in her telling is never neutral. Each night, she offers a morality tale in which Republicans play the villains; Democrats, the weary defenders of reason.

That pattern was clearest when she told readers last month that Kirk’s assassin, Tyler Robinson, was another example of MAGA violence, a symbol of the right’s descent into madness. She still hasn’t corrected the record that Robinson was, in fact, left-leaning, according to his family and basically every piece of credible evidence that exists. But that mistake in particular matters less than what it revealed. Richardson was wrong, but she was doing what she always does: imposing a narrative shape on events that, occasionally, are too messy to have a cleanly delivered moral. In that, she’s emblematic of the new media order: unaccountable, independent, influential, and commanding both an audience larger than most television shows and a devoted fandom. Her appeal rests on what the public has lost faith in — The New York Times telling us all what to think — and what it wants instead: a guide who, more or less, tells us all what to think, but more honorably. A Virgil cutting through the hellscape of modern politics and media.

But because Richardson writes so confidently about the past, her version of the present feels indisputable. Her bibliography — an end-of-letter list of linked sources — creates the appearance of rigor, even when the post is more interpretative, flattering the audience’s priors and affirming what they were hoping to read anyway.

The value is one-way accountability. If Trump is truly becoming an authoritarian dictator, we all owe Richardson a debt of gratitude for spreading the word. But the cost is the fragmentation, the lost nuance, and the mistakes (magnified by the scale of her audience).

In that way, Richardson isn’t unique. She represents the choices we’re all making to numb ourselves to that “other side.”

Heather Cox Richardson’s Rise to Fame

Like other Substack success stories, Richardson came in with institutional credentials. She attended Phillips-Exeter Academy, arguably the country’s most prestigious prep school, before earning three degrees from Harvard, teaching at UMass-Amherst, MIT, and finally becoming a tenured professor of history at Boston College. Along the way, she published five books with mainstream presses (and a sixth in 2023), hosted a podcast on NPR, and built a wide readership.

Fast-forward to 2019. On Facebook, Richardson started posting daily Trump watchdog-type essays, and one, about the whistleblower complaint that sparked his impeachment, went viral.

“This is the story of a dictator on the rise,” Richardson posted almost exactly six years ago, “taking control of formerly independent branches of government, and using the power of his office to amass power.” In her telling, readers swamped her with questions and encouraged her to start a newsletter. Thus, “Letters from an American” was born.

Partly helped by first-mover advantage (Substack was just two years old), Richardson became a breakout star, unseating Matt Taibbi from the top individual spot in 2020. Within a few years, she had a Vox Media podcast, glowing coverage by the Times (calling Richardson “more or less by accident the most successful independent journalist in America”), interviews with Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and inclusion in Time’s top 100 most influential creators.

Richardson thinks of herself as above the fray of the attention economy, and as a “Lincoln Republican,” someone who believes strongly in equality and doesn’t fit neatly into today’s party politics. But in practice, Richardson is a Democrat. On the left, Current Affairs argues that Richardson rarely challenges establishment DNC narratives. On the right, the Claremont Review of Books accuses her of routinely misrepresenting history. These criticisms underline the same point: Richardson has a strong bias, but she presents it as neutral.

The Grand Old Party of Literally Authoritarianism

Richardson’s Substack posts read like miniature lectures.

She begins with a date, recaps the news and ends with a warning. Usually, that warning has something to do with the Trump administration’s “deliberate attempt to destroy American democracy,” as she said in an interview with the Substacker Joyce Vance.

When Richardson talks about our slide into authoritarianism, she’s not trying to be cute. In that interview, an August essay, and other writing, Richardson described the current “emergency” as a product of Republicans’ dirty work over decades: McCarthy, then so-called “movement conservatives,” then Nixon, then Reagan, then Newt Gingrich, then George W. Bush (plus an anonymous Bush aide that Richardson loves to quote) each built on the tactics and ethos of their predecessors to destroy the government and subvert democratic norms.

For example, after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the original movement conservatives — businessmen who hated taxes and regulation, and who also happened to believe that black people weren’t civilized enough to vote — banded together with people who were even more overtly racist in the South, Richardson wrote in August. Suddenly, the Republican party was captured by an originally-seen-as-radical ideology, and their rhetoric followed suit. Words became a way to untether the political narrative from reality in the service of bitterly dividing the country. Democrats, once mere policy foes, became enemies of God and country, hell-bent on regulating traditional values into oblivion with Big Government. The approach worked well. In 1994, the GOP won the House for the first time in forty years. Then: because “if keeping Democrats out of power meant it was necessary to skew the system, surely that was justified,” she wrote; Republicans (galvanized by 9/11, she said in a different post), started suppressing voters, a tactic that paid dividends for Bush in 2000.

Until finally, this all culminated in Donald Trump.

Whereas after World War II, Republicans and Democrats, even if they disagreed vehemently about specific policies, shared a relative consensus about what the government should do (provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, etc.), now we have an executive who wants to destroy it, per the August essay.

If you hammer on this point for about 1,000 words per day for six years, only with the occasional kayaking break, you can paint a pretty grim picture. Dictator-in-chief Donald Trump is going after political enemies; blowing up anyone he wants; benefiting from the crypto deposit of a sovereign wealth fund that is simultaneously winning favorable export controls; weakening FEMA, and then getting rid of FEMA employees who say they can’t respond to disasters; forcing firefighters, while actively fighting a fire, to get in line for ID checks; raiding homes, dragging kids out of their beds, bounding them in zip-ties, and then making a movie trailer out of it to look tough on social media. In one sentence, this is what Richardson’s Substack is about — the steady drip of the absolute horror show that is Trump’s administration.

Presumably, Trump could have reasons for doing what he’s doing. But Richardson always assigns the darkest possible intent. In her telling, MAGA-era conservatism is itself anti-liberal. The modern-day right wing doesn’t really believe in democracy anymore (equality, pluralism, democratic processes) because the tradeoffs it invites (moral and national decline) have “dramatically weakened the country,” Richardson said in the interview with Vance. Therefore, MAGA is turning to strongmen principles. She asserts, for instance, that the Trump administration and right-wing intellectuals are influenced by the Nazi political scientist Carl Schmitt, who argued that liberal democracy weakens the state, that laws and procedures are a comforting illusion, and that real power always comes down to the ability to decide on the exception — to determine when normal laws no longer apply.

“A lot of what he is arguing seems, to me, to be in the water of this administration,” she said in the interview.

Thus, when Trump acts — so often by emergency powers that, in a manner of speaking, break the rules — Richardson sees “a Trump spin on a Schmitt idea,” a blueprint for someone becoming a dictator, even under a constitutional framework, she said.

It’s true, within MAGA circles, that there’s anti-liberal sentiment. Trump has tried, to some degree, to dismantle the “administrative state” (an idea that the monarchist Curtis Yarvin, who has openly referenced Schmitt, has argued for), which is anti-democratic in the sense that it consolidates executive power at the expense of a practical system that’s supposed to serve “ordinary Americans,” as Richardson put it in February, not the president himself. It’s also true that Trump is keeping company with Christian nationalists like Viktor Orbán, a prime minister (strongman) who tanked Hungary’s democracy, and Russell Vought, who Trump has evidently tasked with expanding presidential control over the entire federal budget process.

But that doesn’t mean that “MAGA” literally wants authoritarianism. “MAGA,” not unlike “the left,” is a hodgepodge of factions who disagree, and many conservatives would describe Trump’s most extreme actions (blowing up drug boats without the right paperwork, etc.) more charitably: someone is doing something, finally, about issues they care about (crime and immigration) a lot. You can look at it as a rebellion against the establishment to restore our republic, as the conservative activist Christopher Rufo recently put it — or you can look at it the way Richardson does, citing a random internet commenter: “just textbook 1930s fascism.”

Indeed, one of Richardson’s most radical claims is that “it looks like” members of Trump’s inner circle are creating “a system” that will make it possible for them to “retain control over the country even without Trump,” she wrote in August.

She didn’t label it authoritarianism per se. But she might as well have.

“There is definitely a philosophical, a mechanical, and a personnel attempt to overturn American democracy,” she told Vance. “And by God, while they’re out there talking about Carl Schmitt, I think we should be out there talking about James Madison and Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. And because those principles have lasted — this idea that we have to go back to a Nazi philosopher? Nazism didn’t work out so well. My big thing is that we really need to push on our values because by God, they were proven to work for 250 years. Why we feel the need to turn back to a Nazi is kind of beyond me, except I know why.”

In the interview, Vance noted that she was “so happy to be with a historian.”

“It’s really nice to talk to somebody who just calls it what it is.”

Were We on the Wrong Side?

Reading around 100 of Richardson’s essays was depressing and confronting in a weirdly personal way. Except, coming from an information ecosystem that has plenty of right-leaning takes (e.g. shoplifting should be criminalized), we could see what Richardson was doing.

In June 2024, Biden’s debate performance was so bad that, just one day later, the Times editorial board called on the president to drop out of the race, saying voters could clearly see his infirmity “with their own eyes.” Over in Heather Cox Richardson land, however, Biden crushed it. His stumbles weren’t a product of his decline: he’d just listed “the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand,” she wrote. For weeks, Richardson dismissed the most scathing reports (like the Times investigation that said Biden was “given time for an afternoon nap each day” during debate prep), while her own readers argued, in the comments of her Project 2025 posts, about whether Biden was too “senile” for the gig. In late July, when the former president finally dropped out, Richardson maintained that the reaction to the debate (a “drumbeat” of stories — a media “freakout,” she’d called it — plus outcry from Democrats), was more remarkable than the debate itself.

“Increasingly, that drumbeat imperiled his reelection, opening the way for Trump’s election to install a dictatorship of Christian nationalism,” she wrote.

The first week of October, Trump deployed National Guard soldiers to Chicago on the authority, the administration argued, of Title 10, which allows the president to federalize National Guard units in cases of invasion, rebellion, or when regular law enforcement can’t execute US laws.

To Richardson, however, “there is no crisis in Chicago” that warrants federal intervention, and indeed “any instability” in Chicago was caused by the federal agents, who, besides raiding buildings, “shot and killed Chicago resident Silverio Villegas González” (not mentioned: he drove his car toward agents and dragged an ICE officer) and “shot an unarmed woman, Marimar Martinez” (not mentioned: prosecutors said Martinez, who indeed had a loaded gun, but didn’t use it, aggressively chased federal vehicles in her car while live-streaming on Facebook). To Richardson, the situation was reminiscent of the Nazi teachings of Schmitt, she wrote.

It’s true that people are getting shot for political reasons in America. That seems like a decent bit of history that one could trust a historian to unpack with sobriety. But in Richardson’s posts, violence becomes a narrative instrument to prop up her worldview.

In July 2024, Trump was nicked in the ear by would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks. In June, two Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota and their spouses were shot by Vance Boelter (one couple survived; one didn’t). After both shootings, Richardson posed the same argument. MAGA had normalized violence, “a hallmark of authoritarian leaders,” to cement power “because they know their unpopular positions cannot lead their candidates to victory in free and fair elections,” she wrote in July. And these gun nut Republican shooters were listening.

“Trump has encouraged violence and cozied up to brutal dictators, while MAGA has fetishized guns,” she wrote in June. “When he celebrates violence, unhinged people listen.”

Meanwhile, MAGA leaders’ pitiful attempts to wrongfully blame the shootings on Democrats (JD Vance said the attempt on Trump’s life was a direct consequence of the rhetoric that Trump was “an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs”) — was a cover-up. An attempt to stop criticism of MAGA’s “extremist” and “authoritarian” plans like Project 2025.

So far, we’re at least in coherent territory. Trump had said stuff like “Second Amendment people” could “maybe” do something about Hillary Clinton picking judges. Crooks was “wearing a gray Demolition Ranch tee shirt advertising a YouTube channel for gun enthusiasts,” Richardson wrote. Boelter had a long list of mostly Democrats he wanted to kill, and his roommate told reporters that he was a “strong” Trump supporter. MAGA blaming Democrats? Perhaps it wasn’t, as Richardson conspiratorially suggested, a cover-up. But it was at least a bit odd.

But then September rolled around, and Tyler Robinson assassinated Charlie Kirk. This is the big moment, where Richardson could either incorporate some inconvenient facts into her narrative, risking that clean package of opinions — or lie. And she lied, or at least she made an error that is hard to wrap our minds around.

Richardson shares her list of sources at the end of each Substack post. Which is how we know that she established (falsely) that Robinson was right-wing based only on social media accounts like Kellyanne Conway’s ex-husband speculating that he was a “Groyper,” a far-right group led by Nick Fuentes who felt that Kirk wasn’t “pro-white enough,” she wrote on September 12. The anti-fascist messages he wrote on the bullet casings were just niche video game references¹, according to Richardson. It wasn’t worth mentioning the accounts by his family members, by officials in Utah, and by Robinson himself — all of which were readily available in Richardson’s linked sources — that he shot Kirk because he’d had enough of his “hatred.”

That all set up Richardson, quite nicely, to make the same old case. MAGA’s rage was mere deflection from its dirty deeds. And MAGA’s rage was itself an act of violence.

For context: in the days after Kirk’s death (and actually seconds after he was shot, on the Utah campus), a non-trivial number of leftists — including teachers, professors, nurses, government officials, actors, people we overheard on the street — openly celebrated. This response was deeply disturbing, we hope, to anyone with a pulse, but it hit home among conservatives especially. Robinson’s one act of violence surely didn’t represent the politics of an entire swath of the population, but then again, the reactions afterward seemed to confirm that it did: a lot of leftists indeed wanted conservatives, people they deemed hateful, dangerously so, to literally die. Or at least, they believed hateful people (conservatives) dying would be a net benefit.

When Luigi Mangione assassinated UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, Richardson wrote about the celebrations on social media at length. It was a “cultural moment in which popular fury over the power big business has over ordinary Americans’ lives exploded.” Apparently something happened to Richardson’s ability to look at the internet since then, because on September 13, far from grappling with “those who allegedly had celebrated Kirk’s death on social media,” as she put it, Richardson wrote that Republicans were attacking these folks to create a narrative and “mobilize violence” against their enemies, “a tactic suggested by Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt” — because they’re losing. Fearful of getting pushed out in 2026 — with Trump’s declining approval and unmet promises — MAGA is embracing right-wing violence and disinformation to achieve what Trump cannot, she said.

“The refusal of Republican lawmakers to challenge MAGA’s creation of its own reality has opened the way for believers to try to put that world into place through violence,” Richardson concluded. “Their victory would end the rule of law on which the United States was founded and base the government on the whims of an authoritarian cabal.”

So many contradictions, swirling. Crooks’ T-shirt mattered, but Robinson’s text messages didn’t. The thousands of people who reacted with a laugh emoji to UnitedHealth’s Facebook status about being “deeply saddened and shocked” mattered. The thousands of people who liked and shared posts like “Breaking: Charlie Kirk loses gun debate” — with enough frequency that Bluesky issued a warning telling users to stop — didn’t. When the victim was a Democrat, the act was “horrific.” When the victim was corporate and powerful, it was a moral protest, not unlike January 6, 1872, when the shooting of an unpopular railroad baron was widely rejoiced, sparking a “popular rebellion” against nineteenth-century industrialists. The through-line is obviously that violence is only allowed to mean something politically when it can be assigned to the right’s authoritarian power grabs and “rhetoric.”

Which means: violence is abstract. Violence isn’t violence at all, just something that can happen to the people you agree with.

And it’s great reading. If you’re a Democrat.

Meet the Heatherheads

Amazingly, The National Press Club has described Richardson as, “striv[ing] to enable her readers to make their own decisions,” while the Times recently said her voice was “distinctly unruffled.” But Richardson is closer to Candace Owens or Piker: personalities with earnest beliefs that, thanks to the marketplace of ideas that is the internet, hold and profit from attention.

Only Richardson is re-skinned for the NPR tote-carrying iPad Boomers.

Her core reader is older, college-educated, liberal, and scrolling Substack with the same fervor they once brought to inhaling every word of the Times. They are the adults in the room, on the right side of history, and the other side has gone mad. They feel put off by the “meanness” of social media, and yet they share a kind of desperation — remember, they’re repeatedly told we’re becoming an authoritarian state — that can verge on open hostility to Republicans. And in that, they share a kinship: “Anne-Louise, right on,” per a recent exchange on Heather’s blog about America’s government being a regime bent on destruction. “Exactly, Michele.”

The comments may not have the conspiracism that, say, QAnon-defenders might, but there is still a lot of fury, fatalism, and even apocalyptica. “If ever there existed a time in this nation…to [resist] a transfer of power to a dangerous dumbass and fascist administration, it is now,” declared Karen in December. Some are thankful they’re old and will die soon. As Phil wrote last week: “At 84, the bend in life’s curve is getting sharper. For me, not much longer, thank God.”

Across her Substack, readers share the same posture: anxious, “informed,” politically traumatized. And yet: Richardson gives them hope that America can be reasoned back into sanity. They address her like a pastor. They congratulate her for taking vacations.

They thank her for being a “hero.”

In fact, some of them feel that supporting “Letters from an American” is a form of patriotism in and of itself. In December, Ned said he was paying for several Substacks, including Richardson’s, despite edging toward poverty because: “These sub-stacks remind me to think.” In a response that Ned called “inspiring,” Paula said she was bedridden, spending almost all of her small Social Security income on reading material: “It’s worth it.”

Perhaps, they believe that the payments help keep democracy itself alive.

It’s a (possibly loving?) community in which being challenged is rare.

Perspectives for Sale

Richardson, by all accounts, is a really nice lady who knits and drinks Diet Pepsi every day. Her audience is mostly really nice ladies who probably also knit and drink Diet Pepsi every day. She lives with her lobsterman husband in Maine, spends hours a day responding to readers (per the Times), and cares, a lot, about America. This care is most obvious when she talks about Lincoln, who maintained that a government “by the people” required belief in the equal moral worth of all: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,” he said. “This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”

The quote, which Richardson recently narrated in an orchestral homage to Lincoln’s legacy, represents well the “Lincoln Republicanism” that she subscribes to.

As she wrote on September 15:

“I am staunchly committed to the principle of human self-determination for people of all races, genders, abilities, and ethnicities: the idea that we all have the right to work to become whatever we wish. I believe that American democracy has the potential to be the form of government that comes closest to bringing that principle to reality. And I know that achieving that equality depends on a government shaped by fact-based debate rather than by extremist ideology and false narratives.

“And so I write.”

In Richardson’s view, liberal democracy does work, in other words — it just needs to stop being assaulted by the right wing. So she’s writing from the useful perspective that MAGA is an existential threat to our most precious founding principles, at a time in media when it’s never been more rewarded. Cold aggregation of fact is being punished in favor of those who can build communities, publications that fundamentally have something to say.

The problem with a coherent worldview — that is, a coherent, marketable brand — is that life as it exists is not so tidy. There aren’t neat morality plays with “good guys” and “bad guys.” As a certain intellectual figure said recently in a semi-public forum, extreme optimism and extreme pessimism are both extremely lazy. Clean antagonists and protagonists are for stories. A narrative arc to keep our attention, then satisfying resolution — an argument well made.

In an ideal situation, our media diets would fill in the blanks left by satisfying stories. We’d receive a patchwork quilt that works together to give us a good idea of what’s going on. But that’s not what’s happening anymore. There is no “news.” There is no “history.” There are perspectives for sale, which at least feels like part of the conditioning that leads to violent action.

In Richardson’s essay about Luigi Mangione, she quoted someone who said “When people lose trust in the system, you start seeing more kidnappings and assassinations because they feel like they have to take matters into their own hands.”

Does that same logic apply to people losing faith in the constitutional system that Richardson constantly writes is under threat by an authoritarian regime taking inspiration from a Nazi?

The scary truth is that Richardson’s 2.7 million subscribers have no idea how similar their perspective is to Robinson’s. He, too, had lost faith. The voters couldn’t be trusted. He’d had “enough,” as he put it. Enough of the “hate.” Enough of the fascism.

No writer is truly innocent of selling stories, ourselves included. But anyone who purports to care about America right now, which is to say anyone with a higher aim than just selling stories, should face the consequences of acknowledging troublesome facts. And consumers have to go find them, choosing disorientation over comfort. Because it can not be like this, where outrage at Kirk’s throat being blown out is conspiracy, where violence is just an abstraction — horrifying when it happens to you, a write-off if it happens to someone else.

In fact, a plot twist: we challenge all of you to read Heather Cox Richardson.

Fight all those iPad-loving nice ladies. Read about the new regime. Choose to welcome in the anger, sadness, and confusion, as we did. And then write us a strongly worded email about your perilous journey.

Did we get it right?

—Blake Dodge and Katherine Dee

Footnote

¹ Two of Robinson’s cartridges were inscribed with “Hey Facist! Catch! [arrow symbols]” and lyrics for the rallying song of the Italian resistance, “Bella Ciao.” It’s true that his motive is still being investigated, and that these messages can have a gamer culture connotation, but Robinson told his romantic partner why he killed Kirk in texts, featured in the September 16 indictment that Richardson shared in her notes: “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

Notes

1. June 15, 2024: Vance Boelter shooting the Minnesota lawmakers in a “horrific” act; MAGA fetishizing guns and encouraging violence

2. June 27, 2024: Richardson’s recap of the Biden-Trump debate

3. July 5, 2024: the media “freakout” over Biden’s mental decline

4. July 9, 2024: Supreme Court decisions as a prelude to an authoritarian takeover

5. July 14, 2024: Thomas Matthew Crooks shooting Trump; MAGA normalizing violence to cement power; blaming Democrats as cover

6. July 21, 2024: Biden bowing out of the race and the “drumbeat” of media stories

7. July 16, 2024: Trump’s selection of Vance as Christian nationalism

8. November 6, 2024: Trump’s Christian nationalist influences (like Viktor Orbán)

9. December 5, 2024: the Luigi Mangione shooting and reaction as a “cultural moment” similar to the January 6, 1872 assassination of a railroad industrialist

10. February 11, 2025: dismantling the administrative state as anti-democratic

11. February 16, 2025: hostile Richardson subscriber comments

12. August 11, 2025: Russell Vought, a Christian nationalist, and the federal budget; Trump admin putting a “system” in place to retain control

13. August 23, 2025: Trump’s appeals to racism and sexism in 2016; the Republican Party’s slow-motion march towards authoritarianism via movement conservatism, voter suppression, etc.; the conservative rebellion as “textbook 1930s fascism”

14. August 27, 2025: budgets cuts and National Guard deployments as preludes to an authoritarian takeover; FEMA damage; firefighters and ID checks

15. September 9, 2025: Richardson and Joyce Vance discuss Trump’s attempt to destroy democracy (13:11); anti-liberal sentiment (19:30); Carl Schmitt (throughout)

16. September 11, 2025: 9/11 prompting voter suppression

17. September 12, 2025: Tyler Robinson as a “Groyper”; the anti-fascist messages he left on casings as video game terms

18. September 13, 2025: Trump going after political enemies; GOP history of untethering the political narrative from reality; the oft-quoted Bush aide; Robinson as right-wing; MAGA’s rage as an act of violence, a response to losing, and a prelude to an authoritarian takeover

19. September 14, 2025: a subscriber calling Richardson “the real hero in all of this”

20. September 15, 2025: Richardson on the democratic principle of self-determination

21. September 16, 2025: the sovereign wealth fund and Trump’s crypto venture

22. October 3, 2025: Trump blowing up anyone he wants

23. October 5, 2025: Chicago apartment raid feat. zip-ties; movie trailer

24. October 8, 2025: Chicago deployment; shootings (Silverio Villegas González)