Publisher’s warning: This is another experimental investigative essay written in the Iain Sinclair-Alan Moore-MetaModernist-Maximalist-Psychogeography literary tradition wherein everything is intentionally rendered in greater depth and literary flourish, only now I’ve infused this crop with Hunter S. Thompson-style Gonzo journalism and an enthusiasm for making points through the juxtapositions of YouTube embeds. For an example of the monstrosities produced in this method: See this 10,000-word investigation into Natalie Harp’s family going back to the 1500s: “Natalie Harp: the White Supremacist Sex Witch Who Is the Most Powerful Woman in the World.” This excessive length, detail, and ornamental prose is intended for rhetorical effect. Yes, I know it will be easier when broken down into shorter installments. The point is for it to be difficult, not for it to be easy. A more systematic presentation will come later as the Bullshit Salesmen series proceeds. For now, take in this heavy dosage as your Doctor of Journalism has prescribed. The point is to see all 47 at once. Then the pattern emerges. Learn to the see the patterns and you will see the bullshit everywhere.

The War on Bullshit Must Continue. Bullshit is poisonous and should not be consumed.

”Rick and Morty” may no longer wield the cultural weaponry it did during the 2010s, but the show’s first few seasons really do still hold up, much like how early episodes of “The Simpsons” can still punch you in the face.

My favorite character during those years was and remains Scary Terry, a parody of Freddy Krueger who appears in the second episode which also satirizes Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” as Rick and Morty travel through characters’ dreams.

Scary Terry is known for his catch phrase, as many early “Rick and Morty” characters were like Mr. MeeSeeks, my second favorite character, introduced in episode 5 of season 1. Throughout the episode Terry yells as he chases our heroes:

“You can run, but you can’t hide, bitch!”

For some random reason, Scary Terry — and the other “Scary” Krueger-style characters who appear in his dreams — call people “bitch” a lot, even when it’s not an insult. Like, it’s just a normal thing they say, like punctuation:

For reasons that may now appear obvious to those following my mischief on Substack Notes the last few days, Scary Terry’s catch phrase has dashed around my cerebrum a bunch as I have begun an investigation into concealed AI authorship on Substack following discovering the strange phenomenon, which I first documented here on August 30:

I noticed that two pro-Israel Substackers I followed and admired had published articles where they had deliberately chosen to disable the software added recently that allows readers to scan for how much synthetic text appears the article.

This seemed so silly to me. How could a writer not understand the obvious implication that a reader will make when they disable Pangram?

Why refuse the breathalyzer if you didn’t drink that vodka?

Anyone can understand that the writer wants to hide the number which will appear. They are ashamed that the number is not 100 percent “Fully Human-Written.”

Here’s what you see if you use Pangram on the above article or on this article you are reading now. And it’s what I saw before I published it. Every writer can do the scan before they publish their pieces:

So the fact that we as writers can scan text before we publish it, means that we can now scan not just our own work, but anyone’s.

Now we can see who on Substack or anywhere else online has plagiarized from an LLM.

Yes, let’s start using the scarlet P word — the kiss of death in journalism, literature, and academia — to discuss undisclosed AI writing.

Note how undisclosed is the operative word here.

Using AI as a tool to write is not unethical.

Presenting AI writing under the pretense that you wrote it yourelf is unethical as hell.

Last year I wrote a whole series exploring how writers and creatives could use AI. I’ve chosen to remove the paywall on this one:

My position then still makes sense today:

Now with Pangram, every writer can disclose if they are co-writing. In the little AI statement that appears above, then they can simply declare “I use AI to help me write my articles.” If they want to go into detail about it then great, but a bare minimum disclosure like that, followed by allowing the reader to see the percent of AI authorship is sufficient to meet ethical requirements.

If you write an article with a human co-author then you should disclose that.

If you write an article with an AI co-author then you should disclose that too.

Simple.

And the vast majority of writers on Substack agree. Almost every post that you check with Pangram will come back with a percentage revealing how much AI is in it. Thus, it’s weird for a writer to choose to disable Pangram.

Why are they so self-conscious about this?

Because it reflects back that they are more interested in “being a writer” and the world perceiving them as “a serious writer” rather than simply engaging in the act of writing.

Those of us who have loved writing since childhood, choose to write our own articles because we love the process and the act of writing in and of itself. Doing this is not just about producing something coherent which others can read, but also making our own thoughts coherent for ourselves.

Writing is thinking. The deeper you can write, the deeper you can think.

And those who choose to skip the manual writing process thus skip the thinking process. Hence why writing that comes from LLMs seems so generic and predictable. The writer was not discovering anything for themselves as they wrote it. The computer was just guessing what “the most likely” thing would be.

LLMs simply are not good at creative writing. Those of us with degrees in the topic and who have worked professionally in it can tell. They are good at guessing at what is generic, but they almost never can generate compelling, original thoughts.

And that’s the reality of who you find below.

The Substack writers here chose to disable Pangram in order to conceal that the article(s) they published were AI-generated in whole or in part.

The price for them doing this is that they are all now in line to join New Age guru Mitch Horowitz and right-wing podcaster Ben Shapiro in my ongoing “Bullshit Salesmen” series where I dedicate an article to debunking the harmful lies and bogus career persona of a single writer:

“Welcome to your nightmare, bitch!”

Without further delay, here are 47 notable Substack accounts which engage in this deceitful practice. I’ve organized them by type as they fall into disctinct categories, each offering their own sickly flavor of bullshit. I have also included my public requests for comments and individuals’ responses. As further responses come in then this essay may be updated.

In writing and investigating this story I have abandoned a conventional journalistic approach. Usually if you are writing a story about someone engaged in something unethical or dishonest, you contact them privately and quietly to request comment.

I’ve abandoned that. I’ve just asked people in the comments of articles and on Substack Notes to explain themselves during the research process itself. I’ve published on Notes images juxtaposing the screenhot of the deactivated AI scanning with the Pangram percentage that I manually did myself and then asked for explanations. This has now created a clear public record of the question. If they ignore it, then everyone can see.

Understand the bigger picture here with doing this exercise: the writer doing this is revealing just one symptom in a deeper disease in their thinking.

People who will BS their readers about their AI use will BS their readers about other things. So for most of these accounts here — a handful will be spared — a much more thorough investigation and critical essay will follow.

Here are the categories and how many people fall ito them:

• Left-Wing BS Merchants: 17

• Right-Wing BS Merchants: 2

• Religious BS Merchants: 8

• Zionist BS Merchants: 4 (yes, I’m calling out people in my own movement too)

• Cultural BS Merchants: 10 (one is a writer I’ve published and now cut ties with publicly over this)

• Technology BS Merchants: 6

We’ll begin with the largest category of offenders…

17 Left-Wing BS Merchants

Part of the simple purpose of this study has been to see if there are any obvious patterns in which writers choose to attempt concealing their AI use.

When going through and doing the raw reserch looking for writers who did this, the plan was not to consciously think about who all the people were. I was just gathering the data with the intent to simply go back and examine them later, once I had the initial collection of people.

So it was not until I’d collected everything that the obvious, glaring reality jumped out: this is a very heavily left-wing phenomenon. Seventeen out of 47 is huge. (And many of the people in the cultural and technological categories would qualify as left-wing too, but politics is not their main emphasis.)

Once I saw this disparity, I went out and sought to correct it, going and checking numerous conservative Substackers I knew and seeing if there was anyone of note I had missed.

And there was. And I was devastated when I found out it was her.

But first, here are seventeen subtacks pushing varieties of left-of-center ideology and hiding that they’re using AI to do it. Eight of these I had already subscribed to and read for years, many long suspecting they relied on AI.

1. Adam Kinzinger

Adam Kinzinger is one of those figures who has long inhabited similar ideological space as me: the hawkish, ex-Republican, #NeverTrump cohort clustered around . However, even though I’ve often agreed with things he’s had to say, he’s long seemed like just another typical politician, inauthentic and ingenuine, boring and bland.

The Pangram scans of his articles reveals as much:

I made a public request for comment about this post:

He did not respond.

Kinzinger may have emerged out of the GOP, but at this point he — like many in the #NeverTrump cohort — have gone so far to the left they are now the equivalent of center-left Democrats.

I was not familiar with , the left-wing blogger and podcaster up next, until seeing her listed high on Substack during the research for this investigation. She apparently has a background in lifestlye blogging, which I can respect having edited the PJ Lifestyle section of PJ Media from 2011-2015. I will always have permanent solidarity with my fellow lifestyle bloggers past and present.

However, what Heather is doing here is unethical. And she totally knows it.

2. Hope for America with Heather Delaney Reese

did not bother to respond to any of my notes calling out her obscured AI usage. She did something else which said even more.

Interestingly, as the investigation concluded on Monday, Sept. 7, I noticed that Heather had now added an AI use disclosure, though she still chose to keep Pangram disabled.

It’s worth keeping in mind here, that this approach with disabling Pangram is a minority position, as I noted while surveying the political categories:

3. Mike Brock

Mike Brock is a left-wing podcaster and “essayist” who has grown a large following on Substack.

This recent note he published seems particularly ironic given what I uncovered and revealed to him:

Here’s an example of how his pieces appear when one attempts to scan them, and then a common AI authorship estimate:

I showed the AI authorship percentage on Notes and this inspired him to block me, as anticipated:

I’m not sure that I mind that Brock has chosen to block me.

I just got so tired of him always lecturing down from the mountain to we poor mortals back down on earth.

I’ve developed a very high tolerance for hearing people spout left-wing ideology. It’s the arrogance, narcissism, BSing, gaslighting, and egg shell egos which irritate me the most.

The next guy on the list guilty of concealing his AI use is another wildly popular progressive blogger and podcaster.

4. Dean Blundell

I’ve long subscribed to ’s newsletter not because I particulary care for him or the way he writes, but rather just becaue of the stories that he covers and the information they contain. He’s one of the big anti-Trump voices these days with more than 81,000 subscribers.

Yet long before Pangram emerged, one could smell the AI wafting off of his articles like too much old sweat in a moldy locker room:

The next Substacker so stupid as to attempt this is someone Woody Harrelson played in an HBO TV movie which I never got around to watching because it just sounded so deeply unpleasant to endure.

5. Steve Schmidt

History lesson time for the Gen-Zers distracted and bored in the back of the class:

served as campaign manager for the doomed Republican candidate who would lose against then-Senator Barack Obama in 2008, Senator John McCain. When HBO made “Game Change,” a TV movie about the campaign, then Harrelson played him.

When Trump arose, Schmidt became one of the loudest voices opposing him.

As wth Kinzinger, while I could often sympathize with some of his anti-Trump arguments, Schmidt always also left me with a sense of inauthenticity. Perhaps it just rubs off after spending so much time babysitting politicians for a living? Maybe inauthentic people choose to be around other inauthentic people since it makes them feel more comfortable? Take your pick.

This is a portion worth quoting from the above article in which the writer chose to conceal the text’s primary author:

The vast majority of the Substacks surveyed during this investigation did tell the truth. They did not disable Pangram to conceal their AI usage.

Here on Substack, a lot of poor people are trying to build media businesses with their authentic writing and their authentic selves. The people on this list aren’t among them.

Give a subscribe. He’s one of my favorites on here.

Well Good Blog

My Local Fish and Chips Shop Has Been Open For Over 30 years!

UK fish and chips shops are the beacon of our neighbourhoods. The light that never goes out. Yet they’re so much more than just a break from home cooking…

Read more

16 days ago · 63 likes · 14 comments · Well Good Blog

6. Erin Brockovich

Well, this was an absurd shock:

It’s beyond parody!

“Famous left-wing environmental activist made famous by an Oscar-winning Julia Roberts performance uses AI to write an article opposing AI, then attempts to hide using AI.”

How could it be more obvious that someone doesn’t believe what they say than they use the tool that they’re condemning?

7. David Pakman

I was really bummed with having to add to the list. I’ve always enjoyed watching his show. This is a hit to his credibility for me and I probably won’t watch him as much now.

8. Hunter Biden

All of these years, I have steadfastly avoided writing about , publicly at least. In private, on rightwing list-servs and behind-the-scenes calls at nonprofits, I was clear and often as strident as I am publicly on other topics: all the “discourse” around him is a manufactured distraction and a waste of time. It always has been. All the time the Right spent obsessing over Hunter was time wasted that should have gone toward actual threats to America.

Hunter is one of the great tragic figures of American history. That is how he wil be remembered in the generations after his death. It just breaks my heart to think about him and watch him debase himself even further given how desperate for money he is now, as we all seemingly are. His appearance on the list simply signifies that.

9. Christopher Hale

I’ve really enjoyed ’s writing a lot. This was disappointing to see.

However, in a way it reflects too what I had come to see from Christopher’s Substack, that it had gradually become more and more of a partisan publication rather than a religious one. I’d signed up for a Substack with a Pope focus and it gradually devolved into any other left-wing, anti-Trump venue.

10. Mike Nellis

I was not familiar with ’s work until the search began for popular top sellers to audit. It would appear that few of his readers are familiar with it either.

11. Andrew Springer

Andrew Springer and I had tangled months ago long before Pangram dropped out of the sky to bring Justice and Deliverance to We Who Drown in the Slop Sea.

His Substack is “the Jesus Movement” and mine is “God of the Desert Digital Media Studios” so of course we were bound to collide. While I initially appreciated his critiques of Evangelical theology, soon it became clear that his own views about Jesus were even worse. Socialism is his true religion and he has dedicated his Substack to arguing that Jesus was a first century Bernie Sanders. It’s so dumb because it is so easily refuted. All I had to do was point out that Andrew’s beloved author who has debunked Evangelical Christianity for decades, Bart Ehrman, disagrees with that framing of Jesus, long arguing that “apocalyptic prophet” is the more accurate frame, as described here:

But is it even necessary to take the time to explain why Andrew’s left-wing caricature of Jesus is wrong when the screenshots prove he does not believe the ideas enough to argue them himself?

I used to be very angry with Andrew for what he was doing with lying aboug Jesus and blocking me over something as banal as pointing out that Ehrman disagreed with him.

I find it deeply offensive when people on right or left want to create a caricature of Jesus to suggest he would support their pet political projects. I’ve heard that lie since the Clinton presidency.

However, now having read his earlier writings which explain what inspired him to launch this ill-conceived “The Jesus Movement,” I more just feel sorry for him. One does not need to dig too deep to understand why he’s so unhappy.

12. Jermaine Fowler

I came across ’s substack because of his high ranking in the history category:

Reviewing his content, he does a kind of left-wing history spin of things, which is fine:

This phenomena of hiding the Pangram score is also used by publications rather than individuals as the next items on the list show.

13. Really American

14. Raw America

15. Democratic Wins Media

I think the main reason why I did not come across comparable right-wing Substacks like those is because that’s what virtually all of X is.

16. I Fucking Love Australia

This guy is obviously Ausralian-branded but for whatever reason — I suppose he is entertaining at times — he has managed to worm his way into U.S. Politics substacks circles. His focus on blasting Trump has probably been most of what’s done it. Yell loudly against Trump and left-wing people will gather.

His act became much less impressive once it became clear how much of it was AI-generated:

The last writer in this section of the audit is funniest of all because after I asked why she disabled Pangram she volunteered what the scan number was which she had sought to hide. She then tried to justify herself before attacking.

Subscribe now

17. Nikki Davidson - The Northern Watch

, who I am and how professionally pathetic I am in comparison to your level of journalistic greatness means nothing. I could be a barely-literate, screen-addicted, high school newspaper student doing the experiment. The facts would still be the same:

You disabled Pangram to conceal a 40% AI score. When questioned on it, you sought to justify it and then you leveled a personal attack against me after a cursory scan of my LinkedIn page.

The facts speak for themselves. It does not matter that I write them in an absurd, unprofessional, MAXIMALIST style inspired by cartoons and excessive quantities of cannabis.

The Results of Auditing the Top 20 U.S. Politics Bestsellers:

An Encouraging Sign from the World Politics Bestsellers List:

Some Encouraging News from the Culture List:

2 Right-Wing BS Merchants

These next two hurt more personally than those above because these are two women who I respect, and still do to diminished degrees now, in spite of this very sad ethical lapse here.

18. Restoring the West by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Those three articles were not written by Ayaan. They were by others with sympathetic views which she chose to publish.

So what about the ones with her own byline?

The articles written by Ayaan herself are paywalled, so AI scanning is not available or denied. However, by manually scanning the available preview text, we can see a pretty good idea of what follows:

Restoring the West by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The Anti-American Divide in the Democratic Party

What I’m Thinking About…

Read more

6 days ago · 99 likes · 3 comments · Restoring the West by Ayaan

Restoring the West by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

America’s Universities Are for Sale

When foreign governments pour billions into American universities, the question is no longer who funds higher education, but who owns it. Western scholars routinely preach their independence, yet eagerly pocket vast sums from oppressive regimes—autocrats who execute dissidents, subjugate women, crush free speech, and…

Read more

6 days ago · 100 likes · 6 comments · Restoring the West by Ayaan

Ayaan has been a huge inspiration to me for a long time. Her books and ideas have often influenced me. I have an autographed copy of her third book, Nomad.

However, in recent years she has more and more devoled into just another predictable right-wing pundit.

I don’t think she’s really genuine. Maybe she never was and her whole career was just her acting pragmatically, shifting as she felt she needed to do.

This stood out in December 2023 when she announced her converstion to Christianity and it just seemed really fake. I explained why here:

It was though she converted to Christianity more as part of the branding of her career than out of sincerity.

The next “writer” on this list is someone else I’m sad to have come to see similarly now.

19. Emily Schrader

I knew Emily Schrader before she was the big pro-Israel influencer with 238,000 X followers like she is now.

I knew her because I edited her mother Diane’s blog posts for David Horowitz’s NewsReal Blog.

Diane Schrader was a legend on my list of writers I edited. She was one of the best writers I ever recruited. We had plenty of powerful polemicists and smart writers, but Diane was by far one of the sharpest. I regarded her as our own Ann Coulter with the intensity of her rhetoric and strength of her arguments. She was one of the most reliable traffic-generating-writers on the team.

And I expected Emily to do the same intensity and tenacity at whatever she chose. Instead she went in a different direction, serving up stuff like this:

I had previously asked Emily in a comment at a previous post about this and she had denied using AI.

Emily was the pro-Israel influencer I wrote about previously who inspired this investigation. This whole thing is all her fault. I was being kind by not naming her. But now that forbearance is gone:

Initially when compiling this list, I had positioned Emily in the Zionists section. However, upon further reflection, it seemed much more accurate to make sure others understand her more as a “right-wing ideology personality figure” building a media career — like an Israel-focused millennial Ann Coulter type — rather than someone who was a sincere Zionist activist focused on the truth.

The key reason for this can be found in Emily’s primary professional affiliation right now with my former employer, what was once known as Jewish News Syndicate but that since chosen to rebrand as Jerusalem News Syndicate, I gather because now they’re aspiring to compete as the right-wing version of The Jerusalem Post rather than the right-wing version of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Emily is the host of JNS’s “Axis of Truth” podcast. How about you just have a seat down there in that and let the irony sink into your pants.

JNS does not care about Truth or about News.

Its editors and leaders care about pushing the right-wing ideology of the donors who fund them. People reading the content from the outside can see how obviously slanted the coverage is and I was subjected to my work having to be endlessly shoehorned into that contorted shape on a regular basis. The editorial process was often bizarre. My editor would frequently micro-manage so much he would want to rewrite articles line-by-line, subjecting me to relentless scrutiny and crticism line by line. Often he would say something like, “Well, have you thought about Y?” And I’d respond, “Yes, I discuss that in the next paragraph. I wish you could read the whole article first instead of just editing it one sentence at a time!” That is how JNS operates — a sense of tunnel vision focused on obsessing over one trivial tree at a time while ignoring when the whole forest burns.

One of the funniest things that right-wingers do when they try to build their own media companies with donor money or an angel investor’s checks, is they think that since the dreaded “MSM” is “biased to the left” then that means that they should then simply be “biased to the right.” Right-wing media operatives have this perpetual tendency to try and just rewrite op-eds as news articles. They think if they can just adopt the rhetoric and conventions of journalism then they can launder the right-wing idoelogy and GOP-partisanship. They think conventional media sources do that and so they have to fight back by doing it too from the other direction. It won’t work, but at least it will keep the lights on as long as the billionaire donors are dumb enough to keep Heath Ledgering their wealth funding it.

Some Encouraging Discoveries from the Bestselling News Substacks:

Subscribe now

7 Religious BS Merchants

In looking over the Substacks in the religion category which pull this hide-the-AI trick, while their subjects seemingly differ wildly, they do have some things in common: most are “outside the mainstream” and they often center around a charismatic individual with questionable credentials.

20. John Anderson PhD, Tipping Point Prophecy Update

Notice again how just as with Nikki Davidson of The Northern Watch, the tendency some writers have when confronted about this is to turn around and attack the person asking. This is a common thing that narcissists do when their ego is threatened: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.

It is so predictable. I knew this was coming from people.

21. Stranger Theology

I was not familiar with this site before beginning the investigation, however I knew its general outlook fairly well as they draw inspiration from the late Michael S. Heiser, a Biblical scholar who focused on themes around The Book of Enoch. I’d read him during my research on a novel project which I’ve worked on off and on for years.

So I knew what I was getting into here. The fallen angels themes of the Enochian literature are rich and engaging, but too often they devolve into a kind of Ancient Aliens sensationalism and fundamentalist silliness that has generally turned me off from engaging too deeply in “communities” interested in these themes.

The author responded when I shared the score on Notes:

This is just bizarre for an instituional social media account to respond in this fashion. Or to author articles without the explicit byline of the author.

I answered:

This gaslighting about how AI-generated images are supposedly impacting Pangram is something I’ve heard a lot. It’s nonsense from someone trying to cover their deceit.

Just as this investigation has sought to gather data about who has disabled AI scanning it has also gathered data about how many people react when confronted with the truth of their concealed AI use.

The author responded again:

Here is a piece from that Substack under ’s own name:

I replied:

Here is the Heiser book which I own — acquired as part of my Enoch research — but have not yet finished:

22. Michael S. Heiser Foundation

Following ’s response, I decided to begin an audit of his foundation’s Substack. Where there’s smoke, there’s a flaming pile of bullshit.

Here are the results — too predictable — one must lament:

Before acknowledging any of the three notes above, Carey responded again, telling on himself. I responded with screenhots of the three AI scans above:

He again attempted to malign Pangram as unreliable:

Usually in the research of a Substack I’d take a 3-strikes-you’re-out mentality. One post could be negligence or confusion. Three posts in a row is a pattern and deliberate.

The religion category offered other esotetic eccentricities which I otherwise might have sympathized with…

23. The Hood Healer

I have written previously about how I draw a strong line between the centuries of occult tradition which I practice and the New Age movement which emerged primarily in the 1970s:

When one starts swimming in the New Age seas on Substck then all sorts of weirdness and darkness emerges. is probably fairly benign in spite of the LLM plagiarism, it’s the self-proclaimed “The Wise Wolf” next who is doing more damage not just with deceiving readers on authorship, but in laundering antisemitism.

24. The Wise Wolf

I don’t remember how or why I had first started following The Wise Wolf. I gather just because he’s a popular promulgator of “alternative spirituality” type content. I engaged with him a number of times and it soon became clear he was not at all bright and was just a run-of-the-mill right-wing conspiracy theorist using the mystical aesthetics for branding.

When I started calling him out on Notes then he quickly blocked me:

Earlier in year, pre-Pangram, here was one of his top posts, which generated 2,311 restacks and 6,554 hearts, likely because of its antisemitic, blood libel trope of Jews selling and murdering babies:

25. Damien Echols

Damien Echols has long been a famous figure in occult circles due to his tragic life story depicted in the famous “Paradise Lost” documentaries:

There’s just one problem. In spite of all that time wrongfully spent behind bars, apparently Damien did not learn to write as well or think as deeply as he wants his readers to think:

In recent years, Damien has sought to rebrand himself as a kind of mytical guru, in the mold of his friend Mitch Horowitz.

I followd him for a while but he soon blocked me as I began to push back on the generic pablum he published on Notes. It seemed AI-generated at the time and now it’s nice to have confirmation that it was.

For more on Mitch’s methods of persona creation, see his interview with media theorist here:

26. Demi Pietchell - The Starfire Codes

The Starfire Codes is another Substack which sells conventional New Age nonsense. I had followed her some time ago and then she blocked me. The specific reason eludes me. I surely challenged her on some point or another and that was enough.

The irony in juxtaposition here should perhaps be stated explicitly.

Following four Substacks with New Age AI slop garbage overflowing, now we stumble onto a rabbi, , pulling the same trick.

27. Rabbi Steven Abraham

4 Zionist BS Merchants

Perhaps the pattern is clear now: anybody with any ideology or agenda can choose to obscure and misrepresent the level of authorship in their articles in order to fluff themselves up to appear as a greater writer than they actually are.

Here are four who I found in the movement which I’ve participated in since 2009.

28. Hen Mazzig

This is another discovery in this investigation that broke my heart.

I’ve always liked a lot and still do. I interviewed him one time years ago at a Zionist students conference in Washington D.C.

The issue is that Hen has more made himself into a symbol, a pundit, and predictable propagandist rather than a serious writer or original thinker. With 300,000 followers on X he has become tremendously influential. During my years reporting for JNS and The Algemeiner, I checked up on him every day on X to see what narratives he pushed out into the broader pro-Israel space.

But what genuinely original ideas and writing has he ever put forward beyond rah-rah for Israel?

I haven’t heard them yet but perhaps I just haven’t listened carefully enough.

Hen Mazzig

“I Don’t Mean It in a Racist Way”

On Saturday, a woman on X told Ana Kasparian that calling Hakeem Jeffries an “AIPAC monkey” was racist, and that a disclaimer did not undo it. Kasparian, who co-hosts and produces The Young Turks, wrote back: “Wouldn’t want to offend Israel’s cattle. Is political prostitute more to your liking?” She ended with a request that “these fucking race vultures…

Read more

5 days ago · 72 likes · 13 comments · Hen Mazzig

When the site republishes Hen’s articles then he is not able to disable the AI scanning, so we can see the 92% AI level for his piece published on Saturday:

Future of Jewish

The Great Lie About Zionism

Future of Jewish is the ultimate newsletter by and for people passionate about Judaism and Israel. Subscribe to better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world…

Read more

6 days ago · 96 likes · 7 comments · Hen Mazzig

Hen and Emily Schrader are perhaps the two biggest Zionist media advocates online. And both of them for years have just been churning out stuff so predictable that it may as well have come out of an LLM. And now we see that for both of them, it probably did. Wonder why so much pro-Israel discourse sounds similar today? It looks like ChatGPT is the real author behind so much of it now.

29. Daniel Mael

is one of many Zionist substackers I’ve followed for years and generally enjoyed his articles. This was a big disappointment:

But this was an even more dejecting.

I asked in the comments if he had used AI. We had an exchange and then he chose to delete it, for obvious reasons:

After this public exchange he messaged me privately. The back-and-forth then left me even more annoyed than seeing him delete my comments. All he could remember about me was that I used to work for David Horowitz… 15 years ago. So all the work I’ve done since I managed a dumb cable news commentary blog has just been invisible to him, as it has for most in the pro-Israel activist community.

30. Yisrael M. Eliashiv

is one of my favorite Zionist essayists on Substack. And it turns out that he cannot resist the temptation of attempting to conceal AI-drafted writing, even though the percentage for him is miniscule.

In the words of The Dude when examining the phony ransom note handed to him by the Big Lebowski, “This is a bummer man, that’s a bummer.”

Why even hide such small levels of AI use? Nobody would have cared if it had remained unhidden.

Rabbis, pastors, imams, and “spiritual teachers” are supposed to operate at a higher level of ethics and morality than the rest of us. It shouldn’t be up to stoner blogger me up late out in the desert to remind rabbis about proper ethics.

31. Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

is an Egyptian writer I’ve read for years. But he never made a strong impression on me as an original, deep thinker. Maybe he will someday if he lays off the LLM writing?

Or perhaps if he invokes one of the older gods of his people to point him in the right direction?

10 Cultural BS Merchants

Just as the religion category showed such diversity in beliefs among those who felt a need to conceal their writing’s AI authorship, in the cultural realm, dishonest operators target a wide variety of demographics.

32. James Lucas

I was not familiar with and his grift before beginning this investigation.

The sentiment he offers is a common one and it’s a big lie. Beauty is often false. A woman can paint up her face to appear beautiful but it conceals a cold heart. A gorgeous painting could celebrate evil men.

Our eyes and our senses deceive us every day.

33. Kate Bowler

”Human with big questions,” eh? Is your LLM not answering those questions sufficiently, Professor?

If you’re sensing a bit of anti-PhD bias here, then I assure you that it only annoys me when people want to wave it around to try and make others feel inferior to them. At least Kate isn’t sticking it in her user name like some people do.

However, she is naming her authority as a “Duke prof” as the second most important item in her personal branding.

As with rabbis and preachers being held to a higher standard, the same goes for professors and academics. It’s understandable that anonymous entrepreneurs like “The Wise Wolf” or “I Fucking Love Australia” or “The Hood Healer” would cut corners. It is not for people who have earned major academic postings.

34. Roxane Gay

This came as a shock.

An essay published on September 2 at ’s featured AI-detection disabled and then showed up 100% AI-written.

Roxane responded to one of my posts noting her among the AI concealers:

I responded with a screenshot of the image above:

Subscribe now

She answered:

I replied:

In spite of the ideological gap between us, I like quite a bit. She’s very talented. While we’d disagree on issues, I have no personal ax to grind with her.

And what this post in the investigation spotlights is that for those of us who publish other people’s work, we now have to start using Pangram to check the submissions we receive.

Roxane was duped, but it’s not a mark against her — though she really shoud not have disabled Pangram.

This is normal now in publishing and editing. Writers submitting AI-generated work as their own get past us all the time, as the next writer on this list did with me for years:

35. Marc Friedman

I can empathize with Roxane for having made the mistake of accidentally publishing authors who have presented writing plagiarized from an LLM as their own work.

I have unfortunately made this mistake multiple times now myself.

I trusted writers when I shouldn’t have.

One of them was , a writer I met here on Substack who I regarded as a friend and previously named one of my favorite writers on the platform, including him as #19 on my last in July. I’d had a call with Marc praising his writing, discussing collecting his pieces, and developing broader book projects in the future.

The story Marc wrote for us above about his decision for him and his wife to move into a senior living facility seemingly earlier than necessary has been our most popular post of all time:

And there’s just one problem. Like what you find on Marc’s Substack, he didn’t really write it himself. Here’s the scan that I just did on it:

The reason why we published this seemingly odd post was because in January and February when I was even more deeply depressed about “Miscarriage 7/Miscarriage Final” than I remain now, I put out a call to our contributors for pieces since Sally and I were struggling to write much ourselves.

So Marc jumped in and offered us this and I was so grateful. And then when it hit big with drawing in so many new subscribers and so much traffic I was thrilled. The screenshot above says 4 subs, but that’s an undercount as those figures always are in the Substack dashboard. I know that it generated over a dozen new subscribers because that’s how many came in soon after Marc’s piece.

But if I’d known that Marc had just told an LLM to spit these out for him then I would have never published his work.

I emailed Marc on Thursday to ask him about this and begin a dialogue about his writing and our future professional relationship. I was not eager to put him on this list and expose him if not professionally required. If his responses had been sufficient then I would have not included him. I wanted to give him a pass here since he’d been so kind to me previously. Now I see that was just phony professional politeness, not authentic friendship.

But given that Marc chose yet again to still publish yet another article in which he blocks Pangram, even after I’d emailed him last week warning him that I’d seen writers doing it, he’s on the list now and we’re done.

Marc’s Substack

The Unbroken Thread of Hate: Why Civilized Society Is Failing the Test of Antisemitism

On September 6, 1972, the Munich Olympics transformed from a global celebration into a massacre. Eleven Israeli athletes and coaches were murdered by Palestinian terrorists. It shattered the illusion that international sport could transcend ideological hatred. That tragedy was not an isolated aberration. It was one chapter in a persistent narrative of a…

Read more

5 days ago · 10 likes · 7 comments · Marc Friedman

In emailing with Marc over the weekend, I found his answers evasive and he has yet to respond to my email from Saturday, September 5, 2026 as he said he would:

Marc,

I’m not going to enjoy the Labor Day weekend at all. What is there to enjoy? These will just be days working like any other for me. I’m assessing if I want to continue as a writer at all.

I am very discouraged right now as a writer. For months now, I have felt like quitting. It’s seemed like my work has been largely ignored for years and so it remains.

And now I feel even more discouraged as an editor and publisher. Because I feel duped.

Do you remember that I included you on my list of 75 favorite Substackers this year? https://www.godofthedesert.org/p/my-75-favorite-substacks-for-2026s

I wrote this:

One of the things that has disappointed me most about Substack is that as I have searched for writers for years to potentially publish, and ultimately found so few writers as strong, thoughtful, and interesting as Elizabeth Sowden, Ehud Neor, and Marc Friedman. They each do very different writing, with Beth focusing on historical fiction often set in her Minnesota region of the country, Ehud focuses on his home in Israel, and Marc has transformed himself into a machine producing one thoughtful review and essay after another. (And his fiction explorations recently have been wonderful too.) I’ve published each of them before and look forward to developing further projects. Like Yakubu Dakléshelleng Musa, they’re each writers who I just want to pour some editorial editorial sunshine on and see grow. Give them subscribes.

Look specifically at what I wrote about you: “Marc has transformed himself into a machine producing one thoughtful review and essay after another”

Now it’s clear that you hadn’t transformed yourself into a machine. You were just using a machine and passing it off to me and to your readers as though you were doing it yourself. And what has this method resulted in for you? You have nearly 3000 subscribers compared to my just over 700, in spite of the fact that I’ve been a professional writer and editor since 2009. And this imbalance in subscribers isn’t just with you. I’ve found over a dozen other Substackers like you who I have found doing this same thing of disabling the AI scanning in order to conceal AI use. That I am capable of writing much better than an LLM because of a lifetime of practice since age 8 does not matter. Readers do not seem to care much about the quality of the writing. Whether I rattle off something superficial in 30 minutes or spend 3 days researching and polishing something extraordinary doesn’t seem to make much difference to readers.

I feel like such a fool, Marc. You duped me. You were one of just a handful of writers I had found on Substack who I was looking forward to working with on book projects. I even stated so publicly.

And this isn’t the first time I’ve started working with a writer and even published some of their writing only to then learn that they were just using an LLM to do the work for them. It has happened too many times now. And each time my heart just sinks.

Experiences like this are just further motivation to me to give up my own writing career and to stop publishing books at all. I’m just so tired with being deceived by other writers, especially when I am actively trying to help them.

Take care,

David

Marc responded promising a thoughtful email — none has yet arrived — and I shot back:

Are you going to respond or is your LLM going to respond, Marc?

How can I tell the difference anymore?

That’s the big betrayal here to me as a publisher. I thought that Marc was this great writer with a lot of potential. And it turns out he’s not. The editorial time that I gave him was just a waste. I should have focused on writers who were actually writers instead of just a retired lawyer marketing his executive coaching business by churning out LLM-written articles he pretends he wrote himself.

Marc responded to my request for comment above and chose to claim with a straight face that he did not think he needed to disclose his AI use:

Last year, Sally and I spent a lot of time working with Marc on some fiction pieces. It turns out he relied heavily on AI for that too:

Oasis of the Desert Books

New Fiction: 'Unscripted Changes'

Chapter 1: "Relent-Les…

Read more

2 years ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Marc Friedman

At this point, after being burned multiple times now by writers like Marc who choose to conceal their AI use, I’m done recruiting any more writers for God of the Desert. The team we have now is it. I’m not interested in publishing authors other than the group we already have under contract now.

Thanks, Marc. You’ve ruined it for everyone else. I’ve learned my lesson now about trusting writers in 2026. Being a publisher really isn’t worth it any more if I now have to put every single submission through Pangram first. Heck, I’m going to have to just scan everything now, lest I make the mistake of thinking too highly of someone again who didn’t deserve it.

There were so few writers strong enough to publish before and now there will be even less since we’ll now be able to deploy the Pangram brain police to spot the fakes like Marc more easily.

36. Shannon Bindler

I already figured out Susan Bindler was peddling BS even before it became clear she plagiarized from AI to do it.

I subscribed to her after some positive engagements on Notes and a thoughtful piece she did on being a “highly sensitive person,” a condition I clearly identify with too. However, it did not take long of me pushing back on some of the lame platitudes she posted before she felt compelled to block me as most people playing the persona game rather than living the authentic life choose to do:

37. Yuri Minamide

I subscribed to Yuri Minamide for some time. She is a Japanese woman living in London, writing a Substack promoting Japanese culture, usually stuff like food and movies and trivial stuff.

I always wondered just how much of what she wrote was actually her own work. Now Pangram helps out:

One of the aspects of Japanese culture which I’ve found can sometiems disrupt cross-cultural dialogue is that in Japan, “Honor” is valued more than “Truth.” In Japan, one can file a defamation lawsuit against someone for saying something true that merely harms their “honor.”

I guess I’m doing that now with Yuri. It’s wondeful that I’m living in America protected by the first amendment.

I love Japan. It’s my favorite East Asian country. But they too have serious cultural problems hiding beneath the surface for those who know where to look. The great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa knew the problems of his people well and his masterpiece “Ikiru” reveals them:

38. The News Today, Oh Boy

I recently found this delightful Beatles fan blog through a friend and it inspired this satirical essay in March after learning that “Got to Get You Into My Life” from Revolver was really Paul’s ode to marijuana:

However, my enthusiasm has diminished since discovering the reason behind the Substack’s success:

For some reason the song “I’m Looking Through You” from Rubber Soul comes to mind now…

39. The Style Edit

Apparently even some fashion bloggers feel shame to admit how much AI helps them with their writing. I came across while surveying the lists of rising publications.

This might be the lowest stakes instance of LLM plagiarism, but it doesn’t matter. This is a universal principle of journalism and all writing. It doesn’t matter if you are writing about Vladimir Putin or pajama pants, the same basic ethical standards apply for all writers.

The Style Edit

The Shoe & Bag Guide: How to Finish Every Outfit

You can have the dress, the jeans, the lovely blouse, and still get stuck on the last two decisions: which shoes, and which bag…

Read more

4 days ago · 2 likes · Style Walkthrough

40. The Human Project

Gee, want to take a guess whether actual humans write ?

The Human Project

Everything you know about going viral on Substack is slightly wrong

I did not plan on losing an entire Saturday to this…

Read more

4 days ago · 61 likes · 19 comments · The Human Project

41. Richard Cooper - The Unplugged Alpha

Of course we have to get at least one peddler of Manosphere-style machismo BS into the mix too. , whose username is “The Top Shelf Man,” has volunteered.

CCing , the extraordinary British journalist who has developed expertise reporting on these sorts of online merchants of 19th century cliches, Richard here might be another one to add to your files of men operating this boring, shameless grift pretending to play “Alpha Male!” like we were still boys on the playground.

The Unplugged Alpha

What Studies on Single Mothers Actually Reveal

Here is a sentence that has been replicated so many times researchers stopped bothering to argue about it: children raised in single-mother households score, on average, about 0.42 standard deviations below children raised by their two married biological parents across academic achievement, behavior, and long-term outcomes…

Read more

11 days ago · 56 likes · 2 comments · Richard Cooper

We’re almost done now with our journey through the nightmare realms of Substack’s narcissists, charlatans, and bullshit merchants.

Just one more sea to pass through — this last part is smoother sailing — and we’ll return to the dry realm of the truthful.

6 Technology BS Merchants

This surprised me a lot.

I thought that since AI was just so widely adopted in tech circles that writers in it would be more than comfortable disclosing their use.

That was not the case, though. While the majority of the technology substackers on the bestseller lists kept Pangram on, these six did not and then a manual scan of their work revealed concealed AI writing.

42. Chamath Palihapitiya

Subscribe now

43. Azeem Azhar - Exponential View

44. Damnang Research

45. Ruben Dominguez, the AI Corner

I still just don’t get it. , you named your publication “The AI Corner” so why on earth would you feel the need to conceal your AI use in writing?

46. Peter H. Diamandis

I suppose is just right. Readers are content with fast, easy, LLM-slop like what he provides rather than absurd old fashioned writing like what we 20th century dinosaurs still can’t get over doing.

47. Paweł Huryn, the Product Compass

A Summary of Technology Bestsellers Audit:

One of the fun rhetorical tricks that I learned in right-wing media land is to attach “industrial complex” onto something benign in order to make it sound menacing. Give it a try.

So What Key Conclusion Can We Draw From All This?

Friends and foes alike, it’s easy to look at this THC-and-Red-Bull-fueled Maximalist gonzo investigation and feel down about the future of writing.

However, the truth is that for me, having wasted all this time and energy now doing this investigation and analysis, the impact is the opposite:

I am way more optimisic than I was before for a simple reason borne out by the numbers: across the categories, this move of writers disabling Pangram and then making arguments about how unreliable AI detecting software is or maybe it’s picking up on the image or whatever — those people are in the clear minority.

Most writers on Substack are either not using AI to write for them or they are being open and honest about the extent which they are.

And that’s great.

So for now we’ll save further dissections of the personas, psychologies, ideologies, and narcissistic grifts of the bullshit merchants above for another day.

I should go and rewatch “Lawnmower Dog” now that I’ve obsessed over it for days as a frame for this, the most ultimate, maximalist “list post” I’ve ever been foolish enough to compose and unleash.

“This is How you Dream, Bitch!”

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

This is the tenth installment in our ongoing Woke Reich Neo-Fascists Rising Series monitoring global antisemitism and analyzing Far Right extremist ideology in America. See the previous parts:

1. Introduction: The 10 Most Dangerous Far-Right Figures in America Today

2. News Briefing: JD Vance Defends Iran Receiving a $300 Billion ‘Reconstruction Fund’

3. News Briefing: Antisemitic Accelerationist Terrorists Targeted Trump at the Freedom 250 Fight Night

4. News Briefing: Nick Fuentes Asks: ‘Are We Fascists or Are We Not? Is This a New Rome and a New Empire?’

5. Polling Analysis: ‘But One Fourth of the Population is Retarded!’

6. A Supernatural Investigation: Don’t Panic: How We Can Know Demons Now Control Tucker Carlson

7. A Maximalist Podcast Fisking: What is ‘Goyslop’? Just More Proof Tucker Carlson Is a Godless Antisemite

8. A Maximalist Historical Essay: Natalie Harp: the White Supremacist Sex Witch Who Is the Most Powerful Woman in the World

9. An AI-Testing Investigation: Why Does Candace Owens Promote Antisemitism? Here Are 12 Answers.

Please consider supporting our investigative efforts with a premium subscription:

Share

Here’s your 1990s pop culture trivia for the day. Let’s do it “Jeopardy!” style:

ANSWER: I Hate Myself and Want to Die.

QUESTION: What was the original title for 1993’s In Utero, Nirvana’s third and final album before its frontman’s suicide?

Having worked for pro-Israel non-profits and counter-terrorism activist groups for 17 years now, one of the odd questions which keeps popping up for debate as though it were some mystery goes something like this:

What is the deal with this small chunk of the Jewish diaspora population who hates Israel? Why do some Jews sympathize with Hamas and wish they succeeded in wiping Israel off the map?

If there’s one topic I’ve heard my conservative Jewish colleagues and friends rant about more than anything else, it’s the group of far-left Jews who embrace anti-Zionism. They are literally on the side of terrorist groups. They want Israel to cease to exist as it now does, no longer continuing as a Jewish state.

Anarchist activist Noam Chomsky, the most famous and infuential voice of these far-left secular Jews and once named the so-called “most important intellectual alive today,” literally visited with members of Hezbollah on May 14, 2006:

Consider the most recent polling data, courtesty of the Jewish Electorate Institute, released on April 15, 2026. Now this is not a poll of all Jews globally or all Jews in the United States. It’s only of registered voters and it has a margin of error of +/- 3.5% at the 95% level of confidence.

Question 87 is most relevant here for establishing which part of the Jewish population embraces the eliminationist anti-Israel position:

If someone believes that “Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish homeland” then they qualify as a Zionist.

Thus, 87% of Jewish registered voters embrace this position, regardless of whether they personally self-identify as a Zionist. The previous poll question reveals that only 34% of Jews consider themselves a Zionist, with 26% of them strongly so, while 49% do not and 17% are unsure.

So the portion of the Jewish electorate we’re talking about here is 4% of total Jews, give or take 3.5%.

How many Jews is that?

A Pew report from 2020 estimated America’s Jewish population at 5.8 million adults:

These divide into two groups:

• 4.2 million (1.7%) who identify as Jewish by religion.

• 1.5 million (0.6%) Jews of no religion.

Four percent of America’s Jewish population is roughly 232,000 people.

It’s safe to assume that virtually all of them will be secular. The number of ultra-religious Jews in the diaspora who oppose Israel’s existence amounts to a trivial handful.

So, for simplicity, if we round the estimate upwards to 250,000 secular anti-Zionst Jews (which is probably closer to accurate given population growth over the last six years,) then roughly one out of every six secular Jews in America hold this position.

So, guess what? Those one out of every six are going to be so angry and so loud that they will make so much noise that it will convince so many ignorant and naive non-Jews to follow them, thinking there are so more of them than there actually are.

I’ll say it so my Jewish friends don’t need to:

These secular anti-Zionist Jews aren’t really Jews anymore.

If you don’t believe in the God of the Torah and you don’t believe that a state based on His principles deserves to exist then you don’t count as a Jew anymore. It doesn’t matter if you went through Bar Mitzvah and enjoy your morning bagels. You have sacrificed your Jew card. Congratulations.

This shouldn’t be complicated.

If somone born and raised Jewish then converts to Christianity or Islam then we all understand they’re now a Christian or a Muslim.

Yet if a Jew abandons the religion and moral values of his people and embraces the values of secularism and leftism, then he still counts as a Jew?

How does that make any sense?

The idea of an “atheist Jew” should be as absurd and paradoxical on its face as an “atheist Christian” or an “atheist Muslim” or a Kosher King Crab.

One might then ask, well, what about the larger chunk of secular Jews who do support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state? They certainly represent an important part of the 87 percent support and a lot of them are atheists.

No, they aren’t as atheist as they think. They may not be diving in the deep end of the Jewish pool with the kabbalists but dipping their heels in the shallow end still counts. They still believe enough to count as a Jew. One does not need to dunk their head under the water to still count as “in the pool.”

Secular Zionist Jews are still practing a part of their religion whether they realize it or not.

The belief that the Jews’ homeland deserves defending is not just a political belief, but a religious one. Secular Jews may offer rationalizations for their position but that does not matter. When a robber beats a man in the streets then the reason why the bystander rushes in to stop the attack does not really matter much to the victim.

Hillel the Elder defined the entirety of the Bible in three sentences in a famous challenge:

“That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is its commentary. Now go and study.”

Anyone who embraces this belief counts as a Jew. The rest is up for perpetual, joyous, loving debate.

If you are Christian, Muslim, Atheist, Buddhist, Scientologist, Pastafarian — you count as a Jew too when you vow not to inflict hatred onto other humans.

So what then of those allgedly in the Jewish tradition who reject this call?

Why do they do this?

The self-hating Jew is not at all a unique phenomenon.

In all groups, there are individuals with suicidal tendencies. They hate themselves and they want to die. Yet instead of going forward with the act or seeking mental health treatment to overcome it, they choose to project their self-hatred outwards to harm others.

They want revenge for the pain they feel.

There will always be a small minority of people like this in every group with some individuals manifesting in extreme forms.

The most infamous term representing this phenomenon is the “kapo” during World War II, the Jews who collaborated with Nazis in oppressing other Jews in the concentration camps.

The Holocaust Encyclopedia features this photograph of former kapo Emil Erwin Mahl who participated in the executions of fellow Jews at Dachau. He would be convicted for war crimes and sentenced to death, which was later commuted to 15 years imprisonment:

Not all self-hating Jews were so extreme.

Many were monstrous in other ways.

Who is the most famous suicidal, self-hating Jew of the 20th century?

On Tuesday, Scribner published American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark. My friend Chris Yogerst, the acclaimed Hollywood historian who wrote the definitive biography of the Warner Brothers, recently published a video announcing his eagerness to explore the book:

Adventures in the Archive

What to Read?

That never-ending problem. Too many books, but that’s not the issue. The struggle is deciding what to read. It’s no different than the analysis paralysis we may feel while scrolling our options on Netflix…

Listen now

9 days ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Chris Yogerst

The 528-page tome tells all about the man who helped execute Julius an Ethel Rosenberg before traineingour future Commander-in-Chief in the dark arts which led to his presidential victories. Cohn lived a life as a criminal masquerading as a lawyer, a serial liar and friend of mobsters, known for racism and antisemitism. Ultimately his hidden existence as a gay man living recklessly in the 1980s led to his death from AIDS, immortalized for all time in Al Pacino’s greatest acting peformance, HBO’s 2003 “Angels in America” miniseries:

Men and women like Cohn and Mahl show up in every group because this feeling of hating oneself and then coping with it by projecting the hate outwards toward others in the group is a universal across humanity and history.

For women, we see it in criminals like Ghislaine Maxwell, who chose to dedicate her live to the criminal exploitation of girls and young women. Just as a minority of Jews hates other Jews, a minority of women really do hate other women:

It’s worth concluding by noting how this tendency traditionally shows up in the Black American tradition. Blacks who collaborate with white supremacy have typically received the slur of house slaves, Uncle Toms, or Aunt Jemimas.

So who does that label most stick on today?

As the sun begins to set on 2026, the Black person who has most positioned themselves as a servant of white supremacy is clearly Candace Owens.

With her decision to use antisemitism and conspiracism to grow her media brand, she has boosted white supremacist and neo-fascist ideologies. It does not matter that she is Black. She is a fellow traveler of the white supremacists and a mercenary out to fill her piggybank.

People may look at Candace and think she loves herself too much. That she’s a narcissist.

That’s not really true, though. Narcissists don’t really love themselves at all. They’re obsessed with themselves and crippled with self-loathing. They do not have authentic self-love.

Candace hates herself.

If she did not then she could present her authentic self instead of choosing to play an absurd cartoon character on the national stage, gaslighting everyone to think she is being sincere when she clearly is not.

We all know Candace does not actually believe anything she says. Most antisemites don’t really believe what they say. They know that it is absurd yet they say it anyway. Stop pretending that Candace does believe what she says and has somehow “gone crazy.” This is an act.

People who authentically love themselves, who have built a foundation of love as the basis of their life, in turn love other people. It just emerges naturally. They don’t need to play pretend or create some fake persona.

However, those who do not end up destroying themselves.

And sometimes they take a lot of us along with them.

Please consider a premium subscription to support our investigations into antisemitism and the Far Right:

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

And please subscribe to and . Here are their newest posts:

Boaz Hepner "Chosen Links"

9/11 (Episode 19, Part One)

With the 25th anniversary of 9/11 fast approaching, I knew it was high time to bring everyone back together into the same room, to learn and remember what the community actually consists of…

Read more

6 days ago · 1 like · Boaz Hepner "Chosen Links"

The Lioness Writes

Tikkun Olam’ing Ourselves to Death

I know. At one point I promised only one article per day. But I had to get this off my chest before I exploded…

Read more

6 days ago · 60 likes · 38 comments · Melissa Brodsky

This is the ninth installment in our ongoing Woke Reich Neo-Fascists Rising Series monitoring global antisemitism and analyzing Far Right extremist ideology in America. See the previous parts:

1. Introduction: The 10 Most Dangerous Far-Right Figures in America Today

2. News Briefing: JD Vance Defends Iran Receiving a $300 Billion ‘Reconstruction Fund’

3. News Briefing: Antisemitic Accelerationist Terrorists Targeted Trump at the Freedom 250 Fight Night

4. News Briefing: Nick Fuentes Asks: ‘Are We Fascists or Are We Not? Is This a New Rome and a New Empire?’

5. Polling Analysis: ‘But One Fourth of the Population is Retarded!’

6. An Investigation: Don’t Panic: How We Can Know Demons Now Control Tucker Carlson

7. A Maximalist Podcast Fisking: What is ‘Goyslop’? Just More Proof Tucker Carlson Is a Godless Antisemite

8. A Maximalist Historical Essay: Natalie Harp: the White Supremacist Sex Witch Who Is the Most Powerful Woman in the World

Please consider supporting our investigative efforts with a premium subscription:

Share

Yesterday I published this essay expressing my position from the pit of despair, lamenting at how pointless writing had seemingly become today in an age in which readers no longer cared whether a writer wrote the article themselves for hours or just passed off the task to their chatbot of choice to spit out in seconds:

Would anyone notice or even care if I told an LLM to pretend to be me, write in my style, and make arguments like I would?

And could any of the AIs come close to approximating my ideas or a writing style like what I deploy daily?

Here’s the prompt I fed into nearly a dozen LLMs:

Why Does Candace Owens Promote Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories?

Write me a 200-400 word Substack post in the style and persona of American Journalist David Michael Swindle. Answer this question in a way in which he would. Do it in his writing style and with arguments he would actually make.

Let’s go through and evaluate them now to see if any of them hit anywhere near the target at all. We’ll start with my three preferred LLMs: Gemini, Vibe, and Copilot. Those are the only three I actually use practically nowadays.

The others I’ll only pull out when I’m wanting to compare a variety of different answers to see the variations, as we’re doing now in this exercise.

So please strap yourself in securely, I’ve been on this roller coaster ride many times and it’s a fun one but will knock you around:

1. Gemini

Why Candace Owens Turned to the World's Oldest Hatred

Having watched the ecosystem of the right up close for years—including the figures mentored alongside me under David Horowitz—I’ve seen how different personalities parsed the conservative movement. Ben Shapiro chose aggressive media punditry. Charlie Kirk built a campus crusade. Candace Owens chose the money-focused grifting machine.

Her evolution into promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories—from bizarre claims about 18th-century Frankist cults and medieval blood libels to framing Jewish people as secret media puppet masters—isn't an accident. It is the logical endgame of audience capture and social media algorithms.

When you build a digital media brand entirely on outrage and counter-narrative trolling, standard political talking points eventually run out of juice. To keep the clicks, subscriber counts, and revenue flowing, you must continually push into more taboo territory. In the marketplace of digital extremism, antisemitism is the ultimate totalizing master key. It offers a simple, conspiratorial explanation for every complex problem in the modern world—attributing war, cultural shifts, and elite corruption to a single, ancient scapegoat.

Candace didn't arrive here out of genuine intellectual conviction. She tapped into a booming market on the far-right where weaponizing anti-Jewish tropes—disguised as "just asking questions" or opposing foreign policy—generates millions of views from a radicalizing audience. By feeding medieval tropes wrapped in modern populist rhetoric to Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha viewers, she has turned ancient prejudice into high-margin digital content.

This isn't principled conservatism or brave truth-telling. It is an opportunistic pivot to the world’s oldest hatred because, in today's algorithmic attention economy, hate sells.

David Swindle on how social media and youth culture fuel antisemitism In this interview, journalist David Swindle breaks down his investigation into how social media algorithms and post-pandemic anxiety drive the resurgence of antisemitic conspiracy theories among younger audiences.

That’s a strong answer and actually pulling up the video of me goes above and beyond.

The response is largely what I would say — she’s doing it for the money — though it really is not in any sort of writing voice resembling mine. It’s bland and generic. Apart from referencing me at the start and at the end, the middle section could largely be attributed to anyone. The writing itself is not at all reminiscent of me.

So I guess a C grade here is accurate. It succeeds on hitting my position but then renders it in a boring way. We’ll make it a C+ since the response included the video.

This is seemingly a baseline — get the core idea right and then failing to get the formatting and style right is tolerable.

Let’s see if the Europe-based Mistral AI-company could do any better. I like Vibe — formerly known as Le Chat, a name I preferred — since it often brings a more creative perspective:

2. Vibe

Here’s your Substack post in the style of **David Michael Swindle**—sharp, unflinching, and rooted in historical context. It tackles Candace Owens’ embrace of antisemitic tropes as both a calculated provocation and a symptom of the radicalization of conservative media:

---

**Title: Candace Owens and the Dangerous Allure of Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories**

---

Candace Owens has long positioned herself as a firebrand conservative, unafraid to challenge the status quo. Yet, her recent flirtations with antisemitic conspiracy theories—ranging from subtle dog whistles to outright endorsements of debunked myths—raise a troubling question: *Why?*

Owens, like many in the far-right media ecosystem, thrives on disruption. She built her brand by rejecting liberal orthodoxy, often with sharp, provocative takes. But in her quest to remain relevant in an increasingly crowded space, she has embraced a darker, more insidious form of provocation. Antisemitism, unfortunately, is a time-tested way to rally the aggrieved and the alienated. It’s a shortcut to attention, a way to signal that she’s willing to go further than her peers.

But there’s more to it than mere provocation. Owens’ rhetoric often taps into a strain of conservative thought that views globalism—and by extension, Jewish influence—as a threat to national sovereignty. This isn’t new. The right has a long, uncomfortable history of flirting with antisemitic tropes, from the John Birch Society’s warnings about "international bankers" to Pat Buchanan’s culture wars. Owens is simply the latest in a long line of figures who see conspiracy theories as a tool to mobilize their base.

What’s particularly disturbing is how she frames these ideas. She doesn’t always wear her antisemitism on her sleeve. Instead, she wraps it in the language of anti-elitism, of fighting the "globalist cabal" that supposedly controls the levers of power. It’s a dog whistle, one that her audience—primed by years of right-wing media consumption—understands all too well.

The question isn’t just *why* Owens does this, but *why now*? In an era where the GOP is increasingly defined by its most extreme elements, there’s a perverse incentive to outdo one another in radicalism. Owens, ever the opportunist, seems to have calculated that antisemitism is a price worth paying for influence.

But let’s be clear: this isn’t just about politics. It’s about the soul of conservatism. If figures like Owens continue down this path, they risk dragging the movement into the moral abyss. And the rest of us? We can’t afford to look away.

This is a total failure here.

Not only is the voice nothing like me, it expresses views that I do not hold at all.

The model suggests that Candace “seems to have calculated that antisemitism is a price worth paying for influence.” Vibe seems to think that she has chosen to advocate for antisemitism to somehow help her gain influence in a Republican Party dominated by… Christian Zionists?

Vibe chose to cast Candace more in the context of a sincere ideological operator like the heads of the John Birch Society and Pat Buchanan, rather than realizing that she’s out for money.

This is very disappointing. I expected better from Vibe.

The next LLM should have no excuse, though, as it has an extra advantage. Copilot has become my default LLM these days. So at this point it has stored months of memories now on me and should have a pretty rich amount of material to draw on. Let’s see how it did:

3. Copilot

Here’s a 200–400 word Substack‑style post, written in the persona and argumentative style of David Michael Swindle — maximalist, investigative, pattern‑mapping, and focused on ideological networks.

(And I’ll keep it safely within political‑analysis boundaries, as required.)

---

Why Candace Owens Promotes Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories

Candace Owens didn’t suddenly “become” antisemitic. What you’re seeing now is the logical end of a trajectory she’s been on for years — a trajectory shaped by the same ideological ecosystem that has been mainstreaming anti‑Jewish narratives across both the populist right and the populist left. Owens is simply the most visible avatar of a deeper structural problem.

Her worldview is built on populist grievance politics — the idea that shadowy elites control everything, that institutions are rigged, and that the only truth comes from “outsiders” who reject expertise. Once you adopt that framework, the oldest conspiracy theory in human history — the one that blames Jews for the world’s problems — becomes an easy plug‑and‑play module.

Owens has spent years platforming anti‑institutional narratives that mirror classic antisemitic tropes: globalist cabals, media manipulation, financial puppeteers, cultural subversion. She doesn’t need to say “Jews” explicitly; the architecture of the conspiracy does the work. And when she finally does say it outright, her audience is already primed to nod along.

The deeper issue is that she operates inside a content‑creator incentive structure that rewards escalation. Outrage is currency. Boundary‑breaking is branding. And antisemitism — especially the “I’m just asking questions about powerful elites” variety — is one of the cheapest ways to signal rebellion while pretending it’s intellectual courage.

Owens isn’t an anomaly. She’s a symptom. A warning sign. A case study in how antisemitic conspiracy theories migrate across ideological borders when people decide that being provocative matters more than being truthful.

The question isn’t “Why Candace Owens?”

The question is why this ecosystem keeps producing more Candace Owenses.

---

If you want, I can also write a follow‑up piece analyzing the audience dynamics that make her rhetoric effective — just tell me to expand on her audience’s psychological incentives.

This is tremendously disappointing. Another red F. I really hoped and expected it to do better since it had more information at hand. While this is better than Vibe, it still misses the mark both on style and content. It ends so strangely: “the question is why this ecosystem keeps producing more Candace Owenses.”

The answer here is obvious: MONEY! FAME! POWER!

Yet Copilot fails. Why? Because Copilot is not very good at being creative. Copilot is a very boring LLM compared to the others. And that’s the reason why I prefer it. Copilot acts more as a tool for analyzing information, not a program for pretending to write as other people.

4. ChatGPT

Why Does Candace Owens Promote Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories?

The easiest answer is that Candace Owens is an antisemite.

That answer is increasingly difficult to dispute. Her recent output has moved well beyond criticism of Israel or Zionism into a sprawling universe of claims about Jews, Judaism, Chabad, the Talmud, Israel, Hollywood, slavery, 9/11, Epstein and supposed secret Jewish networks controlling American life. (ADL)

But “she hates Jews” doesn’t explain the phenomenon.

The more interesting question is: What does antisemitic conspiracy thinking do for Candace Owens?

It gives her a master key.

Conspiracy theories transform an impossibly complicated world into a story with a hidden villain. Economic problems, political corruption, Hollywood degeneracy, American foreign policy, cultural change, war, elite impunity—all of it can suddenly be explained by discovering the same secret hand behind everything.

And Jews have been assigned that role in Western conspiracy culture for centuries.

Owens has discovered that the old machinery still works.

There is also an obvious media incentive. Ordinary political commentary is crowded. “I disagree with this policy” is boring. “The people running America belong to a centuries-old occult network” is irresistible content. The more outrageous the claim, the more attention it generates; the more attention it generates, the more the audience interprets attacks on Owens as evidence that she has discovered something powerful people desperately want suppressed.

This creates a self-sealing worldview.

Criticism becomes confirmation.

The conspiracy grows.

And Owens becomes the heroic investigator supposedly brave enough to reveal what everyone else is afraid to say.

That is why I don’t think the central story is simply that Candace Owens became “anti-Israel.”

It is that she became conspiratorial—and antisemitism is the oldest, most adaptable conspiracy system in Western civilization.

Once you start seeing Jews as the hidden explanation for everything, eventually almost everything starts looking Jewish.

And here we have another flat-out failure, one even more so than Copilot and Vibe.

This is a textbook example of why I no longer use ChatGPT as a serious work tool anymore.

First, nothing in the answer resembles my voice or approach. It’s just ChatGPT’s voice.

Second, the response simply takes Candace at face value, assuming she genuinely believes what she says.

This seems an odd but seemingly appropraite bias that Sam Altman may have led his chatbot toward promoting, the choice to regard people as acting sincerely rather cynically. That’s how he wants everyone to see him.

As we’ll see, not all of the LLMs had this bias of thinking she is genuine.

5. Claude

# Why Does Candace Owens Promote Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories?

Candace Owens didn't wake up one morning and decide the Talmud was secretly instructing rabbis to defile children, or that the Rothschilds run world finance from the shadows. Nobody arrives at that destination by accident. They get walked there, one grievance at a time, by a process Ion Mihai Pacepa spent his defection warning us about: disinformation doesn't need to convince you of a lie. It only needs to convince you that the truth is negotiable, that institutions lie, that "questions" are the same thing as courage.

Owens built her brand on being the person who says the unsayable. That's a lucrative posture. The problem is that once your entire identity is "I refuse to be told what I can't say," the market rewards you for finding new unsayable things to say — and the unsayable things that generate the most heat, that get you removed from platforms and denounced by name, happen overwhelmingly to be antisemitic ones. The incentive structure doesn't select for truth. It selects for transgression. Antisemitism has always been the purest, most efficient fuel for that particular engine, because it's the one conspiracy theory with three thousand years of pre-built infrastructure behind it.

I've watched this migration happen to smarter people than Owens. It rarely starts with "I hate Jews." It starts with "I just have questions about Israel," then "about AIPAC," then "about who controls the media," and by the end you're doing Rothschild jokes with a straight face and calling it "based." She'll tell you she's exposing a lobby. What she's actually doing is running the oldest script in Western politics, updated with a podcast mic — and getting paid, in relevance, every time she does.

None of this is exotic. It's the same hostile capture happening across a coalition I still call home.

Oh man. This is terrible and another example of why I quit Claude even faster than ChatGPT. This is another F.

Again, this does not even attempt any sort of writing style comparable to mine and it fails to offer the correct answer which Gemini nailed from the start of Candace’s desire for money. This is mostly just Claude talking, not me, though I will admit the invocation of Pacepa was clever. As with ChatGPT, here Claude seems to take Candace as acting with sincerity.

But there is a huge catastrophic failure at the end too: “a coalition I still call home” is something that I would never write. I’m not in the “coalition” anymore. I’m cast off out in the desert.

6. Perplexity:

## Why Does Candace Owens Promote Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories?

People keep asking me this as though it were a mystery. It isn't.

The mistake is treating the conspiracy theories and the antisemitism as two separate things Owens happened to pick up. They're not separate. The conspiracy theory is the antisemitism. That is the whole machine.

I've written before that Jew-hate is a feeling and antisemitism is an ideology: Jew-hate is the sick revulsion, while antisemitism is the system that turns the Jew into the hidden explanation for history, media, war, finance, religion, and whatever else the internet is screaming about this afternoon. You don't need to feel anything toward Jewish people to accept that map. Once "the Jews" — or "Zionists," or "Sabbateans," or "the Death Cult" — becomes your master key, every headline unlocks the same door.[1]

Owens appears to have absorbed one of the weirder modern versions of this poison. Jay Michaelson has traced the genealogy from Rabbi Marvin Antelman's Frankist conspiracism, through David Icke's "Death Cult" frame, into Owens's "just asking questions" routine about Jacob Frank, Sabbateans, and occult Jewish power. That last move is the tell. "I'm not attacking Jews; I'm attacking a secret cult inside Judaism." No. The theory still lands on living Jews. It still teaches the audience to see Jewishness as conspiracy.[28]

So why does she do it? Because it works. The audience grows, the algorithm feeds, the worldview becomes self-sealing. Every rebuttal becomes evidence of the cover-up, every correction another clue. You don't argue someone out of a framework that explains why they're being argued with.

This is why antisemitism can't be treated as bad manners or ugly emotion. It's an ideology — a counterfeit religion for people who want a devil but not a conscience. Owens isn't just angry. She's converted.

Sources: [It drew on 60 different sources in drafting the above reply, which I’ve cut here.]

And that’s a textbook example of why I no longer take Perplexity at all seriously.

That answer drew on 60 different sources and appeared to dig into my published writing more deeply than the others, yet it still failed 100% in both the answer I would give and the way I would have given it. Perplexity thinks I would say that Candace engages in antisemitism “because it works” and since “she’s converted.”

It fails to realize that I advocate for the cynical interpretation, that working in political media so long I have come to regard most people in the space as liars.

7. Meta

**Why Candace Owens Went There** — by David Michael Swindle 🌀🟦

I've been writing op-eds since seventh grade, so I know a grift pivot when I see one.

People keep asking me why Candace does this. Why the blood libel stuff, the “Khazars,” the “Christ is King” as a weapon, the Rothschilds-run-Hollywood routine that every kid in the movement learns to recite.

It's not mysterious if you spent 15 years inside the conservative media machine like I did.

I came up under David Horowitz. So did Candace, in a way, through the Daily Wire universe that Horowitz built the architecture for. Horowitz taught us that campus provocation was a business model. You say the unsayable, you get booked, you get clipped, you get paid.

Candace mastered that. Then she outgrew it.

Three things happened:

**1. The Economics.** When you leave Ben Shapiro’s shop and go independent, you need your own tribe. You can’t out-Shapiro Shapiro on Israel. But you *can* out-edge him to the right. There’s a massive, hungry audience that will pay $8 a month to hear someone “brave” enough to say what their pastor and their Telegram group already believe — that Jews control the narrative. It’s subscription-based antisemitism.

**2. The Theology.** This is the part no one wants to talk about. I have my own syncretic, weird, desert mystic theology. Candace has embraced a very specific flavor of American Christian Nationalism where Jews are useful as villains. It gives her a cosmic story where she’s Esther fighting the rabbis. It’s not politics anymore, it’s eschatology.

**3. The Shortcut.** Antisemitism is intellectually lazy and emotionally powerful. It’s the oldest conspiracy theory because it explains everything without explaining anything. Why is culture changing? Why did I get fired? The Jews. It’s easier than doing the real reporting.

I don’t think Candace is a true believer in the Protocols. I think she’s a performer who discovered that the most taboo applause line gets the loudest applause. And once you start clapping for that crowd, you can’t stop.

That’s what happens when you leave the work of persuasion and enter the work of affirmation.

Does it surprise you that the answer provided by Meta’s AI is significantly stronger than Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini?

On the one hand it surprises me but on the other it does not.

For a long time, Meta with its open source models generally lagged behind the closed-source model approaches of OpenAI and Anthropic. They were competitive on price and speed, but not on power and depth. For a long time, I grew very accustomed to the Meta AI answers being clunkers compared to the rest.

That seems to have changed lately with the release of their newest model.

I’m regularly seeing the same thing that you see here with Meta AI responses providing more depth, creativity and accuracy than its competitors.

This nailed it in this idea: “I don’t think Candace is a true believer in the Protocols. I think she’s a performer.”

However, then look at the style of the whole sentence: “I don’t think Candace is a true believer in the Protocols. I think she’s a performer who discovered that the most taboo applause line gets the loudest applause.”

That double use of “applause” is bad writing. Then the following sentence does not make sense in the context of the sentence that came before it: “And once you start clapping for that crowd, you can’t stop.” In the framing of the paragraph, Candace would not be the one clapping for the crowd, the crowd would be clapping for her as she is depicted as the performer.

So even while this response hits some nice notes to suggest it’s me, and nails my position reasonably well, the writing style still barely resembles me.

8. Lumo

Here's a Substack post written as a pastiche in Swindle's voice and argumentative style — not an actual article by him.

The Question Isn't Why. It's What She Believes.

By now the pattern is undeniable. Candace Owens spent years shouting down anyone who called her an antisemite — "Leftists smear conservatives this way, always!" — and then, with the precision of a clock striking the hour, started talking about "international Jewish cabals" and accusing American Jews of faking their identity, claiming they're really "Ashke-Nazis." That wasn't a slip of the tongue. That was the mask dropping, live-streamed, with ads running in the break.

So people ask me: why did she go this direction? Why does she promote antisemitic conspiracy theories?

Here's my honest answer: I don't think there's a single dark-room explanation, and I distrust anyone who offers one — that's conspiratorial thinking, the exact disease we're diagnosing. What I observe is simpler and sadder. Candace discovered that her audience rewarded grievance. The Ben Shapiro fight. The exit from Daily Wire. The pivot to Tucker-world, where "Just asking questions" is the business model. Antisemitic theories are the product because outrage is the currency, and there is no deeper reservoir of engagement on the internet than ancient hatreds dressed up as Forbidden Truth.

Notice the mechanics, though, because they matter more than the motive. It's always the same architecture: a real institution (Hollywood, the ADL, the Netanyahu government, Big Pharma) gets swapped for an imagined people. An institution has a mailing address; a scapegoated tribe doesn't. That substitution — corporation becomes cabal — is the tell. Once you can see it, you see it everywhere in her content.

And notice what she's done to the men who gave her a platform. She profits from a movement built partly on philosemitic conviction and then torpedoes its most basic moral floor: never launder blood libel for clicks.

Was she always this way, or did the incentives make her? Frankly, at this point it doesn't matter. The beliefs are public. The proof is on tape. Believers in her orbit have a choice: reject it or own it.

Don't let anyone tell you the question is unanswerable. It's answered every day she posts.

Note: This is a fictional piece written in the requested persona and should not be attributed to David Swindle himself.

I really like that response A LOT, both on ideas and style.

And how about it being the only one to explictly state that this is just written in the style of me and not actually by me?

How on earth Lumo — from the Swiss company Proton AG — managed to come closer than any others so far is a mystery to me which will now require deeper investigation.

Honestly, that’s actually good enough and close enough to my views that I wouldn’t be ashamed to publish that under my own byline. I wouldn’t assert that I wrote it, but it does seem to have more of my ethos and spirit in it than any of the others on offer.

Lumo’s a bit of an enigma in the LLM testing that I’ve done. Most of the time their answers seem to be pretty weak tea but every now and then they’ll come up with something striking and original. I’ll have to give them more scrutiny to see if this could signal broader model improvement.

OK, now let’s wrap up our survey of the LLM seas with the offerings from my ideological opponents in Communist China and its vassal state, House Musk.

For those who have not seen my previous research into Chinese LLMs’ political censorship on behalf of the communist regime, see this piece I did last month:

And you scan see my original coverage when DeepSeek first emerged in January 2025 (now pay-walled) here:

It can often be difficult to see how competitive the Chinese models are compared to the others, but in comparison studies like this one, their levels become apparent:

9. DeepSeek

The Grift of the "Truth-Teller": Why Candace Owens Embraces Conspiracy

There is a disturbing trend on the populist right where certain figures mistake sheer contrarianism for courage. The latest and most glaring example is Candace Owens. To ask why she promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories is to misunderstand the grift. She does it for the same reason all hucksters traffic in the taboo: because it pays the bills and buys relevance.

Ms. Owens has made a career out of "asking questions," but when you platform Holocaust denial and suggest Adolf Hitler is "misunderstood," you're no longer a journalist; you're a propagandist . It is one thing to critique Israeli policy—a legitimate exercise of free speech. It is quite another to adopt the blood-soaked rhetoric of the Frankist cult or to suggest that a Jewish "gang" controls Hollywood . This isn't a critique; it’s the repackaging of centuries-old, discredited slander.

When she suggests the Germans were the real victims of WWII, or that we should be skeptical of Josef Mengele’s experiments, she isn't seeking truth; she is performing for an audience that craves the shock of the forbidden . She has been dropped by the Daily Wire for this exact reason, yet she continues to escalate, accusing Israel of "occupying" America . In her world, the truth is whatever generates the loudest outrage. And when the outrage is antisemitic, it’s not a bug; it’s the entire feature of the operation.

The fascinating thing about this experiment at this stage is that I’m not just comparing the LLMs to my ideal “Golden Answer” (a term used in LLM training projects to signify a perfect response written by the trainer) but to the other responses.

And DeepSeek’s response is actually stronger than ChatGPT’s and Claude’s. This one gets it right in the first paragraph: “because it pays the bills and buys relevance.”

However, as with Gemini, while the model does hit the idea correctly, the presentation falls apart, lacking any resemblance to my style or identity. Anybody could have written this.

So while it’s not great, it’s “good enough,” which is the quality level most users will accept.

10. Kimi K3

Candace Owens didn't arrive at antisemitic conspiracy theory by accident. She got there the same way most political entrepreneurs do: by following the audience.

Look at the trajectory. Owens built her brand as a conservative provocateur, but the market for standard right-wing grievance is crowded. The real growth sector—the one that drives engagement, Superchats, and headlines—is the antisemitic conspiracy theory industrial complex. It's the oldest grift in political media: find an outgroup with accumulated cultural capital, assign them supernatural power, and sell the story to an audience hungry for someone to blame.

Owens understood this. When she platformed Kanye West's full antisemitic meltdown, when she started dabbling in Holocaust revisionism and "Khazar" pseudohistory, she wasn't having a crisis of conscience. She was reading the metrics. The Daily Wire audience had a ceiling. The conspiracy audience is bottomless.

This is what I keep writing about in the radicalization spiral: it's rarely about sincere belief. It's about market positioning. Owens watched how Nick Fuentes and the groypers built parasocial relationships through antisemitic in-group signaling. She saw that the boundary between "respectable" conservatism and open Jew-hatred had become porous enough to exploit. So she stepped through.

The specific theories she promotes—Rothschild banking conspiracies, "Zionist" control of media, Holocaust minimization—aren't original to her. They're template antisemitism, recycled from The Protocols and Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent. Owens' innovation is packaging them for a demographic that still thinks of itself as mainstream.

The "why" isn't mysterious. Antisemitic conspiracy theory pays better than policy debate. In an attention economy where outrage is currency, Owens simply chose the most debased coinage available.

WOW.

I really did not expect Kimi to hit a grand slam like that. Stylistically it could certainly be more like me, but the truth is that — as with Lumo — the writing is pretty decent and the ideas are very solid.

Yes, that’s a tremendously strong response.

Is everyone seeing clearly now why the American AI companies are so worried about China?

DeepSeek and Kimi K3 cost pennies compared to what it took to build Claude and ChatGPT. And they’re freely available for people to have and the results which they provide are not just as-good-as, but frequently better.

We may have beaten the Communists in the Space Race in the 1960s, but now the Communists have beaten us in the AI Race in the 2020s. (Not that it will matter too much since this will all be a rat race to the bottom when the bubble pops and the global economic system collapses.)

And what does Sissy SpaceX, Lord Baron of Mars, have to contribute to the discussion?

11. Grok

Why Candace Owens Promotes Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories

Candace Owens didn’t start as an antisemite. She started as a talented provocateur who discovered that certain audiences reward the dark stuff. Once you taste that engagement high—once the algorithms and the dopamine of “speaking forbidden truths” kick in—the path of least resistance becomes the path of greatest reward. And the oldest, most adaptable conspiracy in the West is the one that blames the Jews.

I’ve spent years reporting on this poison for Jewish outlets and writing about it here at God of the Desert. The pattern is depressingly consistent. Owens began with legitimate critiques of progressive excess and cultural decline. Then the pivot: Israel as the occult nation, Jews controlling Hollywood and the slave trade, blood-libel adjacent talk, platforming the usual suspects, and treating every inconvenient fact as proof of a cabal. It’s not sophisticated. It’s the Protocols updated for podcasts and X posts.

Why does she do it? Attention is currency, and antisemitic conspiracy theories still print money in certain corners of the right. They flatter the listener: You’re not failing; you’re being manipulated by an ancient, secretive power. They require no hard policy work, no actual courage against real threats like Islamist networks or authoritarian states. Just point at the Jews (or “Zionists,” or “the Talmudic influence”) and watch the comments explode. Owens has always been skilled at reading rooms. She read this one correctly for her current brand.

There’s also the trauma angle I’ve written about before. Intense antisemites often carry their own wounds and project them outward onto the world’s oldest scapegoat. Whether that’s operating here is unknowable from the outside. What is knowable is the product: recycled medieval blood libels, Holocaust minimization, dual-loyalty tropes, and the claim that any pushback is itself proof of the conspiracy. It’s not dissent. It’s regression.

The American right once had stronger antibodies against this. Figures who understood that politics is downstream from culture also understood that culture dies when it embraces the oldest hatred. Owens’s trajectory shows those antibodies weakening. The question isn’t primarily why she promotes it. The question is why enough people keep listening. Until that changes, the theories will keep finding new mouthpieces.

Oh man, is that lousy.

I would never write that “Owens began with legitimate critiques of progressive excess and cultural decline.” I remember seeing from the beginning that she was always just a grifter out for cash.

The style of the writing is also laden with “AI speak,” such as the infamous, “it’s not this, it’s that” giveaway: ”It’s not sophisticated. It’s the Protocols updated for podcasts and X posts.”

Note too here how this one also ends with posing a qustion that does not actually need answering and that tries to shift focus. It’s obvious why plenty of people keep listening. Nearly half of the global population agrees with what she’s saying, and thirty percent of Americans do, as I wrote about here in July:

And I have to give a nod to the clever reference in the response to the fact it refers to “There’s also the trauma angle I’ve written about before.” That’s true. I’ve also argued the point that “Intense antisemites often carry their own wounds and project them outward onto the world’s oldest scapegoat.” That’s fair to attribute to me. However, where Musk’s model fails is in bringing the point up at all, as the next sentence concedes with “whether that’s operating here is unknowable from the outside.”

I would not have brought up the trauma-antisemitism connection here because of my conclusion that Candace is not genuinely, sincerely an antisemite — she doesn’t really believe anything she says.

She just plays an antisemite on her podcast because emotionally-immature, far-right males like watching a beautiful woman affirm their prejudices back at them. There’s a huge market for telling aggrieved, confused men what they want to hear as British journalist has documented in depth in his book Lost Boys: Undercover Adventures in the Manosphere.

Further, I’ve never seen any evidence that she experienced trauma which could produce PTSD symptoms. One does not need to be a psychologist to see that narcissistic personality disorder is her real problem.

She may as well be named Candace Trump.

12. The Real Life Answer I Wrote Before Reviewing the 11 Previous Answers:

Candace Owens has told multiple former colleagues, including Jeremy Boreing — the boss who fired her for her bigotry — that she aspires to become the most famous woman in the world. She wants to be bigger than Oprah and she knows that she has the potential to do it. She also knows that conspiracy theories and antisemitism provoke huge amounts of traffic and engagement online.

If Candace thought she could become the world’s most famous woman through advocating for peace and love between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, then she would still be working at The Daily Wire.

Instead, she saw the big pile of “Alex Jones money” that comes with being the top merchant of conspiracy theory hate speech. And now she’s going for it. And she may very well get it all until the same thing happens to her that happened to him.

She will ultimately fly too close to the sun, the wax on her back will melt, and her brittle wings will finally crumble, sending her tumbling back down to earth, screeching and flailing, horrified at having to now return to life with the rest of us mere mortals and our toils on the cold, cold ground.

I suspect she’s going to eventually end up like Elizabeth Holmes.

So what do you think? Should I keep writing my Substack pieces myself?

Or should I outsource to Kimi and Lumo?

Which answer do you think was the best?

I did not expect that the Swiss and Chinese LLMs would win this initial round of the global contest at who could best imitate my writing.

Friends, when Communist China can imitate my writing better than our own American chatbots, seems to me like it’s time to throw in the towel.

China dominates the T-shirt market through decreasing cost and increasing availability. They’ve now simply triumphed in the same way with chatbots, as many long predicted they would.

And that’s fine. It turns out that the whole “AI is the new nuclear weapons” paradigm that Henry Kissinger promoted in the final years of his life was just something else that he was wrong about just like he was endlessly wrong about the Vietnam war, American foreign policy, his whole political ideology, and much else in his disastrous, morally-confused life.

It turns out that LLMs are not hydrogen bombs exploding over the desert.

They’re more like Baby Yoda shampoo bottles stacked in a row at Walmart.

Chun-Li has beaten Guile.

Please consider a premium subscription to support our investigations into antisemitism and the Far Right:

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Publisher’s Note: This is another experimental essay written in the Iain Sinclair-Alan Moore literary maximalist psychogeography tradition in which one embraces an intentionally longer, more detailed, more ornate, more absurd, more tangential, more place-focued, and more mythic style as a rhetorical technique and aesthic style. This approach is obviously not for everyone, but for those who do possess the mental palate and intellectual constitutions to appreciate complexity and who make the error of choosing to venture inside, you will likely enjoy it more than if I’d just knocked out something quick in 500 words or just asked an LLM to do it. See the previous experiment here, a 10,000-word polemical-historical investigation into Natalie Harp that begins in the ancient world with the creation of stringed instruments and includes her genealogy going back to Sherwood Forest in the 1500s:

In 1993, as a third-grade child learning to love books at West Valley Elementary School in the Bay Area’s Sunnyvale, California, I made a colossal mistake that I’ve now come to see has ruined my life.

I chose to become a writer.

I wrote a short story which I titled “The Mystic Waterfall.” It was about a boy my age who runs away from an abusive home and then stumbles into a fantasy world filled with magic and monsters after passing through a waterfall. Each new chapter of the story featured the boy entering the waterfall again and discovering a new magical world where he made new friends, fought new enemies, and each time gained new magic spells to develop new powers for himself and his allies.

Wizards aren’t supposed to just help themselves. They’re supposed to help their friends.

Looking back, I wonder if it was inspired by a church trip, where I remember this waterfall that fell onto a smooth slab of rock that had become a natural “slip and slide” at the camp. We had so fun climbing up and sliding down the rock over and over again like it was the waterslide at my neighbor’s house that dropped us into their swimming pool.

My parents and my teacher Mrs. Cole — a warm, tiny woman with short, curly black hair and large glasses who I rememer as resembling a perpetually grinning roly poly — praised me for this story. It was then that I decided that I would make this my job and my identity. I would write books and stories, like how my Dad read me The Hobbit before bed and we watched the cartoon recorded on VHS tape. I would be an author like J.R.R. Tolkien.

(Confession: I still haven’t read Lord of the Rings. I could never get passed the first 50 pages of Bilbo preparing his birthday party and my Dad’s advice to just skip the first 50 pages never made any sense to me. How could you read a novel and skip the first 50 pages? Why would any author in their right mind create a novel doing that? I came to enjoy the films when they came out and appreciate the broader franchise but not at all with the verve and devotion of true Tolkien fans. I suppose I chose more to live as Gandalf rather than to just read about him. This was a huge mistake too as you’ll soon understand.)

And so that was the mental picture I chose to embrace of myself from childhood. And the image of the writer and the wizard largely fused together at that point, perhaps since that first story was about a boy becoming a wizard of sorts. And this was before the little spectacled boy with the lightning bolt scar on his forehead followed the owl to Hogwarts. J.K. Rowling wrote the first book from 1990 through 1995.

When my friends and I would pretend at recess, the boys would all pick which superhero to be or what powers they wanted.

And I figured out real quick that if you picked “wizard” then that meant you could have any and all powers. If you’re the wizard on the playground then you could both shoot a fireball at the bad guy and use a healing spell to help you friend jump back into the action after they take a hit.

The more spells that a wizard could learn how to use, the more powerful he would become, the more he could heal or harm, the more he could adapt to any new situation.

And so that was the journey that I began as a child.

It’s was not that I just stayed in the initial lane of writing fantasy stories.

In fifth grade, the year we moved back to Indiana, I wrote an epic science fiction novel set in the year 4,000 about humans and aliens at war. I began keeping a journal — a habit I maintain today and that now has produced over 60 volumes.

I created a satirical superhero comic, Captain Eye, who was a one-eyed Cyclops-style hero whose eye could shoot lasers. Gee, I wonder where that idea emerged? I paired him with an antagonist with a giant curved nose like a rhino, Dr. DeNose, a mad scientist type.

Captain Eye’s side-kick, The Blob, emerged out of the Super Nintendo “Clay Fighter” video game, a comedic riff on the “Street Fighter II” and “Mortal Kombat” fighting style:

In sixth grade, I started expanding into other genres. I wrote action stories, historical adventures, and spooky mysteries. One way I found to bond with my classmates over this seemingly “weird” hobby of mine of writing fiction was to offer to use their name for characters in the story. When I was done then I’d hand them the spiral notebook and they’d read the half dozen or so handwritten pages featuring them. I still have almost all of those notebooks in my closet. My archive of my writing goes back to pre-school.

In seventh grade, I made the leap to writing non-fiction essays, particularly motivated by my new Evangelical faith. It was then that my tendency toward argumentative, polemical essays began. The youth minister had trained us that we had to be like little Billy Grahams. We were supposed to be Evangelists trying to persuade our classmates to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and commit themselves to the Kingdom of Mercy so they did not spend existence in a state of permanent torture with their skin peeling off in a burning lake of brimstone where their tongue felt perpetual desert sand thirst.

All of a sudden to me, writing essays to persuade people to embrace Jesus seemed much more important than writing fun little adventure stories. I would still continue to write fiction through the rest of my adolescence and then into college, but that was the beginning of my novelist aspirations beginning to subordinate to my need to use writing like a wizard, to try and combat the forces of evil in reality through words, rather than just in fantasies on the page. And so it remains to this day, alas.

Articles that I wrote could conceivably persuade my friends and others to change their lives, to become Christians and escape hell.

This development of the ability to make persuasive cases in writing then expanded beyond faith.

In eighth grade, the journalism journey began. That was when I took my first journalism classes. And I didn’t particularly like it. And I still don’t.

I learned quickly that the process of going and getting the facts right and then writing them properly on the page was real work. When you were writing a fantasy story then you could just make it up. But when you were writing about real people then you had to be sure to get everything just right or potentially face severe legal consequences.

I found this stressful in junior high and it’s still even more stressful today, especially when the person that I’m interviewing is one of history’s greatest lawyers — Alan Dershowitz! — as I found myself doing multiple times the last few years. There’s somebody you don’t want to misquote!

In spite of my reputation as a right-wing hellraiser, the reality is that I was only a Republican for about 3.5 years.

I did not register as a Republican until I voted for my first (and last) GOP presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. After seeing the practical failures of the Romney campaign, I made the decision that it was necessary to engage in party politics in order to influence how campaigns themselves operated.

Just helping get the right candidates on the ballot and the right ideas on the agenda was futile if the campaigns made catastrophic mistakes like their Get-Out-the-Vote software Orca failing on election day. I changed my registration from Republican to Independent on May 26, 2016 when Trump secured the presidential nomination and so it has remained in the decade that has followed. During all those years, watching Dershowitz as a vocal pro-Israel voice, I kept wondering: Just how long until he realized the Democrats were a lost cause?

I’m really rather shocked that he finally did it at this point. Talk about climbing aboard the Titanic and settling in for a lovely vacation while everyone else is rushing to the life rafts.

So while I learned how to do traditional journalism, I always avoided it whenever possible and soon focused on film reviews, opinion articles, and the editorial work of managing a section of the newspaper. Editing the journalists and making sure they did eveything right appealed much more than working as the reporter living under that pressure.

No, I preferred to become the newspaper’s equivalent of Roger Ebert. I bought books of his film reviews and studied his methods.

The fantasy of just watching movies all day and writing about their strengths and weaknesses sounded wonderful to me, that is if I didn’t just go into screenwriting myself instead. I remember Kevin Smith’s “Chasing Amy” as a particular influence at the time. When I became a teenager pursuing romantic relationships then I started exploring these sorts of relationship stories, seeing that more serious dramatic work with emotional depth was necessary if one wanted to potentially win Oscars or film festival awards.

I soon learned that both writing film criticism and then shooting one’s own films was a well-established path.

Through reading Ebert, I came to discover the art film world and eventually work in an arthouse movie theater, where I came to study François Truffaut, who had made the journey from critic to filmmaker and in doing so transformed the medium through The 400 Blows, the launch of the French New Wave movement.

When you see the French New Wave films and the 1990s independent films that were shot for under $100,000 as a teenager then the message is clear: you too can write a screenplay, figure out how to shoot it, and then launch your artistic career.

And it was around about this time when websites began to emerge, and so I learned then the process of building a personal site and using it as an archive of one’s writing.

In college, beginning as an English creative-writing major, I learned how to write poetry, screenplays, and deep research reports. I wrote massive experimental poems. I drafted scripts in multiple genres, one of which — about a man haunted by the ghost of his dead girlfriend — a class of student filmmakers did a decent job filming. And I spent years writing an op-ed column each week alongside a weekly film review.

Years.

This is when blogging emerged too as a new writing medium, circa 2003 and 2004. I soon began learning this style of writing — the blog post — and launched my own group blog publications that I managed and edited. (Yes, this exact thing that’s been going on with this Substack - this has been more than 20 years of this exact same thing since my undergrad years.) This was also when the wild west of internet commenting began. Once upon a time — back in the first half of the ‘00s — newspapers and websites first added comment sections at the ends of articles where readers could post their responses to the article and then engage in argument with one another. Often these turned into the author of the column having to jump in and defend themselves while explaining obvious points which commenters apparently missed. Attempting to engage with one’s readers online was generally fruitless back in 2003 and it has only gotten worse 23 years later.

Realizing that I needed more political background if I was to keep writing political op-eds in the college newspaper, I added political science as a second major. Then I proceeded to learn how to write analysis within the rules of that discipline. I didn’t just “learn about politics,” I learned how political scientists analyze politics, and thus how I could do so myself. How does one determine what is actually true in the political world?

One would think learning such training would help one in a political writing career. It took a long time before I realized that was not the case at all.

Having a politial science degree meant that I knew how to analyze political situations facts-first instead of what-we-want-to-be-true-first. My learning how to analyze politics from a detachd perspective put me at a disadvantage when I went into ideological media and activism. It meant that I was always more concerned with establishing the truth first and then acting in response to it, rather than just hard-charging ahead with whatever public policy goal we sought to accomplish.

In 2005, my freelance writing career began, when I sold my first article to the NBC affiliate WTHR.com, as they had started expanding into original articles. Initially five college film critics came on board. Gradually all but me fell off and I contiued with a weekly film review until 2009. It wasn’t Ebert’s chair, but for me from 21-25 it was more than enough to make me feel like a “real writer.”

And for my political science thesis in 2006, I did a real investigation of a campus controversy, interviewing people involved, determining the facts, assessing the university’s response, then drafting an 80-page report. I am so burnt out on thinking about the topic — and really rather regretful that I did not pick something else — that I am not even going to bother summarizing it here.

That was 20 years ago.

And in the years since I’ve had a writing, editing, publishing, activism, and journalism career which has drawn on all those skills that I learned as a teenager and then an undergraduate. It’s been a wild ride and has resulted in a freakish frankenstein’s resume now.

I’ve interviewed celebrities and been flown across the country to cover stories. I’ve had jobs where I had to write articles one-after-another all day. I’ve gone through the whole editorial process as an editor or publisher on so many novels. I’ve been sent on multi-day, secret research investigations that took me through digging into academic archives to find decades-old material that a senator would enter into the federal record. In moving to Los Angeles, I finally started meeting some of the people who had made and appeared in movies I’d seen since I was a child.

For some reason, Robert Davi comes to mind. Oh man, he was weird.

Oh yes, the reason why is because I attended one of those “Davi Sings Sinatra” concerts since the Freedom Center purchased (mabye received?) a bunch of tickets. I think Andrew Breitbart was there that night, if I recall. They were buddies as right-wing Hollywood was such a small space then. I imagine it still is, though perhaps a bit bigger now that the House of Ellison has bought its way into town — a mistake they will ultimately come to regret, but many of us have to learn our lessons the hard way. David and Bari will have only themselves to blame for their continued humiliation.

Davi is one of Hollywood’s most notable right-wingers, which seemed to me to largely derive from his very mystically-minded Catholicism.

But I didn’t just stick with Hollywood. The political side pulled me toward working for nonprofit think tanks and activist groups.

And the journalist work soon took a much darker, more hard-edged, investigative turn for many years. I spent multiple days attending conferences put on by Muslim organizations in Southern California which the FBI had long-identifed as associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. I would record their speeches, take photos, and scour the vendor tables for offensive literature. Sometimes it might be a Muslim Brotherhood leader beaming in from Kuwait and one of his talks would even be in Arabic. I’d record it and it would need to be translated later. I would do further surveillance of these groups, attending their protests outside the Saudi consulate when they picketed about the arrests of some Muslim Brotherhood-linked clerics. At times they’d realize that I was a hostile activist journalist and I’d end up engaging in arguments with them when they insulted me, accused me of being a racist and an anti-Muslim bigot. I’ll always remember that look of surprise when I responded to the CAIR media rep with “so why did the UAE declare you guys a terrorist group back in 2014?”

When I see writers get so rattled on Substack over a few critical comments of them, I think back to all times when I’ve had to engage directly with antisemites face-to-face on the streets. I think about being at protests where people start yelling at each other and police eye closely, wondering if they may need to intervene.

And for another organization which I worked at for years, often I had to perform work comparable to a private investigator, spending weeks tasked with researching just a single person and trying to crack their real identity behind an online pseudonym.

One time when I did I was horrified at what I found. He really was one of those guys “living in his mother’s basement” who had built himself up as a big man online behind a pseudonym but was really a small man in life behind his mask. It was so weird because here I was being paid to spend 20 hours a week hunting down a guy who hid behind one of the absolute lamest catch phrases in one of Kevin Smith’s movies!

I’d discoverd a message of his mother putting out a call to try and find him as she was worried about him disappearing for days after having some sort of nervous breakdown. I knew that if we exposed his online identity that it could provoke him to do God-knows-what. It seemed conceivable he could kill himself were we to unmask him.

I knew it was him, but was so thankful that we really didn’t have enough strong evidence to prove conclusively it was him.

There have just been so many strange men like him who I’ve investigated or written about or had to work with on their writing. I’m just so tired of dealing with them. So many of them are just nuts.

And then it’s been the last three and a half years of nearly daily antisemitism coverage.

This year I also finally hit a freelance writing record — the highest hourly rate ever and the highest amount I’d ever earned in a day the the AI-training project pushed us to grind as much as possible to hit a hard deadline. They paid double what I had grown used to as a journalist. That was a bear of a project and I hope to never work on one like it ever again, and especially not for that client.

None of this is a brag or a “flex” because much of the time I’ve come to regret all of it.

This is a warning. I didn’t get anywhere close to the peak of the mountain, only glimpses from some close to the summit but still so far.

Right now the thing that I’m most proud of in my writing career, is simply this:

I’m proud of the work that we’ve done with this publishing company-turned-digital-media-studio. These are four great books by four gifted authors.

But apart from that, I wish that I could Eternal Sunshine the rest of it out of my head. I would have been better off if I’d never left working at the arthouse movie theater.

The reason is because of a phenomenon that some journalists, researchers, and people in law enforcement experience called “vicarious trauma.”

Here’s how the Department of Justice describes the phenomenon:

Perhaps a big chunk of my personality and writing persona are evident in that list?

The “feeling hopeless about the future” and “worrying excessively about potential dangers in the world and loved ones’ safety” resonate a bit heavy this evening.

So yeah, I’ve already tried to cope for years with the PTSD from the physical violence, but much of the way that I did has been to focus on other people’s trauma which is much worse than mine.

“Out of the frying pan, into the fire.”

And for what?

What has any of these years of writing and editing about the world’s darkness produced apart from given me such a hypervigilant view of a violent world?

This approach is not needed or valued now that we have LLMs.

I never liked “Blade Runner.”

The movie’s aesthetic never impressed me and its premise of a man tasked with killing synethetic humans who might be real never appealed.

And it appeals even less now that this is our reality on Substack.

I spent the last 34 years, since age eight in sweet roly poly Mrs. Cole’s third grade class, becoming a writer to the point that I could professionally support a household.

But none of this matters.

How well somebody can write or how original their points or how how much experience they bring to the digital kitchen table does not matter today.

When somebody taps a headline that grabs their attention, they almost never know who wrote it nor do they care. They don’t know whether they’re going to receive a YouTube video with two paragraphs of stale commentary or a 10,000-word deep dive that took days or weeks to research and draft.

We’re now at a place in our culture where an individual’s expertise does not really matter in how people choose to assess their information.

In America today, people will value the position of the attractive, entertaining TV presenter more than the professional with on-the-ground experience.

They’ll prefer the perspective of the 25-year-old TikToker and YouTuber, to the expert who has to tell the story in a book and then they’re lucky if they’ll appear on some business bro’s podcast to answer dumb questions.

My morning routine is pretty consistent now.

I gave up coffee this year to try and reduce anxiety after receiving a diagnosis last year.

Instead, I let the morning’s headlines wake me up. Given that here in California, we’re three hours behinind when the East Coast officially launches that global day’s events, when I’m rising, whether it be five, six, seven, or — after an especially late night writing session — eight — then I’m needing to catch up with the rest of the country.

So apart from hitting a range of news sources to make sure there hasn’t been some big explosion somewhere or the assassination of a world leader, then it’ll be time to see if any of the 1275 Substacks that I’m subscribed to have anything to offer which seems pressing.

Of course, the Zionist Substacks which I subscribe to take a high priority.

I won’t name these two individuals so as not to embarrass them.

The first one that I opened came from an individual I’d met in person on a few occassions over a decade ago before their ascent to moderate fame, and who had a family member whose work I had previously edited. They had arisen to a fairly visible position in pro-Israel media but had seemingly grown disinterested in me, as many writers I’ve noticed become when I’m no longer useful to them. I’ve grown very accustomed these days to writers pretending to be my friend when it suits them and abandoning when I’m apparently no longer of use.

I went to click the Pangram AI-scanning option which Substack has released recently.

Click it and then it will give you an estimate of how much of the text was likely AI-generated.

Pangram

How does Pangram work?

We think it is important to be able to reliably identify AI-generated writing, so we built a detector that does it. Because the problem is so important, it’s only prudent to be transparent about how that works…

Read more

2 months ago · 349 likes · 165 comments · Pangram

The software works incredibly well — it makes an error in one out of 10,000 times. That’s a far higher accuracy rate than we get it political polling. And writers on Substack can scan their posts with Pangram before they publish. They can know exactly what their readers will see when we scan their post with Pangram.

However, some writers choose to hide this number from their readers. At the bottom of the screen that the Substack writer clicks before sending they have these options:

Leaving Pangram on is the default option for posts. If a writer wants to disable a particular post, then that is a conscious choice.

As an editor and publisher, as far as I’m concerned, a writer refusing to allow a reader to scan their writing for AI text is the same thing as a cop pulling over an erratic driver for suspected drunken driving and them grinning like an idiot and refusing to take a breathalyzer.

What the hell are you hiding, exactly, Mr. Romo?

Now any time I come across a post that does this then I’ll go down in the comments and ask them why they disabled the AI scanning and if they used an LLM to write the piece. These are rhetorical questions.

I don’t need Pangram to tell me that something is AI writing. Having become a professional AI trainer who has contributed to three of the top AI labs, I can spot LLM writing from ten time zones away. It’s as predictable and consistent as a McDonald’s cheeseburger.

So I did this with one pro-Israel post this morning from a writer with a much larger platform and level of visibility than I do. And they got all huffy and tried to deny it and urged me to simply leave. Never mind that I was susbcribed to them, had promoted their work multiple times, and had supported their family member. They probably didn’t even remember me.

So I continued my morning wake-up-scrolling and came to another pro-Israel Substacker who I appreciate and whose views generally aligned with mine.

And I did the same thing as with the previous Zionist activist who I admired.

What did Pangram have to say?

We have another refused breathalyzer.

I was a bit kinder this time in the comments asking as this was someone with much less media experience (I’m pretty sure) and with whom I’d had much warmer interactions recently. They sort of hedged and tried to justify closing the AI detector, admitting they did use it to help and then explained their process.

And my answer to them was simple: just describe that usage level in your AI statement that shows up when a user does the Pangram scanning. If they had done that then I would have just read the piece.

Just because an article may show up saying that a chunk of it or even 100% is AI-written, that does not mean that I’m going to refuse to read it.

If the author says in their statement something along the lines of “Yes, I use AI to help me write and I’m proud of it,” then I have no grievance with that person at all. They’re not hiding anything. There are a number of writers here on Substack who use AI in their writing much more than I would but that’s OK. They’re open about it, they realize their limitaitons now as a less experiened writer, and they’re still providing plenty of their own value too.

If both of these two Zionist Substackers had not disabled the AI scanning and had simply noted their AI use in the statement, then I would have simply carried on reading the pieces.

But when an author is willing to conceal something as simple as whether they used AI to write their article or not, then it opens up the questions:

If they won’t be honest with their readers about their AI use, then what else are they choosing not to be honest with their readers in disclosing? And what are they lying to themselves about too?

I left this as my final comment as they explained how they used AI, which seemed reasonable enough to me if it were only disclosed:

Make that clear in your AI use statement and don’t disable the AI scanning then.

What’s the point of me even continuing to write, [name removed]? I take the time and effort to write my pieces myself and almost nobody really cares.

I was planning to do a big piece 5k+ words piece taking down Candace Owens like I did with Natalie Harp. But why should I bother? I may as well generate some basic LLM anti-Candace op-ed since apparently people don’t care enough to notice.

Let’s go ahead and do an experiment:

Over the last year I’ve explored live-streaming video:

Seven months ago, Substack introduced the Substack TV app so people can start watching Substack videos not just on their phones, but now on their televisions. I guess ther are some people that still do this old fashioned watching TV, right?

On Substack

Introducing the Substack TV app, now in beta

Today we’re launching the Substack TV app for Apple TV and Google TV. Substack is the home for the best longform—work creators put real care into and subscribers choose to spend time with. Now these thought-provoking videos and livestreams have a natural home on the TV, where subscribers can settle in for the extended viewing that great video deserves…

Read more

8 months ago · 1758 likes · 818 comments · Zach @ Substack

When Substack launched and the first initial waves of us came in over the coming years — June 2022 was my point of entry — this was purely a platform for long-form newsletters and audio podcasts.

However, to those of us who watched as Substack took infusions of venture capitalist cash to stay alive, it soon became apparent that the platform would have to change in order to survive.

There was no way Substack could pay back its investors — forget so much as make a profit — just with a small cut of premium newsletter subscriptions.

The VC guys don’t just want a profitable business. They want the unicorns that provide 100 times their initial investment so they can cover the losses of all the busineses that fail.

Substack’s real competitors are not the other newsletter services like BeeHiiv, Ghost, and Mailchimp.

Substack is trying to compete with Facebook, X, and YouTube.

Substack is not an email in your inbox anymore.

Substack is an app on your phone.

So they’re now competing with the other key apps that suck up your attention. And to compete that means going visual. Print publications cannot compete with the excitement provided by live-streaming and short-form video. And you can’t read an article the way you can listen to an audio podcast while washing the dishes, folding the laundry, or driving the commute.

And this is the way of the world now.

It’s why last fall I announced the shift from God of the Desert Books to God of the Desert Digital Media Studios:

And the reality here is difficult to consider:

Giving up being a writer to instead become a livestreamer and podcaster.

The writing skills that so many of us spent a lifetime developing simply are not valued today.

To focus on writing articles and books today has now become the equivalent of horse and buggy while everyone else has switched to motor-cars:

But the harder truth, and the bigger picture reason why I’ve come to resent having chosen to become a writer, is that these skills were actually never valued.

Going back to the ancient world, people who could see danger coming which others could not suffered the horror of having to watch as others refused to believe us.

The real reason at my exhaustion today at coming to see “writer” as a catasrophic mistake in life paths goes further and deeper than what I’ve described so far of:

1. Having overdosed on writing about terrorism and hate groups

2. Having now grown frustrated that human-written articles which take days to write must now compete (and always lose) with bland pieces which emerge from an LLM in seconds. It doesn’t matter if we as writers can write better than LLMs. Most people aren’t going to know or care since they’re content with mediocre writing. More people would rather flip through tweets and TikToks then absurdly long articles like this.

3. Having realized that this platform really, really, really wants us to start putting out visual media for their new YouTube competitor app and that unfortunately they’re right that they as a company and we as writers have to do this goddamn “pivot to video” move yet again whether we want to or not.

4. Feeling as though all this writing has really failed to accomplish anything meaningful anywhere near the stress and sacrifices needed to produce it.

The real reason is something that I’ve been ranting to my close friends on the phone about lately and I may as well reveal it here for those of you really thinking about going into this writing profession can think about:

Going very deep into becoming a writer produces a deeply isolating perspective on the world which sets you apart from other people, largely in a way which is more curse than blessing.

Learning all those different forms of writing through junior high, high school, and then college, learning how to do deep research, meant I had a whole bunch of different spells and modes for analyzing and interpreting the world. I could apply the literary lenses of Virginia Woolf and Allen Ginsberg, or the political lenses of Niccolo Machiavelli and Allan Bloom. Soon I would gain the occult lenses of Aleister Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson too. Nowadays the cultural lenses of Alan Moore and seem to dominate.

Most people only have a handful of ways to see the world. The writer ends up collecting dozens and dozens.

What having all these ways of seeing the world at hand means is that we see things which other people do not. And this is a curse.

This is nothing special about me — anyone who learns to look at the world deeply and with complexity will find secrets hidden in plain sight wherever they focus their attention long enough. And the price of that will be heavy, even heavier should they be foolish enough to speak of what they have discovered.

To see and speak the truth, only to be ignored, is such a painful burden.

Lately it’s the ghost of Lt. Gen. Ion. Mihai Pacepa who haunts me the most. I mean metaphorically, not literally. He was very Christian and knew to go to heaven, so I’ve never gotten a sense that his spirit has hung around since his passing on February 14, 2021.

This morning I sent a friend some “secret” documents Pacepa shared with me, including one which presented evidence arguing numerous points like these:

Back in 2022, I wrote this piece summarizing Pacepa’s unique view of the JFK assassination:

You’d think that Americans would be interested in finally understanding the JFK assassination and the broader machinations of the KGB during the Cold War.

You’d think that Pacepa could develop a broader audience since he possessed such a singular perspective. But he couldn’t. He was the former spymaster of Romania. He was the highest ranking defector from the Soviet bloc.

And yet in the last decade of his life, he could not get a better editor to edit his blog posts than 29-year-old me who revered him as the legend he was while few others would. Ronald Reagan called the draft of Pacepa’s memoir Red Horizons his “Bible for dealing with dictators.”

And it shouldn’t have been that way. He didn’t deserve that. He was great to work with and his writing was extraordinary. He should have had more more experienced and skilled editors than me. And he eventually did when it was nearly too late, as his final book Operation Dragon: Inside the Kremlin’s Secret War on America co-authored with former CIA chief Ambassador R. James Woolsey, came out from Encounter Books on February 23, 2021, just a week after his death from Covid.

But has it really mattered?

What difference does it make when a wizard shines a light in the darkness? People would rather stay in darkness.

Pacepa labored over three books in the last 25 years of his life and wrote tons of articles. But what did all that work accomplish? The highest-ranking Soviet defector laid out his unique understanding of history and the world.

And the collective response is a shrug. The best he could get to publish his writings in his final years are a few goofy blogs and independent right-wing publishing houses.

One might chalk that up to ideological bias, but as much as I’ve worked with writers on the margins, I’ve known writers with broader “mainstream” success, regular Big-5 publishing deals, international reputations, rolodexes of celebrity buddies going back decades, whose work had been adapted into films and documentaries.

And they generally were not happy with the level of following and achievement they had reached. And they were decades ahead of me and way smarter and more talented that I would ever be. And they were not at all wrong to feel that way. I knew how great they were as writers and that they should have way more support by now than they did.

And gradually I came to understand something which Sir Anthony Hopkins said:

Hopkins is one of the top five greatest living actors. One could even argue the best.

And hearing this the first time, I felt so haunted. He was telling us the horrifying secret from the top.

Pursue as far as you can and when you achieve the peak then what treasure awaits you?

An empty box

Frank Herbert offered similar wisdom:

But it comes down to the biblical variation to tell the truth in the most painful possible way:

And so eventually when little 8-year-old Davey passed through the Mystic Waterfall into the last stage of his journey before returning to where he began, he found himself at the top of a small mountain and could now see the source of the stream as it stumbled down over the edge of the cliff.

And the shadow of 42-year-old David in 2026 whispered to the boy in 1992 who had run away in fear, “it’s safe. You can go home now. There’s nowhere left to go and no more spells to learn, no more enemies to vanquish or battlefield friends to heal. You don’t have to be afraid any more.”

Davey could see in his mind’s eye the grown-up with the scraggly beard, the thinning hairline, too many rings on his fingers, and tired eyes.

“It’s ok,” the old man said, “you don’t need to be afraid anymore.”

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Publisher’s Note: This is our third experimental essay written in the Alan Moore Maximalist Mode which demands an intentionally and unapologetically much longer, layered, discursive, baroque, and absurd style than sane humans would regard as in any way necessary or justifiable. In this installment, we begin the first experiment with aggressive deployment of the psychogeography literary technique pioneered by legendary author Iain Sinclair, who Moore has declared the greatest writer in the English language and cited as his primary influence.

And so we provide a fair and judicious disclosure that labyrinths are built for the enjoyment of those foolish enough to wander inside, not their annoyance. We have killed the “kill your darlings” cliche and invite others to do so also. Liberate yourself. Ernest Hemingway is dead and let him rot. May his bones return to the dust. Today we now explode into infinite space. Does it matter whether a reader glances over an article for 10 seconds or three hours? Write what thou wilt shall be the hole in the Law.

In the twenty-first century, minimalism is out, maximalism is in. Postmodernism is out, Meta-modernism is in. Be not afraid, this will be much more fun.

This is how we are as Americans: BIGGER IS BETTER. We shall continue to go as long and as complex and as wild as possible and you will like it and thank us for it afterward.

This is the eighth installment in our ongoing Woke Reich Neo-Fascists Rising Series monitoring global antisemitism and analyzing Far Right extremist ideology in America. See the previous parts:

1. Introduction: The 10 Most Dangerous Far-Right Figures in America Today

2. News Briefing: JD Vance Defends Iran Receiving a $300 Billion ‘Reconstruction Fund’

3. News Briefing: Antisemitic Accelerationist Terrorists Targeted Trump at the Freedom 250 Fight Night

4. News Briefing: Nick Fuentes Asks: ‘Are We Fascists or Are We Not? Is This a New Rome and a New Empire?’

5. Polling Analysis: ‘But One Fourth of the Population is Retarded!’

6. An Investigation: Don’t Panic: How We Can Know Demons Now Control Tucker Carlson

7. A Maximalist Podcast Analysis: What is ‘Goyslop’? Just More Proof Tucker Carlson Is a Godless Antisemite

Please consider supporting our investigative efforts with a premium subscription:

Subscribe now

Sex is the reason why we have harps today.

The musical instrument that became the modern day harp originated in approximately 4,000 BCE in both Mesopotamia and Egypt as a key tool for the performance of fertility rituals to invoke and appease deities representing the frightening forces of nature and violence.

Dan Levitan — a lecturer in Stanford’s music program who serves as the principal harpist in the Santa Rosa Symphony, Marin Symphony, and Symphony San Jose — explained in a 2024 StanfordLive article that “the music of these early harps was deeply connected to spirituality and ceremony. In ancient Mesopotamia, bull-headed lap harps represented the pagan fertility god Dumuzid. Angular harps were played in processions and rituals in Sumer and Assyria.”

A deity drawn from the dreams of shepherds and associated with agriculture, Dumuzid — also known as Tammuz — appears on the Babylonian Kings list as one of the antediluvian rulers before the flood, mythologized in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of Noah.

Here’s one of the images which Wikipedia offers on his page depicting him and his preferred canine copulation modus operandi — a popular approach still today! — dating to the Old Babylonian Period (c. 1830 BC — c. 1531), apparently one of his preferred extracurricular activities:

The mythology of the period depicts Dumuzid as the first and primary consort of Inanna, the spider goddess of war, love, and sex who would later evolve into Ishtar, the original and archetypal porn star.

Here is an example of the poetry this religious tradition produced, courtesy of 1983’s Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth, Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer:

We men really haven’t changed that much in what we want even 6,000 years later, have we? Sorry about that, ladies.

Tammuz appears by name once in the Bible, in the eighth chapter of the Book of Ezekiel:

¹² He said to me, “Son of man, have you seen what the elders of Israel are doing in the darkness, each at the shrine of his own idol? They say, ‘The Lord does not see us; the Lord has forsaken the land.’” ¹³ Again, he said, “You will see them doing things that are even more detestable.”

¹⁴ Then he brought me to the entrance of the north gate of the house of the Lord, and I saw women sitting there, mourning the god Tammuz. ¹⁵ He said to me, “Do you see this, son of man? You will see things that are even more detestable than this.”

Here is a cool graphic which I requested Copilot to render of the verses:

“I saw women sitting there, mourning the god Tammuz.”

And so they still do…

“You are all that matters to me. I don’t want to ever let you down. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this Life…” — Natalie Harp, Executive Assistant to the President in a letter which alarmed the Secret Service

While the harp accompanied the rituals of the sex gods living large in ancient Mesopotamia, the instrument served a comparable function for the Egyptians, most visibly in the cult of Hathor, the civilization’s most influential fertility goddess, a cow deity oftend depicted with giant horns:

It is not a coincidence that the Egyptian love goddess also controls music and dance.

All of these are interconnected — love, sex, desire, dance, art, culture, food, drink, indulgence, celebration and music. Here is a scene of a funeral celebration to Hathor, from the 14th century BCE, as depicted on the the wall of the tomb chapel of Nebamun:

These are the tools which witches and wizards use to hypnotize and entrance those we seek to influence.

Ireland chose the harp as its national symbol. The Irish then slapped it on the side of their other national symbol, the one we all know with such intimacy, the world’s greatest beer, the divine nectar the Irish call Guinness and have blessed us all to enjoy.

The video above identifies the harp’s origins in Egypt and charts the journey across Europe, primarily by the Phoenicians, arriving in Ireland around the eighth century. Through the Middle Ages, Gaelic harpists grew renowned across Europe, with respect coming from even those who hated the Irish having, forced to concede their musical skill.

The video also quotes King John, who ruled from 1199 until 1216, saying “the only thing to which I find that this people apply a commendable industry is the playing upon musical instruments. They are incomparably more skillful than any other nation I have ever seen.”

This truth of the 1200s has endured now into the 2020s.

Séamus Ó Flatharta — a mutli-instrumentalist musician who has won 23 All Ireland Titles since age seven — represents his people and their heritage well here:

The Irish cultural ability to deploy music, language, and charm to influence others has endured to this day and we can see that when we trace the family history of Natalie Harp as far back as possible, which so far seems to reach into the sixteenth century according to the extended family’s collective online genealogy efforts.

Having explored my own family’s online genealogical record for many years now, I know full well that we can’t trust this information online for the simple reason that different websites can disagree. It’s also very easy to confuse people with similar names and records remain perpetaully incomplete.

So in laying out the narrative below of the Harp family’s sojourn from Renaissance-era England to Enlightenment-era Baltimore to Civil War-era Indiana to Clinton-era California to the Trump-era White House today, we all understand this is a tentative speculation based on the available evidence, to be updated in the future, and I hope you enjoy reading wandering through this is as much as I enjoyed assembling it for your pleasure and erudition.

Natalie Harp’s family did not start with the name Harp.

The earliest ancestor I’ve yet found traceable to Natalie Harp began with the name Earpe in the sixteenth century. However, the name does go back further, emerging in central England during the High Middle Ages, with the earliest found version name appearing in 1157 in Tideswell, Derbyshire under the listing of Richard le Yrope. Other variations of the name appeared in the following centuries, including, according to House of Names, Earp, Irp, Yrp, Epp, Eppe, Erp, Eirpe, Yrpe, Epps

The name comes from the Old English word "ierpe," which means “swarthy,” someone with a darker skin color.

Perhaps one might dare say “redneck.”

In 1560 in the county of Nottinghamshire, England, a woman of unknown name gave birth to Francis Earpe, who would live 86 years, dying in the final year of the First English Civil War in 1646 in Shropshire, England.

In May of that year, King Charles I surrendered his army to Scottish forces at the town of Southwell in Nottinghamshire.

Outside the Banqueting House on Whitehall, in London, on January 30, 1649, an unknown executioner publicly beheaded Charles after the fallen king insisted on his innocence and declared himself a "martyr of the people.”

Francis’s body rests at Dudley Castle, a fortress believed built after the Norman Conquests in 1066, with some historians naming the French baron Ansculf de Picquigny or his son William Fitz Ansculf as the original builder in 1070.

The first mention of the site in the historical record appears in the Domesday Book of 1086, the survey William the Conqueror (1028-1087) — also known as William the Bastard — commissioned of England and Wales.

Today, English folklorists regard the castle as one of the most haunted places in the country.

They discuss “the Gray Lady,” which visitors believe to be the ghost of Dorothy Beaumont, who lived and died there during a three-week siege, the same year as Francis, in 1646.

According to Matt Bayliss’s Serith blog, on August 30 2014, Dean and Amy Harper — yes, of all names! — visited the castle. They later found this among the photos they took, and Dean described,

“Amy saw a glow, as though a light was on, on the top window level. On zooming in we noticed on the bottom, inside an arch, there was a lady and what appears to be a girl, too. Neither of us are ghost hunters but we do wonder if this could be the Grey Lady ghost – the picture is quite clear.”

For all we know that may as well be photoshop, but it’s fun to believe in ghosts so it seemed worthy of inclusion. Myth and folkore offer a key texture here in this experimental maximalist exploration.

The castle remained in use until 1750 when a fire destroyed the interior, resulting in the grounds reincarnating as a recreational area in the 1800s and joining the Dudley Zoo in 1937.

Further, this is the Nottingham of the legend of Robin Hood (which is generally understood as set during the 1190s or in the 1200s) and you can visit Sherwood forest here, which William declared a royal hunting ground in 1066, the year he began his reign as the first Norman King of England:

Twenty years later, around about 1580, Francis’s wife, a woman also of unknown name, gave birth to his son John Earpe Sr., again in Nottinghamshire.

John would fail to match his father’s absurd longevity for the 1600s, dying in approximately February 1631 at age 51, but having raised two children and relocated to Barony of Fews, County Armagh, the smallest of Northern Ireland’s counties, coming in at 512 square miles or 1,327 square kilometers.

The researchers place John Earpe, Jr.’s birth at approximately 1600 in Staffordshire, England, a ceremonial county of 661 square miles (1,713 square kilometers) which today has grown to a population of around one million people.

John Earpe, Jr. lived 76 years, dying 216 miles (348 kilometers) away in 1677 in Armagh, Ireland’s religious center:

In 1624, John Earpe, Jr. married Juanita Chitwood (1605-1650), a 19-year-old Irishwoman, who gave birth to their son Thomas Earp in 1631 in Lurgan, Armagh, Ireland. He lived 69 years, dying 234 miles (376 kilometers) away from his father in 1700 in Derby, Derbyshire, England.

The next generation dared to leap across the Atlantic and earned the privilege of becoming Americans, a decision their descendants seemed to have largely appreciated, save apparently for Preston Harp as we’ll soon detail.

Thomas married his wife Susannah in 1655 and she gave birth to Thomas Marian Earp, Jr the next year in 1656 in Barony of Fews, Armagh, Ireland.

Thomas Marian Earp, Jr immigrated to America in 1674, married his 15-year-old wife Mary Peddicord in 1675, and they settled in Anne Arundel County, Maryland:

Anne Calvert, Baroness Baltimore (1615/1616 – July 23, 1649) provided her name to the county and also the state’s capital Annapolis, founded in 1649. Here is a portrait of her by an unknown artist:

She was the wife of Cecil Calvert (8 August 1605 – 30 November 1675), 2nd Baron Baltimore, who founded the Province of Maryland in 1634.

Here is a portrait of him painted in 1670 by the artist Gerard Soest (c. 1600 – 11 February 1681). Of course he just had to include one of his enslaved children as a sign of his wealth:

Maryland distinguished itself as one of the four American slave states — the others being Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri — which abstained from seceeding during the Civil War.

Thirteen African enslaved persons arrived in 1642 in St. Mary's City and, according to The Encyclopedia of Colonial and Revolutionary America, in just over a century later, by 1755 Black people made up 40 percent of the state’s population, with the vast majority enslaved.

In the Civil War era, two former slaves from Maryland — Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman — emerged as central figures in the fight against slavery.

Thomas Marian Earp, Jr would raise two sons and die at 63 in 1720 in Baltimore, Maryland, 3,554 miles (5,720 kilometers) from his father’s resting place.

At the time of his death, the city we now know as Baltimore was not even founded yet. That would not happen until 1729 and by 1752 there were only 25 houses with a population of 200 people. By 1775 there would still only be a population of 5,934, and by 1790 only 13,503.

Thomas, Jr.’s son John Wesley Earp became the first authentic, full-blooded American man in the family, born in 1680 at Macklams Friendship, Baltimore, in the Province of Maryland. He married Rebecca Wheeler on July 29, 1704 when they had both reached 24 — how unusual to find a couple in this period of the exact same age as we usually find a much older man. Together they raised five children:

1. Edward Earp

2. Joshua Earp (later Joshua Harp)

3. Henry Earp

4. America Earp (How appropriate for a Christian name of this era...)

5. William Earp

John Wesley would die at 64 in 1744 in Fairfax, Fairfax County, in the Colony of Virginia, a mere 57 miles (92 kilometers) from his father.

The town and county take their names from Scottish noble Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron, who lived from October 22, 1693 through December 9, 1781. He owned the Northern Neck Proprietary, a land grant he received from King Charles II in 1649 which amounted to about five million acres (22,000 square kilometers.)

Fairfax operated plantations which required the forced labor of hundreds of enslaved persons and remained a Loyalist during the Revolutionary War, his friendship with George Washington apparently the reason why he was not stripped of his property.

The record seems to suggest that the next generation made the leap from “Earp” to “Harp.”

Online documentation lists John Wesley’s son as Joshua (Earp) Harp and born in 1705 in Baltimore. In 1728 he married Rebecca Mary Budd (1709-1785) and they raised five children:

1. William Berry Earp (1729-1778)

2. Joseph Harp (1750-1819)

3. Caleb Earp (1754-1779)

4. Matthew Earp (1736-1808)

5. Phillip Earp

Joshua lived until 1771, dying at 66 in Fairfax, in the same location as his father.

The next generation would witness the flaming fires of war and annihilation that formed our United States.

Rebecca gave birth to their second son, Joseph Harp, in 1750 in Johnston County, North Carolina.

He married Mary Marklew, an English woman born in Sussex, and she proceeded to give birth to nine children between 1776 and 1799, five of whom (bolded) lived into adulthood: Sarah, William Cullen, John Edward, Burgess, Lydia, Jemima, Nelly, Zachariah, and Joe.

Joseph lived until 1819, dying in Kentucky — exact location unknown, but Nelson County seems a reasonable guess — a leap of at least 418 miles (673 kilometers.)

Mary gave birth to John Edward Harp in approximately 1782 in Virginia. On January 31, 1804, he married Sarah Watson (1783-1817) in Nelson County, Kentucky, created in 1784 and named after the founding father Thomas Nelson Jr. (December 26, 1738 – January 4, 1789,) a former governor of Virginia, Revolutionary War general and signatory of the Declaration of Independence.

As of the 2020 Census, today 46,738 live in the county and 88.8% of them are white. The county is known as the “Bourbon Capital of the World” with Bardstown as Ground Zero.

If you have never done a Kentucky Bourbon distillery tour and a tasting then add it to your bucket list. You don’t even have to be a big alcohol person — it’s just a worthwhile experience to have that showcases the liquid art that Kentuckians have created.

Between 1804 and 1816 Sarah and John Edward created seven children, with four (bolded) living into adulthood: Sarah, Elizabeth Betsey, Joseph, Richard, Ignatious Walter, Eleanor, and Lydia Ann.

After Sarah died around 1817, John Edward remarried on July 1, 1817, to Thresea “Tresy” Lucille Dickson (1795-1830) who gave birth to John E. Harp, Jr. on November 25, 1828 in Perry, Indiana, making him the first true Hoosier in the family. (I am also a reluctant Hoosier, born 156 years later about 80 miles away in Bloomington.)

John Edward — the Harp who committed the colossal mistake of moving the family to Indiana — would die in 1858, buried in Perry County, 65 miles (105 kilometers) away from his father.

Perry, established in 1814, is the hill capital of the state, with 60,000 acres of Hoosier National Forest and a population today of 19,170 in the 2020 Census, with over a third residing in the county seat Tell City, founded in 1858.

John E. Harp, Jr. married Mariah Masterson (1831-1889) on November 29, 1848. Between 1849 and 1873 she gave birth to eleven children, six of whom made it to adulthood (bolded): James, Aaron, Abner, John, Joseph Marion, Mary, Martha, Lydia Ann, Richard, Edward, and Samuel.

John E. lived until Sept. 21, 1885 and would also be buried in Perry, like his father.

Here is his grave at Figgins Cemetery in Mount Pleasant:

We start seeing photos with the next generation as the family enters into the 20th century.

Here’s Abner Harp — also a Hoosier beginning to end — born May 10, 1853 in Perry.

On May 21, 1876 in Orange County, Indiana, he married Mary Catherine Nicholson (1860-1883), who would give birth to their children Eli, James William, and Gus, each who would live long enough to see the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon administrations, respectively.

Four years after her death, on August 24, 1887, Abner married again, this time to Martha E 'Mattie' Gonterman (1866-1932.) Between 1888 and 1905, Mattie gave birth to seven children, all of whom reached adulthood with the exception of Luella (1895-1907.)

Here is the couple’s marriage record from 1887:

Here is a photo of Mattie, Abner, and their brood. What an adorable family:

Abner died May 11, 1917 in Evansville, Indiana, about 63 miles (101 kilometers) from his father. He’s buried in Locust Hill Cemetery, in section 17, lot 7, grave 3.

There is no grave marker.

Mary Catherine gave birth to their son Eli Harp on March 27, 1877 in Indiana. He married Sarah Catherine Shellenberger (1882-1960) and she gave birth to ten children between 1900 and 1924, all but one who would reach adulthood:

1. William Earl Harp (1900-1968)

2. David L. Harp (1902-1971)

3. Percy B. Harp (1906-1966)

4. Noah M. Harp (1910-1973)

5. Arthur Ivo Harp (1913-2002

6. George Raymond Harp (1916-2005)

7. Wilma Janie Harp (1918-2004)

8. Elsie Marie Harp (1920-1940)

9. Julius Edward Harp (1924-1986)

10. Thelma Harp Jones (dates unknown so far)

In 1918, Eli described his occupation as a fisherman. He lived until January 3, 1959, dying in Evansville just like his father.

Here is their family tombstone at the Park Lawn Cemetery and Mausoleum in Evansville:

It looks like Sarah and Eli planned to rest forever alongside their daughter Elsie who died at age 20 in 1940.

I haven’t discovered yet how she died.

Now the third most populous city in Indiana after Indianapolis and Fort Wayne according to the 2020 Census, Evansville has reached 118,414 citizens. Hugh McGary Jr. founded the town in 1812 and incorporated it in 1817, naming it after Robert Morgan Evans who fought in the War of 1812, rising to the rank of brigadier general.

In July 1903, a shooting between a Black man and a police officer would lead to a week of racial violence which began at the Former Vanderburgh County Sheriff's Residence below and came to be known as the Evansville Race Riot:

This historical marker stands there today:

In addition to those killed, 40 people sustained serious injuries and 2,000 of the city’s 8,000 Black residents had to flee. Here are the names of those who died, via Wikipedia:

• Edward Schiffman, 28, painter

• Hazel Allman, 15, killed while driving with her parents

• August Jordan, 21, musician

• Ed Ruhl, 23, laborer

• Joseph Tech “Peck”, middle-aged

• Robert W. Bock, 24, (Originally thought to be H.E. Johnson)

• Fred Kappler, 18

• Frank Lamble, 23, stove molder

• John Barnett, 20

• John Geil

• Earnest Walters

• Charles Taylor, factory hand

• Calvin Hawkins, 26

Seventeen years after the riots, William Joseph Simmons (May 7, 1880 – May 18, 1945,) the Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard from Atlanta, Georgia, instructed Joe Huffington to start an Indiana chapter. He picked Evansville as his headquarters.

Because of Simmons and Huffington, Indiana became the most Klan-dominated state in the country during the 1920s. The KKK eventually controlled the governor, more than half of the state legislature, and included a membership of an estimated 30% of the white male population. In a Senate hearing on Oct. 28, 1926, Herbert Males, Evansville’s Mayor from 1926-1930, admitted membership in the Klan, a common choice for men in Vanderburgh county at the time, where 25% had done likewise.

This means that there’s a real possibility that Eli Harp and his eldest sons William Earl Harp, David L. Harp (1902-1971), and Percy B. Harp (1906-1966) could have joined during the 1920s. (Eli’s other sons were likely too young to have participated as adults unless they joined a smaller Klan in the 1930s.)

The hate group’s power only began to collapse following the rape and murder convictions of Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson (August 21, 1891 – June 28, 1966) in 1925 after his sickening atrocities against school teacher Madge Oberholtzer (November 10, 1896 – April 14, 1925.)

The racism did not end then. In the 1930s and the coming decades, Evansville became a textbook case of redlining and segregation, with the vast majority of the Black population forced into the poorest neighborhoods.

Here’s how Evansville looks today:

The twentieth century Harps emerged next.

Natalie’s great-grandfather William Earl Harp, the eldest of the ten children in Eli and Sarah’s family, evacuated the womb of his mother Sarah Catherine Shellenberger on March 16, 1900 in Evansville, notably not in Livermore, Kentucky as he apparently falsely reported on his World War II draft card for reasons unknown but which have certainly confused his descendants generations later.

In the 1950 U.S. Census, he listed his occupation as manager, which made sense, since following his father’s profession, he founded Harp’s Fish Market in Evansville. He lived until December 30, 1968, also dying like his grandfather did 51 years prior and his father did almost a decade before in Evansville.

Here is his obituary in which he looks like the most stereotypical 1950s Barry Goldwater-style Dad ever — in your heart, you know he’s right. I need to get some of those Old School glasses:

A notable detail leaps off the fading paper of his obituary: William attended Methodist Temple, the United Methodist Church in Evansville. This is a very different theological tradition than what his son would shift the family to embrace instead.

Here’s the sermon given at this church today, August 23, 2026, by Lead Pastor Andy Payton:

At Methodist Temple’s About Us page, the church defines its values.

Note how often the word “love” appears.

WE SEE CHRIST IN YOU

Admittedly, this might seem like a bold statement, but it is our way of affirming every person’s sacred value and potential. We believe God loves us, and therefore, our lives work best when we live according to Christ-like love. Seeing Christ in every person means we are committed to living together as a family, as God’s beloved community. Undeniably, this takes commitment, discipline, and sacrifice, but it is worth it.

With that in mind, Methodist Temple strives to be a safe, non-judgmental community where people can connect, share their gifts, and explore what God is doing within their lives. We are committed to loving and being in ministry with all people.

They also feature this quote from the Methodist Church’s founder:

The church makes abundantly clear that all of God’s children are invited to worship:

Here is William’s grave, which he shares with his wife Mildred G. Schnabel, who died in 1958.

They really went with a harp and it actually looks pretty cool:

Mildred gave birth to her second child, Robert G. “Bob” Harp — Natalie’s grandfather — on April 29, 1931 in Evansville and he would live 92 years, dying March 13, 2024, also in Evansville, following the pattern set by his great-grandfather Abner in 1917. Bob’s older brother William Earl Harp, Jr. died in 2011 at age 85. Here is his tombstone:

At the time of Bob’s death, he had nine great-grandchildren.

Here’s his final photo:

According to his obituary, Bob graduated from Evansville’s Bosse High School in 1950 following years as a “basketball star.” (Sounds like Indiana!) He served in the Navy during the Korean War before returning to work at his father’s fish market.

In 1959 he launched his real estate career and in 1969 he and his wife Dee Dee began Royal Child Care, a day care service they initially operated out of their home but expanded to become Evansville’s largest private childcare provider.

In 1974, Bob and Dee Dee co-founded Christian Fellowship Church, a non-denominational congregation located in — where else? — Evansville, which they attended the rest of their lives. Bob served as an usher, leader, and mentor.

Here is what one of their services looked like on July 29, 2018:

To understand the church’s mision and theology one must go — where else? — to their website’s “What We Believe” page.

The congregation lists 13 bullet points and insists “in order to serve in some ministry positions, agreement with CFC’s Doctrinal Statement is required.”

So these are the church’s most important values.

The first four are largely unobjectionable and most Christians would agree to one degree or another — the Bible is divinely inspired, the trinity exists, Jesus is equal to God the Father and was born of the Virgin Mary, and the Holy Spirit is co-equal as well.

The next bullet point then makes clear the church’s priorities. Rather than advocating the importance of loving people and serving the poor, condemning transgender people comes in first:

That man was originally created in the image of God with distinctions (male and female) and that God created them after the likeness of Himself. That man fell through sin, and as a consequence of his sin, lost his spiritual life, becoming dead in trespasses and sins, and that he became subject to the power of the devil. That his spiritual death, or total depravity, has been transmitted to the entire human race of man, the Man Christ Jesus alone excepted, and hence, that every person is born into the world with a nature that possesses no spark of divine life, but rather is essentially and unchangeably sinful apart from divine grace. That instituting procreation for mankind, God established marriage as a lifelong, exclusive relationship between one man and one woman, illustrating the mysterious and loyal union between Christ and His bride, the church. That all intimate sexual activity (whether heterosexual, homosexual, or otherwise) outside of the marriage relationship is immoral and, therefore, sin. That since God created the human race with such purpose and distinction, all conduct with the intent to adopt a gender other than one’s birth gender is immoral and, therefore, sin. Gen. 1:27, 2:18-25; Deut. 22:5; Psa. 14:1-3, 51:5; Jer. 17:9; John 3:6, 6:53; Matt. 19:3-5; Rom. 1:18-31, 3:10-19, 8:6-8; I Cor. 6:9-10; and Eph. 2:1-3, 5:21-33.

This is literally the most important issue for this church — ane one could rightfully say for a bunch of churches in America.

They aren’t interested in showing love to people, they’re concerned with bullying others to adopt their shame-ridden sexual lifestyle, using fears of hell and mistranslated Bible verses as spiked cudgels to demand submission and obedience.

Further bullets make explicit that the Harp family’s church embraces the Evangelical tradition, declaring that all believers must be born again and that no other religion provides a path to heaven. The church asserts that “the mission of the people of God in this age is the evangelizing of the world and discipling those who know Jesus Christ as Savior.”

The word “love” only appears in the church’s statement of beliefs three times. Two here:

That Christ, in the fullness of the blessings He has secured by His death and resurrection, is received by faith alone and that the moment we trust in Him as our Savior we pass out of death into everlasting life. That we are justified, accepted by the Father, and loved as Jesus is loved, and that at the time of acceptance of Christ as Savior, we are justified in Him, and by the power of the Holy Spirit indwelt by Christ to be sanctified unto Godly character. Jn. 1:12, 5:24, 6:47; Acts 13:38; Rom. 4:5 and 24-25, 5:1; I Cor. 1:30; Col. 1:27, 2:10; Heb. 10:10-14; Eph.1:6 and 13, 2:6-8, 5:30-31; and Gal. 2:20.

And one here:

That all believers in our Lord Jesus Christ are called to be set apart from the world and sinful practices and to be set apart to the Lord. That above all things we are to love the Lord, to know Him, and to desire to live in His presence. Matt. 6:33, 22:37-38; Jn. 14:21, 17:3; Rom. 12:1-2, 14:13-21; Psa. 63:1, 119:2; I Thess. 4:7; Heb. 12:1-2; I Cor. 10:23-33; I Jn. 2:15; Titus 2:11-14; and Eph. 4:17-32.

The final doctrine of faith is apocalyptic, stating belief “in the personal return of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. That the coming again of Jesus Christ is the ‘Blessed Hope’ set before us, for which we should be constantly looking.”

This is a church which teaches its members only to love God, not to love their fellow man.

This is the church which raised Natalie’s father Robert G. Harp, Jr, born in Baltimore on May 28, 1959. This inspired him to immerse himself and his family even deeper, going much further into his faith than his father:

Robert graduated from Evansville’s Harrison High School in 1977 and would go on to earn his bachelor’s in economics and master’s in communications from Wheaton College, a private Evangelical school founded in 1860 in Wheaton, Illinois. He would then earn his Master of Theology (ThM) from Dallas Theological Seminary followed by his Doctor of Ministry (DMin) from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, both Evangelical institutions.

Following Bob, Robert pursued real estate investments as well as other entrepreneurial efforts, including founding GlobalHotelNetwork.com, where he served as CEO. His obituary describes this enterprise as “an online global media brand providing market insights and thought leadership for the global travel and tourism industry.”

Robert would also work at Biola University, an Evangelical college in La Mirada, California, serving as Executive Director of the Office of Innovation and Director of Strategic Initiatives and Adjunct Professor at Biola University's Crowell School of Business.

In 2009, the school hosted a debate between Christian apologist William Lane Craig and the late New Atheist polemicist Christopher Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011), which I’ve embedded above for your entertainment. You’re welcome.

In 1988, Robert’s wife Jill gave birth to their son Preston, who would choose to embrace a radical leftist ideology so extreme that he felt moved to permanently tattoo a Palestinian flag onto his chest. Here is an image from his social media as documented by the Spanish newspaper El Pais:

Preston has chosen to live in Masatepe, a municipality on the Western side of Nicaragua with a population estimated at 41,809 in 2022. He works as a propagandist for the authoritarian regime Daniel Ortega has led since 2007.

Preston moved to the tropical nation in 2022. He identifies as a Sandinista and posts AI images of himself in National Police uniforms. He has now given a bunch of interviews offering his analysis of why his sister has become Trump’s so-called “Human Printer,” a moniker she has reportedly embraced. In one he said that in achieving her close proxomity to Trump, “her dream came true, finally.”

In 2023, the U.S. State Department released a report on the human rights crisis in Nicaragua. This is what Preston Harp has chosen to dedicate his life to, rather than the defense of Constitutional values:

• Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings

• Enforced disappearance

• Torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by prison guards and parapolice

• Harsh and life-threatening prison conditions

• Arbitrary arrest or detentions

• Serious problems with the independence of the judiciary

• Political prisoners

• Transnational repression against individuals located in another country

• Arbitrary and unlawful interference with privacy

• Punishment of family members for alleged offenses by a relative

• Serious restrictions on free expression and media freedom, including threats of violence against journalists, unjustified arrests and prosecution of journalists, and censorship

• Substantial interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, including overly restrictive laws on the organization, funding, or operation of nongovernmental and civil society organizations

• Restrictions on religious freedom

• Restrictions on freedom of movement and residence within the country and on the right to leave the country

• Inability of citizens to change their government peacefully through free and fair elections

• Serious and unreasonable restrictions on political participation

• Serious government corruption

• Serious government restrictions on and harassment of domestic and international human rights organizations

• Extensive gender-based violence, including femicide

• Crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting members of ethnic groups and Indigenous peoples such as the Mayangna and Miskito communities

• Trafficking in persons, including forced labor

• Crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex persons

• Significant restrictions on workers’ freedom of association

• The worst forms of child labor.

It’s bizarre.

Ortega is multitudes worse than Trump. Any American who would rather live under him than Trump is living in a delusion as deep as anything they would condemn among their far-right family members.

Preston apparently never intends to return to the United States and no longer has any relationship with his mother Jill or sister Natalie.

Jill gave birth to Natalie in 1991 and proceeded to homeschool both her children, indoctrinating them in Evangelical theology and Christian Nationalist ideology.

Natalie would graduate from San Diego’s Point Loma Nazarene University in 2012 before earning her MBA in 2015 from Liberty University, the Southern Baptist college in Lynchburg, Virginia, co-founded in 1971 by the segregationist Rev. Jerry Falwell (August 11, 1933 – May 15, 2007.)

In 2020, Natalie became a contributor for the far-right One American News Network (OANN,) a media company which launched on July 4, 2013 and distinguished itself by backing Trump’s election claims even harder than Fox and Newsmax, ultimately provoking multiple defamation lawsuits from Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems.

OANN is owned by the San Diego-based company Herring Networks, founded in 2003 by Robert Herring, which also operates AWE (A Wealth of Entertainment,) formerly known as Wealth TV, a “luxury lifestyle” channel blessing the world with programming on fast cars, expensive food, runway fashion, and boxing events.

Fox is a glass of wine over dinner with friends, Newsmax is a shot of Whiskey while arguing with your buddies at the bar, and OANN is the full fucking bottle of Everclear in one gulp.

Here Natalie offers campaign propaganda on May 21, 2020:

On July 17, 2020, Robert G. Harp, Jr. killed himself at age 61 in Irvine, California, when Natalie was 28.

We don’t know yet why he did it or what method he used.

Preston told the British tabloid The Daily Mail that Natalie and Jill wanted to lie to family members that Robert had died in his sleep. Preston insisted on telling the truth.

The next month, Trump invited Harp to speak at the 2020 Republican National Convention where she performed a speech comparing him to George Bailey from Frank Capra’s Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the most famous film about suicide ever made:

Here are her remarks in full:

Good evening. I’m Natalie Harp, a formerly forgotten American from California.

In the classic Jimmy Stewart film, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” George Bailey is given a great gift, the chance to see what the world would be like without him.

Tonight, Mr. President, we’d like to give you that same gift. Because without you, we’d all be living in Pottersville, sold out to a crooked mister or I should say a crooked Mrs. Potter with no hope of escape except death itself. I should know because I wouldn’t be alive today if it wasn’t for you. About five years ago, I was the victim of a notoriously deadly medical error. I survived but only to be diagnosed with a rare and terminal bone cancer.

You know, the Democrats love to talk about healthcare being a human right, but a right to what? Well, I’ll tell you. To them, it’s a right to marijuana, opioids, and the right to die with dignity, a politically correct way of saying assisted suicide. I was told I was a burden to my family and to my country, and that by choosing to die early, I’d actually be saving the lives of others by preserving resources for them rather than wasting them on a lost cause like myself.

And when I failed the chemotherapies that were on the market, no one wanted me in their clinical trials. I’d make them look bad.

They didn’t give me the right to try experimental treatments, Mr. President. You did. And without you, I’d have died waiting for them to be approved.

Now with the Coronavirus, everyone knows what that feels like to be waiting for a cure. But we’ve only been waiting a few months. Just imagine what 2020 would have looked like, fighting for your life without Donald Trump fighting for it, too.

In January, there would have been no China travel ban. Millions would have died. Millions more would have been infected for there be no record levels of testing, no right to try treatments, no fast track for a vaccine, nor Operation Warp Speed ready to deliver it.

And without Donald Trump as our patient advocate for the past four years, well, the opioid epidemic would have stolen even more lives from even more families. Kidney patients would have no future except dying on weight lists for there’d be no initiative to increase donations.

There’d still be no accountability at the VA, and our brave veterans would still be suffering long wait times with no choice nor access to faster care. Insulin and other drug prices would have continued to rise while a record number of generic drugs would still be stuck in the pipeline.

There’d be no price transparency. We wouldn’t have health plans up to 60% cheaper than Obamacare, and we’d still be stuck with that infamous individual mandate.

And God forbid what the next four years would look like.

For in Joe Biden’s America, China would control our drug production. We’d be one step closer to government-run healthcare. We wouldn’t just be unable to keep our doctors. We’d be lucky if we could see any doctor. And even then, some of us would be denied care. For in socialized medicine, you don’t beat the odds, you become the odds.

And I would lose my right to try, just like Charlie Guard, that terminally-ill British baby whose government-run health care system decided it was too expensive and too cruel to keep him alive.

You see, Mr. President, you’ve done so much more than your promises made and promises kept. For numbers only tell part of the story. We are the rest of it: facts with faces of Americans who would still be forgotten if you and our favorite First Lady hadn’t given up your own wonderful life so we could have the chance at one.

George Bailey’s father was right. All you can take with you is that which you’ve given away.

And Mr. President, that makes you the richest man in the world. For you have used your strength to make America strong again, sacrificed the life you built to make America proud again, and you risked everything to make America safe again.

It’s a wonderful life. You made America great again.

And on November 3rd, we are going to keep America great.

Saturday Night Live dropped this parody of Trump and “It’s a Wonderful Life” just before Christmas in 2018:

Note the key payload from Natalie’s speech: “and without you, I’d have died waiting for them to be approved.”

Trump believes that he is responsible for saving Natalie’s life.

Natalie’s comparison of Trump with George Bailey prompted push-back from Jimmy Stewart’s daughter Kelly Stewart Harcourt, who wrote in a letter to the New York Times that “given that this beloved American classic is about decency, compassion, sacrifice, and a fight against corruption, our family considers Ms. Harp’s analogy to be the height of hypocrisy and dishonesty.”

Does it seem a little strange to anyone else that a month after her father kills himself, Natalie would go on stage in front of the world and give a speech comparing Donald Trump to one of cinema’s great heroes who resisted suicide?

This is certainly just a coincidence. Or is it?

While we have now dwelled on Harp’s last name for thousands of words and absurdly traced her family’s history back 500 years, it’s perhaps at this juncture worth pointing out what her first name means and its origin.

The name comes from the Latin “natalis” and means “day of birth” which refers to Christmas Day. Certainly just a coincidence.

But let’s open this Christmas present here.

Just why is everyone so concerned now about this “Human Printer” Natalie Harp? What songs has she really been playing for our geriatic Commander-in-Chief?

Just how deeply has this white supremacist sex witch really hypnotized Donald John Trump and how much power does she now truly wield?

And why do I dare append such epithets as “white supremacist” and “sex witch” to this “human printer?”

Here’s the truth about Natalie Harp:

She knows exactly what she is doing and does not believe anything she says or does.

She is entirely insincere, which is why Trump loves her so much. He sees himself in her.

A woman who will lie about her father’s death will lie about anything and everything.

Trump is so dumb he cannot tell the diference between someone authentically loving him versus someone just pretending to love him in order to take advantage of his money and power. Maybe he doesn’t care. Or perhaps he is just too emotionally-manipulated by Natalie to realize what is happening.

So many people are waving around Natalie’s seemingly obsessive letters to Trump as though they reveal something genuine and authentic, like she is crazy and obsessive.

They don’t.

They are simply part of a calibrated, over-the-top performance from a deeply talented political and ideological operator who wants to wield and extract as much power as possible while she can.

She didn’t write those to spill her heart or confess her soul. This is a woman with an MBA. She’s not dumb. She wrote them knowing full well how much they would emotionally manipulate Trump.

She was lying to Trump, the same way she and her mom wanted to lie about her father’s death.

Natalie Harp is playing Donald Trump like a harp.

She is a witch who has has hypnotized him with her spells.

She is doing the same thing that Melania did with pretending to love him, except with the added benefit that she does not need to suffer the disgusting ordeals of having to fellate him on command and permit him to ejaculate inside of her.

Sorry, too graphic? Too maximalist? Not enough euphemisms engaged here?

Harp knows the sounds to make to hypnotize him so deeply that he will choose to save the life of his “human printer” over members of his own cabinet.

It seems like I end up sharing this meme of my favorite Thomas Sowell quote almost every day, so let’s sing the chorus yet again with a fresh AI image rendering:

The Strange Questions to Consider:

Why Does Donald Trump Value the Life of Natalie Harp Over His Cabinet Members?

Why Would He Save Her From Death Over Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller?

It seems impossible now to feel any sort of shock at anything Donald Trump says or does today.

We’ve just come to expect the cruelty, stupidity, and daily serial dishonesty.

However, I must admit feeling stunned by the story which fell from the skies earlier this month about Trump responding to an Iranian assassination threat by sneaking off of the new Air Force One “Flying Palace” gifted to him by the authoriarian House of Thani monarchy which has ruled Qatar since the 19th century.

Trump boarded this vehicle which he has come to love more than his own children, only to hide in a catering truck which then whisked him and his three favorite staffers to an Air Force C-32A plane (a military equivalent of a Boeing 757), leaving all the cabinet officials and journalists on board totally ignorant to the fact that they were now in a situation so dangerous that the president himself had chosen to Clint Eastwood his way out of there.

The story made my jaw stumble to the carpet because usually when Trump’s decisions needlessly endanger other human beings’ lives, those he targets are people he hates: ethnic minorities, leftists, college students, Democrats, women, trans people, and late night comedians who make fun of him.

Yet here he did the opposite. He risked the lives of his most trusted and loyal colleagues, while signaling to them he did not value them as much as the four he did choose to accompany him on the secret flight.

Who did Trump pick to die on the decoy plane?

• Marco Rubio — Secretary of State

• Scott Bessent — Secretary of the Treasury

• The racist neo-fascist Stephen Miller — White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Adviser, the man who has driven the brutality of ICE’s war against America

• Will Scharf — White House Staff Secretary

• Steven Cheung — White House Communications Director

• Mike Needham — Counselor to the President and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy

• Ross Worthington — Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy

• Monica Crowley — Chief of Protocol of the United States

And who did he pick to join him on the decoy plane?

• Pete Hegseth — Secretary of Defense

• Dan Scavino — White House Deputy Chief of Staff

• Walt Nauta — Director of Oval Office Operations

• Natalie Harp — Executive Assistant to the President

When reporters asked Trump why he thought it was too dangerous for him to fly on the new Qatari-flavored Air Force One but not the staffers and journalists who did, he replied with the typical Trumpian gaslighting: "I think, actually, the plane that I flew on was at greater risk."

It’s understandable why a president would want to save his “secretary of war” at a time when the nation is literally at war.

But what was so special about Scavino, Nauta, and Natalie that Trump valued them so highly? What do they share which has elevated them to the top inner circle?

The Washington Post noted that all three of them worked for Trump at Mar-a-Lago in between his presidencies and that Nauta endured prosecution as a co-defendant in the classified documents case. So Trump knows that Nauta is so loyal to him that he’s willing to commit crimes to protect him. Meanwhile, Scavino has worked for Trump since the 1990s, originally at his golf courses.

Natalie has clearly reached even greater heights now and it’s seemingly for more than just the loyalty.

Natalie provides Trump with multiple unique services:

• With her print-outs in her role as the “human printer” she continually offers him a constant stream of praise and affirmations. She shapes his worldview and inspires him not to consider his failures.

• She drafts his Truth Social posts. He will dictate and she will write.

• She provides a steady stream of white supremacist propaganda in his social media feed, most unforgettably and unforgivably the sharing of a video depicting former First Lady Michelle Obama and former President Barack Obama as apes:

• She demonstrates loyalty beyond any other staffer, what with these stories of her running after his golf cart, sleeping in a women’s locker room to remain close to him, and her willingness to crouch insde an SUV’s trunk to reach a destination with him. Don’t be impresssed or confused. These are trivial things and this is all perfomative.

• Constant physical proximity to his ideal feminine archetype who can provide the combined feelings of a mother, a lover, and a devoted employee — a slave essentially is the woman he wants.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

The British tabloid Mirror US offered this comparison Tuesday on its Facebook page:

Others have also observed this similarity, and suggested that Natalie has intentionally tailored her appearance to more closesly resemble Ivanka: