This is the third installment of an ongoing series investigating Substack writers who choose to disable the Pangram AI scanning software in order to conceal their use of AI to aid in writing their articles. See the first two maximalist essay installments here:
If you value this work then please consider supporting it with a premium subscription. It means a whole lot right now as I’ve felt on the edge of quitting writing all year. I’ve felt so dejected:
Another Publisher’s Warning: this is another investigative essay written in the Iain Sinclair-Alan Moore traditions of literary maximalism and psychogeography infused with the Tom Wolfe-Hunter S. Thompson New Journalism ethos. This is intentionally written to be much longer, more complicated, more digressive, more provocative, more ornamental in prose, and more of a challenge to comprehend. Yes, this level of depth will repel many readers who prefer simple and short, but many other readers do crave intellectual depth and sophistication. They can handle something long and complicated that challenges them to think. You all know who you are. Not all essays in this series will be in this style. The next one following this will be a more simple summary of the facts as they have been established.
I urge other creatives, regardless of your discipline or preferred medium to take Alan Moore’s 6-hour BBC Maestro course on storytelling and to then dive headfirst into not just his work, but the man he names as his favorite author and the best writer in the English language, Iain Sinclair.
I don’t understand yet why I’ve grown so enchanted with this little book Lud Heat such that I would feel it necessary to open an article on Substackers blocking scans of their AI use:
I’ll need to read the book another couple times before writing about it and applying the techniques to my own writing.
What Sinclair did with London across many books and what Moore did with Northampton in Jerusalem, I am now doing with my home territory: Substack.
And I’m going to keep urging others to do likewise. I responded earlier this week to L. E. Mullin — my favorite artist on Substack and creator of the extraordinary The Flight of the Condor series — after providing him a link to the previous installment in this series and urging him to take his time:
We as traditional writers are now in a creative war with LLMs and the so-called “content creators” who refuse to disclose using them. It’s time to fight back with MAXIMALIST firepower. Create writing so complex, engaging & unique that no LLM could ever imitate it. That includes dropping in photos, video embeds, large excerpts, and screenshots galore. People can then take as much or as little time as they want. What difference does it make to the author whether someone spends 20 seconds or 20 hours with an article?
OK, enough self-justification of this verbosity and self-indulgence, let’s begin this new journey into Substack deceit with a new cartoon guide, an old friend to many of us and now the perfect symbol to describe what is happening to our world because of these godless AI companies “summoning the demon…”
“This is a Meeseeks box. Let me show you how it works. You press this. You make a request. Mr. Meeseeks, open Jerry’s stupid mayonnaise jar. The Meeseeks fulfills the request. And then it stops existing… Just keep your requests simple. They’re not *belch* gods.”
— Rick Sanchez
AI is the Meeseeks box of today.
So many fans of the show have already noticed this obvious parallel for some time and now with regular news of OpenAI and Anthropic “accidentally” unleashing autonomous AI agents which then attack other companies, it’s time that non-fans start seeing this metaphor too as it’s only going to persist further.
In the classic “Rick and Morty” episode “Meeseeks and Destroy” — Season 1, Episode 5 — we see Beth, Summer, and Jerry each tap the Meeseeks box which Rick has given them. They then make requests.
Beth and Summer both ask for goals which their Meeseeks could help them complete that day. By the afternoon, their Meeseeks have disappeared and they each feel great.
However, Jerry, being the idiot of the show, asked his Meeseeks to help him take two strokes off his golf game, a task that is far from simple and certainly not something anyone could accomplish in a day.
And then mayhem ensues. Jerry gives up on trying to improve his game and the gang of dozens of Meeseeks realize the only way they can end their “existence is pain for a Meeseeks” experience is to kill him.
It’s actually a pretty common folktale premise with a common sense message: trying to get lazy by outsourcing the hard work to a machine or a tool or a magical entity beyond its intended capabilities will ultimately backfire. “Be careful what you wish for” is the standard lesson children learn. Sometimes what we think we want can get out of hand before we know it.
“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence from “Fantasia” remains the gold standard which embeds in our minds as children and never really goes away, or at least it shouldn’t:
And then we relearn that lesson through its regular parodies:
In the Brothers Grimm stories, a similar lesson came in “The Magic Porridge Pot” story in which an enchanted pot continues to produce and produce until it floods the town:
The myth of King Midas further illustrates the great wish fulfilled only to discover a curse in its place.
The story enters the historial record with Aristotle, who describe Midas as starving to death, and indeed, outright preferring death to life:
“You, most blessed and happiest among humans, may well consider those blessed and happiest who have departed this life before you, and thus you may consider it unlawful, indeed blasphemous, to speak anything ill or false of them, since they now have been transformed into a better and more refined nature. This thought is indeed so old that the one who first uttered it is no longer known; it has been passed down to us from eternity, and hence doubtless it is true. Moreover, you know what is so often said and passes for a trite expression. What is that, he asked? He answered: It is best not to be born at all; and next to that, it is better to die than to live; and this is confirmed even by divine testimony. Pertinently to this they say that Midas, after hunting, asked his captive Silenus somewhat urgently, what was the most desirable thing among humankind. At first he could offer no response, and was obstinately silent. At length, when Midas would not stop plaguing him, he erupted with these words, though very unwillingly: ‘you, seed of an evil genius and precarious offspring of hard fortune, whose life is but for a day, why do you compel me to tell you those things of which it is better you should remain ignorant? For he lives with the least worry who knows not his misfortune; but for humans, the best for them is not to be born at all, not to partake of nature’s excellence; not to be is best, for both sexes. This should our choice, if choice we have; and the next to this is, when we are born, to die as soon as we can.’ It is plain therefore, that he declared the condition of the dead to be better than that of the living.”
—Aristotle, Eudemus (354 BCE), surviving fragment quoted in Plutarch, Moralia, Consolatio ad Apollonium, sec. xxvii (1st cen. CE)(S.H. transl.) via Harper’s
I always loved the “DuckTales” and “Aladdin” variants where the Midas power becomes limited to objects, a Golden Goose in the former and a “Hand of Midas” in the 1996 direct-to-video second sequel “Aladdin and the King of Thieves.”
Even in these 1980s and 1990s Disney cartoon variants the lesson is still the same: greedy men seeking magic objects to give them infinite wealth will end up harming other people.
This is a lesson which most of us learn in childhood. The cartoons teach it so well!
And they still do today with our beloved, adorable Mr. Meeseeks.
I even remember the message sometimes when walking around the apartment having acquired Meeseeks socks:
Another way of putting it is simply:
Moderation in all things.
Now, that does not mean always be wishy-washy and soft or just let people push you around.
Embracing moderation does not mean one never hits hard, or never takes an “extreme” stance on anything. It does not mean always splitting the difference between two opposing viewpoints. Sometimes we need to go to war. Sometimes killing is morally justified or even necessary.
It just means one does not do extreme all the time when it’s not needed.
Not every idea warrants a 10,000-word maximalist adventure. Sometimes 1,000 words or 100 provides enough. Friday’s essay came in at under 900. Apologies, I was aiming for 500:
And this same principle applies to AI use in writing.
The moderate position — the mainstream view held by most writers on Substack — is to use AI sparingly and to disclose when one does.
I’ve made a point to emphasize this on Notes during the investigation so it’s not just a string of confronting people about why they disabled Pangram:
I’ve felt so much joy going through Substacks during this investigation and seeing this bright green light more often than not—not what I anticipated at all:
“Okay, nobody stop me, I'm on my green light, go” — Becky G
And then when the gray bar of 100% AI shows up? Or a mixture of the two?
That’s OK.
I will still read a 100% AI-generated piece if it’s on a subject which interests me.
Because AI-generated doesn’t mean that it’s de facto bad or false.
All it means is that the author used an AI tool in creating the text. And plenty of people can still use these tools to make pieces that are worth reading.
But they should never hide it.
There is no rational, ethical, legitimate reason to disable Pangram. I have yet to hear one from any of the dozens of people I’ve confronted over the last week.
The only reason is to hide a number from one’s readers — and it’s one we’re perfectly capable of finding ourselves just by running the scan manually.
So a writer who does this is insulting their audience. They’re saying “I’m going to hide my LLM use and you’re not going to be smart enough to pick up that I’m doing it.”
Don’t insult your readers’ intelligence. We’re not all as dumb as we look. Some of us are, but many of us try very hard to live up to your level of brilliance.
The list of 16 Substackers below differs from the previous list of 47 in that it is not organized by categories or ideology. Rather, they appear in the order in which I discovered them, with two key exceptions:
Originally this list came in at 18 rather than 16. I have chosen to remove two of them originally intended for inclusion for a simple reason: when publicly confronted about their concealed AI use, they acknowledged what they had done, explained their process, and responded with maturity and kindness. While I had initially considered including them and identifying them as people worth following, it seems better to just forgive and forget. So they’re cut out altogether. They’re not really people trying to inflate themselves up and I like them both. I listened to them, they listened to me, and they’re both putting out decent work still. So no reason to “name and shame” them when they’ve passed the ethical test. That will be the standard going forward in future investigations. Any writer who responds with moral decency when questioned about their disabled Pangram scanning will simply be let off with a warning, rather than issued a ticket to appear on the Maximalist Wall of Shame Until Eternity.
Leading the list is the most prominent person and the one who I am most deeply disapointed in for doing this. Finding him was almost as devastating as when I discovered Restoring the West by Ayaan pulling this high school-level crap.
This was literally me when scanning the work of the first person on this list:
“No! God! No, God, please no! No! Noooooooooooo!”
I was yelling Michael Scott-style so loudly that our doggo Jasmine jumped off the couch to come over and rub up against my leg. “Oh no, girl, you’re fine, it’s OK. I’m just really upset about this great journalist I admire who’s doing something dumb he really knows he shouldn’t.”
Seriously Gerald Posner, how could you not think you wouldn’t eventually get busted for this? You think if students can get away with smashing their box to call forth a Meeseeks to write their Shakespeare essays then you can get away with instructing your grinning blue demon to write your articles?
To bullshit or not to bullshit, that is the question. And we now have an answer.
“Shield me from the law!”
- Morty Smith, instructing dozens of Meeseeks in Season 4, Episode 1, “Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat”
1. Gerald Posner - Just the Facts
Jasmine is a boxer and she is tough and fierce as hell. Her pain tolerance is amazing:
Gerald is one of the most acclaimed investigative journalists in the world. Here’s the list of his titles according to Wikipedia:
Here’s Gerald discussing his 1993 book Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assissination of JFK with Bryant Gumbel on the Today Show:
Absolute mad respect for that early 1990s mustache he’s rocking there:
Here he is also in 1993 appearing with Dan Rather to discuss his Pulitzer finalist title, a video which YouTube warns is age-restricted and thus not wanting to embed here for your convenience and education.
Gerald is properly proud of his book’s appearance as an answer on “Jeopardy!” as he features the clip on his personal YouTube:
Here’s Gerald appearing in 1996 on “Politically Incorrect” with Bill Maher to discuss his biography of third-party candidate Ross Perot (1930-2019,) the far-right conspiracy theorist responsible for handing the 1992 election to the Democrats and empowering baby boomer liberalism to morally warp the 1990s.
In 1998, Gerald returned to the Today Show to discuss Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Again we’re going to have to pay homage to that glorious 1990s goatee, now in its later decade variety:
While Gerald largely focused on Nazis and historical assassinations in his writing career — with a detour to write his Perot biography — following Osama Bin Laden’s Sept. 11, 2023 terrorist attacks on Ameria, he shifed his focus, writing books on 9/11 and Saudi Arabia.
Here’s Gerald appearing in 2005 on CSPAN’s BookTV to discuss Secrets of the Kingdom: The Inside Story of the Saudi-U.S. Connection. The absence of facial hair really leaps out here. It’s a bit distracting, honestly. We can see now why he needs it:
Here’s a video of him 11 years ago discussing God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican with Maher on Real Time:
The more light facial hair here is certainly an improvement:
Here is the trailer for the book:
Here he is discussing his 2020 book Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America with Michael Shermer, the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society and thus a longtime admiral fighting the war of ideas against the Forces of Bullshit. And there he is finally hitting a solid styling on the mustache and gottee. This is rather distinctive to him so it suits him.
Here he is appearing six years ago on Tucker Carlson’s show:
A year ago, Gerald made the cable news rounds following Trump’s announcement of plans to release further JFK assassination files.
Here’s his NBC appearance:
Here he is on Fox:
And here he is on the far-right cable channel Newsmax, also age-restricted content, so impossible to embed.
Most recently, Gerald joined Peterson Academy as an affiliate. This is an online lecture platform founded by Jordan Peterson which presents itself as a university. For $399 a year or a one-time payment of $2,723 for lifetime membership, you can have access to 850+ hours of lectures.
Here is a lecture released four months ago, inspired by Gerald’s Big Pharma book:
I’m not sure he hit the right balance here on the facial hair. It seems like a little bit more would be better, but in general his more minimalist look has worked for him. It’s distinctive and has slid into his author persona:
Meanwhile I’m a guy sitting in his pajamas in the Mojave, walrus mustache and beard widly unkempt, perpetually stoned off his ass, struggling just to get down to the pharmacy to pick us his PTSD medications, frightened to walk the dog in this poor neighborhood where trash sticks in the cacti, and writing about regretting the counterterrorism journalist and activist path that I’ve tread for way too long. In comparison to Gerald’s achievements, here’s my article warning people how to avoid smoking too much weed (skip the damn vapes):
I expect much better than what I found and must now document for the historical record. The standards should be higher for Pulitzer Prize finalists who are buddies with Bill Maher.
So what’s your excuse for this, Gerald? You’re supposed to be the “serious” journalist here while I’m doing the Traumatized Xennial Hunter Thompson Imitation Gonzo journalism thing enlightened by psychedelic and occult adventures out in the desert:
And you certainly know that I asked you about why you did this:
I decided to go and check out the excerpts from your paid posts and see what they came in at:
And then a scary thought emerged, what if we took a look at that Free Press excerpt from your debut piece at Bari’s embarrassment to our Xennial micro-generation? This is the first time I’ve had a reason to try scanning text outside of Substack for AI.
I winced when that score popped up, like watching a classice scene from Jackass:
And you know that I then provided you with this information on Notes and requested comment, informing you of the sequel in progress:
And yet, we have silence from the “merciless pit bull.”
So I thought I’d go back a bit further and look at more excerpts:
Also in Season 4, Episode 1 of “Rick and Morty,” the series reveals a cheaper knock-off Meeseeks box:
However, this unwillingness to depict and confront reality is something I’ve noticed more broadly in a lot of Gerald’s analyses and commentary on current events.
Lately Gerald has deployed his considerable journalist knowledge not to uncover truth, but to further obscure it, choosing to cast doubt rather than acknowledge the common sense reality that people across the political spectrum can see now.
On Septembet 8, Gerald posted the following very long Note in which he tried to cast skepticism on the sourcing for the recent bombshell story that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had received warning 10 days before the Oct 7, 2023 terrorist attacks against Southern Israel, and he had failed to act:
Here’s the CNN coverage of the reporting:
I did not expect my response to him to receive so many likes:
Time and again, whenever there is some story negative to Trump or Netanyahu or whover Gerald favors, he’s going to pull out his Pulitzer-nominated investigative journalist “let-me-tell-you-about-proper-sourcing” schtick like he’s trying to wake up a classroom of sleepy undergraduates. Dig deep enough and there’s always some reason lurking somewhere that can justify dismissing a story you want to ignore.
That’s how people are. Rather than confront a problem or address someone providing a critique, it’s much easier to ignore, to run, to block, to counter-attack. We saw that pattern in the previous installment in the series and here it comes again.
Speaking of patterns, here’s an obvious one: when a husband does something, then it’s not an unreasonable guess that his wife might embrace the same practice.
I’ll also note that Gerald’s spouse Trisha Posner is also an acclaimed, celebrated journalist, most recently authoring The Pharmacist of Auschwitz: The Untold Story, and she publishes “No More Nice Jewish Girl” on Substack.
Trisha has made antisemitism a focus and runs Antisemitism Watch as both Founder and executive director. I recommend subscribing to their newsletter. The fact that she’s on here and as well as the four Zionist activists in the previous piece should make clear that people in my own movement don’t get a hall pass here. We as Zionists need to be more aggressive in policing our own side than in how we go after our antisemitic enemies.
All writers get held to the same moral standard: no plagiarism, be honest with your readers about your process and if any LLMs are involved.
Writers don’t need to be embarrassed when pieces come back with some AI imprint — as will often happen without them thinking about it when writers insert an LLM somewhere in the process or embrace AI-aided help in Google docs or elsewhere.
And they shouldn’t be ashamed about deploying 100% AI-aided pieces provided they’re honest about it and the article still offers some value even if it’s below the standards of professional journalism.
This is a pretty cool graphic for Trisha’s Substack, which I suspect is AI-generated. When you see AI-generated imagery in logos and illustrations then that’s a sign that AI-generated writing may be nearby too.
Gemini refused to offer an answer to the image’s origins, asserting “No reliable signals were detected indicating how the content was created. You should look for other supporting evidence from trusted sources.” Fair enough. This isn’t Gemini’s area of expertise apparently
Copilot analyzed the graphic and said,
“Most likely yes, David — this image has several strong indicators of AI generation. Here’s the clean, forensic breakdown, the way you prefer it…”
Copilot then offered six signs of AI-generated imagery. Here is a link so you can view the whole prompt and answer yourself. These points in particular seemed most relevant as they also apply to AI-written text:
[Everyone see how this works here? You want to use an LLM to explain something, then just quote it like you would a human. Don’t take credit for the writing. Take credit for coming up with the prompt and then knowing which parts of the answer may be useful enough to share with others.]
These three points of the six seem relevant as we now dive into a new journey through the fake plastic tree forest. The terms to keep in mind: “hyper clean,” “too smooth,” “algorithmically neat,” “idealized,” and “sterile.” Just as these terms often — but not always — apply to AI art, you’ll see them in the writing too.
Trisha does not appear in her own entry in this series because she has not published anything since the introduction of Pangram, thus it is impossible for her to qualify. People need to have made the moral lapse of choosing to disable Pangram to hide AI usage. (And BTW, people who block Pangram but then write 100% human-written. They’re fine. They’re doing something stupid as they may lose readers or credibility, but they’re not engaged in plagiarism, so they will not appear on this list.)
But I will make her readers and everyone else aware of Pangram’s assessment of her recent pieces because authors who have previously published AI-aided pieces and not disclosed it have technically still made the error of plagiarizing with an LLM.
For Trisha’s newest article, Pangram offers this assessment:
For the one before it:
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: if we’re going to go after the Far Right, we can’t be hiding our AI use. That is one thing they can seize on — as simply as I have done — in order to dismiss our arguments.
Here is Trisha’s Tucker tromping here so you can review it for yourself and its AI composition becomes obvious. Once one knows what to look for with the signs of synthetic writing then it becomes easy to spot:
Trisha Posner, you don’t do yourself any favors in your writing by publishing these LLM outputs under your byline. This writing is boring as hell. Someone of your skills can surely do much better than this:
Carlson’s embrace of Mosley is not an isolated misstatement. It is a signal. It tells us something clear about how far the boundaries of acceptable discourse have shifted—and how willing some are to normalize ideas that were once universally understood as beyond the pale.
Rehabilitating figures like Mosley is not about revisiting history.
It is about testing whether we have learned anything from it.
Is that really as hard as you’re wanting to smack down Tucker? Your Substack promises “done being polite about antisemitism” but this is fucking polite as hell.
Come on, we have to call him what he fucking is:
Tucker Carlson is an antisemite.
Tucker Carlson is a neo-fascist.
Tucker Carlson is the most dangerous figure right now in right-wing politics.
Tucker Carlson is an apologist for Russia’s neo-fascist ruler Vladimir Putin.
Tucker Carlson is an apologist for the House of Thani regime in Qatar, the sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement born out of the blending of Medieval Islam with fascist and communist organizing methodology.
Do better for your readers and for the Jewish people. We need to be rhetorically whooping Carlson’s lying, far-right, neo-fascist, antisemitic ass much more brutally than what you’ve offered. My approach is better. You and Gerald should embrace this more no holds barred approach sans AI that I’ve retained from my trial by supernova under the late liar David Horowitz. David was wrong about a lot and as ethically twisted as a question mark, but he was not wrong that we need to rhetorically go after the fucking antisemites as hard as we fucking can. Fuck. If now is not the time for F-bomb deployment then when is? We’re even allowed to get away with it on TV now.
Here is how I’ve been hitting Tucker’s BS lately and I urge others to likewise strike aggressively when the hammer is hot.
Trisha’s AI-generated slop article seeks to counter Tucker’s recent turn toward seeking to reform the legacy of one of the original fascists, Oswald Mosley:
She’s writing an ideologically-driven and purposed history article. I found in the previous investigative essay’s research that this is a common trope. This seems to be something that LLMs can imitate easily and it doesn’t stand out as much. People expect history write-ups to often embrace a dry, boring rhetorical style and that’s what the next two offenders offer in obnoxious abundance.
2. Amanda Nelson - Amanda’s Mild Takes
I was not familiar with Amanda Nelson previously, only finding her while searching for prominent writers with high numbers of subscribers. She has almost 40,000 now and reminds me a lot of a Substacker from the previous list, Jermaine Fowler, who has the same sort of grift. They both present history content, but give it a boring and predictable left-wing slant.
Now, this next occurence does happen often in the research for this series. People will just get in the habit of disabling Pangram, even on posts that they do write themselves. They’ll just leave it on:
At the time of questioning Amanda, I had not yet scanned to know if the piece was AI-written or not as I was still in the process of waking up, having now adopted a late-night writing routine:
Her response was so predictable:
So when rising and climbing up into the chair at the laptop, it became time to take a closer look at her pieces:
However, it turns out that this scheme of presenting AI-generated writing spinning American history in one ideological direction also manifests on the Right.
Finally, we have another overtly right-wing Substack to add to the list alongside Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Emily Schrader, and Gerald Posner (who now has chosen more the path of right-wing punditry rather than the serious investigative journalism which he he used to build his illustrious career. Seriously, Gerald, please go back to being a journalist pursuing the truth instead of an opinion merchant pursuing a bigger paycheck peddling predictable right-wing propaganda across state lines.)
The next person on the list is another big fish, running his own 501©3 fiefdom.
3. Ned Ryun - American Leviathan
Here is the biography for Ned Ryun offered by his American Majority nonprofit. He is the author of this American Leviathan book (totally not a cliche right-wing book title at all!) and accompanying documentary:
Ned Ryun is a grassroots and conservative activism expert. He is the founder and CEO of American Majority, a non-partisan political training institute whose mission is to identify and mold the next wave of liberty-minded candidates, grassroots activists and community leaders. Since its founding in January of 2008, while under Ryun’s leadership, American Majority has conducted over 2,400 events and trained over 86,000 candidates and activists in all 50 states. A former writer for President George W. Bush and the son of former Olympic medalist and U.S. Rep. Jim Ryun (R-KS), Ned Ryun is sought after for his commentary on the national political scene, grassroots engagement and the conservative movement in general. Ryun is a frequent contributor on Fox News and Fox Business, including appearances on Jesse Watters Primetime and The Ingraham Angle. Ryun serves as an unofficial advisor to President Trump and is a member of the 1776 Commission. Prior to launching American Majority, Ryun founded and directed Generation Joshua, a civics education program for middle and high school students that reached a membership of nearly 10,000. Ryun graduated with Highest Distinction (summa cum laude) from the University of Kansas with degrees in English and History. He is the author of Restoring Our Republic: The Making of the Republic and How We Reclaim It Before It’s Too Late, The Adversaries: A Story of Boston and Bunker Hill, and American Leviathan: The Birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism and the accompanying American Leviathan documentary. Ned also writes the American Leviathan Substack and is a frequent contributor to various conservative publications with recent articles including: JD Vance’s Trip to Greenland Is a Strong, Smart Move, GOP & America Will Be Better for Passing Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, and The City Leviathan: How Corruption Killed Capitalism, The Border Disaster Was Not an Accident. Together with his father and twin brother, Drew, he also authored Heroes Among Us and The Courage to Run. Ned Ryun resides in Purcellville, Virginia, with his wife and four children.
Oh gee, and this is so innovative too. Nobody ever has compared the Right’s enemies to an octopus with tentacles!
Ned’s creative genius knows no bounds!
Nobody should be surprised that bullshit ideology relies on bullshit writing:
And what is all this actually in service of beyond just selling copies of a book? What is this American Majority actually doing? The mission: “As a 501c(3) non-partisan, nonprofit, American Majority continually trains, organizes, mobilizes, and equips new grassroots conservative leaders.”
This purpose of this “charity” is to train right-wing political operatives. That’s actually the point of a whole lot of conservative philanthropy and has been since the 1950s.
But really, I know a goddamn grift when I see one. I’ve worked inside too many of them.
Go over to to American Majority’s YouTube channel and you can see the group’s real priority: putting out videos using a crime allegedly committed by a transgender suspect to go after “the Deranged Left.”
And look more broadly at their releases. Apart form the trailers for documentaries, the content is just Ryun’s TV appearances:
What is the real purpose of this “American Majority” nonprofit? Promoting the interests of a majority of Americans through fighting the “American Leviathan” opressing them?
Or is it promoting Ned Ryun so he can assemble his big pile of mad money?
How many Fox News appearances is that? Twelve. How many times do you see his name in their videos above?
The truth about the right-wing nonprofit world is that really a lot of these organizations are just set up to aggrandize the men who found them and to line their pockets. Ryun has just built for himself a $4 million piggybank with money he can use to play around with and produce stupid fucking documentaries that will do nothing except dupe his donors into thinking their money is being well-spent on “fighting the Left.” Horowitz figured out 30 years ago he could do this and now people like Ryun here are just imitating the same model.
One of the really fun things that I learned how to do in my years of researching leftist and Islamist nonprofits is how to look up how much money the leaders of so-called “charities” are actually bringing in. This is the Form 990 for 2024 which American Majority filed, as it was required to do so by law and all nonprofits must to disclose their financials. Here is page 7 where you can see how much money Ryun is raking in each year to run a charity to train “grassroots conservative activists.”
So add up those three D, E, and F categories: $292,631 a year.
Not quite an Uncle Scrooge money bin but it may as well be considering that it’s higher than 97 percent of Americans.
There’s lots of cash to round up from scaring Americans that a giant octopus man government is coming to get them!
4. Feral America
This left-wing news Substack follows a similar approach and formula as a number of accounts documented in the previous installment. It mirrors Really American and Raw America in providing progressive content under an Adjective America framing. However, they have nowhere near the following of their competitors yet who clock in at a respective 133K and 328K to Feral America’s just under 6K. So this is an upstart imitator.
I am so sick of Gen-Zers calling me “bro.” Whenever that trend can go out of fashion would be just great.
The next account on the list also deploys this trick of writing under the publication’s name, albiet in a different market and to a much larger readership — more than 643,000.
5. Business Analytics Review
I just don’t understand why publications like this and Feral America would feel the need to hide that they use AI’s help in drafting their articles. It makes sense when it’s some famous writer who wants everyone to think that they’re incredible.
But why lie about something this trivial?
Probable answer: because they’re just used to lying. It’s their way of moving through the world.
6. M. Ballard - Citeline News
I don’t remember why I subscribed to this guy — I tend to subscribe pretty liberally, as I like to give new people a chance — and at only 137 subscribers, he’s smaller than I’d generally aim to include in this series, but the size does not matter. If I come across an account doing this then they’re getting treated like everyone else.
Following our exchange, he continued:
However on his next piece, he failed to disable Pangram:
Did he forget?
Or does he realize now that while he can run, he cannot hide, bitch?
7. V Spehar
V Spehar is another writer I had not encountered before the investigation.
This suggestion that blocking Pangram somehow prevents our writing from being used to train AI is a refrain that shows up when these writers try to justify themselves.
It’s hard to know if V really believes this business about Substack supposedly wanting to use our writing to train AI. It’s so absurd.
8. Marlon Weems
Marlon Weems has gradually built himself up into one of the more influential anti-Trump commentators on Substack, now branding himself as an “independent journalist.” His background is in finance and I’ve never been all that impressed by his takes as they’ve often seemed rather bland and predictable. Perhaps this is why:
After our exchange, Marlon added an AI statement and chose not to disable Pangram:
I asked him to clarify his choices:
Why is it so difficult for some people to just be honest about all this?
Why must so many people gaslight us about how unreliable Pangram actually is and how that then justifies them blocking their readers from using it?
9. The AI Pixel
Why?
Seriously!
The publication itself is about AI, so why can’t its author(s) admit their use? Who would care? Do they think it will discourage subscribes?
Next, I decided to drop in to see the parenting category. There was not as much concealed AI use as you might suspect, at least not so far in the investigation.
10. Scarlett Longstreet
There certainly is a large market for advice columns…
11. Catherine Andrews
As noted in the previous installment with The Hood Healer and Damien Echols, AI will be very helpful for those wanting to promote stereotypical New Age cliches. I should probably do a segment just devoted to people in this category who engage in this practice of selling synthetic spirituality:
12. Freedom to Offend
I’d followed Freedom To Offend for at least a year or so. He offers political and cultural essays. It’s hard for me to remember anything he’s written that would really provoke offense, though.
I can’t recall anything compelling at all. And it’s understandable why when you see his Pangram scores:
I had the above exchange with Freedom to Offend before engaging with the two people who I chose to remove from the list after they responded in a professional manner.
13. Tim Denning - Modern Freedom
Tim Denning writes self-help bullshit which he offers to his more than 233,000 subscribers.
Or, rather, he writes most of it. Tim is one of the minority of the Substackers in this investigation disabling Pangram who aren’t even hiding that much AI use.
Even 7% is apparently too much for Mr. 233K’s ego:
Four percent? Come on, man. Your readers aren’t going to look down on you for 4%. But this former reader sure as hell does for your attempt to hide it.
14. Stoic Wisdoms
One of the weird things that happened over the last decade was the popularization and commercialization of the Ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism.
The reason this happened is because Ryan Holiday’s self-help book The Obsctacle Is the Way became a huge hit. Ryan is one of history’s greatest marketers and realized the financial potential here for becoming the world’s foremost neo-Stoicism Evangelist. And it worked.
The Obstacle Is the Way is indeed a pretty good book — for what it is. This is a book of short, simple essays offering motivational life lessons. It provides bits that coaches and corporate leaders can use in pep talks. And it does the job. I bought a copy and it does help. His later books I’ve found less impressive and much more repetitive. He’s become one of those authors with a big hit and then they simply repeat the formula as long as they can.
This in turn inspires imitators, like this Stoic Wisdoms, just as in the left-wing category Feral America chose to imitate Raw America and Really American.
The AI-written publication Stoic Wisdoms has collected 366,000 subscribers. The human-written Stoic Philosophy has reached 168,000.
His newest piece seems appropos here:
Here is some stoic wisdom from it which all would-be AI-writers should consider:
Our lives today are full of convenience. With AI, things are even going to get worse. We get warm showers, fast internet connecting us to a global community, food with a few taps, a means of transport for a distance we’d otherwise walk, and endless entertainment.
Life should be good.
Until power goes out for a day, someone disappoints us, or we miss our usual meal.
Stoics therefore recommended a deliberate practice on discipline, called askēsis.
The principle is to welcome and even create discomfort in our lives before life throws it at us.
It’s something you should start today.
Writing the easy way with an LLM doing the hard work, will produce weaker, less interesting results. That’s the constant we see when evaluating these substacks across subjects.
15. David McIlroy - How to Write for a Living
And now we bump into one of the most irritating genres of Substack writers. The pickaxe salesmen.
There are a lot of people on here who aren’t really writers themselves, but instead they want to help you as a writer. They have tons of marketing advice and endless Substack optimization tips to help you. Of course they aren’t actually interested in mining for gold themselves, but they’ll sell you the tools so you can do that hard, thankless work.
Just one problem, all of them are just conventional wisdom that any LLM could tell you:
On Amazon, David describes how he “writes from his home in Northern Ireland, where he lives with his beautiful wife Christine and their two dogs, Lupin and Ghost. He loves books, movies, football (he’s better at watching than playing), and getting his hiking boots dirty.” He lists four fantasy and horror novels with an upcoming nonfiction book, A Biblical View of Law and Justice.
If he wrote these articles himself then he would simply say “yes, I wrote these myself.” But instead he has to ignore reality, that this scheme of presenting LLM writing as your own is not going to last much longer. But at least it’s been a good run so far, right?
16. Fleur Hall
“25+ years in marketing.”
Tell me you’re going to bullshit me without telling me you’re going to bullshit me.
As the video above indicates with their association, Fleur Hull operates on Substack in the same category as David McIlroy: the eager marketing guru, excited to help aspiring writers learn the secrets of how to market their books.
Does it undercut her pitch too much for writers to see the role of AI in her process?
This was quite the slip she made next:
And then the block came, as though that would undo the damage instead of make it much worse:
Fleur calls herself a “5x published author.”
Well, what are these books exactly? What publishing experience has equipped her to advise other authors?
For some reason, only one book comes up on Amazon for Fleur:
In her bio, Fleur notes that “the book and e-book became Amazon.com.au bestsellers in their online launch week in December 2020,” thus suggesting an Australian location and providing justification for few baby echidna video embeds. Apparently they’re called “puggles” when first born:
But there’s something stranger in Fleur’s story than the unique animals on her continent of choice. Here is Fleur’s bio on Amazon accompanying this one book. Nowhere in it does she mention any of these other four books she claims to have authored. Instead, she does not describe herself first as a writer or author but a “a high-energy and results-driven personal branding and career coach with a passion for personal and organisational growth.” The bio also does not describe her writing or literary credentials, but does make sure to tug at your heart strings by mentioning her recent recovery from cancer.
When was the last time you went to an author’s bio page on Amazon and found a story about their cancer survival? Why would an author need to distract you with that instead of emphasizing their actual credentials?
In Conclusion: The Real Reason Why So Many Flee the Truth
As noted at the beginning, two people planned for inclusion in this list have now escaped professional humiliation through demonstrating honesty and maturity when confronted about their decision to disable Pangram to conceal text generated by an LLM. A foundation of Christianity is radical forgiveness.
Fleur Hull, Tim Denning, M. Ballard, and the numerous others from the previous list who also chose to block me rather than answer for their actions, could have each chosen to do likewise.
Why did they not? Because they are narcissists and I have inflicted an injury to their ego by confronting them with an ethical lapse:
Emotionally-healthy people can maintain discussions when confronted about a mistake they may have made. They see themselves as separate from their ideas and actions. They recognize the critique of something done or said is not the same thing as a personal attack.
The narcissist does not process the world that way. Instead, to challenge an idea they advocate or identify a harm they have caused is received by them as an attack on their very essence. For them they find meaning not in doing good, but in looking good.
Doing writing which matters and makes an impact is not as important as simply being perceived as an important, great writer who matters and makes an impact.
Coming Up Next: The War on the Bullshit Mercenaries Peddling Deceptions for Dollars Will Continue…
In our next installment of this ongoing series, I’ll set aside the maximalist costume and produce the simple list of all those named in this piece and the previous one so everyone can know which subscriptions to cancel…