The Truth Is Out There
Substackers, Podcasts, and Newsletters Not Complying in Advance
While those who would suppress or misdirect the flow of truth are busy thinking up ways to make legacy media bow down to wannabe tyrants, there are new alternatives popping up daily. I want to take some time on a regular basis with giving readers of this publication a flyover of outlets worthy of your attention.
Some have deep reporting, some have informed commentary, others speak to specific audiences or topics, some are entertaining and very few are deep thinkers. I’d say there are more places to find information than ever. I apologize in advance for the high number of Substackers; these stories rose to the top of my pile this morning.
So here goes…
From across both news and old media: Nationwide No Kings Day Protests. Posts on social media were the best source for information on Presidents Day actions in State Capitals and dozens of cities around the U.S. Once again, these protests were organized under the aegis of 50501, an informal alliance of activists whose primary purpose is to give an organizational framework to the broad spectrum of Americans opposed to actions by the Trump/Musk regime.
I spotted protests in Washington DC, Sacramento, San Diego (CA), New York city, Little Rock (AR), Atlanta (GA), Austin, Dallas (TX), Augusta (ME), Portland (OR), Santa Fe (NM), Roanoke (VA), Boston, Nantucket (MA), Phoenix (AZ), Denver, Rocky Mountain National Park (CO), Columbia (SC), Green Bay, Madison (WI), Tallahassee, Winterhaven, Tampa, Orlando (FL), Seattle, Trenton (NJ), Hartford, New Haven (CT) and more…
Melissa Hira Grant at The New Republic:
Mere weeks ago, media outlets were still publishing pieces asking where the “resistance” was. It seems we are now well past that: Possibly, that’s because “the resistance” is bubbling up in too many places to track. When we look back on these weeks, we may see a broader narrative was emerging: The rolling protests everywhere may turn out to be more sustainable than the mass one-day turnouts by which many judge the strength of a movement.
San Diego’s daily didn’t bother with the local protest at Waterfront Park; they ran a generic Associated Press story.
ORGANIZED MONEY (Podcast) with David Dayen featured an interview with former top Dept of Justice antitrust enforcer Doha Mekki, talking about putting together an antitrust case and taking on Google.
KEN KLIPPENSTEIN (Substack) Tulsi Gabbard Has Nothing to Say: “The newly confirmed Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence thus emerges as the most conventional of all of Trump’s high-level national security appointments. “
HOW THINGS WORK (Substack) by Hamilton Nolan-Checking in on The Party of the Working Class: “One of the most excruciating threads of political discourse I have ever had to endure in my entire life is the ongoing Very Serious Discussion of whether the Republicans are now the “party of the working class.”
JILL FILIPOVIC (Substack) The Task Ahead: Pull In The Dissatisfied Trump Voters. “The hardest job in the world will be to welcome them, to talk with them, and to resist the urge to tell them that they are absolute morons who got us into this mess in the first place.”
RELIABLE SOURCES (Newsletter) Brian Stelter NATO for news? “ "To protect the free press in America, we need to agree that 'an attack on one is an attack on all,'" Jim Friedlich says, invoking the famous phrase in the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949. Friedlich is the CEO and executive director of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the nonprofit that owns The Philadelphia Inquirer. In a new opinion piece, he proposes a "commitment to collective action," akin to a "NATO for news," in response to President Trump's "assaults.””
LIVING IT (Substack) Olivia Troye. Hope in the Face of Authoritarianism. “The forces of authoritarianism, disinformation, and political violence want us to believe that resistance is useless and that we should simply accept what is happening. But history tells us otherwise. It tells us that even the smallest acts of defiance: telling the truth, refusing to comply, supporting one another, can snowball into movements that bring down entire systems of oppression.”
THE MESSAGE BOX (Substack) How to Make Trump Unpopular Again. “Despite messaging and media advantages, the primary reason that the GOP is now in power was a global spike in inflation as the world came out of COVID. But there are methods to bring down Trump’s numbers. This post is the first in a series about the various strategies and tactics Democrats — from the leadership on down to activists — can employ to make Trump more unpopular.”
STOP THE PRESSES (Substack) Mark Jacob Why won’t the media call fascists ‘fascists’?In today’s America, the news industry is fighting the last war. When reporters cast everything as a partisan battle of Republicans vs. Democrats rather than a choice between democracy and dictatorship, they’re fighting the last war. When they give Republicans and Democrats “equal time” without regard for whether the assertions are true or not, they’re failing to adjust to the right wing’s increasingly sophisticated information warfare. They’re fighting the last war. And the public is losing.
POPULAR INFORMATION (Substack) Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, Noel Sims The whitewashing of military schools The Department of Defense (DoD) is imposing a comprehensive censorship regime across its network of 161 primary and secondary schools — eliminating content that acknowledges the contributions of women, minorities, and LGBTQ people…The speech crackdown is important not just because it impacts 67,000 students in military families, but because it likely reflects an agenda that the Trump administration will seek to impose on all public schools.
PAUL KRUGMAN (Substack) Making Microbes Great Again “Americans should have taken two big lessons from the Covid experience. First, scientists do know what they’re talking about. Second, taking medical advice from people who reject science is bad for your health. In fact, it can kill you. What happened instead was a hard turn by Republicans against vaccination. Only 26 percent of Republicans now say that childhood vaccinations are important; 31 percent say that they’re more dangerous than the diseases they were designed to prevent.”
PUBLIC NOTICE (Substack) Stephen Robinson How Marco Rubio helped bury American soft power. “It’s become commonplace these days for Republicans to abandon everything they once believed to gain favor with Trump, such as their NATO allies. But Rubio’s flip-flop on USAID reinforces Trump’s triumph over the last vestiges of neoconservatism.”
THE STATUS KUO (Substack) Jay Kuo Elon Sees Dead People “The legacy press is doing a lousy job letting the public know that Musk’s statements are bogus and easily disprovable. They’re doing an even worse job explaining that Musk has a nefarious agenda behind all his false fraud claims. That means it’s up to us independent reporters and writers to get the word out, and for that we need your help amplifying the truth.”
POLITICO PLAYBOOK (Newsletter) What Trump Wants “Essentially, Trump wants massive payback for the military support the U.S. has offered up these past three years. The terms of the contract … amount to the U.S. economic colonization of Ukraine in legal perpetuity,” the Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes. “It implies a burden of reparations that cannot possibly be achieved … with terms normally imposed on aggressor states defeated in war. They are worse than the financial penalties imposed on Germany and Japan after their defeat in 1945 … [and] amount to a higher share of Ukrainian GDP than reparations imposed on Germany at the Versailles Treaty.”
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN (Substack) Heather Cox Richardson February 17, 2025 “The portrait of our first president voluntarily giving up power rather than becoming a dictator will always be foundational to the true principles of the United States of America and is certainly reason enough to celebrate him. But in 2025, as we navigate an ocean of disinformation under a president who won office thanks to what is actually called the “Big Lie” that he won the 2020 presidential election, there is also reason to honor the idea that a democracy depends upon citizens’ ability to make informed decisions about their leaders and their policies. That ability, in turn, depends on leaders’ honesty—a lesson taught more than 200 years ago by a parson who wrote about a future president, a hatchet, and a cherry tree.”
CIVIL DISCOURSE (Substack) Joyce Vance A Different Kind of Special Counsel “This is the first of the current challenges to Trump’s takeover of the executive branch to reach the Supreme Court, but as we noted last night, it would be a mistake to read too much into it. Although presidents can only remove the special counsel of the United States for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” that substantive issue will not be on the table in this early appeal. Nonetheless, Court watchers will be on alert for any signal the Court may give of how it views the early activity by Trump 2.0, and whether it may be willing to pump the brakes, at least temporarily.”
NOTES FROM THE CIRCUS (Substack) Mike Brock If Men Were Angels “Let us speak plainly: What we are witnessing is not reform or innovation. It is not efficiency or modernization. It is the resurrection of something far older and more dangerous—the merger of private wealth and public power into a single, unaccountable force. When a tech executive can control global discourse, shape government policy, and potentially access every citizen's financial information, we're not seeing the future. We're watching democracy's past try to reclaim its throne.”
