The Michael Fanone Show

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com The research didn’t get updated. It got deleted. The administration pulled taxpayer-funded gun violence research off government websites and bet you’d never notice. After two decades carrying a badge, I’ve watched plenty of politicians talk tough on crime. This isn’t that. This is making sure you never see the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com He told a federal agent it was all a joke. Free speech. He said it on his own front porch, with the FBI standing right in front of him, and he kept saying it right up until the night they came back and put him in handcuffs. After twenty years in law enforcement, I can tell you “it’s just a joke” is the most pr...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com For more than a year, the anti-vaccine movement had its perfect martyr. A young mother in Idaho. Two healthy eighteen-month-old twins, a boy and a girl. A routine checkup — and within days, both babies dead in a shared bed. RFK Jr. and his people at Health and Human Services rushed to make her the example they...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com The party’s on fire, and its would-be leader went quiet. There’s a real fight tearing through the Democratic caucus, and the man who wants to be the next Speaker of the House looked at it, watched his own members go at each other’s throats, and decided the smartest thing he could do was keep his mouth shut. He...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Trump called her a hostage. She killed a mother of two. For four years we’ve been fed a story about January 6. The people who stormed the Capitol weren’t rioters, they were patriots. Not criminals — political prisoners. On a rally stage in Ohio in March 2024, Trump saluted while an announcer had the crowd rise...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Two point two billion dollars. That’s what Donald Trump made last year — not his companies in some abstract sense, him, personally. And the reason we know the number is that his own White House dropped his annual financial disclosure with his signature at the bottom. The year before he returned to office, his...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com They told you it was about crime. It wasn’t. That was the whole pitch — armed soldiers on the streets of the capital, M17 pistols and M4 rifles, posted at Metro stations and the Lincoln Memorial, because Washington was supposedly so dangerous it needed a military response. Trump called DC one of the most dange...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com He named his child-abuse account after Joe Biden. RJ May was a Republican in the South Carolina House, a founding member of the Freedom Caucus — the hardliners whose whole job was calling other Republicans insufficiently conservative. On the House floor he said, out loud: “We as legislators have an obligation...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Trump threw America a birthday party. Nobody came. The Great American State Fair is the administration’s big America 250 celebration — sixteen days on the National Mall, June 25 through July 10, to mark the country’s 250th birthday. There’s a 110-foot Ferris wheel they named “Freedom 250.” There’s a nonprofit...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Fifteen weeks. Fifteen weeks that will go down as one of the most costly and moronic wastes of American taxpayer money we’ve ever made — a war that cost thousands of lives, accomplished nothing, and left us worse off in almost every way you can measure. This week the President announced that he and JD Vance ha...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Let me name the feeling before we get into it. It’s the feeling that this is hopeless. The lawlessness moves too fast. The courts get ignored. Congress rolls over. They come after their enemies and nobody stops them. And underneath it all, the quietest, most dangerous one: that you’re the only one who still ca...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Look at the candidates breaking through this cycle and they don’t line up. One’s practically a democratic socialist. One’s a moderate who had kind words for some of Trump’s tariffs. One wraps progressive politics in scripture. One’s a buttoned-up senator who barely does interviews. One’s the governor of the bi...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Keon McDaniel was six weeks into Air Force basic training. His whole career ahead of him. His whole life. On Friday he was rushed to Brooke Army Medical Center after a medical emergency. By Monday he was dead. The Air Force says a full medical review is underway, and we don’t yet know for certain whether his d...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com According to the Justice Department, five men planned to fly explosive-laden drones over the UFC event on the White House lawn, panic the crowd into a stampede, and have snipers pick off high-value targets as people ran. They’d built an encrypted group chat, stockpiled rifles and thousands of rounds, scouted t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Look at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool right now. It isn’t red, white, and blue. It’s green — a vivid, soupy, algae-bloom green. And the brand-new blue waterproofing on the bottom is already peeling up and floating to the surface. That pool just went through a $14.2 million repair. And the company brough...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Picture a guy standing in an empty field in central Tennessee, seeing a town that isn’t there yet. A church spire. English cottages. Cattle on the ridge. A farm store. Families gathering to worship. His name is Josh Abbotoy. Thirty-eight, a master’s in medieval history, and he runs a real estate company called...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Let me tell you about Afa Ah Loo. Thirty-nine years old, born in Samoa, the youngest of five. He learned to sew from the women in his family, and that skill carried him to a fashion showcase inside Buckingham Palace and onto Project Runway. He became a U.S. citizen in September of 2024 and voted for the first...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com The Trump administration is investigating Gavin Newsom. Not one investigation — multiple, according to the New York Times, aimed at the sitting governor of the largest state in the country and a man most of America expects to run for president in two years. Newsom went on camera this week to say so himself, be...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com There’s a peninsula on the Adriatic coast called Zvernec. A thousand acres of flamingos, pelicans, and wetlands that have been there longer than any of us have been alive. And right now there are people standing on that sand, in front of barbed wire, refusing to move. They’ve been there two weeks. They aren’t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Here’s something that doesn’t get said enough: when you put unqualified people in powerful jobs, they don’t suddenly become qualified. They just fail in more expensive and more public ways. That’s exactly what’s happening inside Donald Trump’s Justice Department. Politico reported that at least a dozen times i...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com A sheriff’s deputy in rural Indiana pulls over a speeder on a Sunday afternoon. Routine. Nothing about a stop like that should make the news, and nothing about it should end with a body on the shoulder of the road. Except the driver had been a free man for exactly six days. His name was Matthew Huttle. Forty-t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com There’s a senator who keeps insisting he’s not running for president, and the more he says it, the harder the political class loses its mind over him. That alone should tell you something. Anybody who reads me knows I hate endorsing politicians. I’ve been burned too many times. So I’m not endorsing Jon Ossoff...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com When Eileen Wang was sworn in as mayor of Arcadia, California — a quiet suburb outside Los Angeles — she gave the kind of speech that makes a room feel good. A small mountain village in China to American city hall. And then this line: our loyalty must always be clear, to this country, to our Constitution, to o...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com The deadliest year of war on this planet since the Rwandan genocide just happened, and I’d bet money this is the first you’re hearing of it. Nearly a quarter million people killed. The silence around that number is its own story. The count comes from Uppsala University in Sweden, where researchers track the wo...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Spend a fortune trying to destroy a candidate and you expect to see it somewhere in the polls. The national party threw everything it had at Graham Platner — an oyster farmer and former Marine running for Senate in Maine — and it didn’t move him an inch. He took the nomination going away. A lot of people in Wa...