One hundred years ago tomorrow, former president Jimmy Carter arrived in the world in Plains, Georgia. According to the Atlanta Constitution of that date, he arrived just after the worst wind and rainstorm of the year passed off to sea. His home state of Georgia, along with North Carolina and Virginia, sustained significant damage, with railroad tracks and bridges washed out, crops damaged, and at least seven lives lost. 

Today, almost a hundred years later, the destruction from Hurricane Helene continues to mount. At least 128 people have died in six states, and many more remain unaccounted for. Roads remain closed, and power is still off for more than 2 million people. In remarks to reporters today, President Joe Biden called the damage “stunning” and explained that the federal government is providing all the support it can. He noted that federal help was on the ground before the storm and when asked if there were more the government could be doing, answered no and explained that the administration had “preplanned a significant amount of it, even though they…hadn’t asked for it yet.” 

Biden said this morning he will not tour the damaged areas until his presence will not disrupt emergency response operations. This afternoon, he said he would travel to North Carolina on Wednesday for a briefing and an aerial tour of Asheville, after ensuring the travel “will not disrupt the ongoing response.” He has also said he may have to ask Congress to come back into session before its mid-November return date to pass a supplemental spending bill. Punchbowl News political reporter Melanie Zanona noted that Congress left disaster aid out of the short-term continuing resolution to fund the government it passed before leaving town. 

And yet, the hurricane has become the latest topic of disinformation for MAGA Republicans. Social media today is full of accounts claiming that the federal government is not responding to the crisis in western North Carolina because it prefers to spend money in Ukraine and on undocumented immigrants. Newsmax host Todd Starnes claimed that FEMA’s “top priority is not disaster relief” but to push diversity, equity and inclusion. “So, unless you’ve got your preferred pronouns spraypainted on the side of your submerged house—you won’t get a penny from Uncle Sam. Western North Carolina is just too Conservative and too Caucasian for FEMA to care.” The House Judiciary Committee posted that “Joe Biden was at the beach.”

These posts echo Russian disinformation, and Trump was on board with it. Touring Valdosta, Georgia, today, as a private citizen where people are still without power amidst the devastation, Trump said he had spoken to Elon Musk to get his Starlink satellites into North Carolina; FEMA has already provided 40 of the systems to North Carolina. He claimed that Georgia governor Brian Kemp is “having a hard time getting the president on the phone. They’re being very non-responsive.”

Kemp himself told reporters that Biden had called yesterday. “And he just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?’” Kemp told him, “We got what we need, we’ll work through the federal process. He offered that if there’s other things that we need just to call him directly, which I appreciate that.” South Carolina governor Henry McMaster, a Republican, called it “a great team effort…the federal government is helping us well, they’re embedded with us. There is no asset out there that we haven’t already accessed.” 

Republican governor of Virginia Glenn Youngkin told reporters that he was “incredibly appreciative of the rapid response and cooperation from the federal team at FEMA.” Asheville, North Carolina, mayor Esther Manheimer told CNBC “We have support from outside organizations, other fire departments sending us resources, the federal government as well. So it’s all-hands-on-deck, and it is a well-coordinated effort, but it is so enormous….” 

FEMA spokesperson Jaclyn Rothenberg responded to a post claiming that FEMA was refusing to help certain Americans, saying: “This is a lie. We help all people regardless of background as fast as possible before, during and after disasters. That is our mission and that is our focus.” 

In contrast, numerous posters today noted that Trump repeatedly withheld federal aid from Democratic governors—including that of North Carolina—after disasters in their states. After the Trump campaign organized a fundraiser for victims of the hurricane, David Frum of The Atlantic reminded readers that in 2019, Trump was fined $2 million and three of his children were ordered to take classes as a penalty for taking for their own use funds from charities they ran.

When a reporter asked President Biden and Democratic North Carolina governor Roy Cooper to respond to Trump’s accusation that they are ignoring the disaster, Biden responded: “He’s lying. And the governor told him he was lying…. I’ve spoken to the governor, spent time with him…. I don’t know why he does this. And the reason I get so angry about it, I don’t care about what he says about me, but I care what he communicates to the people that are in need. He implies that we’re not doing everything possible. We are…. I assume you heard the Republican Governor of Georgia talk about that he was on the phone with me more than once. So that’s simply not true. And it’s irresponsible.”

Economist Paul Krugman noted: “We’ve all become desensitized, but it’s amazing how at this point the Trump campaign rests entirely on denouncing things that aren’t happening—[an] imaginary bad economy, imaginary runaway crime and now an imaginary failure of Biden and Harris to respond to natural disaster.”

In Florida, though, Governor Ron DeSantis says his state does not need more federal help. “We have it handled,” he said. DeSantis might be eager to downplay the damage to the state in part because in May he joined other Republican leaders in an attack on Biden’s actions to address climate change. 

DeSantis signed into law a new Florida measure that erased any references to climate change in state law, where they had been included in a 2008 climate change and renewable energy package then backed by the state’s Republicans. The new law prohibited cities and counties from approving restrictions on energy policy, relaxed regulations on natural gas pipelines, and state and local governments from taking environmental concerns into consideration in their investing policies. DeSantis also rejected more than $350 million in federal funding for initiatives to promote energy efficiency, and $320 million for reducing vehicle emissions. 

Like DeSantis, the authors of Project 2025 claim that those working to address climate change are part of “the climate change alarm industry,” which is “harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” 

In fact, the U.S. economy is booming in part thanks to the climate change initiatives begun under the Inflation Reduction Act, which have prompted both domestic and foreign investment in alternative technologies. Biden approached the need to address climate change as an opportunity to create good jobs, including union jobs, in the United States.

With those investments, economist Mark Zandi wrote yesterday that the U.S. economy is one of the best performing economies in the past 35 years. “Economic growth is rip-roaring, with real GDP up 3% over the past year. Unemployment is low at near 4%, consistent with full employment. Inflation is fast closing in on Fed’s 2% target—grocery prices, rents and gas prices are flat to down over the past more than a year. Households’ financial obligations are light, and set to get lighter with the Fed cutting rates. House prices have never been higher, and most homeowners have more equity in their homes than ever. Corporate profits are robust, and the stock market is hitting a record high on a seemingly daily basis.” 

Zandi noted that there are “blemishes.” Lower-income households are struggling, there is a shortage of affordable housing, and the government is running large budget deficits. As always, things could change quickly. “But in my time as an economist,” he wrote, “the economy has rarely looked better.”

North Georgia, the area represented by MAGA Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, is one of the areas that has been revitalized with new solar panel manufacturing funded by the Inflation Reduction Act. Yet Phil Mattingly and Andrew Seger of CNN reported on Friday, September 27, that while voters there like the strong economy, in this year’s election they say they still plan to back Trump, who has called Biden’s green energy initiatives a “scam” and vowed to claw back any money still unspent from the Inflation Reduction Act.  

Aaron Zitner, Jon Kamp, and Brian McGill of the Wall Street Journal today called attention to this paradox, that people in counties that vote for Trump are significantly more likely than those that vote for Democrats to rely on federal government funding. This is in part because they are older and thus receive Social Security and Medicare, and in part because they live in areas hollowed out when industries there left. These are the areas the Biden-Harris administration have targeted for investment.

The authors note that these government-funded pro-Trump counties are clustered in the swing states that will decide the election. About 70% of the counties in Michigan, Georgia, and North Carolina rely significantly on government income. So do nearly 60% of the counties in Pennsylvania. 

In other news today, in Georgia, Fulton County Superior Court judge Robert McBurney struck down the state’s six-week abortion ban, which prohibited abortions before many women know they’re pregnant, as unconstitutional. A government investigation recently showed that two Georgia women died after being unable to obtain abortion care in the state shortly after Georgia’s ban went into effect. 

In a searing 26-page decision, the Republican-appointed judge wrote that the state cannot force a woman to carry a fetus that cannot live on its own. “Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote. Forcing a woman to carry an unwanted, not-yet-viable fetus to term violates her constitutional rights to liberty and privacy.” 

—

Notes:

“Floods Threaten Further Damage in Coast States,” Atlanta Constitution, October 1, 1924, p. 1.

https://www.cnn.com/weather/live-news/hurricane-helene-florida-north-carolina-georgia-09-30-24/index.html

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/09/30/remarks-by-president-biden-before-air-force-one-departure-dover-de/

https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/politics/2024/05/15/desantis-erases-climate-change-from-fl-laws-strikes-blow-at-windmills/73591696007/

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/27/politics/dalton-georgia-trump-voters-biden-climate-law/index.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/28/global-climate-change-trump-00181545

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/americans-government-aid-social-security-medicare-unemployment-34e92b19

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/30/weather/hurricane-helene-recovery-cleanup-monday/index.html

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2024/09/30/fema-administrator-deanne-criswell-ground-north-carolina-biden-harris

https://www.flgov.com/2023/05/02/governor-ron-desantis-signs-legislation-to-protect-floridians-financial-future-economic-liberty/

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/11/14/remarks-by-president-biden-on-actions-to-address-the-climate-crisis/

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25178630-mcburney-sistersong-final-order

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This article is based on a speech delivered by Matt Taibbi at the “Rescue the Republic” rally in Washington, D.C., on Sunday. 

I was once taught you should always open an important speech by making reference to a shared experience.

So what do all of us at Rescue the Republic have in common? Nothing!

In a pre-Trump universe, chimpanzees would be typing their fourth copy of Hamlet before RFK Jr., Robert Malone, Zuby, Tulsi Gabbard, Russell Brand, Bret Weinstein, and I would organically get together for any reason, much less at an event like this.

True, everyone speaking has been censored. The issues were all different, but everyone disagreed with “authoritative voices” about something.

Saying no is very American. From “Don’t Tread on Me!” to “Nuts” to “You Cannot Be Serious!,” defiance is in our DNA.

Now disagreement is seen as a threat, and according to John Kerry, must be “hammered out of existence.” The former presidential candidate just complained at a World Economic Forum meeting that “it’s really hard to govern” and “our First Amendment stands as a major block” to the important work of hammering out unhealthy choices.

In the open he said this! I was telling Tim Pool about this backstage, and he asked, “Was black ooze coming out of his mouth?”

Kerry added that it’s “really hard to build consensus,” and told forum members they need to “win the right to govern” and “be free to implement change.”

What do they need to be free of? The First Amendment, yes, but more importantly: us. Complainers. That’s our shared experience. We are obstacles to consensus.

My name is Matt Taibbi. I’ve been a reporter for 35 years, covering everything from Pentagon accounting to securities fraud to drone warfare. My son, a few years ago, asked what I do. I said, “Daddy writes about things that are so horrible they’re interesting.”

Two years ago, I was invited by Elon Musk to look at internal correspondence at Twitter. This led to stories called the “Twitter Files,” whose main revelation was a broad government effort to suppress speech.

I was invited to talk about risks to the First Amendment, but to spare the suspense: That battle is lost. State censorship is a fact in most of the West. In February, our European allies began observing the Digital Services Act, which requires internet platforms to enforce judgments of state-appointed content reviewers called “trusted flaggers.”

Everything we found in the Twitter Files fits in a sentence: an alphabet soup of enforcement agencies informally is already doing pretty much the same thing as Europe’s draconian new law.

Now, is it against the law when a White House official calls Facebook and asks to ban a journalist for writing that the Covid vaccine “doesn’t stop infection or transmission”? I think, Hell yes. It certainly violates the spirit of the First Amendment, even if judges are found to say it keeps to the letter.

But this is post-9/11 America. Whether about surveillance, or torture, or habeas corpus, or secret prisons, or rendition, or any of a dozen other things, we ignore laws. Institutional impunity is the chief characteristic of our current form of government.

We have concepts like “illegal but necessary”: the government may torture, the public obviously can’t. The state may intercept phone calls; you can’t. The state may search without warrants, assassinate, snatch geolocations from your phones, any of a hundred things officially prohibited, but allowed. This concept requires that officials have special permission to ignore laws.

Ten years ago, we were caught spying on three different French presidents as well as companies like BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, Peugeot, Renault, and Total. Barack Obama called the French to apologize, but did we stop? We did indict the person who released the news, Julian Assange.

Congratulations to Julian on getting out, by the way. And shame on every journalist who did not call for his release.

We ignore laws. It’s what America does. With this in mind, our government has moved past censorship to the larger project of changing the American personality. They want a more obedient, timorous, fearful citizen. Their tool is the internet, a vast machine for doling out reward and punishment through likes and views, shaming or deamplification. The mechanics are complicated, but the core concept is simple: You’re upranked for accepting authority, downranked for questioning it, with questions of any kind increasingly viewed as a form of disinformation.

Let me pause to say something about America’s current intellectual class, from which the “anti-disinformation” complex comes. By the way: There are no working-class censors, poor censors, hungry censors. The dirty secret of “content moderation” everywhere is that it’s a tiny sliver of the educated rich correcting everyone else. It’s telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it.

America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Haydens, John Brennans, James Clappers, Mike McFauls, and Rick Stengels who make up America’s self-appointed behavior police.

In prerevolutionary France, even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword duel to the death. Our aristocrats pee themselves at the sight of mean tweets. They have no honor, no belief, no poetry, art, or humor, no patriotism, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They’re simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off.

They have one idea, not even an idea but a sensation: fear. Rightly so, because they snitch each other out at the drop of a hat; they’re afraid of each other, but they’re also terrified of everyone outside their social set and live in near-constant fear of being caught having an original opinion. They believe in the manner of herd animals, who also live whole lives without knowing an anxiety-free minute: They believe things with blinding zeal until 51 percent change their minds, and then, like deer, the rest bolt in that direction. We saw that with the Biden is sharp as a tack/No, Biden must step aside for the Politics of Joy switch.

I grew up a liberal Democrat and can’t remember having even most of the same beliefs as my friends. Now, millions of alleged intellectuals claim identical beliefs about vast ranges of issues, and this ludicrous mass delusion is the precondition for “disinformation studies,” really the highly unscientific science of punishing deviation from the uniform belief set—what another excommunicated liberal, my friend Thomas Frank, calls the “utopia of scolding.”

“Freedom of speech” is a beautiful phrase, strong, optimistic. It has a ring to it. But it’s being replaced in the discourse by “disinformation” and “misinformation,” words that aren’t beautiful but full of the small, pettifogging, bureaucratic anxiety of a familiar American villain: the busybody, the prohibitionist, the nosy parker, the snoop. 

H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is happy.” That streak of our early European settlers unfortunately survives in us and keeps surfacing through moral panics. Four hundred years ago it was witches, then it was Catholic immigrants, then “the devil’s music,” comic books, booze, communists, and now, information.

Because “freedom of speech” is now frequently described as a stalking horse for hate and discrimination—the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk scolded Musk that “free speech is not a free pass”—it’s becoming one of those soon-to-be-extinct terms. Speech is mentioned in “reputable” media only as a possible vector for the informational disease known as misinformation. Soon all that will remain of the issue for most people is a flutter of the nerves, reminding them to avoid thinking about it.

The endgame is not controlling speech. They’re already doing that. The endgame is getting us to forget we ever had anything to say.

To small thinkers, free speech is a wilderness of potential threats. The people who built this country, whatever else you can say about them, weren’t small thinkers. They were big, big thinkers, and I mean that not just in terms of intellect but arrogance, gall, brass, audacity, cheek.

Kurt Vonnegut called the founding fathers “sea pirates.” He wasn’t far off. These people stole a continent from the King of England. And got away with it. Eminem said there ain’t no such thing as halfway crooks—there was nothing halfway about the Constitution authors.

James Madison, who wrote the First Amendment, foresaw the exact situation of a government that ignores laws. In fact, he was originally opposed to the Bill of Rights because he didn’t think “paper guarantees” could stop a corrupt government. So he put together a document designed to inspire a personality type that would resist efforts to undo the experiment.

Here, an important quality came into play: Madison was a great writer. The 45 words of his First Amendment were composed with extraordinary subtlety:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The First Amendment didn’t confer rights or entrust government with guaranteeing them. Instead, the founders stood to the side and, like an old country recognizing a new country, simply acknowledged an eternal truth: the freedom of the human mind.

This is what censors never understand. Speech is free. Trying to stop it is like catching butterflies with a hammer, stopping a flood with a teaspoon. . . choose your metaphor, but it’s a fool’s errand. You can apply as many rules as you want, threaten punishment, lock people up. The human mind always sets its own course, often in spite of itself. As the poet William Ernest Henley explained:

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

Unlike the busybodies of the Internet Age, to whom words are just another overproduced, over-plentiful, unnecessary, and vaguely hazardous commodity like greenhouse gases or plastic soda bottles, people like Madison understood the value of language.

In 1787 you might have to walk a mile or five just to see a printed word. It was likely to be the Bible. I’m not religious, but I’ve read the Bible, and so, of course, did they. They knew the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.”

That was a reference to Genesis: In the beginning, God said, “Let there be light,” and the world was born. For them, the idea of the word was suffused with the power of creation itself. This wasn’t law. This was metaphysics. It was cosmogony.

A little country run by a bunch of jumped-up tobacconists and corn farmers needed an ally to withstand the wrath of European royalty. They got it by lighting a match under human ingenuity, and creativity, and passion. It was rash, risky, reckless, and it worked.

What was the American personality? Madison said he hoped to strengthen the “will of the community,” but other revolutionaries weren’t quite so polite. Thomas Paine’s central message was that the humblest farmer was a towering moral giant compared to the invertebrate scum who wore crowns and lived in British castles.

Common Sense told us to stand up straight. Never bow, especially not to a politician, because as Paine explained—I want you to think of Kerry and Hayden and Cheney here—“Men who look upon themselves as born to reign, and others to obey. . . are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.”

Oscar Wilde noted ours was the only country in the world where being a kook was respectable. Every other country shunned the tinkerer or mad inventor and cheerfully donated them to us, turbocharging our American experiment.

We welcomed crazy, and the world has light bulbs, the telephone, movies, airplanes, submarines, the internet, false teeth, the Colt .45, rock and roll, hip-hop, and monster dunks as a result. Wilde lampooned our ignorance and lack of artistic sophistication and tolerance for ugly words—hilariously, he refused to speak at a town that named itself “Griggsville”—but his final observation was a supreme compliment:

The Americans are the best politically educated people in the world. It is well worth one’s while to go to a country which can teach us the beauty of the word FREEDOM and the value of the thing LIBERTY.

In my twenties, while traveling through the former Soviet Union, I noticed that people from other cultures often had hang-ups about authority. Men from autocratic countries in the Middle East always seemed to whisper out of the corners of their mouths, as if they were afraid someone might hear, even about meaningless things. They would say: “Listen, my friend, the only good song George Michael ever wrote was ‘Faith. . . ’ ” 

“Why are we whispering?” I’d ask. “I don’t know,” they’d say.

People who grew up in places with the queen on their money were class-conscious and calibrated what they could say according to who else was at the table. Russians were like us, expressive and free-spirited and funny, but infected with terrible fatalism: They froze around badges and insignias and other symbols of authority as if they had magic power.

Over time I realized: I liked being an American. For the first time I was seeing the American experience through the eyes of foreigners. I did an interview once at a restaurant in Moscow called Scandinavia. A group of European diplomats was having a conference and complained about a table of loud American businessmen. A young Swedish waiter was sent to deal with them.

He leaned over to the biggest and loudest of these finance bros and said, “If you could keep your voice down, sir. . . ”

The American turned and said: “Is that a question?”

The kid froze. The American said: “You mean ‘Be quiet,’ right?”

“Yes.”

The American got up. “Look, you’re over here because a bunch of Belgians are too afraid to come over here themselves. You’re carrying that like the weight of the world. I can see it on your shoulders. Let it go, man.”

Now those diplomats grew spines. “Hey,” they said. “We are not Belgians. We’re—”

“You’re Belgians,” the American snapped. Then he gave the floor to the kid who said, “Please be quiet.” The American took out a $100 bill and stuck it in the kid’s vest pocket. He walked around the rest of the night like he owned the place. He might have gone on to do just that.

After that, I realized every American has a little bit of asshole in him. William Blake said, “Always be ready to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you.” Some struggle with this concept. Americans are born knowing it.

Incidentally, propaganda is the same trick I saw in that restaurant. It’s always someone trying to make you feel bad for their weakness, their mistakes. Don’t be ground down by it. Stand up straight, and give it back.

Which is why I say: Kerry, Hayden, Cheney, Adam Schiff, Craig Newmark, Reid Hoffman, Pierre Omidyar, Leon Panetta, and especially that Time editor turned self-appointed censor Rick Stengel should be packed in a rocket and launched into the fucking sun.

Let’s be clear about our language. Madison famously eschewed the word toleration or tolerance when it came to religion and insisted on the words freedom or liberty instead. This became the basis for the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which in turn became the basis for the Bill of Rights. That’s why we don’t have “toleration of religion” or “toleration of speech.” We have freedom of speech. The right word for the right time.

To the people who are suggesting that there are voices who should be ignored because they’re encouraging mistrust or skepticism of authority, or obstructing consensus: I’m not encouraging you to be skeptical of authority. I’m encouraging you to defy authority. That is the right word for this time.

To all those snoops and nosy parkers sitting in their Homeland Security–funded “Centers of Excellence,” telling us day after day we must think as they say and vote as they say or else we’re traitorous Putin-loving fascists and enablers of “dangerous” disinformation: Motherfucker, I’m an American. That shit does not work on me. And how can you impugn my patriotism, when you’re sitting in Klaus Schwab’s lap, apologizing for the First Amendment to a crowd of Europeans? Look in the mirror. 

I’m not the problem. We’re not the problem.

You’re the problem. 

You suck.

Thank you.

Matt Taibbi is the founder of Racket News. Taibbi is the author of ten books, including four New York Times bestsellers. He was previously a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and winner of the 2008 National Magazine Award for columns and commentary. 

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Megyn Kelly cut her teeth in the mainstream media and became one of the most influential voices in the political debate. From her meteoric rise at Fox News to her stint at NBC, Megyn Kelly has been a central figure in American journalism for over a decade. 

You might recall her contentious exchange with then-candidate Donald Trump during a Republican presidential debate in 2015. Kelly asked him about the names he’d called women—such as “fat pigs” and “dogs.” Trump’s response, in part: “I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be, based on the way you have treated me. But I wouldn’t do that.” He later went on CNN and accused Kelly of having “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her—wherever.”

Kelly has since abjured the mainstream—she now hosts a podcast on SiriusXM and YouTube that has fast become one of the most popular political shows in the country. Her success captures the broader media shift away from brands like Fox and NBC to more personal, one-on-one relationships between commentator and consumer. (For example, she’s let her audience know she plans to vote for Trump, despite their past quarreling.)

People are hungry for unbiased, unfiltered information. And in the last few years, there has been an explosion of independent media: outlets like ours here at The Free Press, podcasts like this one, Substack newsletters, Twitter feeds, YouTube shows—all promising an alternative to the mainstream. 

But is independent media always trustworthy? Does it need some of the guardrails and editorial processes that were once common at legacy outlets? Because if one peers into this independent—and often right-wing—media landscape, one cannot help but notice the frequent descents into conjecture and conspiracy theory, from commentators like Tucker Carlson, Tim Pool, and Bret Weinstein. 

While Megyn is normally the one doing the grilling, today it’s her turn in the hot seat. Michael Moynihan and Kelly discuss the role of conspiracy theory in our current discourse, where she stands politically these days, how the legacy press is handling the presidential election, how she says she avoided “Trump Derangement Syndrome” even as some of Trump’s most die-hard supporters showered her with threats, and her guiding principles as a journalist.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

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