In honor of Don Jr’s oligarch-funded wedding fireworks and my long-delayed explanation of how I think of corruption as a process, LOLGOP and I are reissuing our Ball of Thread Series from a few years back. We did about a dozen episodes that began before 2016 and ended with Kash Patel’s confirmation in early 2025, tracing how the polarization seeded in 2016 led us to the brink of fascism.
Episode 1 covers how I understand the 2016 Russian attack to include not just several attempts to recruit Americans and stoke polarization, but also laying the groundwork for three parallel attacks on the Deep State.
By the time Kash visits Moscow this October, we should be past the point in the series where he enters the story with his MAGA-career-making effort to make the entire Trump/Russia investigation about the Steele dossier and the fucking pee tape.
Here’s more context for why we’re doing this now:
As we roll this out we want to foster more discussion about this, in conjunction with a LOLGOP Studio pledge drive (so he and I can keep doing these videos).
We’re going to see if this will work: Every week, we’ll post a re-released episode on my YouTube channel, if we can manage it, before end of day Friday. Then, we’ll post a YouTube short promoting the episode with some context like the one above. I’ll put up a post here with the video and the short. And you can comment with your questions or “more of a comment than a question.”
Then LOLGOP and I will record a conversation on that episode about what I got right, what we missed, and what matters most now — kind of like we did with a discussion of whether you should get the fuck off Xitter (you should, but I have not). We’ll also answer your questions about any other videos, current Trump/Russia nonsense, and Michigan in general. Maybe we’ll do episode by episode or in batches. There is an election going on.
This effort also supports the first LOLGOP Studios Pledge Drive.
Members of the LOLGOP Studios Patreon will get the episodes first, though they will all end up on the emptywheel YouTube eventually.
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