Ball of Thread

Marcy Wheeler digs deeper into the Catturd Deficit that allows white supremacists to use Xitter to rig the news. Then she looks at how Trump's illegal war on Iran has created unprecedented fractures in his base, from Russian useful idiots like Marjorie Taylor Greene to anti-Semitic voices like Candace Owens, and even convicted January 6th participants like Joe Biggs.

She explores how to exploit these cracks using the same tactics that got Trump elected, turning his own troll army's playbook against them.

Marcy discusses how Twitter became Elon's Machine for Fascism and how we can use it against the fascists.

A quick update from Marcy.

Get the whole story at https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/03/19/the-significance-of-amy-gleasons-fabulous-disappearing-act/

Marcy Wheeler ties it all together.

In this last bonus episode of Ball of Thread, Marcy explains how the confirmation of Ka$h Patel and the Trump administration's abandonment of Ukraine confirm the big ideas behind Ball of Thread.

Eight years ago, Kash Patel helped Trump turn a legitimate investigation into Trump's ties to Russia into a grievance narrative. Over and over, Kash added to the tale: with Ukraine, with January 6, with the stolen documents.

And now, as Kash prepares to turn the FBI into an instrument of Trump's vengeance while gutting the agency's ability to counter Russian operations and crime, Trump has all but fully capitulated to Vladimir Putin.

For eight years, Kash and Trump have worked together to turn every effort to hold Trump accountable into a grievance fantasy to sell, to slowly train Republicans to eschew rule of law. Along the way, Trump delivered everything Vladimir Putin might have sought in 2016: a divided America, the end of the Western Order, and a world bartering corruption. Ball of Thread hoped to help avoid the exact reality we now face. We failed, but we will persist.

Marcy carries on, as always, at emptywheel.net, where you can follow and support her work.

Thanks to everyone who supported us in creating this document. Hopefully, we've shown that some of us were very, very aware of the risks our democracy faced from Donald Trump in real-time. May the lessons in these episodes help us defend our nation as we try to limit the misery of the biggest mistake this country's voters were ever lured into making.

The series will conclude with a final bonus episode, "So Let's Talk About Merrick Garland."

Donald Trump will never accept losing anything – whether an election or a bet. But that wouldn't matter if he didn't convince millions of Americans to make his grievances their own.

This Ball of Thread unwinds what made the pincer attack that overran the Capitol on January 6th possible. Donald Trump's grievance narratives gave disaffected Americans meaning, and in that meaning, he convinced thousands of people to throw their lives away in his name.

The thing is, it's all the same con. That con defeated the Russia investigation and weaponized the Department of Justice against his opponent. And when he lost in 2020, he unleashed it to unite fringe right-wing groups and mainstream Republicans in a shared revenge fantasy. Thus, he was able to raise a ragtag army to sack the nation's Capitol briefly, and in the process, savagely battered hundreds of police officers and ended America's tradition of a peaceful transfer of power.

Though the attack ultimately failed by only delaying the certification of Joe Biden's victory, the bets Trump and many of his biggest fans made on January 6, 2021 are now paying off in ways that were inconceivable on January 6, 2025.

In this bonus episode, Marcy saves reporters a lot of work by explaining more than a half dozen direct political interventions into Hunter's prosecutions. The reporting on Hunter Biden's pardon shows just how badly Ball of Thread is needed—especially the last two episodes on the blackmailing of Joe Biden and the packaging of Hunter.

While the pardon story has died down and the former FBI informant who tried to frame the Bidens has now pled guilty, the Republicans in the House who kept this targeted abuse of power alive for the last two years have vowed to continue hounding the soon-to-be-former president's family. One thing Ball of Thread has made clear is that whatever the right-wing media fixates on will be what Republicans in power fixate on. And House Republicans will need a perceived enemy to distract from the actual oversight they won't be doing.

After Bill Barr buried the Mueller Report and went to work suffocating the remaining prosecutions in the Russia investigation, Donald Trump and his "lawyer," Rudy Giuliani, shifted their main narrative focus from Hillary Clinton to Hunter Biden—also with the help of Bill Barr.

The first flailing attempts to smear Joe Biden with his son's connections to a corrupt Ukrainian business resulted in Donald Trump's impeachment and the arrests of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. But MAGA hit paydirt with the "discovery" of Hunter Biden's "laptop," which first appeared mysteriously right around the time of Trump's first trial in the US Senate and then reappeared the following year, just in time to be the election year October Surprise. At first, the laptop, with its endless supply of digital proof of the depravity to which Hunter Biden had descended before he got sober the year before, didn't work out the way John Podesta's emails had. At first, journalists actually demanded proof the files were authentic and also tested whether they proved what Rudy Giuliani or NY Post claimed they did.

But over the years, egged on by Fox News and enticed by the promise of easy sensation, they came to chase the dick pics because they were there, just as Murdoch's propagandists had done.

And the process by which icky dick pics came to stand in for unsubstantiated claims that Joe Biden was corrupt sucked all the air out of DC reporting for years … and laid the groundwork for Trump's reelection.

For the first time, Marcy Wheeler ties together the story of what is actually known about Hunter's laptop(s) and hard drives and the baffling characters who got their hands on them. She explains how the shameless leaking of the private data of the son of a former vice president and future president to his father's political opponents was never really treated as a crime. She also exposes how Trump's plot succeeded in sucking all the air out of Joe Biden's presidency and fueled problematic political prosecutions that haunt America and still twist our discourse today.

This Ball of Thread also attempts to do what almost no one has. It shows how the press joined in an effort to dehumanize Joe Biden's kid and, in the process, abdicated their primary job.

What if the President of the United States was framed with the help of the Attorney General of the president he defeated, and nobody cared?

In this Ball of Thread, Marcy Wheeler reveals how Donald Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Guiliani, spent more than a year trying to trade access to or leniency from the Department of Justice for dirt on Hunter Biden. And while that disgraceful abuse of power eventually erupted into Trump's first impeachment, it essentially continued for another four years, only fading away after a key player in the conspiracy was indicted for feeding the FBI lies from Russian spies.

It's a story that only Marcy has told and will now likely fade into history. But the abuse of the Department of Justice as a plaything for Donald Trump to deploy against his perceived enemies will continue for at least the next four years.