How To Become #1 on Substack - HCR.AWFL.NPC.AI
Subverting the subversion of Substack's #1 highest grossing author, "Historian" Heather Cox Richardson, and her insane take on the Biden debate debacle
Comrades: If the news is fake, imagine how fake the history is.
Substack is a fantastic platform that protects free speech and allows writers to be compensated for their work. Most of its highest grossing authors are seasoned independent voices. You may not agree with everything we write, but Substack provides a “safe space” for creative and healthy dialogue. The Free Press is now #1 with 1,000,000+ readers and 100,000+ paid subscribers. However, the second highest grossing Substack is a Blue Anon making a fortune from feeding TDS to her AWFL addicts: “Historian” Dr. Heather Cox Richardson. I am a competitive capitalist comrade and would appreciate your support moving up the Substack ranking, where this samizdat is now #7 in Education!
Presenting… drumroll please… so stunning… so brave… Historian Heather!
The photo screams: “Welcome to Karenland. My neighborhood is 95% white, but we fly BLM and LGBTQ flags everywhere. Please mask up and keep the volume down, otherwise I will call the police that I voted to defund. We have walls around our houses, but don’t want one at the border. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some wine, cats, and CNN to attend to. I tested positive for COVID, so I am grateful to have gotten 9 boosters.”
In December 2020, The New York Times called HCR a breakout Substack star in nauseating fluff piece. Credit where it’s due, she feeds her audience the mind-killing fear that they crave. She serves as a fentanyl grade copium dealer to millions of AWFLs like her, whose brains have been broken by decades of MSM consumption. Most of her posts regurgitate MSM and White House press releases. The relationship between her, MSM, DNC, and their readers is a recursive human centipede of leftist drivel.
Has anyone ever seen HCR, Joyce Vance, and RBG (Ruth Ben-Ghiat) in the same room together? They are the heads of the human centipede.
From the NYT article:
“What I am doing is speaking to women who have not necessarily been paying attention to politics, older people who had not been engaged… I’m an older woman and I’m speaking to other women about being empowered.” She thinks of her politics as Lincoln-era Republican, but she is in today’s terms a fairly conventional liberal, disturbed by President Trump and his attacks on America’s institutions.
The top Reader Pick comment reads like a parody. Maskachusetts has fallen from the Birthplace of the Revolution to the Longhouse of Karentocracy.
I wake up, start the coffee maker, walk the dog for her business. Then I open my email. I leap to Heather's "letter". I could stop there when it comes to news and commentary. I can't, of course. But in her letters, not a word is wasted. Not a silly expletive is uttered. The core issues which are not always obvious are revealed. I am struck how a platform like "substack" can be so successful in this world of tweets and blurts of rage. Inspiring. Heather now has a daunting task. I feel as if I know her well enough to think that she is wrestling somewhat uncomfortably with her new found fame. I think anyone would appreciate the recognition. But with it comes too many possibilities for wider fame and fortune. How to juggle that with her treasured life as a professor and a resident of my favorite state.
The top NYT Pick comment predicted the her audience capture:
I am an unapologetic liberal (actually, more of a democratic socialist really) and stumbled upon HCR's 'Letter from an American' by pure chance. It was a relief, at first, to read her daily letters. With the never-ending assault on America's democratic institutions being perpetrated by Trump and his cabal, her 'letters', amply supported by documentary evidence and written in a sober, calm style, effectively shone a light on the ensuing Trumpian chaos. And that she often placed her daily letter within the wide sweep of American history was particularly delightful for me being a history buff. But then I began to notice something. Her letters were becoming repetitive and wholly partisan, being anti-Trump/Republican. Let me state right away that I hold absolutely no brief for Trump and his republican supporters both in Congress and outside the Beltway. They are contemptible and history will judge them harshly. But Dr. Richardson's letters had become so one-sided that I began to fear that she had fallen into the same trap of which I and others on the left have accused those on the right: the creation of an *echo chamber* where the contents of her letters simply reinforced the preconceived notions of her readers. I am particularly struck, for example, by the virtually complete absence of dissenting voices in the comments to her letters. It would appear that her readers (who she admitted are overwhelmingly older women) subscribe to the same liberal political ideology as hers.
Her Wikipedia biography is all too predictable. Raised in the least diverse state in the union, wealthy enough to attend the most expensive boarding schools and colleges, and worked for NPR. Freak out and carry on is the perfect motto for the mentally ill leftists she whips into frenzies.
Born in 1962 and raised in Maine, Richardson attended Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. She received both her B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Between 2017 and 2018, she co-hosted the NPR podcast Freak Out and Carry On. In September 2019, Richardson began writing a daily synopsis of political events associated with the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump. Originally posted late every evening or in the early hours of the next day on her Facebook page, Richardson later moved to add a newsletter format, entitled "Letters from an American", published via Substack. The newsletter became popular because of her calm voice, with straightforward explanations of the news of the day. As of December 2020, Richardson was the most successful individual author of a paid publication on Substack and on track to bring in a million dollars of revenue a year. The newsletter received a "Best of Boston" award for "2021 Best Pandemic Newsletter" from Boston magazine.
I subscribed to “Letters from an American” out of curiosity about the “calm voice” and “straightforward explanations”. Unsurprisingly, they are anything but calm or straightforward. Every breaking news story is equated to the the Civil War and losing our sacred democracy! Her feed is emblematic of the reality distortion field, where media driven hysteria about the current thing is more important than real pain being felt by ordinary people every day. The TDS industrial complex has enriched Heather and many other grifters. Her loyalty to The Party and The Narrative was rewarded with a bootlicking session with Dear Leader Uncle Joe Brandon.
The day after Biden’s debate debacle, HCR received 6,000+ likes for her reality-denying take. I have never seen such gaslighting. You cannot reason with a demoralized person, especially the top comments. My commentary:
Tonight was the first debate between President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, and by far the most striking thing about the debate was the overwhelming focus among pundits immediately afterward about Biden’s appearance and soft, hoarse voice as he rattled off statistics and events. Virtually unmentioned was the fact that Trump lied and rambled incoherently, ignored questions to say whatever he wanted; refused to acknowledge the events of January 6, 2021; and refused to commit to accepting the result of the 2024 presidential election, finally saying he would accept it only if it met his standards for fairness.
“Biden’s appearance and soft, hoarse voice” is the most absurd spin on senility I have ever seen. Then she accuses Trump of rambling incoherently.
Immediately after the debate, there were calls for Biden to drop out of the race, but aside from the fact that the only time a presidential candidate has ever done that—in 1968—it threw the race into utter confusion and the president’s party lost, Biden needed to demonstrate that his mental capacity is strong in order to push back on the Republicans’ insistence that he is incapable of being president. That, he did, thoroughly. Biden began with a weak start but hit his stride as the evening wore on. Indeed, he covered his bases too thoroughly, listing the many accomplishments of his administration in such a hurry that he was sometimes hard to understand.
Biden thoroughly demonstrated his mentally capacity is strong? Hit his stride as the evening wore on? Covered his bases too thoroughly? Kim Jong Un would blush at this level of propaganda.
This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them. It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective.
The Gish gallop accusation is the projection of the Democrat strategy. Biden, KJP, and the entire regime lie every time they open their mouths. He claimed no American soldiers died under his watch, dishonoring those who were killed in Afghanistan, and also said the Border Patrol union endorsed him when they didn’t. Killing the mic worked in Trump’s favor because it kept him from interrupting Biden’s brain freezes, where he couldn’t fill two minutes of speaking time.
A much bigger deal is what it says that the television media and pundits so completely bought into Trump’s performance. They appear to have accepted Trump’s framing of the event—that he is dominant—so fully that the fact Trump unleashed a flood of lies and non-sequiturs simply didn’t register. And, since the format established that the CNN journalists running the debate did not challenge anything either candidate said, and Dale’s fact-checking spot came long after the debate ended, the takeaway of the event was a focus on Biden’s age rather than on Trump’s inability to tell the truth or form a coherent thought.
The pundits and moderators didn’t bootlick as hard as HCR! We need leftist fact checkers to tell us what to think. CNN is not biased towards Biden enough. Traitors!
At the end of the evening, pundits were calling not for Trump—a man liable for sexual assault and business fraud, convicted of 34 felonies, under three other indictments, who lied pathologically—to step down, but for Biden to step down…because he looked and sounded old. At 81, Biden is indeed old, but that does not distinguish him much from Trump, who is 78 and whose inability to answer a question should raise concerns about his mental acuity…. Of far more lasting importance than this one night is the clear evidence that stage performance has trumped substance in political coverage in our era. Nine years after Trump launched his first campaign, the media continues to let him call the shots.
Imagine thinking that the media lets Trump call the shots. Biden is the one unable to answer a question. The top comments are even more absurd than the article. Every time you see a dumb comment, you can guarantee their reading list is full of the Trump Derangement Substack human centipede:
This one is my favorite because the reader’s profile picture is a cat eating her brain:
I am convinced that the poor quality of history education has resulted in the poor decisions and analogies we are seeing today. “Historians” and “educators” like Heather will continue to distort reality for their Biden-aged braindead audiences. We should focus on winning the hearts and minds of the young. History is written by the victors. Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, while the rest of us watch on in amusement and horror.
Sadly, my own mom is one of HCR’s victims. She’s the exact target demographic - older, female, lifelong Democrat who spent most of her adult life only loosely following politics until 2016.
She has had actual mental breakdowns, severe panic attacks, thinking the country is on the verge of a civil war and looked into ways to smuggle her grandchildren out of the country if Trump wins.
She has recommended HCR to me several times and even back when I was a Democrat I couldn’t stomach her writing.
It breaks my heart to watch her and other people, especially women, with their hearts in the right place get sucked into her doomsday nonsense.
Then again, my mom probably feels the same way about me since I’ve “left the left” as they say.
I started reading Heather Cox Richardson last month after a few of my liberal friends lauded her. I enjoy reading left-wing lunacy as a type of intellectual Schadenfreude.
You hit the nail on the head. She should be #1 in comedy if she weren't so dangerous - because the snowflakes bathe in the snake oil she sells.