This is my attempt to explain why Ball of Thread is the most important project I’ve ever worked on. You can subscribe to Ball of Thread on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or YouTube or Audible or Podcast Addict, which sounds bad. You can back the podcast and find out more on Patreon.
America, if you’re listening, please ask yourself one question.
How the hell did we get here?
How did we get to the point that an attorney of a man who the polls now favor to be our next president, a man who ended America’s tradition of the peaceful transfer of power, could argue that his client should be allowed to assassinate an opponent if he feels like it?
The answer feels simple. It’s Donald Trump.
But if that’s simply the answer, we’re done, baked, finished. Because all we have is just yelling at each other about Donald Trump, which is Donald Trump’s wettest dream come true.
The truth is much bleaker.
We are in the midst of a massively successful attack on our democracy, what could be the most destructive assault on our Constitution since at least the end of Reconstruction. And it’s by far the most severe threat to the existence of this government from an outside force in our history.
This attack's most successful aspect is that the truth of what has and is happening to us remains buried in plain sight. That was my thought when I began reading Marcy Wheeler’s series “Ball of Thread” at the beginning of this year. (Here’s the latest installment on “The Cultivation Of Don Jr: A Framework To Think Of The Russian Attack”.)
In this series of posts, Marcy is doing what I think she always does: She’s using her expertise honed from decades of covering national security and civil liberties to find the details that reveal meaning that almost everyone else has missed.
And I screamed to myself, “She’s the only one doing it in a way that attempts to explain how we got to his point!”
A serious attempt to document and convey the crisis American democracy faces in 2024 should be the obligation of any publication concerned for this country and our system of laws. But only Marcy is doing in the way the public deserves, with a belief in our Rule of Law that doesn’t simply rely on amping up the polarization and sensationalism that effectively overwhelm our rationality and enable this attack on our democracy.
It hit me that Marcy is telling the story of the greatest true crime ever.
I wanted to make sure as many people as possible heard it. For a while, that mostly just involved hitting retweet, repost, re-X, or whatever it is we do now as we try to avoid the Nazis around every corner online. Then, after I interviewed her, I begged her to let me do more. We needed to do a true crime podcast.
That’s how the Ball of Thread podcast was born.
I’m incredibly proud to announce the first episode. Marcy walks us through the “Absolute Immunity” hearing in the Supreme Court in late April. And if you don’t end up terrified by the danger in the arguments, that’s my fault, not Marcy’s. Ideally, you’ll ask yourself, “How the hell did we get here?”
In the coming months, about every two weeks, we’ll unwind more of the story. It should be available wherever you get your podcasts. Let me know if it isn’t.
Because you pay close attention, you will know much of what you hear. But I promise you there will be surprises and new bursts of clarity. You should know how we got here by the end, which may be our only way out.
This is an attack and a story unfolding today as we retweet, repost, re-X, or whatever we do now. Because there is so much thread, it can get confusing. That’s why we’re also doing a bonus Q&A podcast for those who want to support us. You can join our Patreon for as little as $1 a month to get that.
We would greatly appreciate anything you can do to help and share Marcy’s work as widely as possible while we still can.
This is a call to anyone who cares about democracy