You are not going to believe the breaking news about who is a part of Peter Thiel’s secret society — the same secret society that is planning for World War III, instructs its members on how to start cults and is otherwise built like every conspiracy theorist’s wet dream.

We break this all down for you — the bad, the terrible, and the heartbreaking. (Yes, there are Democrats and even friends of Mayday in this cabal, as it turns out.)

To get more content like this, to fight back against this billionaire cabal and to support our work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to the Mayday Network.

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Thank you, as always, for your support.

Julie and Michelle

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Join us tomorrow for #Ask Me Anything Tuesday at 10 AM ET — only for paid Substack subscribers of the Mayday Network.

We’ll cover it all and take all your questions. No topic is off-limits.

See you on Tuesday at 10 AM ET!

Julie and Michelle

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Keep an eye on this race, because if anyone can turn Florida blue this November, it is Alex Vindman. Watch this podcast and let us know what you think in the comments.

In the meantime, visit AlexVindman.com to learn more about Alex’s campaign and to donate

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” Emma Lazarus wrote in The New Colossus, the poem now inseparable from the Statue of Liberty’s meaning as a beacon to immigrants. Lazarus was not writing as a newly arrived immigrant herself but as an American Jew deeply moved by the suffering of refugees, especially Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. She turned the statue into a moral symbol of refuge.

But across the harbor, at Delaney Hall in Newark, the message from this administration is something closer to: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses — and we will lock them in a for-profit cage, all but torturing them for having the temerity to seek a better life where so many others before them had.

Delaney Hall is not some accidental bureaucratic overflow site. It is a private immigration detention facility operated by GEO Group under contract with ICE. The federal contract is worth $1 billion over 15 years and provides 1,000 beds, multiplying immigration detention capacity in New Jersey fourfold. This is not immigration policy; it is a business model. Human beings go in and federal money comes out.

What is happening inside right this very moment is exactly what happens when a democracy starts outsourcing its conscience.

Members of Congress who visited Delaney Hall described dire conditions: food allegedly containing maggots, inadequate medical care, and jail-like treatment of detainees who are not serving criminal sentences. Hundreds of detainees have participated in a hunger and work strike over food, medical care, air circulation and delays in their immigration cases.

This is the point that gets deliberately blurred by the goon squad rhetoric of the right: these are immigrants in civil detention. They are not supposed to disappear into a warehouse where their health, food, legal access, and basic dignity depend on whether federal officials and a private contractor feel like letting outsiders see what is happening.

And when outsiders have tried to see, the response has been force.

Last year, the mayor of Newark was arrested for setting foot on the property. Rep. LaMonica McIver is being persecuted by Trump’s Justice Department, indicted and threatened with prison time for defending her mayor. Sen. Andy Kim was pepper-sprayed during the chaos outside Delaney Hall this week. New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill was denied entry when she sought access amid the escalating crisis and her Department of Health has been prohibited from inspecting the entire facility to ensure that it is sanitary. Protests have intensified around Delaney Hall, with arrests outside and allegations of pepper spray and physical force inside and outside the detention center.

GEO Group denies mistreatment and DHS denies that there is a hunger strike. That is a blatant lie. Ambulances have arrived to take detainees to a hospital because they were assaulted by guards. The hunger strike continues.

But if everything is so clean, so humane, so properly run, then why the secrecy? Why the barricades? Why deny entry to elected officials? Why unleash chemical agents around a sitting United States senator? Why is the most powerful government on earth acting as though transparency is the threat?

That is what makes Delaney Hall so profoundly un-American. America has not always lived up to its ideals. We have long had the golden door and the locked cage existing side by side. But the whole point of the American promise is that the plaque is supposed to shame the cage. The Statue of Liberty is supposed to be an accusation against our worst impulses. It is supposed to remind us that this country’s greatness came not from blood purity or border cruelty, but from people who arrived poor, desperate, unwanted, foreign, strange — and built this country into the greatest nation on earth.

Delaney Hall is our national shame.

It sits in the shadow of the “Mother of Exiles” and turns exile into inventory. It takes the tired and makes them hungrier. It takes the poor and makes them profitable. It takes people yearning to breathe free and allegedly locks them in rooms where they are begging for air circulation.

Do not call that law and order. Call it what it is: state power, corporate profit and public cruelty dressed up as border security.

A nation that believed in its own Constitution would welcome oversight. A nation confident in its humanity would let doctors, lawyers, clergy, journalists and elected officials inside. A nation worthy of that harbor would not need pepper spray to defend a detention center from the truth.

Shut Delaney Hall down. America is supposed to be better than a gulag beside the golden door.

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Friends,

Welcome to the Mayday Network’s Substack page! We are so grateful that you’re here.

Starting this week, we are launching a special feature for our paid subscribers: the Mayday Network #AMA, where we will do an hour-long Ask Me Anything interactive show with all of you.

The show kicks off on Wednesday at 10 AM ET, so sign up to be a paid subscriber and Ask Us Anything! Politics, puppies and kittens, favorite recipes, why New Jersey is the greatest state in the nation (you can tell that it’s Julie writing this particular post and not Michelle). Seriously, feel free to ask us anything.

See you tomorrow!

Julie and Michelle

Before this Memorial Day comes to an end, please check out our co-founder Michelle Kinney’s video about those who paid the ultimate price and what their sacrifice demands of us today.

If you need any further evidence that Larry and David Ellison’s decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was about bending the knee to Donald Trump and not about “economics,” look no further than what Paramount Skydance just did to our little YouTube channel, TheMayday Network.

Yesterday, the Mayday Network posted Stephen Colbert’s appearance on a public access show in Monroe, Michigan, one day after he left CBS. We did it because we wanted as many people as possible to see Colbert’s message of resistance to Trump, the Ellisons, and the larger MAGA universe. That’s why we linked back to Monroe Community Media, where Colbert had taken over its local public access show, “Only in Monroe,” for one night. We wanted to drive attention and support to the public access station that had the good humor to put Colbert back on television before the corporate undertakers had finished measuring him for his professional coffin.

Our replay of the show began to go viral — and that’s when Paramount Skydance swooped in and blocked the video. YouTube promptly took it down without explanation. Our appeal is pending but the larger question is: why? Why did Paramount Skydance exert a copyright claim over content it does not own and why did YouTube not provide us with the opportunity to edit out any copyrighted content that might have existed, as it typically does?

Needless to say, Paramount does not own the intellectual property of Only in Monroe. Ours was not some bootleg archive of Paramount’s intellectual property or a pirated rerun from network television.

Apparently, Paramount’s decision to cancel Colbert’s CBS show was not enough. It seems to believe that it owns his public voice, his next act, his jokes, his guests, his defiance and a Michigan public access station it does not actually own.

Notably, YouTube has not taken down Colbert’s own video of the public access show, which you can — and should — watch here, presumably because Paramount has not laid claim to it. But it has taken down our replay.

Unless we are missing something very big here, Paramount Skydance has absolutely no authority to claim copyright over a public access broadcast simply because Colbert appeared in it. And unless it also acquired the life rights to Stephen Colbert as part of its humiliating accommodation with Trump, it does not get to follow him onto our channel and claim the man himself as corporate property.

Ladies and gentlemen, they don’t get to do this without a fight and believe us — we are going to fight it.

But this is about much more than the Mayday Network and our work to create a space where culture and progressive politics meet. It is largely about Colbert’s Monroe appearance, which was perfect for so many reasons.

One day after his final CBS broadcast, he resurfaced where nobody in the corporate media hierarchy expected him: on community television in Michigan. He did not pop up on Netflix or HBO (soon to be acquired by the Ellisons too). He did not launch some glossy streaming special with a twelve-person publicity team and an embargoed rollout. He showed up in the Midwest on public access, with Jack White as his “volunteer music director,” Jeff Daniels making sandwiches, Steve Buscemi plugging a local Monroe restaurant, and Eminem, as a fire marshal, helping approve the ceremonial destruction of the set.

It was funny, it was strange, it was joyful, and it was the biggest middle finger imaginable to Trump without ever needing to say his name.

Colbert did not have to deliver a solemn monologue about censorship, corporate cowardice, or media conglomerates slithering toward autocracy in search of regulatory favor. He simply had to show up somewhere Paramount did not control. He had to sit behind a cheap desk in Michigan and say, in effect: you can cancel the show, but you cannot cancel my voice.

That was the message -- and it is also why Paramount Skydance’s takedown of this replay on The Mayday Network matters.

Paramount fired Colbert — or, at the very least, removed him under circumstances that looked to any sentient person like a company trying to appease Trump while protecting its own business interests — and then, when he proved he could still reach people without them, the company behaved as if it still had custody of him.

Paramount cannot have it both ways. It cannot dump Colbert and then claim dominion over his next breath. It cannot cancel his CBS show and then behave as if any camera that captures him afterward is somehow part of the Paramount universe. It cannot wash its hands of him on Thursday and assert ownership over him on Friday.

If Paramount Skydance has a legitimate claim, it should show the legal basis for claiming ownership over a Monroe public access broadcast that was not produced by CBS, not aired by CBS, and not created for The Late Show. Absent that, this is exactly what it looks like: a scared corporation using YouTube’s enforcement machinery to smother the viral afterlife of the man it had just helped push off network television.

YouTube is its willing executioner too. The platform likes to sell itself as a democratizing force, a place where independent creators can reach audiences without begging for permission from the old gatekeepers. But when a corporate giant files a claim, the promise of openness can vanish in an instant. One click, one claim, one automated system, and the independent channel is the one left trying to prove it has a right to exist.

It should be no surprise. YouTube and its corporate parent, Alphabet, have hardly been models of resistance to Trump’s intimidation machine. Last year, YouTube agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit over his post-January 6 suspension, with $22 million directed to the Trust for the National Mall to help fund Trump’s planned White House ballroom. This fits a broader, deeply dangerous pattern in which the biggest media and tech companies in America do not need Trump to formally censor anyone. They simply anticipate his rage, price out the cost of resisting him, and decide that appeasement is cheaper. So when YouTube allows a Paramount Skydance copyright claim to silence a public access Colbert broadcast amplified by an independent channel like Mayday, it does not look like neutral platform enforcement. It looks like another corporate giant learning the only lesson Trump has ever tried to teach corporate media: bend the knee early, pay the toll, and hope the king spares you.

That is how speech gets chilled now — not through a government censor with a stamp or through police at the door. Sometimes it happens through merger approvals, settlement checks, copyright claims, platform enforcement, risk departments, and executives who insist they are just following procedure while the public square gets quietly fenced off.

Nobody has to send a memo saying, “Silence Colbert.” They just have to create a world where every corporation knows Trump is watching, every platform knows litigation is expensive, every media company knows regulatory favor can be won or lost, and every independent outlet knows that one copyright claim can make its work disappear.

That is why blocking our rebroadcast was so outrageous. It was not just about our channel. It was about whether independent media is allowed to amplify dissent when corporate media gets scared. It was about whether a public access station can host a comedian who has just been pushed off network television without some conglomerate acting like it owns his shadow. It was about whether platforms that pretend to democratize speech will actually protect that speech when powerful interests object.

Trump and his allies want people to believe cancellation is final and that losing the network slot means losing the microphone. They want every comedian, journalist, producer, executive, and independent creator to look at what happened to Colbert and internalize the lesson: this is what happens when you offend the king.

Colbert’s Monroe broadcast delivered the opposite lesson. It showed that the microphone can move and the audience will follow. It showed that the joke can survive the boardroom and the voice can outlive the network.

That is what Paramount Skydance apparently could not tolerate. They did not just want Colbert gone from CBS. They wanted him contained. They wanted his reappearance managed, muted, blocked or buried. They wanted the last word.

They do not get it.

They can cancel the show, block our upload, and pretend copyright law gives them ownership of a man they just discarded. They can bend the knee to Trump until the ballroom chandeliers sparkle with the sweat of their shame.

But they cannot silence Stephen Colbert and they cannot silence the rest of us unless we agree to be quiet. Sorry, Messrs Ellison. We do not consent.

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