Letter to the Editor: How Could You Not Know Ground News Was A Bad Idea?

HOUDINI has received a mysterious, typewritten transmission from a writer who simply signs their manifesto, "AM." They would like to make it known that they think Ground News is a bad idea. Our staff took the bait and now we're compelled to share.

8-11-2026

How could you not know Ground News was a bad idea?

Maybe a year ago I was told I "sound like a fed" by the content peddler on a channel which primarily centered around men fascinated with the fandom called Lacanian psychoanalysis. It was in response to his guest's thinly veiled attack on the people, not the claims, who study M.Heidegger, the infamous Nazi. I had merely asserted that if a person's scholarship is implicated by their associations or their terms of employment, was it fair to indict him and his colleagues for their Catholic paystubs and history of hanging out with folks who espouse pseudospeciesism?

'Sounds like a red', 'psyop,' and other such phrases are used as shorthand to instigate incredulity not just for the message, but the messenger themselves. This may have some emancipatory potential in the event where an actual, demonstrable link between the suspect and some nefarious action/tor may be even possibly discerned. Or I should say, at some point in the past this may have been the case.. the problem is that it isn't a terribly sophistocated process to use this same kind of language for our opponents to sow FUD within what would otherwise be emancipatory networks.

Besides whatever personal frustration I felt with the namecaller, I was obliged to engage some circumspection given that I'd up to that point taken both people in that conversation seriously. Did I have Fed-like tendencies? (As a humorous aside, I should note that our peddler was employed by the US Navy at that time and so the poetic irony was well and truly Morsettian.)

The trivial little story above was meant to serve as a kind of conceit to the notion that it may be just as prohibitive to our struggle as assistive to be immediately speculative about the media through which we acquire our information. I want to highlight the word immediately above because it is doing most of the work in my argument. I'll avoid a philosophical digression on time here and simply state that what I mean by immediacy here is more in the sense of 'thoughtless' than 'quick'. I have previously and will certainly in the future write about the problem presented by clarity conceptually for those of us who care to struggle against power. This is an occasion where I'll again note that what feels like knowledge is not always das ding an such; if you'll forgive my German.

So with that disclaimer, I'll reiterate: how could you not know that Ground News was a bad idea? This could have been as simple a thing as looking into how it was funded. It could have been an easy matter of writing off any sponsor who manages to dominate dozens of YouTubers in the leftist-aesthetic space. But that's just 'sounds like a Fed' mentality. You're too based and nuanced a thinker to employ that bullshit. Fine.

Had it escaped you what the whole premise was arguing prima facie? Simple math: if it aggregates all of the 'news' from the left and the right, then it aggregates all of the news. Right?

FALSE

This claim does double-duty in your brilliant rind without you noticing. One: the idiot math above. Two: (this is really One with extra steps).. It does a Baudrillardian Disneyland! For that cranky ass Frenchy, Disneyland functioned as the thing you're supposed to see as the fantasy place so you'll fail to see the fantastic elements of society at large. Ground News wants to sell something far more powerfill than aggregated data (for both the media itself and the people reading it -- though it certainly does that too). No, what it really sells is the same hyper-reality in spirit: there is but a left and a right. Politics is composed of this chiral thing and nothing else.. To be a discerning reader of politics, you have but to see the spectrum on its terms and in its axiomatic framing..

Look, obviously Ground News 'looks like a fed'. Obviously it's a psyop. If we're going to be effective in dealing with this shit, we gottta get a bit more specific about this shit though. It aint enough to 4-leg-good, 2-leg-bad this motherfucker. The shit I'm trying to get across is hygiene. Get used to seein' me rep it because it's the one damn thing I've got that might help this shit progress.. Narrative hygiene. Wash that ass, folks.

AM

Editor's Note

This work was originally submitted to HOUDINI Magazine via a scanned typewritten manifesto, which we include below for posterity: