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The Importance of this Day: June 19, 1865

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  “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”  Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote the following for the archived PBS SoCal site: When Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued the above order, he had no idea that, in establishing the Union Army’s authority over the people of Texas, he was also establishing the basis for a holiday, “Juneteenth” (“June” plus “nineteenth”), today the most popular annual celebration of emancipation from slavery in the United Stat...

Removal of Executive Branch Officials for War Crimes

  Note: This article outlines the constitutional and legal frameworks for the removal of a President and key Cabinet members based on allegations of ongoing war crimes. Although the report originated from a request for generation from an LLM – in this case, a recent ChatGPT act-alike, Nova –   as well as Google’s Gemini AI - the statements made here have been fact-checked for accuracy. Greetings. My name is Frank Austad. I run the Franken Honest Substack and Blog. I figure that I am a little bit like you, in that I look at today’s events on the national and world stages and wonder not only how we got here, buy why we are still here, statically relying on our elected officials to change the ways that we so easily slip into war, economic and political decline, despite the promises to the contrary that our leadership handed to us during the 2024 Presidential campaign. Since the start of his second term in 2025 Trump has ordered military strikes to be carried out on a host o...

AI Is Draining Our Water and Electricity

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https://youtu.be/Kum7RrAdJzM

Draft Letter to Congress: Impeach, Convict and Remove President Donald John Trump

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  The second presidential term of Donald John Trump has been one fraught with abuses of power that threaten to destroy our democracy. There is only one way to check these abuses and begin to repair the damages done to the constitution and heal the lives of those who have been injured in the process. That way is the legal impeachment, conviction and removal of our current president. Submitted for your approval, please find this short, and to-the-point letter draft you can use to contact your representatives. Please read it over.  If you have been following the events involving President Trump’s second term in office. The lies, the crimes committed, the abridgment of our constitutional freedoms, the naked politically motivated prosecutions of those opposing him both in the past and present, then fill in as much of your information as you feel comfortable sharing with your congresspeople and send it to your representatives for your state. It is the first step toward ending th...

My Story - What You Missed

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  Hello. My name is Frank Austad. I am the man behind the levers of the Franken Honest Substack, the Franken Honest Blog, and the Frank, No Mustard TikTok identity. Until recently I also had a YouTube channel called, Frank – No Mustard. For several years I steadily grew this channel, using AI tools such as InVideo ( www.invideo.io ) while also occasionally shooting videos on my phone or a handy GoPro camera. It was a lot of fun watching my channel grow. My channel dealt with issues such as Climate Change, Voting Rights, Anti-Vax myths, and our national trend toward authoritarianism. Eventually I grew from only a handful of subscribers – about 13 or so, to nearly 40 subscribers – a larger handful. I became interested in the Donald Trump/Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell scandal, and produced a couple of videos about it. While I was on vacation recently, I found that YouTube had deleted my channel. They claimed that my channel violated their community standards for fraud and sp...

Some (Good) News About Climate Change

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 It wasn’t that long ago when the topic of Climate Change was a commonly investigated topic in the United States. Once termed “Global Warming” in the 1980s and 1990s, the phrase still refers to the phenomenon of severely transitioning weather patterns caused by increased atmospheric warming brought on by continued use of fuels and products that release emissions of greenhouse gases. There is some good news about Climate Change, but it is coming from countries other than the United States, the nation that elected a climate change denier, receiving over one billion dollars in campaign contributions from oil, coal and gas providers. The result of which was the defunding of the Natural Weather Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). These organizations served to inform those in the target areas of dangerous and sometimes deadly storms of natural disasters coming their way have been crippled by the Executive Branch of the U.S. government. Even a curs...

How The Far Right Will Suppress Your Right to Vote

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  According to the ACLU, "Voting rights are under attack nationwide as states pass voter suppression laws.” These laws significantly burden eligible voters trying to exercise their most fundamental constitutional right. Since 2008, various measures such as cuts to early voting, voter ID laws, and voter roll purges have made it harder for Americans—especially Black people, the elderly, students, and people with disabilities—to vote. Voter suppression in the U.S. through legal and illegal actions is designed to prevent eligible citizens from voting. Tactics vary by state and jurisdiction but historically have targeted racial, economic, gender, age, and disability groups. After the Civil War, despite the 15th Amendment, measures like poll taxes and literacy tests were used to restrict African American men from voting. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 brought progress, but suppression tactics persist today. Since the 2013 Supreme Court ruling in She...