Blake Dodge and Katherine Dee:
Who wrote these dispatches, you may ask? An obscure leftist blogger, tucked away on BlueSky, followed by a handful of Portlandia co-op members? Nope.
Heather Cox Richardson may not be a household name, but she’s one of the most influential voices in American media. From her home in Maine, the Boston College professor has built a following of 2.7 million subscribers — that’s 1 million more people than Jimmy Kimmel’s average audience size, and just shy of the left-wing political commentator Hasan Piker’s 3 million streaming followers — who treat reading her nightly Substack, “Letters from an American,” as an act of patriotism.
To her followers, Richardson is the last responsible adult in the room: calm, authoritative, devoted to the hard facts of history. She presents herself as America’s professor, neither a polemicist nor performer. Yet the history in her telling is never neutral. Each night, she offers a morality tale in which Republicans play the villains; Democrats, the weary defenders of reason.
That pattern was clearest when she told readers last month that Kirk’s assassin, Tyler Robinson, was another example of MAGA violence, a symbol of the right’s descent into madness. She still hasn’t corrected the record that Robinson was, in fact, left-leaning, according to his family and basically every piece of credible evidence that exists. But that mistake in particular matters less than what it revealed. Richardson was wrong, but she was doing what she always does: imposing a narrative shape on events that, occasionally, are too messy to have a cleanly delivered moral. In that, she’s emblematic of the new media order: unaccountable, independent, influential, and commanding both an audience larger than most television shows and a devoted fandom. Her appeal rests on what the public has lost faith in — The New York Times telling us all what to think — and what it wants instead: a guide who, more or less, tells us all what to think, but more honorably. A Virgil cutting through the hellscape of modern politics and media.