Politics

If you suddenly got added to Jaime Harrison’s Substack, you’re not alone

Published

10 months ago

August 21, 2025

Former DNC Chair Jaime Harrison is jumping on the Substack trend, but he seems to have overlooked the fine print.

Harrison appears to have run afoul of Substack’s terms of service by mass-subscribing his former campaign email list and other personal contacts. Substack’s rules say: “Don’t add people to your mailing list without their consent, and don’t import your contacts list or social graphs.” And Substack emphasizes that subscribers should have “explicitly opted in,” according to a Substack spokesperson.

Harrison recently uploaded those on his 2020 Senate campaign list and other contacts he had collected over the years, though he made that clear to subscribers when he started his Substack. His introductory email last week stated, “As a past member of my email list, you have been automatically subscribed to my new hub on Substack.” Harrison has a Substack podcast where he’s interviewed Democrats including Hunter Biden, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and he also started a paid subscription section for superfans to get early access to podcasts and bonus content.

The way he built his Substack list, however, has attracted negative attention online, with several X users expressing outrage that they were added to his Substack without their permission or even knowledge. One user wrote, “The horrors of giving my email to Democrats never cease. Why tf did I get auto-subscribed to Jaime Harrison’s Substack,” while another wrote, “Just found out I was automatically subscribed to Jaime Harrison’s Substack without my knowledge or consent.”

The spokesperson for Substack, granted anonymity to speak freely, declined to comment on Harrison’s case but said the company’s guidelines “require that any mailing list a publisher imports be made up of people who have explicitly opted in to receive emails from that publication” and that lists purchased or collected without consent (which frequently happens on campaigns) are not permitted. The spokesperson bolded the phrase “explicitly opted in.”

The spokesperson said Substack runs basic checks for issues including invalid addresses but that it doesn’t have a way to verify how emails were collected.

Harrison said in a brief phone interview that he “assumed” his team had followed Substack’s rules but added, “For me, knowing email stuff and all that other stuff, I don’t follow this stuff.” In a follow-up text message, he said he had abided by all Substack policies and that his team “worked directly with Substack to upload our list, which was collected from my Senate campaign and other personal activities.” A spokesperson for Harrison declined to give Blue Light News the name of the Substack representative they dealt with and said such interactions were done only over the phone.

Several other Democratic politicians with Substacks have chosen different ways to build up their newsletter lists. A person familiar with Pete Buttigieg’s Substack, granted anonymity to discuss the matter, said the former transportation secretary is only using organic ways to grow his Substack, which has around 600,000 followers, and that his team doesn’t pull any lists over.

A spokesperson for Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said he’s also grown his Substack organically and didn’t think it was necessary to pull subscribers from his campaign email list. The person said the video interviews the senator has done with anti-Trump influencers Jim Acosta and Jennifer Rubin, as well as journalist Anand Giridharadas, have been very helpful in adding new subscribers, now totaling more than 65,000.

Last week, Harrison’s Substack showed that he had a million subscribers, but most of Harrison’s posts have less than a dozen likes. After Blue Light News started asking questions, the number of subscribers became private. A Harrison spokesperson declined to comment on why the subscription number is no longer public.

For years, Democratic consultants have raised concerns that Democratic politicians are exhausting donors with too many emails, but Substack is a new platform on which Democrats can grow — and annoy — people in their orbit.

“Substack prohibits unsolicited spam for a reason,” said Josh Nelson, CEO of progressive ad platform Civic Shout. “Jaime Harrison, as a former DNC chair, should know better than to add people to an email list without their knowledge or consent.”

Another Democratic consultant, granted anonymity because of fear of business consequences, said leaders of many progressive organizations and other influential Democrats now have Substacks that he joked they view as their “retirement plan.”

“It’s so dumb because obviously there’s not enough people on Substack to pay $5 a month for all these people, and they all use tons of organizational resources to pump up their own Substacks, which is so corrupt and such a misallocation of resources,” the consultant said.

Politics

Iran set to progress at World Cup

Published

2 minutes ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Iran’s adventure through a World Cup beset by geopolitical complexity and logistical complications will likely continue after the team landed a frenetic 1-1 draw against Egypt. The high-stakes encounter kicked off hours after a tenuous peace between Washington and Tehran was threatened by American strikes on Iranian military installations along the Strait of Hormuz. Read the full story from Seattle by Sasha Issenberg and Sophia Cai here.

Politics

The “Pride Match” that wasn’t

Published

2 hours ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

SEATTLE — As a lesbian who was born in Egypt, Noha Mahgoub could have chosen to dress for what local organizers branded a “Pride Match” in colors associated with either her sexual orientation or her country of origin. The 43-year-old Democratic legislative aide — one of the top staffers in Washington state government — chose the latter, arriving in a red Egyptian national team jersey, a black hat emblazoned with YALLA and red-white-and-black tricolor facepaint.

“I’ve seen Pride shirts, I’ve seen Pride face paintings,” she observed from a concourse minutes before national anthems began echoing around Lumen Field. “It’s been really great, but I’m seeing a lot more Egypt and Iran and people cheering for their countries and singing their songs.”

Indeed, despite FIFA’s announcement that rainbow flags would be permitted in the stadium, few were visible as the match began. Instead, the stands rippled with the colors of the two Middle Eastern countries on the field, including many of the pre-revolutionary lion-and-sun flags that FIFA has attempted to ban under a stadium code of conduct that prohibits political displays.

Mahgoub had seen Egypt’s national team in person only once before, as a child while the team was angling to qualify for the 1990 World Cup. Since then, Mahgoub and her family relocated to Washington state, where she said the local Egyptian-American community has become enlivened by new arrivals coming to work at Seattle-based tech companies.

“You know how it is, you start calling everybody your cousins — a lot of cousins that I wasn’t related to,” Mahgoub said. “Well, I think a lot of them are here.”

Politics

Why Belgium’s prime minister isn’t cheering on the Red Devils

Published

5 hours ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Ah, Belgium. The country of fries, chocolate, Kevin De Bruyne and, some might say, chronic political division.

Beyond Brussels, a mighty international melting pot, the country is split between Dutch-speaking Flanders, French-speaking Wallonia and a small German-speaking community. Those linguistic divisions are mirrored in its politics: Belgium has separate party systems on either side of the language border, as well as a highly devolved federal structure that gives significant powers to its regions.

Today, Belgian politics is as fragmented as ever. It took 234 days to form a federal government after the June 2024 election (yes, you read that right). The delay was driven largely by the fact that no camp came close to winning a majority, forcing months of negotiations between parties with sharply different ideological and linguistic bases.

Flemish nationalism has also become a growing force, shaped by two right-wing nationalist parties: the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), which wants to transform Belgium into a looser confederal state and ultimately give Flanders far greater autonomy, and the far-right Vlaams Belang, which openly campaigns for Flemish independence.

So, you might think the 2026 World Cup would offer Belgium’s leader a rare opportunity to rally and unify the country behind a shared national symbol, right?

Wrong.

Prime Minister Bart De Wever, who hails from the N-VA party, has expressed almost no public support for the Red Devils, Belgium’s national soccer team.

That contrasts with leaders in nearby countries that also qualified for the World Cup. The leaders of the Netherlands, Germany and France have all publicly backed their squads, whether on social media or through public appearances.

The reason may be simple: De Wever just doesn’t care for the sport.

A Belgian official told Blue Light News: “The prime minister is not a soccer fan, so he doesn’t seek to project that image publicly. To do otherwise would not be authentic.”

Flemish media have indeed reported that the prime minister has little interest in soccer. In a podcast appearance a few years ago, he said the sight of people “going totally crazy in a group in the stands” left him feeling “ice cold.”

But politics is likely part of the story too. De Wever has led the Flemish nationalist N-VA since 2004. Throughout his political career, he has argued that Flanders should have far greater autonomy and that Belgium should evolve into a confederal state. For a politician with that background, overt displays of Belgian national unity probably don’t come naturally, and in fact contradict emphasis on Flemish autonomy.

This is not the first time the N-VA’s relationship with the Red Devils has attracted attention. In 2015, after Belgium reached No. 1 in the FIFA world rankings, Francophone Socialist Party leader Laurette Onkelinx asked the Chamber of Representatives to applaud the team. All parties joined in, except the N-VA.

During Euro 2016, the N-VA had to deny it instructed ministers and MPs to avoid publicly celebrating the Red Devils so as not to appear too Belgian, after rumors circulated in Belgian media.

One of De Wever’s few comments about this year’s World Cup concerned Belgium’s official tournament song. His complaint: It did not contain a single word of Dutch.

“My staff have confirmed to me that not a single word is sung in Dutch. That is, to put it mildly, not elegant,” he said, in keeping with his ideologies of promoting Flanders, when asked about the song during a parliamentary committee hearing.

Sport is often treated as a vehicle for national unity. In New Zealand, Belgium’s opponent in today’s match, elite teams have successfully woven elements of Māori culture into their sporting traditions, most famously through the prematch haka, which has helped create a shared cultural identity that connects Māori and non-Māori New Zealanders.

In Belgium, however, this World Cup has not yet become that kind of unifying project. At least not from the very top.