My Substack Journey, Four Months In

Don't believe the hype

Mrs. K and I at Lake Michigan following our relocation from DC to Wisconsin. Few know this but they’re called the “Great Lakes” because they’re big

Today marks four months since I went fully independent, publishing exclusively at this newsletter. Some friends and family thought I was crazy to leave a steady paycheck for the uncertain world of self-employment. But I went with my heart, knowing that this was the only way I would be able to do the reporting I wanted for the audience I wanted: ordinary people like you. So I took a leap of faith, hoping you all would catch me.

And you did! Thanks to thousands of you becoming paid subscribers, I’m now producing more journalism than ever before in my career. I’m still accountable to an editor, but not the pointless meetings and officious bureaucrats who tend to sprawling media institutions rather than journalism. I’ve had more time for reporting, a lot more fun, and most importantly, freedom. But independence from conventional media means dependence on support from ordinary people like you.  The key to the long-term survival of this newsletter — as well as our new @klipnewsorg feed on Twitter, where we post news items daily — is a steady budget. That means support from you, either by becoming a paid subscriber or making a one-time donation to my GoFundMe (link here). Over 60,000 people subscribe to this newsletter, I’m proud to say. All I need is for more of them to convert to paid subscribers.

Here are just some of my scoops your support has made possible so far: 

• The Intelligence Community Is Spying on Student Protesters,

• Biden Admin Working With Social Media Companies to Limit Pro-Palestinian Content,

• U.S. Special Operations’ Shadow War in Ukraine

• U.S. Deploys Record Number of Troops to Jordan in Quiet Buildup

With the world on fire, it’s hard to imagine a moment where aggressive national security reporting is more urgently needed. While Ukrainian forces push into Russia for the first time and attack targets in Moscow, while the war in Gaza metastasizes into a regional war, while the United States is everywhere and yet doing nothing useful anywhere, the conventional media alternately ignores and sensationalizes, pouring gasoline on an already combustible situation.

Before going independent and writing here, I might have just rolled my eyes at the scaremongering of the national security state and not seen that I had the power to offer readers a corrective. Today though, with the wise counsel of my world-class editor and T-1000 bullshit terminator, Bill Arkin (who’s seen plenty of media hype cycles in his decades as a national security analyst and journalist), I’m able to push back. Here are some examples of media panics I’ve explained were unjustified in this newsletter:

• Concerns about Iran conducting an imminent attack on Israel this summer were blown wildly out of proportion (as of this writing, no direct attack has even happened),

• The U.S. military buildup in the Middle East was much more of a propaganda campaign than an actual buildup (see the much-headlined dispatch of a nuclear sub three weeks ago that still hasn’t arrived),

• There’s no reason to believe Iran’s hack of the Trump campaign’s emails could significantly influence the election (it’s no longer even a story anymore, as far as I can tell),

It’s not that I won’t raise the alarm when it’s warranted. (See, for example, our story on how Congress is pressuring U.S. intelligence to drop the hammer on American protesters believed to be pro-Iran, including by recruiting informants.) But I refuse to participate in the orgy of scaremongering the national security state routinely whips up, in its eternal quest for greater funding and more power. Ironically, the tendency to see threats everywhere dilutes the significance of real threats, most of which have nothing to do with national security (you know, like stagnating wages or our dogshit healthcare system).

Resisting the media hype machine is where Substack has really been a blessing. Since this enterprise runs on a subscription model, we don’t face the usual pressure for things like huge quantities of clicks and therefore constant titillation and sensationalism which leads to the threat inflation I’ve been describing. Not needing my stories to go viral has been an incredible gift, opening the door to what I call Don’t Believe The Hype stories. The only downside is that puts our fate entirely in the hands of our readers and whether they become paid subscribers. We started out strong, but have fallen behind where we planned to be at this point.

Will you help us in this experiment to create a more thoughtful kind of reporting that respects its readers' intelligence? One that doesn’t rely on cheap jump scares, outrage bait and political celebrity drama (Trump/Harris/Biden DESTROYS so-and-so) for clicks? I firmly believe that this is the kind of reporting most people want; however, it requires a change not just on the part of the media like me, but on readers as well, and their willingness to chip in. “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public,” H. L. Mencken, the unofficial spokesperson for the elite political commentariat, once said. Help us prove those types wrong by becoming a subscriber.

For a one-time contribution, visit my GoFundMe campaign.