One Year Anniversary

The battle plan for year two ⚔️

A year ago today I started this newsletter after noisily resigning from The Intercept. I committed myself to practicing a new kind of journalism, guided by my abiding faith in the public’s ability to handle truths that a gatekeeping media establishment said you were too stupid or reckless to be entrusted.

After one year and 192 posts reaching some 20 million people, I’ve succeeded beyond my rosiest hopes. From publishing Luigi Mangione’s “manifesto” to the JD Vance Dossier as well as complete copies of countless government memos and documents, I’ve shown that media can in fact publish these things without the sky falling. And the thousands of you who made my work possible by becoming paid subscribers sent a clear message to the gatekeepers: that the public is not only mature enough to want the full story, it’s willing to put its money where its mouth is to pay for it. (Please do so if you haven’t already.)

I cannot stress enough how radical a message that is for a media elite that thinks people are too inattentive to want to read leaked documents in full, or too impressionable to reader a shooter’s manifesto without being spurred to violence, and so on.

In one year, I’ve punched more holes in the wall standing between the public and the facts we’re entitled to than I could have imagined. If anything the wall was paper thin. Sometimes all I had to do was hit publish! That’s the good news. But what I’ve realized is there’s another wall behind it, and this one is much sturdier.

The paradox of the Internet age is that while there’s more journalism available than ever before, it’s also harder to understand what the hell is going on. If you’ve ever stuck your head outside the car window as a kid and realized there’s such a thing as suffocating from too much air, that’s what it feels like. Overload. We’re drowning in a sea of information without a drop of understanding to drink.

That’s the other wall I hope to break down over this next year.

Here’s the plan.

When I covered the “Hands Off” protest in Madison, Wisconsin, earlier this month, I posed a simple question to attendees: “What brings you here?” It was my own protest against the dominant style of media coverage that isn’t really interested in what ordinary people think.

Their responses surprised me. Contrary to the major media narrative, protesters were angry about a lot more than just Trump and Musk. They were pissed off at the Republicans and even Democrats in Congress, too, at the healthcare system, the wars, fossil fuel companies — you name it. “This is like an everything, catchall protest,” as one attendee told me, chuckling at the idea that it could just be about Trump.

The protest was more like the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street than, say, the women’s march of 2017. Rather than being content with just anybody-but-Trump style resistance, they now expect an actual vision. And they’re not going anywhere. Bernie Sanders recently held his largest rally ever, and like the Hands Off, I don’t think it’s just the Vermont senator that people are interested in.

My plan over this next year is not just to tell you what’s happening, but also what it means, why it matters. What the point is. Not just that there was some “anti-Trump protest,” as media lazily described the Hands Off protests, but what they were really about.

As part of my plan to do that, I’ve started a YouTube channel in which I discuss these and other events at length with my editor, the legendary national security reporter William Arkin, so we can go deeper and characterize things the major media missed.

We posted our first episode last week and would greatly appreciate if you could give our channel a “like” (this helps us reach more people).

This will give us more space to bring order out of the chaos of the 24-hour news cycle. We’re going to need a video editor, though, so I hope you’ll become a paid subscriber to support this next phase of our independent news journey. And if you’re a video editor who’s interested in working with us, feel free to reach out.

Onto phase two!