A Heartfelt Thank You to Subscribers
A year on Substack and what it has meant to me.
Audio version:
“Subscriber” seems crass and off-target.
Can I call you “freethinker”? Will you accept that mantle?
It puts you in pretty good company. Socrates, Aristotle, Jesus, Galileo, Spinoza, Voltaire, Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, Thoreau, Einstein, Feynman, Sagan… all freethinkers of their day.
Historically, the term meant someone who opposed religious authoritarianism (though not necessarily religious belief). Freethinkers typically argued for freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. They argued that you and I can (and should) be the source of our own knowledge of the world, rather than blind acceptance of authorities or the orthodoxy of the day.
I believe freethinking is on the rise again. There’s a growing swell of people who are simply tired of traditional ideologies and see right through the thin veneer of the conventional narrative--especially now that the conventional narrative is the return to authoritarianism.
Freedom of thought and expression are under direct attack. The attackers want to re-establish an authoritarian view of the world, graciously volunteering to take on that authority themselves, with the rest of us surrendering our minds to them.
Hence the name of this newsletter.
The freethinkers of the world won’t surrender to another Dark Ages so easily.
I want to tell you the story of how you saved me.
For you and I, 2020 was a giant kick in the sensitive part of the pants. The kickers really wound up and put their all into it. Most of us didn’t see it coming.
It wasn’t the virus, of course. It was the unmaking of the civilized world. It was the wholesale jettisoning of rights and freedoms. It was the zeal with which everyone around us seemed to be going along with it.
Over and over the Michael Ondaatje quote kept popping into my head: “I felt like the only sane man on a ship full of demons.”
This isolation and face-covering and dehumanization, was, of course, by design. We were meant to go insane. Insane enough that we would clamor for the miracle cure when it arrived.
I remember hearing about suicides being on the rise. I won’t claim to have honestly considered it myself, but I could understand why they were happening. And that scared me. For the first time in my life, I could see the logic in it—life had became too unacceptably painful for many people.
Humans need to connect, of course, but particularly, I think they need to know they’re not alone in the way they think.
I was saved by some early courageous folks like Dr. Mercola, Malcolm Kendrick, Ivor Cummins, and the like.
But it wasn’t enough.
When 2021 came along, we caught a glimpse of how truly, truly terrible the world might become.
Those of us who had foreseen the coming of the “miracle cure” and questioned it, were subjected to gaslighting, hatred, more dehumanization, locked out from public life, made to feel ashamed, ridiculed, shunned by family, friends, and fellow employees, made to feel “dirty”, and even hearing calls for our imprisonment, exile, or death.
Formerly beloved “rebel” heroes seemed brainwashed into supporting the pharma narrative.
Many of us lost jobs and beloved careers. My partner was faced with losing two decades of her nursing career for not taking an experimental gene therapy that we knew, fairly early on, would do absolutely fuck all to slow the virus, would likely create escape variants forever, and carried a massive risk profile. She was hailed as a Hero in 2020, and now public enemy #1 in 2021.
The work of those people I followed early on was getting ridiculed, shadow-banned, deplatformed, and censored.
One by one, I saw them being extinguished as if by a giant, invisible candle snuffer.
A Ministry of Truth was proposed to increase the scope of the candle snuffery. Then it was ridiculed and cancelled. Then it continued anyway, in private.
And no one around me seemed to care. They weren’t even paying attention. They were too busy lining up to be injected with Pfizer mystery juice, hailing the pharmaceutical gods for delivering them into eternal salvation, and screaming bloody murder at the non-believers.
I got booted off of my previous writing platform, Medium, for posting things that officials had actually said. Of course, Medium gave me no explanation or chance to modify or take down the post. Seven years of articles and followers went poof.
Thankfully, a small voice told me to open a Substack account some weeks prior, almost as if I were obtaining a passport to a desert island nation I could escape to, if things got really bad.
I thought: Fuck it. If we’re going down, I’m going down swinging. I’ll start writing on Substack.
Little did I know I was Conway stumbling into Shangri-La.
Finding the work of
, , , , , , and others, was like walking into a room of familiar friends.The main thing I felt I had to post was a statement of why I’m rejecting the miracle cure. I wanted something I could point to when people confronted me with an incredulous “Why not??” Many of you found me when Steve Kirsch linked to this post:
…which also got reprinted in a couple languages, and jumped the subscriber base into four digits. (Hallo! to the many Dutch subscribers 😀)
And Thank God we found each other. Because I don’t know how much longer we could have gone on, like it was.
I know there are people still suffering, and there’s a lot more that’s ominous on the horizon, and there’s plenty more work to do. But to me, 2022 felt like the year we struck back.
Substack has not only gave us a voice and brought us together, it has made it possible for writers and citizen journalists to earn in a real way that other platforms never seemed to figure out.
Medium (before it became overrun by the censorious woke) offered writers a lot of freedom. But it was essentially, still, an authoritarian gatekeeper system. There were “curators” and if somebody liked your article it would be curated and reach a larger audience. You got paid by clicks and “claps” (likes), with dozens of clicks amounting to a few pennies.
A torturous affair, at best. I only ever got one thing curated. This (reprinted here):
It reached about a thousand people, and I got paid about 50 bucks for it. Then, as I said, the gatekeepers eventually got sick of hearing what I had to say, and kicked me off the platform.
It’s not lost on me that Substack is analogous to a “freethinking” vs. an authoritarian model of paying writers. No gatekeepers. Let the people decide who they want to pay.
And it works beautifully.
And, sincerely, thank you for that.
Think for Yourself is not quite to “bestseller” status, yet. But fingers crossed for the new year. It’s a speck on the horizon that looks like it might, could, maybe, possibly be land. And the winds are in our favor.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about you, freethinker, and how I can add something of a little extra value for you in the coming year. I’ve toyed with a few ideas. I want to get into audio and video more. There are some other Substack writers that offer little extras:
gives his paid subscribers memes once a week, gives her paid subscribers audio versions of her posts. I’m going to be toying around with these and other ideas in the new year. If there’s any ideas you have, things you enjoy from other Substacks you read, let me know in the comments or email me.One more thing.
It meant a lot to me to be able to share the story of Sarah and Chris Harkins and their battle with the Coast Guard mandates:
After I published it, the story also got picked up by gatewaypundit, FoxNews, and Epoch Times. It dawned on me that now that this newsletter has an audience in the thousands, I have an opportunity to give a voice to the oppressed, who don’t feel like they have a voice of their own.
So, this is a call for submissions, of a sort. If you have a story of someone who has suffered some form of oppression, tyranny, harm, or injustice as the result of the covidian/tyrannical madness, please send it to me. (Email me at: thefreethinker@substack.com or hit reply to your newsletter.) If getting their story out will help, I’ll do my best to get it told.
Thanks for reading, listening, and supporting, and bless you and yours for the holidays and the new year.
Question authority, think for yourself, never stop fighting!
Cheers.
(PS. Let me know how you liked the audio voiceover and if it’s something you’d enjoy for future articles. Or not. Be gentle, it’s my first time. 😬)
Saved under the Diss idents file in my bookmarks.
Bravo. And well done.
I thoroughly enjoyed the audio version of your beautifully expressed commentary and reflections of this past year.