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David Sirota
Apr 10

So you’re feeling bad that the campaign is over. You’re feeling angry at the state of the world. You’re feeling scared about what’s on the horizon. And you’re feeling overwhelmed by the sheer amount of new, terrifying information hitting you every day. You’re Howard Beale — you’re mad as hell and you’re not gonna take it anymore, etc.

Yeah, OK, me too. So I’m going to try to start a little newsletter here to see if we can’t make a little sense of this garbage fire of an era on a regular basis — and I hope you’ll click here to subscribe and pitch in to help.

If you’re reading this, you probably know the kinds of things I’ve focused on in my 20+ years of a journalist and in politics. The topics vary, but the focus is the same: power — who has it, who doesn’t, and how that disparity shapes our dystopian world. That’s what I’m going to try to write about here (and hopefully I’m going to have some other journalists and writers help too).

For the last year during the presidential campaign, my writing was confined and constrained in a way it has never been — so I’m eager to start afresh.

Sometimes I’ll write shit you don’t like. Sometimes I’ll curse, like I just did right there. Sometimes it will be super serious and dour. Other times it will be fun and frivolous. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and all that — but all the time I’ll try to unearth and spotlight truth and facts that need more attention in this noisy moment.

Now for some details:

What the hell is this?

It’s a regular newsletter. By regular, I’m not sure what the publishing schedule will be — at times it may be daily, at other times it may be once a week. Hell, I even may go dark for a few weeks if I am working on something long-form, or if I am overwhelmed home schooling the kids during a lethal pandemic. I plan on making this a part of a larger set of projects, including other writing/reporting, podcasting and some film stuff.

How can you help?

You can click here to subscribe — you can be a free subscriber, or if you want, you can pitch in as a paying monthly subscriber and/or a founding subscriber, which would help support my larger journalism work. Paying subscribers will be able to add comments and get a bit of exclusive content, etc. I’m not committing to any specific publishing schedule, and who knows — if this fails, it may be short lived. But the more subscribers that end up supporting this, the more time I can devote to it.

Who the hell am I?

I was Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter and senior adviser, and on that campaign I wrote the Bern Notice. Before working on the campaign, I was an award-winning investigative journalist and radio host, and I also worked on a bunch of underdog political campaigns that simultaneously sapped my soul and made me feel alive because they were all fighting the good fight. If you’re really bored or masochistic, you can read my full bio here.

Is this gonna be some Bernie thing?

Working for Bernie was one of the great honors of my entire life. He’s been a hero and an inspiration to me for literally 20 years. So yeah, I may begin by writing a tad about the campaign in this newsletter, because a lot of people seem interested in that right now, and I have a whole lot of thoughts about this past excruciating year. And yeah, the themes, issues and policies that defined the campaign will obviously be a huge part of this — but sorry, no, the Bernie 2020 campaign won’t be the long-term focus here.

I’m already overwhelmed by the Internet’s glut of content, is this gonna overwhelm me?

Right now, lots of people are spamming the Internet, and I find I’m spending as much time figuring out what to read or watch or listen to as I am actually reading, watching or listening. We’re all searching for the signal in the noise, and it feels like there are 500 billion channels and nothing’s on.

So yeah, I’m going to try to write with respect for your time. Lots of times this is going to be short — because, as the TMI name implies, there’s too much information out there, and things need to be boiled down. Sometimes it will be long — and if it’s too long, you should yell at me.

Some of you may already be ready to yell at me because this is already too long. So with that, I’m going to end this by saying: subscribe, and then go annoy your friends to subscribe.

More soon,

Sirota