A Modest Proposal: Hear Me Out About Supporting Armageddon Prose

Originally published via Armageddon Prose Substack:

“If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, [patronize Armageddon Prose,] forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.”
-H. L. Mencken

It’s time again that I come to you, dear reader every other month or so, to politely request that you ponder kindly lending financial support to Armageddon Prose.

As I have said before, which remains true, AP is a labor of love that I would carry on even if I never made a red cent off of any of it.

But I ask you to consider this: I produce articles faithfully and regularly, some of which require a substantial effort to get out.

As many of you who have done similar work can appreciate, it’s not just the actual writing that sucks up energy and time — the writing part might not actually even be the majority of it — but also the research, the administrative efforts to upload the articles and disseminate them, emails to and fro, accounting bullshit, etc. 

Please don’t take any of this as complaint; it’s a statement of fact that, being a trapped in three-dimensional space, I have limited time, and I and those who depend on me have to eat, so at some point ideally there has to be something like an economic justification, or so says my beloved wife.

Truly independent media — as in media without any advertising or censorship influences — is an entirely new beast birthed by the internet, which for now remains relatively free outside of Big Tech social media.

Dinosaur corporate state media outlets enjoy billion-dollar windfalls because they have corporate sponsors who essentially write (or at least heavily edit) the news that they present as objective or sincere when it’s anything but and always anchored by an ulterior motive.  

Even so-called “public” outlets theoretically working purely in the public interest like NPR have both enormous institutional corporate and state sponsors. Their coverage of vital topics — running the gamut from COVID-19 truth to money-changer malfeasance to child transgenderism — is necessarily colored by these influences; it’s literally impossible, one might argue, in a world of incentives, for them not to be.

I have none of those pernicious controlling influences in my ear at Armageddon Prose, and so I’m free to report on what I believe matters most — in my own interest and my audience interest specifically and in the public interest generally — no matter what Pfizer or the State Department thinks about it.

By virtue of the nature of Substack’s model, there are no advertisers here of any kind. Any financial support I have ever garnered has come directly from readers like you — a liberating and noble model, for reasons I just explained, but not remotely approaching as lucrative (at least not unless you’re Matt Taibbi or Glenn Greenwald or someone with national name recognition) as the selling of one’s soul to The Beast.

          Related: Year-End Reflections on Independence and the Global War For Human Freedom

If a $5/month or $50/year Substack subscription doesn’t strike your fancy for whatever reason, you can also support my work these ways:

• insta-tip jar
• Locals
• Patreon
• the AP merch store

God bless and Godspeed.

Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

Follow his stuff Substack. Also, keep tabs via Twitter.

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Support always welcome via insta-tip jar.