Welcome to The End

I am starting this newsletter to try to solve some problems.

I've been covering right-wing and far-right politics for over a decade, mostly as a freelancer, with hundreds of bylines across publications including The Guardian, the SPLC, Bellingcat an others.

I'm not going to stop publishing with big outlets where I can.

The simple fact is that the pace of events since Trump's inauguration have created a bottleneck across publications which necessarily limited space and limited resources, even as far-right authoritarians wield power and undermine democracy in the United States and beyond.

The bottleneck holds back urgent stories that I think need to be covered. It also makes it harder to sustain the work I do: I only get paid when I get published.

In a time where the news industry is entering renewed crisis due to AI-assisted search, I need to find a way to keep doing this work, which I believe is more important than ever, and which I have a long record of delivering.

There are some other considerations that led me to make this move:

• The far right is now transnational but the coverage footprints of news outlets mostly aren't, meaning some stories fall between the cracks.
• Some groups I investigate are hooked into international and even global networks, but that aspect of their activities can be hard to include in coverage written for US newsrooms.
• Sometimes I find newsworthy phenomena entirely outside the US that I have found hard to land pitches on with international outlets.
• My role in mainstream outlets has increasingly been that of an investigative reporter, and I don't really have a place for big-picture analysis.

The newsletter will have four kinds of articles.

First and most importantly it will feature the kinds of investigations on far-right actors that you may well already associate me with.

Investigations like my most recent story unmasking members of The Old Glory Club, my series of reports on Christopher Rufo's far-right links, or further back my story unmasking the founder of neo-Nazi accelerationist group The Base.

I am hoping that the newsletter will allow me to give sustained attention to particular networks as I have tried to do elsewhere, as in my series of reports published over months on the Society for American Civic Renewal, sequences of stories on political figures like vice president JD Vance and defense secretary Pete Hegseth, or my reports over years that drew on the Blueleaks trove of hacked law enforcement data.

Secondly there will be reported analysis. (These will be my informed takes, not simply opinion. My opinions are about as uninteresting to me as I presume they are to readers).

That kind of article might look something like linking Brenton Tarrant's crimes to the history of Australian Islamophobia, tracing the false narrative of white genocide in South Africa from the political fringes to Donald Trump's brain, or tracing the growth of the "Cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory.

Now and then, I will also write articles explaining skills I have developed and tools I use in investigating far-right actors, government officials, and law enforcement agents. Some of this will be about so-called "OSINT" techniques like the ones I have used to identify neo-Nazis, far-right publishers, movements like the Boogaloo boys, and far-right influencers who are secretly working as public officials. Others will point to sources of information you may not be aware of, and some will be on essential disciplines like verification.

Lastly, I will publish interviews with people whose expertise has a bearing on the subjects I cover, with a bias towards schoilars, researchers, and community activists. (I have an allergy to journalists interviewing journalists, so I probably won't do much of that if I can avoid it).

I will not paywall anything for the first month or so of publication, and after that I will do so selectively, and even then I will try to keep the most pressing public interest stories free.

My plan is to issue

• A weekly roundup of links and points of interest for those concerned about the ongoing surge of far-right politics.
• A weekly piece of focused analysis on a topical subject.
• Investigations as and when I can publish them, but at least one per month.
• Interview transcript (and maybe eventually a podcast) at least once a month.

But I am offering two levels of membership for those who want to help support my reporting.

One, at $6/month or $60/year will get you almost everything: both weekly newsletters, all investigations, and all interviews.

For $25/month or $250/year you get all of that plus a quarterly in depth report on some aspect of far-right politics (the first one will be on the extent to which ideologically aligned tech companies have tapped into US defense funding), a seat at a monthly office hours stream, and special thanks in newsletters if that's something you are comfortable with.

For now I won't be running ads but I reserve the right to in future with the goal of sustainability in mind. It goes without saying that advertisers will have no influence on my coverage.

In the meantime, Please feel free to subscribe or make a one-off donation to sustain investigative journalism. I appreciate it!

(Oh and on the title: it's a tribute to a free joint newsletter that Corey Pein and I used to run which was totally derailed by the pandemic. It's meant to be sobering not defeatist!)