Photo by Jørgen Håland on Unsplash
Introducing Unprecedented, a newsletter to help you win with facts. (And a little humor.)
I’m writing this at the end of 2019. Donald Trump has been impeached in the House. But with Mitch McConnell rigging the proceedings in the Senate, Trump is fully expected to be “acquitted” there. After that, the nonsense will really begin.
Three things are certain:
The lies will be endless.
The distractions will be constant.
The media will fail us.
Minute by minute, day by day, this election battle will be tough. The opposition will be relentless in its assaults on truth and decency. The bots will be out in force. Kremlin propaganda will be parroted daily on Fox News. On Facebook, Trump’s lies will be accepted as “paid advertising” and given the oxygen and share buttons they need to further pollute the minds of the already brainwashed. And if Putin’s ongoing attack on our democracy isn’t already bad enough, the GOP’s voter suppression efforts will make 2019’s college cheating scandal look like a kindergarten game.
2020 will also mark @TheDailyEdge’s 10th anniversary on Twitter, an account I started just for fun.
Remember fun?
Back in 2010, “fake news” meant The Daily Show and The Onion. I tried to do something similar, at Twitter speed, in the days of 140 characters. A little while later, in May 2013, I also created @realDonalDrumpf (and got blocked by Trump one month later). Between those two accounts and my personal feed (@richardhine), I’ve now amassed nearly 340,000 followers (and unlike the orange clown I parody on Twitter, I’ve never paid for a single one of them).
My original goal with @TheDailyEdge was “to mock, challenge and deflate outrageous right-wing viewpoints while giving progressives timely jokes, information and arguments to use in the real-world and share across social media.” Things seemed to be going OK until the invasion and national emergency occurred. By which I mean the invasion of the Russian bots and the national emergency of the Trump Presidency. Now I’m branching out beyond Twitter to this newsletter on Substack.
The Daily Edge’s Unprecedented newsletter will be up and running early January 2020. Each edition will be short and sweet, with quick takes on big news, some stories you might otherwise miss, and some fun stuff, too.
Amid the blizzard of lies and the deluge of distractions, Unprecedented will stay focused on facts and reality. And unlike the “mass media,” I won’t be allowing Trump to use demented Twitter rants or the trappings of his office to dictate his own coverage. (Although @realDonalDrumpf will likely butt in from time to time.)
Special Offer
My subscription pricing is set at the lowest this platform allows ($5/month, $30/year). But if you sign up in January 2020 as a “Charter Subscriber” you’ll get 50% off. That’s just $2.50 month billed monthly or $15/year ($1.25 a month) for an annual subscription.
Thanks if you do choose to subscribe. I’ll try to make it worth it—and your support will help me make it better. If you want the free updates only, that’s cool, too.
The most important thing we can all do is to ensure a Democrat wins in 2020 and Democrats retain the House and regain the Senate. After that, we can begin to repair the unprecedented damage Trump and the GOP are doing to America and the planet.
Wishing you all a Happy, Healthy, Unprecedented New Year.
Richard
P.S. I’ll continue to tweet up a storm through the next election, so if you came here via Twitter, thanks for continuing to follow me there.