Two Announcements

This newsletter is two and a half years old this month, which, considering my track record of starting projects and then abandoning them, is astounding. My publication schedule has ebbed and flowed but at this point, it’s safe to call BANNED IN YOUR STATE well-established.

It’s also about to change in two very cool ways. Well, 1.5 cool ways. Let’s start with the .5 first:

Premium Subscription Perks

Look at me trying to half-full this one.

My intention for the newsletter was to have it be free, always and forever, with premium subscriptions available for those who want the warm, fuzzy feeling of supporting the newsletter. Our current media model of paying $5 to each and every creator that we like adds up quickly. It’s simply not sustainable.

Here’s the thing, though: this business model has also become unsustainable. Freelance rates haven’t changed in 20 years, but grocery prices and housing costs sure have. There are a lot of reasons that the newsletter ebbs and flows the way it does, but one of those reasons is that it has to take a back seat to paying work. It’s also why audio versions of these articles went away about a year ago. I couldn’t justify the time it takes to put them together.

And so, starting July 1st, you will find that things have changed a bit around here. For just $5 per month or $50 per year, you will now get:

• Access to the newsletter archives. You’ll still be able to read the latest couple articles for free, but anything older than that will require a premium subscription

• Audio versions of the articles. I’m still playing catch-up from the last year, but the most recent articles will all have audio on July 1st and I’ll be rapidly working my way backwards after that.

• Access to a private Discord. Please be advised that I have literally no idea what I’m doing in this department or whether anyone will be interested, but it will exist and maybe even be fun.

If there are other perks you’d be interested in, please let me know!

I hope you’ll choose to subscribe, of course, but I absolutely understand if you decide not to. Statistically speaking, many of you are also staring down the barrel of unpaid bills right now. If our roles were reversed, I probably wouldn’t subscribe until things were a bit more stable. It’s why the most recent articles will remain free. Whether you’re paid, free, or getting around the paywall using archive.org: I’m happy you’re here.

Hot Gossip

There’s a reason I’ve chosen this month to monetize the newsletter.

Barring earth-shattering world events, my feature article on the rise and fall of Project Veritas will drop in the next few days at Rolling Stone — online and in print. If you find me insufferable now, just wait. I’m going to make Harvard namedroppers look modest by comparison.

For those unfamiliar: Project Veritas was either the last bastion of investigative journalism or a grifting right-wing propaganda machine, depending on who you ask. You might remember them for taking down ACORN, the largest advocacy group for low- and middle-income Americans, back in 2010. You might remember them for their attempt to get the Washington Post to publish a fake story about Roy Moore impregnating a teenage girl and paying for her abortion, or for the Ashley Biden diary scandal, or for the Pennsylvania postal worker who claimed to have evidence of election fraud in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election. You might remember them for a lot of things, but what matters is they’re dead now — not because the Woke Left finally silenced these brave truth-tellers, but because internal conflict tore it apart. It’s a wild story, full of intrigue and corruption and a shocking amount of musical theater. Watch this space. It’s coming.

This article took roughly as long to write as a baby takes to be born, and it came into this world kicking and screaming. The first draft was 9,000 words and way too inside baseball — in the words of my long-suffering editor: the average reader of Rolling Stone does not know or care who Jack Posobiec is. The second draft was almost entirely different and 10,000 words long. The third draft, which added important context for all the weird little stories I told in the second draft, was 16,000 words long. The incredible and tireless editors over at Rolling Stone cut it down to 8,000 words, which is the version you’ll be reading next week.

What I am trying to tell you is that a lot of material got left on the cutting-room floor, not because it’s bad, but because we needed to explain the basics of the story for an audience that hasn’t been immersed in the world of Project Veritas for the last two and a half years. Here are just a few of many things you won’t be reading about in Rolling Stone next week:

• An inside scoop on the Love Boat Caper (somehow more debauched than it sounds)

• Project Veritas’ 007 era

• A barroom brawl between Project Veritas and members of the New York Young Republican Club

• Why I got to spend so much time with Project Veritas in the first place

And so, I’m very excited to announce the Project Veritas Auxiliary Series, which will start when the article drops and continue until I run out of material, which is going to be a while. I’ll intersperse these articles with my usual analyses and rants, but it’s going to be very Veritas in here for the next couple months.

Life is about to get very weird. I suspect there will be more fallout from this article than from anything I’ve ever published. But I have a few days left to not worry about that fallout, and I’m going to spend those days not worrying about it. I’ve got an Idaho article to continue researching, people to interview, a bunch of audio to record, and the hills and lake of Coeur d’Alene to explore.

See you next week!