Dear Reader,

Change is afoot.

I am moving the Conflict of Interest Newsletter and its subscriber list to a new platform called Substack. I hope you will continue to follow me. Substack is an online community that helps writers and readers find each other. You know many of them, including Heather Cox Richardson’s wonderful Letters from an American, to name just one. I am joining Substack to increase readership and broaden my dialogue with people like you.

My page is up now. You can find and subscribe here.

First, I’d like to thank you for reading this newsletter. I began during COVID in March 2020 as a way to stay sane and get some things off my chest. But the writing has grown into a mission. It turns out I have something to say about our democracy experiment.

The stakes are high for democratic self-government these days. It goes far beyond Trump, who is just a result of the runaway market system that emphasizes wealth creation over community and celebrity over values. An entire media/tech ecosystem has sprung up to divide the country into smaller segments and make us really, really angry - all to make them more and more money. You have to give Roger Ailes. Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerburg credit. They knew exactly what they were doing. 

Fox News is just another right-wing nut house. Tucker Carlson spews his white nationalist nonsense on his Twitter show, and CNN hires and fires the former head of the RNC. Our market economy allows this. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called it the “marketplace of ideas.” But he didn’t foresee the Internet, the 1987 abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine, and Facebook’s business model - which makes teenage girls feel bad about themselves in order to sell advertising.

My intention with Conflict of Interest has always been to dig beneath the BS on Cable News and online to better understand the gap between American aspiration and reality. Those who would turn the US into an autocracy need to be confronted, always with dignity but without fear. I try to do that here. 

Conflict of Interest will continue to focus on these issues and attempt to remind us all that there is more to life, politics, and culture than “advertising to sell toys to our children,’’ as Robert Kennedy said in 1968.

So again, thank you to all my readers and subscribers. I hope you will stick with me on Substack and send me a note with your reactions. Hearing from you is the highlight of my day and inspires me to keep writing.

Nothing changes for you. The newsletter still comes to your email Inbox. As the community grows, I plan on expanding our offering to include audio and video. I am also working on some longer-form journalism that will be published on Substack. And how about a giant Zoom call with all our readers? Wouldn’t that be fun!

Don’t forget to let me know your thoughts. I promise to respond to every comment and every email. 

One more thing - Substack allows readers to pay a small monthly fee to support its writers. I am setting an initial introductory fee of $6 per month. You can subscribe now and lock that in. If you want to pay for a whole year, the cost is $70. You can become a founder for life for $200. Don’t worry; you can still get it all for free. I want everyone to be part of this community. But I hope you will consider contributing. It helps pay expenses and those who help me do this work.

See you over on Substack!

Kevin