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The migration of The Bugbear Dispatch from Substack to Ghost is well underway. I have exported and imported both subscribers and post content.

What I now need from you is to please check whether you have received a newsletter email sent from Ghost. If you haven’t, please email me to let me know so that I can get that fixed. The e-mai…

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One thing I’m announcing today is that the future of this newsletter will not be with Substack. Once I get set up at a better alternative, probably Ghost, I will announce a belated two-year anniversary sale. This may take me a couple of weeks yet, and the publication schedule may remind a little behind and irregular until I get the details sorted out. I’m sorry about that.

I participated in the original “Substackers Against Nazis” campaign, which did not require participants to leave but was meant to put pressure on the owners of this site to stop funding Nazis and other violent white supremacists. The campaign failed to change the site’s approach, but many good people, including marginalized and specifically trans writers, stayed. At the time, I reasoned that I did not want to let Nazis push us off of every platform. I was reeling from the loss of Twitter and my weekly column for openDemocracy, and also afraid of the risk of losing any income from making a switch at a time when my finances were somewhat precarious. Sadly, they still are/

This is a smaller newsletter (and a one-person operation), bringing in about $17,000 annually at the moment. Today, despite the intimidating prospect of moving (exacerbated by the fact that my depression has been pretty bad of late), I can no longer justify staying on this platform. Not after the literal Nazi push notification “mistake.” This platform is sick, and its “free speech absolutism” is a sick ideology. I never blinded myself to that, but, recognizing that total purity on the internet and under capitalism is impossible, I stayed. At this point, however, I feel compelled to move on. I probably should have found the energy and resolve to prioritize doing it earlier. More information will be forthcoming soon on how I’ll complete my exit from this platform.

Further Thoughts on Cutting Ties and Letting go

Thinking of things I should have done earlier, last week I did something that I honestly should have done a long time ago. I wasn’t actively putting off doing the thing; I honestly hadn’t thought about it in a long time. Specifically, I needed to cut what was at this point an on-paper only tie, but one that nevertheless sent the wrong message to anyone who might have noticed?

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But given how toxic New Age beliefs and leaders can be, lately I find myself wondering what exactly constitutes healthy spirituality. To many of my fellow atheists, the answer to this question falls along a simple black and white binary: there is no such thing. Many would immediately dismiss the sincere posing of the question as stupid, and even harmful, with a contemptuous sneer.

I think that kind of knee-jerk antitheist response is a cop-out. Still, I have some empathy for those antitheists who come by their anger honestly, as opposed to the Richard Dawkins types: atheists of extreme privilege who seem to get their jollies from condescending contrarianism and an obnoxious sense of superiority. The kind who put their (ostensible) IQs in their social media bios and snark about the relatively small number of Nobel Prizes that have gone to Muslims.

Blanket antitheism reflects bias, prejudice, and ignorance about religion, as anyone who has taken even one college-level religious studies course should be able to understand. And in our western societies, this kind of antitheist atheism tends to manifest as Christian atheism, mirroring Christianity in its proselytizing and universalist nature and its colonialist contempt for Islam, and mirroring Protestantism specifically in its narrow focus on belief as opposed to the more fundamental matter of values.

Still, atheists are a classic American bugbear, historically associated with moral panic surrounding “godless Communism” and the Soviet enemy. In many parts of the United States today, the nonreligious continue to face discrimination and persecution unless they stay quiet about their nonbelief, which can be difficult when one of the first “small talk” questions you’ll get in a typical encounter in much of the South and parts of the Midwest is “Where do you go to church?” Some atheists feel compelled to pretend to be the local flavor of Christian just to get by, and being in that situation is psychologically damaging.

So yes, it’s not easy to be an atheist in families and communities dominated by evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons, or similar. And in the immortal words of LeVar Burton, you don’t have to take my word for it. You can check out the data for yourself, starting with the groundbreaking 2019 Secular Survey published by American Atheists.

That being said, the idea that religion and spiritual practice per se are inherently harmful is simply not consistent with the psychological and sociological literature on the topic. Yes, this literature reflects Christian privilege and the bias in favor of religion that permeates our society. Further, I’m glad that some literature has begun to emerge about religious trauma and the ways in which adverse religious experiences are a very real and harmful phenomenon (you’ll find links to relevant reading below the paywall). Religion and spirituality absolutely can (and often do) break bad, and when they do it can be devastating. But it is simply not true that one must be either “spiritual” or strictly secular in order to achieve wellbeing.

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To be sure, that number comes with a certain amount of trepidation, particularly for a an American bugbear like me in a time of fascist witch hunting.

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Did you miss me?

I’m sleep-deprived and literally bruised, but I’m back online as we finish up the final emptying and cleaning of the old apartment, after which we will continue to empty boxes here in the new place for an unfortunately indefinite period.

We remain in the same zip code, which is both good (I had it pre-memorized!) and annoying (Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez, aka the Kyrsten Sinema of the House, is still my congressional representative). In any case, this makes trips between the old and the new place easier, but on the downside, moving is one of those obnoxious tasks that expands to fill the time you allot for it.

Moving always places you into a liminal space. At least I think it does, though I wonder if it still feels that way if you have the resources to hire professional movers to handle the worst of it. On that note, I turn 45 soon—another milestone that is making me reflective (if you’re an optimist) or broody (if, like me, you’re a pessimist). I’m pretty sure it says in the Constitution of the United States itself, and/or in the Bible, that once you turn 45 you are henceforth forever exempted from having to carry heavy furniture up and down stairs.

What? That’s no weirder than the conspiracy theories far too many Americans actually believe (and I’ve got a story about that for you). The reflections that follow below are more personal than your usual Bugbear Dispatch fare, but you know me. I’m a systemic thinker, the personal and the political are intimately intertwined, and I’m rarely capable of writing personal reflections without bringing in some historical, social, and cultural analysis.

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Speaking of uncomfortable parallels, I find that many liberal Americans balk at the statement that Russians and Americans have a great deal in common, most of it not good. The statement is true, however. Both the Russian Federation and the United States have vast swaths of undergoverned rural territory and sizable populations of conspiracy theorists prone to jingoism. Both do poorly in foreign language education, both have major issues with violence against women. Russia has more or less always been a low-trust society, and American society is increasingly low-trust. Both countries have experienced an identity crisis since the end of the Cold War.

As the United States under Donald Trump is currently transforming into kleptocratic autocracy much like Russia under Vladimir Putin, now is the time to face these realities. I’ve been documenting these similarities and the affinity for Russia among right-wing Americans for years, and at the end of today’s essays you’ll find links to my relevant writing. In the meantime, I’ll take you on a little tour of some of the time I’ve spent in Russia—mostly, and this is salient, the time I’ve spent outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, although one certainly encounters xenophobia, bigotry, conspiracy theories, and imperial provincialism in the Russian capitals as well.

Sometimes they speak directly to the affinity between conspiratorial, right-wing Russians and their American counterparts, like for example in the Confederate battle flags—on bumper stickers, in windows—you’ll come across if you spend much time in Moscow. I suppose I may have only seen five or six, walking through the same parts of the same neighborhoods multiple times when I lived in Moscow from 2012 to 2015. But even if that’s the case, it’s bizarre—the ideal number of Confederate displays to come across in a foreign country or, well, anywhere, is of course zero!

Area Studies Adventures and Observations on Russian-American Similarity

In the summer of 2005, after my first year of grad school, I returned to Vladimir, Russia—a provincial city about 120 miles northeast of Moscow—where I had taught English at an institution called the American home from 2003-2004. Now a PhD student in modern Russian history at Stanford, I was back for the American Home’s intensive Russian program, continuing to work with the same tutor I’d studied under for free as one of the benefits of my teaching job with the AH.

One day that summer, I returned to my host mother’s apartment only to find her on again, off again, alcoholic live-in boyfriend Andrei sitting at the kitchen table with a militia officer. (At that time, the Russian police were still referred to as the militia, though in 2011 they were officially designated police.)

As I opened the door and strode into the hall, preparing to take off my shoes, I heard Andrei say to the officer, whose presence I was only just noticing, “Ah, here comes our American.” For his part, the officer sighed and dramatically replied, in a deeply nostalgic tone, “An American? Our best enemies!”

Why is there a militia officer at the kitchen table? I thought to myself. Am I in trouble? While I didn’t think I had done anything to get myself in trouble, some days prior I may or may not have shouted “Down with Yanukovych” in the street, in Russian, when Ukraine’s then recent Orange Revolution came up in conversation with a new friend. This friend reacted—sensibly, in retrospect—by shushing me.

Andrei immediately objected to his militia friend’s “best enemies” comment. “Nyeeeet, they’re not our enemies anymore,” the skinny drunk with permanently messy brown hair insisted. “It’s the Chinese!” Looking at me and the tall, classically handsome officer in turn, he added, “They’re your enemy, and they’re our enemy.” As Andrei continued in that jingoistic but America-friendly and Sinophobic vein, I realized both that I was not in trouble and that I was going to be stuck at the kitchen table drinking with these chudaki for an indefinite period before I could get to my homework. Well, to the khui with my homework. The vodka began to flow.

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To be perfectly frank, most of America’s three-day weekend/Monday off holidays don’t mean much to me. I often mostly ignore them, sometimes even forgetting that colleagues I may need to reac…

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Though I find some value in Taylor’s communitarian thinking, I do so always with one skeptical eyebrow raised, particularly as this Catholic intellectual has a tendency to romanticize times and places where one particular religious worldview can be taken for granted. That impulse is nothing new. It is rather a type of recycled reaction we can trace back at least to the proto-fascist Scottish curmudgeon Thomas Carlyle. Unfortunately, this fash-ish nostalgia all too often passes for serious thought today, when, for example, a nearly 600-page unoriginal rant about the ostensible horrors of “hyper-pluralism,” by a more flamboyantly conservative Catholic scholar than Taylor, becomes a monograph that elicits accolades from academics who should know better.

Seriously and relatedly, philosophy departments remain of the most unreconstructed bastions of misogyny in contemporary American and British universities, and with today’s fascist attacks on DEI, that’s not likely to change any time soon. But I digress.

In any case, I am no lover of Hegel, whose influence runs through the reactionary thinking I mentioned above. That being said, there is one Hegelian insight from his Philosophy of World History that I find myself coming back to over and over again these days. Namely this one: “The History of the World is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it….” I keep returning to this thought because to me, at least, current events feel frighteningly “historical” in Hegelian terms, while I can look to earlier periods when I personally felt safer, though none I would perhaps rate as entirely “happy” if happy means long-term social stability.

But let’s turn to something more concrete.

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According to a recent PRRI report, 52% of Americans agree with the statement that “President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy,” compared with 44% who agree with the statement “President Trump is a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness.”

Presumably, those 44% see the present as a “happy period,” whereas it is quite the opposite for the 52%. This begs the question of whether a “happy period” in history is something that could ever be measured more or less objectively, although it seems intuitive to me that a clearly angry and revanchist “happiness” is, well, not exactly truly happy. In other words, when the “happy” people are engaged in authoritarian efforts to force everyone else to conform or disappear (perhaps to a foreign prison), I think we can argue we’re in a “historical” time, and all else being equal I, for one, would rather live on a “blank page.”

In any case, it’s the breakdown of those PRRI numbers among various demographics that tells the real story. The following groups show the highest tendency to deem Trump, correctly I might add, a dangerous dictator: Christian nationalism rejecters (84%), Black Protestants (71%), Hispanic Catholics (69%), all Black Americans (67%), religiously unaffiliated Americans (65%), Jewish Americans (64%).

By contrast, 51% of white Americans see Trump as a strong leader, while only 44% consider him a dangerous dictator (though that number rises to 56% for white Americans with four-year college degrees). A full 73% of both white evangelical Protestants and Christian nationalism adherents put Trump in the strong leader box (the Venn Diagram between those groups is likely almost a circle), along with 66% of Mormons. Clearly religion, race, and ethnicity all matter to what one is able to see and what one does not see with respect to America’s disastrous political state. I am sure gender and sexuality are key factors as well, but that breakdown was not included in PRRI’s report.

These statistics, I think, largely speak for themselves, and so I won’t belabor them further here. Instead, I want to consider the issues of anxiety, guilt, obligation, and survival in turbulent “historical” times.

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“April is the cruelest month” is how …

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On top of that, I’m now worried that with DOGE descending on the FDIC, what meager savings I have may not be secure. Then there was the tariff rollercoaster (and the obvious and grotesque profiteering that must have occurred for the rich and connected when stocks soared after Donald Trump announced his “pause”). And the Trump regime’s direct defiance of a federal court order, affirmed by the Supreme Court, to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from the Salvadoran prison to which he was deported.

The New York Times, naturally, claims Garcia was “inadvertently” deported, which is dictator-appeasing bullshit. CNN, too, reports, “The Trump administration has conceded that it mistakenly deported him ‘because of an administrative error,’ but maintains it cannot bring him back because he is in Salvadoran custody.”

Major news organizations should not be taking our authoritarian government’s excuses at face value. “Administrative errors” are a feature, not a bug, of this authoritarian government that is deliberately wreaking havoc on American life and international relations. If the Trump regime cared about redressing such “errors,” or outright avoiding them in the first place, it would be acting very differently, and we can only hope some federal judge will eventually find the courage to hold Trump officials in contempt and apply the maximum penalties possible.

The cruelty is the point, as the truism goes—the Trump regime is deliberately striking terror into marginalized populations. And speaking of marginalized populations, I’ve been thinking a lot about the transgender community (of which I am part) this week after giving a relevant virtual talk to an audience of mainly religious studies scholars and their students. Below you’ll find some thoughts along those lines, including both political analysis and personal reflections. Be warned that the following section contains discussion of suicide, and specifically of trans people driven to suicide by the intense hostility to our existence that is prevalent in many parts of the United States.

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I was spending a lot of time in Russia in those years. Many Russians identify as essentially apolitical and, if they’re the type who like to be edgy, cynical. Given Russian history and contemporary realities, Russian cynicism is easy to understand. In the case in question, however, it was an American expat who told me she didn’t really pay attention to politics, and for reasons I couldn’t immediately articulate, that rubbed me the wrong way. (These days, I’m all too aware that the worst expats will “I’m not political” themselves all the way into supporting the most egregious abuses of authoritarian regimes. If you are very good at this game, you become basically Paul Manafort.)

One reason this woman’s declaration of political apathy in ca. 2007 didn’t sit right with me was undoubtedly that that my childhood socialization involved heavy politicization—for the Christian Right, of course, with the politics I was expected to espouse and pursue lining up with the illiberal goals for American governance that they are currently achieving at an alarming rate.

As my own political (and personal) awakenings continued, I moved further and further left, and became more and more outspoken on matters such as universal healthcare and LGBTQ rights. With that in mind, I’m pretty sure the other reason I found the comment off-putting was that on some level I was beginning to understand instinctively that political apathy isn’t innocent. It protects power.

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Of course, when you’re raised to be a culture warrior and your ideological worldview falls apart, you don’t stop being a culture warrior—you switch sides. If you’re not careful to give plenty of time to reflective self-work and learning from those whose life experiences have been very different from your own, you can easily end up perpetuating the same structural flaws and oppressive norms you internalized as a kid under a new ideological cover, not to mention running from one god that fails to another, and another, and another.

Now, this is not to say that neither ideology nor words matter. They do, and I am going to spend much of this essay precisely unpacking the power of words. Words do things, and if I didn’t believe that it would be pretty silly for me to be a writer—unless, of course, I were self-consciously cynical and lacking in conviction.

But if that were the case, I’d be making a mint off of the Right’s free-flowing wingnut welfare as a Claremont fellow or the like, writing up viral fascist drivel for The Federalist or some equally repulsive publication. I write out of conscience and conviction, and I choose writing not only because it comes relatively naturally to me, but also because I believe that words can provide valuable information, convey thoughts and values in a way that sparks thinking in others, and, at least occasionally, even change people’s minds.

By the same token, of course, words can obscure. And our rationalizations for unethical behavior, which we form out of words, can at times be so convincing that we even begin to believe them ourselves.

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USAID is a flawed organization. As a secular Am…

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I follow that up with some personal reflections on my individual relationship with nostalgia, which is complicated by being a queer person raised in evangelical America, where strict father morality rules the day.

Strict Father Families and the Weaponization of Small-Scale Group Nostalgia

Have you ever stepped foot in a multi-generational small family business in the American South? If you have, then you’ll likely have noticed a wall of family photos, sometimes accompanied by the story of the company and/or particular reminiscences related to the family’s and business’s history. These nostalgic shrines aren’t ubiquitous, but they’re common enough. To some extent, they resemble the walls of family photos seen in many a conservative household, and sometimes found in Midwestern family businesses as well.

Frankly, they’re are always a bit off-putting to me.

It’s not that it isn’t good to have a loving, supportive blood family (if you’re lucky enough to have such a thing), but rather that I always wonder how much coercion, manipulation, and control might have been going on that doesn’t show up in the pictures. How many black sheep might be left out of the pictures? Or how many of the people in them were filled with quiet desperation and unattainable dreams as they posed?

To be sure, these family shrines may be, on some level, showcasing the kind of genuinely close-knit family and community that provides a great deal of social support. At the same time, these family photos and the (sanitized) local history they represent, along with the associated imagery and kitsch beloved by conservative Christian southerners and midwesterners, never tell the whole story. While an authoritarian Christian family may offer its members support, that support is often highly conditional. These images that capitalize on “family values” and nostalgia, but they do not display the tension, lying just beneath the surface, that often arises between individual autonomy and familial expectations and demands.

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It’s funny, but the same kind of American right-wingers who love to talk about “individual responsibility” and “American individualism” typically employ a variety of coercive physical—that is, spanking and often even worse—and psychological disciplinary mechanisms to stamp out individual deviations from the family line. Since we’re talking about mostly white, conservative families in the United States, the family line means always voting Republican, though in the early and mid-twentieth century in the South it meant always voting Democratic but for the same racist reasons. Following the family line also means shutting up about any objections to racist, anti-LGBTQ, and misogynistic comments made by family members or Republican politicians, and of course it means not being queer. My own Midwestern family was quite controlling regarding my hair length as I grew up, because long hair, which I consistently wanted, might have suggested that I was a hippie and/or queer.

If you grew up in this sort of family, then, like me, you may have been educated in evangelical Christian schools, or you might have been homeschooled. What the authoritarian family gets out of that is the limitation of your options for breaking with the family’s mores, and certainly for finding any support as you do so. Isolation facilitates control and a variety of abuses.

And if you’re queer in this type of family and come out as a minor? To be clear, I did not, and I was so repressed I couldn’t even recognize my own queerness until I was in my early 30s. But if you do, you’ll likely be beaten, berated, and guilted into conformity to heteronormative expectations, or you’re going to have problems with your blood family.

Further expectations often pile up in right-wing Christian families. In addition to accepting young earth creationism and other anti-scientific conspiracy theories, going to “the right kind” of church, and marrying “the right kind” of Christian so you can pump out babies, you might be expected to go to a particular college or to a particular kind of college. This can easily be coerced in most cases, since higher education in the United States is prohibitively expensive, federal student aid is determined by family income, AND parents who don’t want their children to go, for example, to state as opposed to evangelical universities, can simply refuse to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).

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Responding to American Fascism: Don’t Lose the Forest for the Trees

But first, I’ll make a few comments on how to assess the chaos in the government and its effects on individuals’ lives in terms of patterns rather than isolated events, the blow-by-blow of which is nearly impossible to follow. Finally, paid subscribers will get some bonus recommended reading and a gift link to my latest article for The Flytrap, “Haidt Crimes: On Moral Foundations Theory and the Normalization of Fascism.”

First off, some fairly quick thoughts on the authoritarian patterns in the chaos we’re experiencing. I object to calling any particular focus of an authoritarian movement a “distraction”—this was often said (including by many on the Left) in recent years about the Right’s moral panic over transgender Americans existing in public and receiving access to medical care, and look where that’s gotten us. As trans people and experts on authoritarianism such as myself knew all along, the culture-warring attacks on our rights were not a distraction, but a key pillar of America’s fascist movement. American fascists are now in control of the entire federal government, and as it turns out they are very sincerely concerned with pushing genocidal anti-trans policies.

In recent related news, we’ve seen the website for the Stonewall National Monument erase all mentions of trans participation in the famous uprising, when trans women were in fact central players in that series of events. The use of “LGB” language, evidently copied from British TERFism, seems designed not only to erase the “T,” but also to drive a wedge between trans folks and the rest of the queer community. I don’t believe this will work, and I’m encouraged by the protests that immediately sprang up in response to the changes of the website. Even so, it’s quite an insult, if an entirely unsurprising one.

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Meanwhile, a trans man from Minnesota, Sam Nordquist, was tortured and murdered in upstate New York in a what was likely a hate crime (though it has not at this point been officially declared one). His family has set up a GoFundMe to help them with out-of-state travel as they deal with the horrific crime and process Nordquist’s death.

Whether the Nordquist case turns out to have been a hate crime or not, the dehumanization of a group of people provides a permission structure for bigots with violent impulses to act on those impulses. And that would be the case even if the anti-trans moral panic were simply thrown out as red meat for the bigoted and uneducated by cynical elites who just want tax cuts (or, you know, illegal control of the treasury itself), but that’s clearly not what’s going on.

Does that mean there is no degree of instrumentality to the targets of choice for a fascist regime? No. That, too, would be too simple. Fascism thrives when fascists are able to stir up a significant degree of hatred and fear toward one or more othered groups. But as fascism is an ideology driven by majoritarian grievance, the selection of potential groups to scapegoat is not infinite. The scapegoat du jour must fall outside of white Christian patriarchy in order for fascists to be able to argue that the focus of their ire represents a threat. From that perspective, focusing attacks on trans people makes sense (even though our existence harms no one). As an engine of fascism, this scapegoating process may be regarded as instrumental, but the chosen targets are not accidental. Nor is the process itself a “distraction” from the pursuit of other objectives.

That being said, the pace at which Elon Musk—who seems more like our de facto dictator than the nominal president, Donald Trump—and the Trump regime are moving across the entire government, and the resulting chaos (which is causing people to lose jobs and income, among other consequences) are very much meant to disorient and demoralize us. Not so much to distract us, perhaps, as to drive us to seek distractions, to stop paying attention because what’s happening is overwhelming.

That’s why I think it helps to remember the general anatomy of moral panics and fascist movements. They follow patterns, and this is one of them. Perhaps focusing on that may help you not to worry about having to follow in real-time, or constantly remember, every single move the regime makes. Instead, look at the big picture, and beyond that focus on whatever battles you are able to fight in the circumstances that you are in. Local and state battles still matter—when push comes even further to shove, and it will, blue state leadership will need to be pressured to protect the vulnerable and to continue disobeying unconstitutional directives from this lawless federal government or from fascist state governments. Community engagement also matters.

And, I think, phone calls to our federal-level senators and representatives also still matter. The anti-authoritarian organization Indivisible recommends keeping individual calls to one topic. Tt’s clear that behind the scenes there is discontent even among Republicans with Musk’s completely illegal access to highly sensitive government data and his ability to lay off government workers en masse and completely upend federal departments. So I think one topic it’s important to call about is Musk—tell your senators and representative that no one voted for an unelected dictator who doesn’t even have a high-level security clearance to have sweeping power over the federal government, and to do whatever they are able to get this billionaire asshole and walking conflict of interest out of the government. If you are up to another set of calls, I would very much appreciate calls in favor of trans rights. But of course there are many valid issues to call about.

As a final thought, it remains to be seen exactly how far the Trump regime will go to defy the courts, but indications are that they will most likely cease, at some point, to provide even surface-level compliance to rulings that do not go in their favor. A case in point is the court order to restore health-related websites the Trump regime had taken down. The regime ultimately did so, but appended a statement to all pages having to do with gender condemning so-called gender ideology. We’ll see where things go from here, but when, as is likely, the Trump regime begins to simply disregard court orders that don’t go its way, it will become all the more important for state and local governments in Democratic hands to stand firm in defying the federal government when it orders human rights abuses.

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A Bugbear Dispatch Update

As I’ve done before, today I wanted to take the time to let readers know where things stand with this publication. I can still only afford for it to be a one-person effort, but revenue and subscriber growth have moved incrementally in the right direction for me to eventually be able to pay an editor and occasional guest-posters.

Over the last few weeks, The Bugbear Dispatch finally exceeded the 200 paid subscriber threshold and has remained above that level (there’s always a little churn). The current numbers are as follows: 2.54k total subscribers, 206 paid subscribers, and annualized revenue (this is a moving target, of course) of $17.1k. Because I’m currently working on my taxes, I can also tell you that in 2024, The Bugbear Dispatch made exactly $16,046.47.

The last time I published an assessment like this, in August of last year, The Bugbear Dispatch had 1,594 total subscribers, 187 paid subscribers, and was projected to bring in $15.7k in annualized revenue.

I appreciate the vote of confidence in my work apparent in the improved numbers, which I will continue to publish periodically in order to be transparent with my audience. I am certainly satisfied with, and thankful for, slow and steady growth, which is likely to be sustainable. At the same time, I’m still a couple hundred paid subscriptions away from being able to make serious improvements like paying for branded art, hiring an editor, or taking on guest writers. The publication would also benefit from the fact that I would need to direct less time and attention toward freelancing.

If you are a free subscriber who has been reading The Bugbear Dispatch for a while, and you find value in my work, would you please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if that’s feasible to you? And to all subscribers, would you please consider posting my work to your social media or telling your friends about it? Thanks!

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