Our business is truth
Friends,
It’s Sarah from The Bulwark. We started this thing of ours during the first Trump term. Remember those days? You’d wake up every morning to see what insane or racist thing the American president had tweeted while you were sleeping. Every day it was something. Little rocket man; kids in cages; senior staff getting fired by tweet and left on the tarmac; very fine people on both sides. Good times, amirite?
Except that this run is probably going to be worse. I can’t predict the future, but Trump is an angry old man who has spent four years talking about getting vengeance and retribution on his political enemies. Maybe you think we don’t need to take him seriously. But I do. And so do a lot of people in tech and media—which is why so many of those who tried to resist Trump last time are pre-surrendering and promising to do whatever Trump wants.
Just look at Jeff Bezos, who refused to allow The Washington Post to make an endorsement in the race. Or Mark Zuckerberg, who just killed Facebook’s fact-checking regime and had his henchman call Trump’s people “big defenders of free expression.” This while Trump is running around filing defamation suits against pollsters and TV shows he doesn’t like!
It’s ridiculous. These people are giving in because they’re scared of Trump, and they’re scared he’ll hurt their businesses if they speak the truth.
What I want to know is: What’s the point of being a billionaire if all that money doesn’t give you the freedom to simply say the things that are true?
This is where we’ve been a little lucky at The Bulwark. We’re not beholden. Maybe The Washington Post has to worry about Trump going after Amazon. Or CNN has to worry about getting access to Trump officials. Well we don’t have a side hustle; we don’t do access journalism; and we don’t have a $100 billion to protect.
More to the point: Our business is truth. It’s why The Bulwark community came together. Not to pre-surrender and not to flatter our tribal sympathies, either. We’re not members of a party, we’re part of a team: Team Democracy.
That’s actually our superpower. We’re politically homeless, which means we’re not beholden to any cliques. We just say what we think is true and if people get mad at us, so be it. And because we’re an independent media company we don’t have corporate owners telling us what we’re allowed to say.
Right now The Bulwark has a website, six newsletters, 12 podcasts, loads of daily YouTube content. We’re growing, right now, adding new reporters to cover Trump’s Washington and expert voices to help guide us through it all. And here’s the kicker: We give almost all of this away totally free.
The Bulwark isn’t a business so much as it’s a mission. We believe that you can’t save democracy from behind a paywall and that you have to reach as many people as possible with the truth. By signing up, you aren’t just helping make our journalism possible. You’re also joining a community of people who really care about this stuff.
And ours is a community like no other. Bulwark members are kind, smart people who care enough about America’s future to take an active role in shaping it for the better. They aren’t stuck in tribes—they’re anti-tribal. If that sounds like you, we’d love to have you riding with us.
We hope you’ll consider joining us, because we’ve got a country to save.
Sarah Longwell
Publisher, The Bulwark