Substack's Collegiality Is Creating the New Journalism

The people I've met!

On Tuesday I spent two hours on The Delingpod, James Delingpole’s excellent podcast. I first came across James in the Spectator, and the Telegraph, where he cracked me up over and over again. My worst trait as a writer is my inability to read anything pedestrian, unless I am researching. I read for pleasure entirely, for the ideas first but always couched in a way that my mind can soar while reading. James is one of those people. I still remember, 20 years later his phrase, “Bat-chomping bird-slicing eco-crucifixes” littering the English countryside, the last of which, whatever you think of the English, is one of the stunning visual successes of mankind and is now being eaten by “alternative energy”.

As soon as James takes the interview off subscriber-only, I will send it on. It is largely an update on the Sean Combs arrest and ancillary fall-out. Basically any celebrity pushing a) Kamala and b) “global warming”, is subject to P. Diddy’s blackmail bank, which means they participated in his most grisly escapades as either perpetrator or victim or more likely, both. It seems that blackmail banks, also Jeffrey Epstein’s job, are the way the Globalist junta controls the culture.

The problem they are having with shutting down the Diddy case is that Hollywood is filled with people who were service people, who did the scut jobs for celebrities and they are talking in a loud loud loud chorus of accusation. Last week, one of his former bodyguards reported to the FBI that Diddy was involved in the deaths of Aaliyah, Left Eye, Tupac, Biggie and Michael Jackson. And that theFBI has reopened Michael Jackson’s case.

Who knows what is true and what not at this point? The cabal are keeping the lid on tight, otherwise a whole industry, a profit center would fall. In any case this piece about Diddy had more readers than any other so I assume interest.

When I worked in journalism, weirdly in three countries, England, USA and Canada, it was like being a crab in a bucket, all the other crabs wanted to eat your head and pull off your claws, take your job, your readers, your “clout”. And best of all, leave you humiliated.

Journalists are mean as snakes, they have complex minds and plot their attacks to surprise and hurt the most. 50% of my energy at Time Inc. was spent defending myself. Newspaper newsrooms are factories of hate, envy and suspicion, and I gladly took a cut in my income to never work in an office again. I was offered starry editorships of a big city newspaper, then a major monthly, turned them down without a moment’s thought. Be in charge of a nest of snakes? I’d rather bag groceries.

Substack is different. It is collegial. Why? I don’t know. Maybe the money is no longer going to the cabal, the unions, the printers, the distributors and it’s enough, the growth potential staggering. But there’s more, it’s a bit like the Communion of Saints. Everyone wants the best for humanity and is working towards it. The people I’ve met so far, whether in person, hello Pitchfork Papers, or on line, the Breggins for instance, damn, they are fantastic people. I wish I lived down the road from the Breggins and I’d buy a cottage near Pitchfork Papers, I love them that much. Everyone is the exact opposite of the newsroom furies, I used to dwell among.

And then there is James Howard Kunstler. The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere are among the most important books I’ve read, a thousand times more convincing and meaningful that that creaky old Ivy League hard left ignorant bubble-dweller, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone.

And man, can Kuntsler write. So l was thrilled last week when he used a quote of mine as a subtitle. When writers can think like this, write like this, all of heaven is on our side.

Here is the piece:

Surprise, Surprise

"The left’s ideas have failed and failed spectacularly, and all they have left is cheating.” Elizabeth Nickson

James Howard Kunstler

Oct 21, 2024

     Of course, there’s no “pandemic” this time to cover for the trip that the Party of Chaos wants to lay on the country, no excuse for gross and glaring ballot fuckery, for the days of anxious uncertainty following an election. Everybody and his uncle expect a gigantic tantrum to follow November 6 if Mr. Trump somehow overcomes the tide of bogus harvested votes, illegal alien votes, phantom overseas votes, voting machine swapped votes, lost-and-found votes, last-minute rafts of votes, and other products of the Marc Elias election sabotage machine.

     I am not so sure that the tantrum will materialize. Despite the orgy of Orwellian language inversions you have been subjected to in recent years, and the bending of reality it induced, you will know a real insurrection if you see it. You already know the real reason the Democratic Party went insane: its crime spree against the citizens of this land was so obvious and outrageous that a thousand Beltway bureaucrats are now going crazy in fear of prosecution. The tantrum everyone expects them to provoke would be a real insurrection and they are liable to find themselves in even deeper trouble for resorting to it.

      Crime is the whole reason for the Democrats’ desperation. There was no “policy” the past four years, only crime. The Covid operation was a mass murder. The open border was not something that just happened, like a spell of bad weather. It was a colossal racketeering operation. They worked it hard. “Joe Biden” paid dozens of NGO cut-outs to systematically jam more than ten million sketchy interlopers into the country, and then support them lavishly with cash payments when they got here.

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      The political prosecutions of AG Merrick Garland are gauche and lawless. The pervasive censorship by DHS and other agencies is an affront to our constitution. The transgender campaign is a malicious prank against American children (and their parents). Our CIA may be a party to the fentanyl crisis. The war in Ukraine is a failed resource-grab, unbelievably stupid in inception. “Joe Biden’s” empty treasury is writing trillions in IOUs to stealthily bail out the banks and jack-up the stock market. Everything about our government has become criminal and those responsible for it know they are bound for a reckoning now.

     Will the Democrats’ Antifa street-army be allowed to terrorize the cities? I expect the remaining cops not de-funded in DC, New York, Chicago, and LA won’t hold back this time, no matter what mayors Muriel Bowser, Eric Adams, Brandon Johnson, and Karen Bass tell them to do. You will instead see the return of something that has been missing for years: a sense of duty to public safety and the common good. Won’t that be a surprise? And there will be nothing that the FBI can do about. It’s one thing to incite a riot among a mob of ordinary middle-aged folks moiling around the US Capitol. It’s another thing to try to subvert the police in carrying out their duties. New heroes will emerge and there will be no ambiguity about what happens.

      Black Lives Matter had already been outed as a lowlife money-grubbing hustle. But the Democratic Party may no longer depend on its old “plantation” field-hands to stage mostly peaceful anarchy and arson if the election goes the wrong way for the masters. Forty years of pretending to be an oppositional culture hasn’t worked. It was just minstrelsy updated, when all was said and done. Too many black men are rising up to speak out in support of Donald Trump, and of one America, and of acting like men. They appear to be tired of self-stigmatizing as designated victims in the Woke-Jacobin DEI psychodrama. A new generation of black male leaders is emerging to replace embarrassing con artists like Al Sharpton, Michael Eric Dyson, and Ibram X. Kendi. It’s been a long time coming.

      Will we ever know how Kamala Harris was put over on the Democratic Convention like the sale of a used car? How the rank-and-file delegates got swindled into nominating her by acclamation without any debate, without anyone else rising to object, anyone else offering up themselves for a vote? There wasn’t even a smoke-filled room this time where the bosses actually haggled over who would front for them, not a minute of suspense, no process whatsoever. Kamala Harris was just pulled out of a hat, like a rabbit. And everybody involved knew she was a dud, a slow learner, inattentive, not well-educated, lazy, possibly high a lot of the time, self-medicating due to anxiety, insecurity, purposelessness.

     It took four years for slightly more than half of America to see that our country’s fate was in the hands of villains wrecking the joint. It looks like their depredations are nearly over. The USA really does not want to gurgle down the drain of history. We’re not ready to roll over and die. We’re waking up from an induced coma, starting to remember who we are. That has been the weird lesson of 2024. Surprise, surprise!

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Elizabeth Nickson was trained as a reporter at the London bureau of Time Magazine. She became European Bureau Chief of LIFE magazine in its last years of monthly publication, and during that time, acquired the rights to Nelson Mandela’s memoir before he was released from Robben Island. She went on to write for Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times Magazine, the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail and the National Post. Her first book The Monkey Puzzle Tree was an investigation of the CIA MKULTRA mind control program and was published by Bloomsbury and Knopf Canada. Her next book, Eco-Fascists, How Radical Environmentalists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage, was a look at how environmentalism, badly practiced, is destroying the rural economy and rural culture in the U.S. and all over the world. It was published by Adam Bellow at Harper Collins US. She is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Center for Public Policy, fcpp.org. You can read in depth policy papers about various elements of the environmental junta here: https://independent.academia.edu/ElizabethNickson

Her essay on the catastrophic failings of Canada's CBC is included in Michael Walsh’s Against the Corporate Media, 42 Ways the Press Hates You, published in September.