The Wilds Are Calling

The State of American Media and a Major Announcement

Donald Trump is slowly but visibly losing his grip on the Republican party. Marjorie Taylor Greene is making power moves, Mike Johnson is in trouble. Republicans are backing themselves into a rhetorical corner with Obamacare that will double healthcare premiums for millions of people and probably nail their midterm coffin shut if the elections are free and fair. The Epstein saga continues to unfold, and Trump continues to throw weird little tantrums when people ask about his pedophile sex trafficker former bestie. And, after months of war crimes against Venezuelan fishing boats, Pete Hegseth’s alleged order to “kill everybody” appears to be a bridge too far even for some Republicans—he probably won’t go down for it, but the fool who followed illegal orders to murder two survivors of an illegal bomb attack just might. Or, nothing at all will come of it and we’ll all just accept that America now openly and unambiguously commits war crimes on the high seas. 2025 has been The Year That Things Happen, and the happenings show no sign of slowing down as we enter the final stretch.

This article is about none of these things.

You may have noticed that my output has plummeted over the past several months, here and elsewhere. I’m about to write about why that is, talk about the state of media generally, and then announce a major change for this newsletter. If you’d rather skip all that and read something, you know, topical, here’s the part you, as a reader, should know:

• I am making my de facto hiatus official and comping paid subscribers for the month of December (you should have received an email about this—if not, please let me know). I’ll be back at the end of the month with coverage of TPUSA’s AmFest, which I’m sure will be very normal and not at all dystopian fascism nightmare fuel.

• I am quitting legacy media at the end of this year, getting one of those “real jobs” I keep hearing so much about, and doing a complete rebrand of the Substack. All of my creative energy will be focused here from now on. Expect a LOT more content going forward. Too much, possibly.

For the last year and a half, I’ve known that I need to choose between this newsletter and freelancing. Rather than actually making that choice, I’ve spent most of that time convincing myself that I could do both things. I could definitely make this work financially if I just worked a little. bit. harder.

And that’s absolutely true. If I’d worked harder, put out more articles, finished things on time instead of lighting every single deadline on fire, I could have made enough money to at least tread water and done enough work to feel good about my life. If I were a different kind of person, things might have worked out. I’m not that kind of person, am unlikely to become that kind of person, and quite frankly have run out of time to become that kind of person. Something has to give.

The trouble started with Project Veritas, as trouble tends to do—not in the course of research for my 2024 Rolling Stone feature about them, but in the writing process itself. I could not be more pleased with how the article turned out, but the work it took to get there took a toll I never fully recovered from. The article went through three full rewrites. I missed deadline after deadline. More text got left on the cutting-room floor than made it into the article. I don’t remember much of the two months that led up to its publication. I barely slept. Spoke to almost no one. I’d finish a draft and sleep like the dead until the revisions came in and then it was back to all-nighters and wall-to-wall stimulants. Just me and the computer, forever.

Or maybe it started earlier than that. Maybe it was the summer of 2023, when I flubbed one of the biggest breaks a journalist could possibly dream of on the article that means the most to me: the eternally-under-construction Kyle Rittenhouse project. Sometimes doors slam shut, never to open again. Makes me sick to think about, still.

Probably it was a combination of these two things. All I know is that I emerged from the Project Veritas article tired in ways I have never been tired, burnt to a crisp and smouldering. I went on to write three more great features that year, but the exhaustion never went away. Everything took longer than it used to. I never felt fully rested.

It was in the middle of writing that third feature—back in November as the election bore down upon us—that I received horrible news: the terminal cancer diagnosis of a close family member. For weeks, I worked all night to finish the San Francisco article, then spent all day doing what I could to help with arranging medical treatment, providing transport, and generally being there in whatever ways I could. Another period of no sleep, too soon after the Project Veritas sprint. It was the last big feature I would ever do.

For the final months of 2024 and much of 2025 I was back and forth between New York City and Portland, Oregon to help with caretaking. Tired beyond belief, unable to ever really get into any kind of rhythm. I had opportunities to do big things this year, and I took advantage of almost none of them. I had time to work, stretches in NYC when I could have done a hell of a lot more than I did. Portland too—cancer patients sleep a lot, it turns out. But I didn’t.

One opportunity that did not fall on the floor was the Oman space program article; one of the weirdest assignments I’ve ever taken on and, in retrospect, a huge mistake. I knew nothing about Oman, nothing about space, and vastly underestimated how much I rely on background knowlege to write the things I do. My trip to Oman in April involved negotiating a culture I was not familiar with to score interviews with people who did not want to talk to me about subject matter I did not understand. During the day, I worked to get up to speed and lock down interviews. When evening rolled around, America’s morning news started rolling in. I wrote about the experience of watching the death of the country I love so much from a distance. I didn’t mention how little sleep I was getting.

I flew back to the States. I wiped my phone to go through customs, just in case, then restored my backup…and found that my final phone backup had failed. I didn’t double-check or back up the important files separately just to be sure: I was so tired and so stressed about customs, I wasn’t thinking straight. Those interviews I worked so hard to get? The ones that took so much negotiation, so much prep work, so much study? Gone. Lost forever.

When I tell you I spiraled, know that it is the understatement of the century. It broke me. I lost my fucking mind.

The article was late. Of course the article was late. It took weeks of careful, patient effort shot through with sheer panic to beg, wheedle, and cajole my subjects into speaking me again. I did eventually manage to redo the interviews I lost, though none of them were as good as the originals. Travelling back and forth to Portland this entire time: the body horror of chemotherapy witnessed from a helpless distance. Other family obligations that summer: weddings, a family vacation. Holding it together during the day, writing most of the night, crying myself to sleep more than I care to admit. Deadline after deadline blown, imposed by both editors and reality. There’s a multi-part Epstein explainer sitting in my Substack drafts folder. It took weeks of effort, of working when I should have been sleeping. Never saw the light of day. Enough other people got there first that I binned it.

Here’s the thing about freelancing: if you don’t work, you don’t eat. There is no paid time off. The credit cards maxed in September.

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Jack London’s Call of the Wild tells the tale of Buck, a sled dog during the Alaskan gold rush. Spoilers for a 122-year-old book: there is a horrible moment about three-quarters through when Buck, exhausted and at the brink of starvation, lies down in his traces and refuses to get up or pull. The inexperienced, worthless goldseekers whose negligence led him to this sorry state beat him bloody, but they’ve been doing that for days and he simply does not care anymore.

The scene has always made me cry, every time I read it, ever since I was a kid. These last few months, though, I’ve truly understood. Pride, passion, love of the game, fear of failure, even the looming specter of total financial ruin: nothing moves me anymore. I can’t get up. I can’t find the strength to do anything.

None of the personal events I’ve described above are unusual. These things happen to everyone on a long enough timeframe: burnout and illness and small mistakes with large consequences. They make for a bad year. They should not make for the destruction of a career. In a lot of fields, including this one, they can and do.

Have you ever wondered why so many journalists seem so out of touch most of the time? Why they come off as elitist pricks, why they side with capital at every turn? We blame it on the billionaires who own the outlets they write for, but that’s only half the story. Freelance rates today are lower than they were 20 years ago—I don’t mean adjusted for inflation, I mean the actual numbers you see on a paycheck. Staff jobs are increasingly impossible to come by, and mass layoffs mean that the few remaining positions get flooded with applications from industry veterans with decades of experience and robust industry connections. Reporters used to climb the ladder by working for local publications, but local publications are dying. It is very hard to get a job working in a newsroom if you haven’t worked in a newsroom, no matter how many features you write. Go ahead. Ask me how I know.

In 2025, the only people not already established who survive this industry are born rich, marry rich, or scrape by on nothing. That third way is unsustainable long-term. Life happens. Things happen. And when they do, you’re fucked.

I don’t begrudge the journalists who fall into those first two categories. I’m glad they’re making it work, I’m glad they’re keeping journalism more or less alive. But it is very bad for society when the fourth estate consists largely of the wealthy. You don’t want all your economic news coming from people who grew up with the hedge fund owners they’re reporting on, or all your educational news coming from people who’ve never set foot in a public school. You don’t want your political news to come exclusively from coastal elites who regularly confuse Idaho for Iowa. Race and class are inextricably intertwined in America, and you don’t want your news about issues that affect Black or Latino or Asian communities coming exclusively from white people either.

If you would like a visceral picture the state of modern journalism, look no further than the media scandal du jour us Very Online news junkies are suffering through right now: Ryan Lizza, an extremely successful 51-year-old journalist who attended an elite private school and is somehow a multimillionaire, is mounting a campaign of furious vengeance against Olivia Nuzzi, his extremely successful 32-year-old journalist ex-fiance who got through college by being a sugar baby to 66-year-old sports journalist Keith Olbermann (which is real work, to her credit), because Nuzzi just dropped a book about cheating on Lizza with 71-year-old Robert F Kennedy Jr. Doesn’t that make you want to kill yourself just a little bit? Just me? Cool.

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Buck doesn’t just goes limp in the Alaskan wilderness because he’s tired. The trail they are traversing crosses the Yukon river, which in the winter is frozen solid and traversable. But the fools driving and starving these dogs have dawdled and blundered for weeks, and winter is turning into spring. Buck can feel how rotten the ice is beneath his paws. He can sense that something is wrong—that the trail is wrong. That continuing might be more dangerous than the lash.

Legacy media is dying. Everyone in the industry knows it. The only revenue models for news organizations that dependably work are nonprofits championed by wealthy benefactors, for-profits owned by wealthy conglomerates, and sensational clickbait garbage. As journalism gets worse, people are less willing to pay for it; as fewer people pay for it, journalism gets worse. This cycle is not going to get better. If anything, it’s speeding up.

There are great people who work in journalism still. Articles that make your heart sing, scoops that change the world. It’s a noble profession full of people who truly believe in the craft, and I’ve been privileged enough to work with a lot of them. I’ve had incredible editors who have taught me so much about how to write, how to structure ideas and kill your darlings and turn meandering concepts into knife-sharp works of art. I read great articles every day by talented writers able to get at the heart of things rather than skimming the surface in service of some oligarch or almighty algorithm. And we are still blessed with a cadre of investigative journalists who shine a bright light on reality in defiance of our current administration’s efforts to plunge us into post-truth, fascist darkness.

But the ice is rotten, and no one can stop this spring from coming. There’s an alternate universe in which I am announcing the end of this Substack so I can focus exclusively on features journalism—a final, terrible mistake to round out a year chock full of them. The old ways, which barely sufficed during the twilight years of liberal democracy, are catastrophically unsuited for our current moment. The myth of objective journalism has never been more hazardous; structural conventions that protect the elites never more destructive. There has got to be a better way. I want the freedom to find it.

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As Buck begins to slip into unconsciousness, a bystander named John Thornton attacks the worthless goldseekers beating the dog to death. Thornton cuts Buck from the traces and threatens to kill the bastards if they try to do anything about it. Those bastards, as cowardly as they are cruel, flog their four remaining dogs into motion. Buck and Thornton watch as the overburdened sled sets off down the trail…and as the ice gives way beneath them. The Yukon devours the entire outfit. Only Buck remains.

I’m cutting myself from the traces. If all goes according to plan, I’ll soon acquire a job that requires minimal brainpower and allows me to read on the clock (security work and hotel night shift are currently in the lead; if anyone has other suggestions please drop them in the comments). I’ll read during my downtime, then write when I come home. Ideally, this job will be temporary—a year or two at most—but if things don’t shake out that way, that’s fine too. I’m OK with working a dead-end job for the rest of my life if it means I get to enjoy writing again.

Maybe it sounds like I’m giving up. I’ve put off this decision for so long because it feels like I’m giving up, and I’d like to thank both LSD and Township Rebellion for helping me understand that this is an exciting moment and not a sad one. I’ve done journalism for the last five years but am, at heart, an artist. I don’t want to report breaking news, or provide horse-race commentary, or fit my work into an iso-standard journalistic template with its rules of form and function. I want to push the boundaries of prose and find new ways to convey the truth of the world we live in. New Journalism tried to do this in the 60s and 70s and then we stopped and I would like to try again. I want to make beautiful, traumatizing, thought-provoking things—I am hearing the call of the wild—and I would rather make my art my way than be famous or admired or even recognized for the work that I do.

So I’m taking a December hiatus. I have two, possibly three legacy media assignments I need to finish, and I’m going to work as hard as I can on finishing them, galvanized I hope by the knowledge that this will be the last time, the final stretch, the end of it all. If I have to extend the hiatus into January, I’ll extend it into January and comp paid subscribers for that month as well. Either way, I’ll come back to the Substack with AmFest in late December. When I do, this newsletter will no longer be called Banned In Your State. It will emerge from the ashes as Firewalled Media: All The News Unfit To Print. I’ve locked down the domain. I’m plotting the aesthetics. It’s going to kick ass.

And 2026 is going to be better. I’ll beat this next year bloody if I have to, I’ll kick it while it’s down, I’ll strangle it to death with my bare hands before I let it look like 2025. Fuck it. We ball.

Thanks for listening.