Notes from 2023, my “Substack” from the Worsening Biden Years

 


I’m not writing about the Inauguration until it’s safely accomplished. Trying to look everywhere else today. So I dug up the remains of a brief dalliance I had with a medium called Substack. It’s a subscription service, a thing I’ve been long leery of; you have write regularly whether you feel like it or not. What you owe to your readers. But I also think you owe your readers content you care about, not hasty products drenched in flop sweat catalyzed by a ticking clock.

Gave it a try though. The way to start was with free stuff, which would lead to part-free as a teaser followed by the good stuff below the fold where only subscribers could go. I wrote entries when I felt the presence of a topic at the back of my mind. For me, writing is synonymous with thinking. Can’t claim to have thought about it if I haven’t worked the thoughts into coherent sentences, paragraphs, and other media designed to share my perspective and understanding to others.

I lasted for about eight months doing the free stuff. By then, I was spending more time on Facebook as the lawfare and the presidential campaign got nastier and uglier. The Substack stuff seemed to need a calmer voice than I could manage at the time. 

So I withdrew. The stuff I wrote is still there. Multiple topics cover people and issues still in the news, just less stressfully readable now than then.

If you’re hiding from the news today, or any day ahead in what Breitbart was hopefully calling “The Golden Age” this morning, here’s a spot where the familiar is perhaps comfortingly yellowed but not hopelessly obsolete. You may even be the first to read some of these posts.

My favorite graphic from the Substack experiment…

It’s from a post called “The Main Event.”

The Robert Laird Substack (Sept 2023 to April 2024)

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