Welcome Stranger:
Wise Wolf Media is what happens when a former tech guy realizes the game is rigged, says so out loud, and discovers that the reward for honesty in America is a stabbing and an insurance claim you canât afford to file.
I spent a decade in technology and finance. I was good at it. I could read a balance sheet the way normal people read a menu. I spotted trends before they were trends. I thought this meant I was somebody. It did not. What it meant was I had a front-row seat to watch billionaires print money while I sat in the upper-middle-class penalty box, which, for those unfamiliar, is the income bracket where you earn enough to get taxed like you own a yacht but not enough to actually own the yacht. You can see the club from the parking lot. You can smell the steak. You will never be seated.
Ten years I did this. Ten years of being the smartest guy in the room who still couldnât afford the room. Then I did what any rational person would do after a decade of watching rich people get richer while your 401k does whatever 401ks do (which is mostly disappoint you). I got into journalism. Independent journalism. The kind that pays slightly less than a lemonade stand and generates approximately 4,000% more death threats.
I started writing about power, corruption, money, and what happens when you follow the trails past the point where polite people stop looking. I wrote about the things the billionaires I used to work for didnât want anyone connecting. I named names. I showed receipts. I connected dots between boardrooms and intelligence agencies and nonprofit foundations that exist primarily to launder reputations.
Then somebody stabbed me and left me for dead.
Not metaphorically. The kind of stabbed that involves a hospital and the sudden clarity that comes from watching your own blood leave your body in quantities it was not designed to leave. I did not die. This was apparently a surprise to the people who stabbed me and a minor inconvenience to the people who sent them.
I kept writing. Partly out of principle. Mostly because once someone literally tries to kill you over your Substack articles, quitting feels like letting them win, and I am petty enough to find that unacceptable.
Hereâs what I know after all of it. After the money, after the stabbing, after watching every system I was taught to trust reveal itself as a costume worn by something much older and much darker.
God is real.
I donât say that because itâs comforting. I say it because Iâve seen enough of the other side to know the war is real. The enemy is real. Satan is not a metaphor. Heâs a business plan. And the people running the systems you trust (your money, your health, your childrenâs education, your information) are executing that plan with quarterly earnings reports and 501(c)(3) status. Heâs having a banner century and most churches wonât even say his name because it makes the congregation uncomfortable and uncomfortable congregations donât tithe.
Wise Wolf Media exists because somebody has to write this down while itâs happening. Not the sanitized version. Not the version that gets you invited to conferences. The version that gets your content throttled to nine of your sixty thousand subscribers because the algorithm decided âuncomfortable truthâ is a content category somewhere between spam and malware.
Iâm doing this from Florida, trying to make rent and afford medical care, which in America is a sentence that describes 180 million people so at least I have company. Every dollar goes toward keeping the lights on and paying my editor Lily, who is 22 and somehow has more journalistic integrity than most newsrooms combined. She is statistically improbable and I am grateful she exists.
The important stuff is always free. Paid subscriptions exist so this doesnât quietly vanish, which is what inconvenient things tend to do in this country.
If this resonates, share it. Thatâs how independent media survives. Not through algorithms. Through people who still give a damn handing it to other people who still give a damn.
Wise Wolf Media isnât a brand. Itâs a warning shot from a guy the algorithm doesnât want you reading, the billionaires wish would shut up, and somebody once tried to kill over a blog post.
Theyâre going to have to try harder.
