What Is the Difference Between an Intelligence Asset and an Investigative Journalist?

About $45 a night and a water stain shaped like Jesus.

I want to talk to you about why Hollywood movies have been terrible for the last ten years, but before I can do that I need to explain why I’m writing this from a motel room where the ceiling has a water stain that looks like the face of Jesus. Those two things are connected. Bear with me.

My sister is a doctor. She lives in a house on a hill with land in every direction, which she earned, and I am proud of her. I live in a room that costs $45 a night off a highway where the vending machine has been sold out of everything except some generic Latin American soda called “Tropical Fantasia” since what I’m guessing was the Obama administration. The remote control is chained to the nightstand (I have questions about this that I do not want answered). The shower has one temperature setting and that setting is “third degree burns.” And there is a water stain on the ceiling that looks so much like the face of Jesus I have been lying here for forty-five minutes wondering if God is watching over me, because this thing literally looks like the Lord decided to incarnate as water damage above a smelly mattress in a cheap motel in some no-name town off the highway that I chose over the KOA campground up the road for the same price.

When people hear that a grown man lives in a motel off a highway, they assume something went wrong with him. Bad investments. Gambling. Drugs. Some spectacular failure of ambition that ended with a suitcase and a long drive to nowhere.

In my case the truth is almost exactly the opposite. I work constantly. Lily, my co-writer (less than a year from finishing her journalism degree), works constantly. We earn a ‘living’.

It is not what it should be for the hours and the risk.

Lily rides the bus because she can’t afford a car. My wisdom teeth need about $10,000 worth of surgery I can’t afford. And I am in this motel because my credit was obliterated by a series of lawsuits filed against me for publishing true things about powerful people.

I have recently tried to rent several apartments.

It goes the way you’d expect it to go when the credit check comes back looking like a federal indictment and the prospective tenant has to answer the question “So what do you do for a living?” with something that sounds like he made it up in a psych ward.

Nobody wants to be the guy who rented a unit to the person who brought a Fortune 500 company’s legal team to the building. That conversation does not end with you getting the apartment.

But how did I get here?

I used to be a tech stock analyst. I managed investments for people who had so much money they needed a guy like me to help them hide it in places with names like “Cayman Islands Holding Trust IV” (not the real name, but honestly not far off). I even went to a few of the ‘fancy’ rich people dinners. Four forks per setting. Wine that cost more per bottle than this motel room costs per week. I sat across from people who owned things you didn’t know could be privately owned, including, (in one case I am not going to elaborate on), several local Judges and half the detectives on the vice squad. I had a six-figure salary and a bikini model girlfriend and a very clear path to the house on the hill.

Then I saw some things I was not supposed to see, and instead of keeping my mouth shut, which is what everyone does, which is the entire basis of the system, I wrote it all down and published it on the internet and ruined my life.

That was about fifteen yers ago. Let me tell you what that decision costs.

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Freelance investigative journalism is one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet. More journalists were killed last year than in any year the Committee to Protect Journalists has ever tracked.

Freelancers especially, because we do not have a network or a corporation or a legal department behind us. We have a laptop and a source and whatever survival instincts the Lord saw fit to provide. We disappear and nobody notices because we didn’t have 2 million subscribers and a government amplification machine making sure anyone cared.

Remember that number. Two million subscribers…

Big Money Does Not Send a Search Party for Freelance Journalists

Shelly Kittleson is a freelance investigative journalist who spent over a decade reporting from the Middle East. She was just on the news. Grabbed off a sidewalk in Baghdad. Broad daylight. Shoved into a car.

That was not a movie. That was her life.

I have been praying for her since I saw the headline because I know how this works. She did not have a security detail. She had a byline. Now she’s gone, and most of you had never heard her name until I wrote it just now.

Shelly and I do a similar job. That is her story. Here is mine.

A lot of you go to work every day. You clock in. You clock out. You have a weekly paycheck and health insurance and a 401(k). If something goes wrong there is a number you can call.

I do not have ANY of those things.

When someone puts a brick through your window at four in the morning with a note that just says ‘DIE!’ on it, which has happened, you can call the cops…

BUT they don’t lift a finger because they’re on the same payroll as the guy who sent the brick.

There is nothing you can do when strangers walk up to you on the street and tell you that you have a big mouth and somebody ought to shut it. I have been beaten. My home has been broken into three separate times. They stole my work. They stole photos.

They left subtle ‘calling cards’ just to make sure I knew they could walk in anytime they wanted and end my life.

I have been jailed on charges I maintain were fabricated. I have been shot at twice. I have been stabbed multiple times.

I have had women who were far too attractive to be randomly interested in a guy living the way I live show up out of nowhere, charm their way into my life, drain my crypto accounts, install backdoors on my laptops, and then disappear.

That happened more than once before I figured out the pattern, which I recognize does not speak well of me, but in my defense they were very attractive and I was very lonely.

And then there was the hostel…

I was in San Francisco, staying at a place I am certain was operated by the Russian mob or Putin’s intelligence apparatus (Is there even a difference?), a detail they do not include in the listing. At a certain point during the night I became aware that the people in that building had no intention of letting me check out in the morning.

I jumped out of a second-story window. I almost broke my arm on the way down. I didn’t, (which I consider a top five lifetime accomplishment), and if that tells you something about how the last fifteen years have gone - GREAT, because it should!

I landed, and I ran, and I found a patch of overgrown bushes, and I lay in those bushes all night in the dark without moving or sleeping, waiting for the sun to come up and fearing for my life the entire time. When morning finally hit I ran for the Amtrak station. I sat on a bench waiting for my train the hell out of that nightmare city, and a man with a thick Russian accent sat down next to me and asked me how I slept the night before.

I did not sleep the night before. I was in a bush.

I’m sure he knew that already. He was sent there to make sure I understood they could end my life anytime they wanted. The only reason I am still here is either dumb luck or direct intervention from God, and given some of the things that have happened to me over the last six years (things I am not comfortable writing about on this newsletter just yet), I am leaning heavily toward the second option.

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I will probably die doing this sort of work.

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That is not dramatic. That is what the numbers say about people in my position. Freelance investigative journalists get murdered by the mob. We get disappeared by governments. We get thrown in jail by crooked cops and charged with crimes we didn’t commit. We get shot in parking lots and nobody solves it.

Sometimes I lie in bed at night and think my life sounds like a bad movie. Which is funny, because I have a theory about that.

Why the Movies Are Bad and What That Has to Do With Professor Jiang

Have you noticed that movies have been unwatchable for about ten years? Sequel after sequel. Reboot after reboot. Franchises that feel like they were assembled in a spreadsheet and accidentally released to theaters.

The writers who used to make you feel something seem to have vanished.

My theory is: they didn’t vanish. They got bigger clients.

The craft of narrative storytelling did not disappear from American life. Building tension. Controlling what the audience knows and when they know it.

Making millions of people believe something that isn’t true…

That skill set used to produce films. Now it produces geopolitical events. That skill set migrated from studios to intelligence agencies and the billionaires who fund them, because those clients pay better and their productions don’t need to worry about opening weekend. They air on CNN and Fox News and the audience doesn’t buy tickets. The audience just shows up. They call it “the news.” They sit there convinced they’re watching reality.

Speaking of performances. Professor Jiang.

Professor Jiang is a Chinese academic who appeared on YouTube less than a year ago. He now has over 2 million subscribers. He predicted Trump would win the election. He predicted the escalation with Iran. He predicted specific geopolitical outcomes before they happened, with the kind of accuracy that would get you burned as a witch in an earlier century and gets you called China’s Nostradamus in this one.

He is not a prophet. He has read the script.

He knows what happens next because the people who wrote it told him. He sits in front of a camera and performs astonishment for 2 million people who think they’re watching a genius when they’re watching a man with a cheat sheet.

Professor Jiang works for the Chinese government. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is his JOB.

Professor Jiang is an INTELLIGENCE ASSET. That is why he has 2 million subscribers in less than a year. Intelligence agencies do not grow audiences. They MANUFACTURE them. They can put 2 million subscribers on a channel the way a studio can buy a billboard in Times Square. It is a production. He is the lead actor. And the point of the production is not to inform you. It is to manage you. To let you believe you are smart for watching, so you keep watching, so that when the next scene starts you are already seated.

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I am NOT an intelligence asset. I am a guy who walked away from a mountain of corporate money to tell the truth from a motel room with a water stain shaped like Jesus and a vending machine full of whatever the heck ‘Tropical Fantasia’ is.

That is the difference.

Between me and Professor Jiang. Between me and every CNN host and Fox News anchor and podcaster and YouTuber you’ve ever watched who always seems to know what’s going to happen next. They are paid assets reading from scripts, and they are rewarded for it, and they go home to comfortable lives in comfortable homes. I have been howling for over a decade and all it got me was PTSD, a few stab wounds, and a Substack of moderate success.

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The Part Where I Ask You for Money (But At Least I’m Honest About It)

Lily and I are Christian journalists. Not Republican. Not Democrat. Satan is in both party headquarters and if you think the devil only works one side of the aisle you are out of your mind.

You don’t have to be a Christian to read or support our work.

We’ve been documenting the technocratic AI-powered takeover of human freedom longer and more accurately than almost anyone. Check our work.

There is a special Hell for TV evangelists.

Lily graduates next year. She wants to stay on full time and I am terrified for her, because the work is dangerous and I will not let what happened to me happen to her. I want to expand. Hire new writers. Get an office. Buy a newsvan for on-location reporting. Hire a bodyguard, because if I am going back into the field: I am NOT getting stabbed again.

The truth deserves better than a $45 motel and a bus pass.

A lot of you have been messaging asking for a way to support us outside the Substack ecosystem. You don’t trust the platform. We heard you.

SubscribeStar: https://www.subscribestar.com/the-wise-wolf

If Substack works for you, we’re running 50% off a full year.

You are the only people willing to help. No government. No billionaire. No intelligence agency handing us scripts and subscribers. Just you.

That water stain is still up there on the ceiling looking down at me. I’m taking that as a sign. When the Lord shows up as water damage above a guy who gave up everything to tell the truth, you either laugh or you pray. I did both. Then I drank a Tropical Fantasia (it was the only option) and got back to work.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

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Note from Lily the Editor: Please share this article. (That’s all I had to say. Sorry, I have a really bad migraine right now.)