Somebody Turned Down Our Volume

Twenty thousand new subscribers and almost nobody can see us anymore

Six months ago a typical Wise Wolf article pulled in somewhere around five thousand likes. These days a piece we bled over is lucky to scrape together 100 or 200 of them and that would just be a sad little story about a shrinking audience if our audience were actually shrinking. The truth is we have TWENTY THOUSAND more free subscribers now than we did back then and more people than ever have raised their hands and asked to read us.

So where did all those likes go? I’d love to tell you I know for sure but The Wise Wolf lives on Substack and Substack is a website I don’t own and can’t control. Every word I write sits on somebody else’s servers and runs through somebody else’s algorithm before it ever reaches your inbox or your feed. If a company I’ve never met decides you don’t need to see my work this week then you just don’t see it and I never get a phone call or an email or so much as a sad emoji explaining why.

The drop didn’t come out of nowhere either. It started right around the time I began writing about what I believe is a technocratic plan to overthrow the United States government and install a new aristocracy of kings and engineers and scientists to run whatever’s left. Maybe it’s all one big coincidence and I’m just a paranoid wolf who has read too many leaked documents. Then again I’ve covered enough corruption to know that coincidences love to cluster around people who ask the wrong questions. My math also says twenty thousand new readers should mean MORE likes and not a swan dive off a cliff. If anybody at Substack wants to walk me through the numbers my inbox is open and I promise to be only moderately hostile.

The Newsvan Just Became a Gallbladder

Fewer eyeballs means fewer subscribers and right now we’re losing free AND paid subscribers so fast that it’s kinda terrifying. I had been planning to bring Lily on full time and now I’m scared to death I won’t be able to afford her even part time after the new year.

The newsvan I wanted for on-location reporting is probably dead too because a doctor at a walk-in clinic ran some tests and if those tests are right I need my thyroid AND my gallbladder removed. I asked the universe for a van and the universe countered with two surgeries. I don’t have health insurance because I make too much money to qualify for the welfare kind and nowhere near enough to cover the fifteen hundred bucks a month an independent plan wants. That gap is where a giant chunk of this country lives (hi friend, i see ya) and nobody in Washington seems to remember we exist until they need our votes.

Meanwhile the richest men in America have managed to double and triple their wealth since COVID while the middle class and the poor struggle to afford food and fuel. The people in office and the talking heads on TV keep telling us how GREAT everything is. They did that in Soviet Russia under Stalin too and the famine never once stopped to check what propaganda was printing. So to the guy on cable news telling me this economy has never been stronger, I’d really love the name of your grocery store.

I could live with being broke if being broke were the scariest thing on my desk right now.

Our Own Constitution Turned Against Us

You should see the black circles under my eyes right now after a two-day research binge into something I really hope isn’t true. The deeper I dig the more it looks like it is. Boiled down to the bones it’s our own Constitution being weaponized against us to make sure the rich stay in power PERMANENTLY.

Our two-party system is flawed and nobody with a pulse would argue otherwise. There’s a reason we’ve put up with that constant tug of war for so long though. The rope keeps either side from grabbing so much power that it never has to let go. History is real clear about where that road ends because one side winning for good is how you get a dictatorship and it doesn’t matter one bit whether it shows up as fascism on the right or communism on the left. Both are bad news for you and your family.

Bad things are happening right now and there’s going to come a time when people like us get marched into work camps for speaking up against the government. Work camps is the polite term (the honest one is DEATH CAMPS) and the only people who dodge that fate are the ones with enough money to book a private plane out of here when the shit hits the fan.

I can’t even scrape together enough to get into an apartment so the twenty-five grand it would cost to charter a small plane out of the country when they come for me might as well be twenty-five million. God forbid poor Lily ever has to deal with what I’m afraid is coming. She’s young enough that the scariest thing in her life should still be my first drafts.

Lily Is Still Waiting on Her Raise

Independent journalists like The Wise Wolf are the only people in the world still giving you the truth and we can’t keep doing it if nobody keeps the lights on. That goes for me and Lily and it goes for my friends doing the same thankless work, like Maddie over at Books Behind Borders and Is It Propaganda from Wise Wolf friend Jerry B. Marchant or Ethan Faulkner over at Explorer.

Without you none of us can afford to spend 80 hours a week with our noses buried in stacks of printed documents and fifty open Chrome tabs. We can’t keep paying anonymous sources for tips either and some of those tips are so explosive that even after I fact check them I’m afraid to publish them at all.

Those end up in my dead man switch instead and it’s the only insurance policy I can actually afford. About a decade of dark web research and leaks that whitehat hackers sent me sits inside that switch. Some of it scares the right people badly enough that I’m fairly certain it’s the only reason I’m not dead right now. If I vanish for too long an automated system kicks in and ships links to roughly 12 gigabytes of stuff I wish I’d never seen to seven thousand journalists, whistleblowers, human rights organizations and social media influencers.

If you can help keep The Wise Wolf going please do. Just restacking our articles and sharing them on social media is a HUGE help and every share is one more crack in whatever wall somebody built around us. We’re also running 80 percent off a full year of The Wise Wolf from now until the new year and every penny of it goes straight into Lily’s pocket. I promised that girl a raise three months ago and so far I haven’t been able to deliver. She works so freaking hard for so little and paying her what she’s earned is the least I can do.

So what’s the least you can do?

I don’t want this Substack roller-coaster ride to end with a homeless shelter as the final destination. Please like,share, and restack our articles whenever you can. Lily will thank you personally with some of her grama’s famous chocolate chip cookies.

Dolls That Stare Back

Tomorrow I’m taking a break from the REAL scary stuff (our nation coming apart at the seams from division and foreign influence) to focus on the fun scary stuff for a while. The next installment of our Wise Wolf Weird History series takes a tour of haunted dolls around the world and I hope you enjoy reading it half as much as I needed to write it.

Our new YouTube actress ‘Kitty Wolf’ helped me dig through the research and she and her boyfriend went all out shooting a brand new YouTube Short to go with it that I think you’re all going to love. Thanks for reading all the way through the real nightmare and I’ll see you tomorrow for the fun kind.

Help keep The Wise Wolf howling.

END OF YEAR SPECIAL: 80% OFF THE WISE WOLF -

(If you can afford the regular 4 dollar a month rate, please consider using the button below.)