Welcome, Sam Husseini’s Readers
My work is something different and might not be what you were looking for. But maybe it is.
Since Sam Husseini was dragged from the State Department’s press room, my subscribers and followers more than doubled. The image of Sam, as he barked questions at Blinken as he was being carried from the room, will last with me for the rest of my life. Hollywood could not have scripted something like that.
Sam and I met through Ed Herman, and I am doing something that the “left” has never embraced, other than my astronaut colleague Brian O’Leary, who advised several Democratic candidates for president, beginning with George McGovern in 1968. So far, I am Ed’s only biographer, which I hope changes one day. Ed’s life more than deserves a professional biography. I tried to introduce Ed to Brian several times, but Ed was not interested and I never held it against him. Ed had his hands full as arguably the best media analyst on Earth.
Sam kindly put my Substack site on his blog roll (I joined Substack at his recommendation), which I have never seen anybody on the left do before, and is why I have so many new subscribers and followers (a few hundred), but my work is generally regarded as quite fringe and strange by most on the “left.” Sam, however, is far from a typical lefty, which is partly why we get along.
Before spring arrives, I plan to revise my pinned post, to reflect the posts since I first wrote it (150 new ones and counting). But I think that it is still the best summary that I have of my work at Substack, so I suggest that new readers might want to read that first, to know what they are getting into. My work is definitely not for everybody. I challenge all in-group conceits in my work, but especially those that I was raised with, and almost everybody gets one of their oxen gored when reading my work. I seek people who can rise above all in-group ideologies and conceits and help manifest the biggest event in the human journey. Those ideologies and conceits prevent people from seeing what is really happening on Earth today, and they cannot be productive in the task that I have in mind if they are stuck there.
I seek disillusioned idealists. All sincere idealists eventually become disillusioned in our world of scarcity and fear, as we live in a world of illusion, especially illusions conjured by the rich and powerful, and those idealists became disillusioned by pursuing their ideals until the reality finally dawned on them. My disillusioned-idealist colleagues sometimes barely survived their moments of awakening (1, 2). My moment of truth was on the witness stand, but it capped many years of idealism and disillusionment. For the people I seek, I am here partly to help them generalize that moment of disillusionment. They are far from alone, and that moment of truth can be achieved in all walks of life.
New readers may find that my work is not what they signed up for. They have my sympathy if that is the case, and I wish them well as they depart. But some may find that they have been seeking work like mine for many years, and I hope that they get something out of my work. I do my best to make my work worthy of the people that I seek, and some days are better than others. I have been writing publicly since 1990 and hired an editor long ago, as I keep trying to hone my work to its essentials.
To all of you new readers, welcome.