If you like "News from Underground" (or hate it, but get something out of it), please read this post

The best things on Substack aren't always free

I started “News from Underground” way back in 2005, Bush/Cheney having just been “re-elected,” and I having lately shown in detail why that victory was a fraud (just like their first one in 2000). Starting with “None Dare Call It Stolen,” a Harper’s cover story on the disaster in Ohio, I went on to write Fooled Again for Basic Books; and as I toured the country, speaking in book stores and doing a lot of local media (mostly friendly), my reputation was undergoing a surprising change. Though I’d written several op-eds for the New York Times (two of them refuting points of propaganda from Operation Desert Storm), was often featured as a talking head on NPR and PBS, and had regularly published in such journals as The Nation, The New Republic, HuffPost and The Atlantic, I now was suddenly untouchable, or unprintable, by both the corporate and left-liberal press, having been branded a “conspiracy theorist.”

This change affected my career—my life—in many ways; but here I want to focus just on the prosaic fact that I was no longer able to make any money writing. This was, of course, a drag, since, on a professor’s salary in New York City, and with a family, I surely needed that extra revenue; but it was a secondary problem, because I wrote, and still do write, not primarily for money (you don’t write for The Nation to make money). I wrote to tell particular forbidden truths, if possible; and I quickly made up for my banishment, or cancellation, with such independent efforts as stand-up comedy (an occasional offering that led to Patriot Act, a two-man show about Bush II, which I performed at the New York Theater Workshop), and, especially, a list-serve called News from Underground, whereby I told those various truths in emails to (eventually) some 2,000 people, who got that news for free, and some of whom responded generously to the pleas for donations that I sent out periodically. (If you want to read them, those emails are all or mostly archived at markcrispinmiller.com.)

Having been thus getting by for years, then, Substack came as a godsend, because of its commitment to free speech (so far), and ease of use (essential for a cyber-klutz like me) and attractiveness. True to form, since starting News from Underground in June of 2021—as the censorship of all things COVID kept on tightening—I’d made payment for subscriptions optional, and let everybody comment, since I was countering the omnipresent “virus” propaganda with truth that all must know, regardless of their income, as it was (and, God knows, still is) a matter of life and death.

This has been quite in keeping with my view of media studies, into which I moved from English in the Seventies, though without taking any courses on the media. I made that transition on my own, believing then, as I do now, that we must all learn to “read” the media, not for any academic purpose, but in order to reclaim—or realize—democracy, and help protect it from those interests seeking to destroy it. This view drove my activism on the threat of media concentration in the Nineties, and then my efforts to alert the public to the danger of election fraud; and now it has been driving my full-time effort to expose this second Holocaust so clearly that it ultimately cannot be denied. No paywall should cordon off such vital counter-propaganda, nor will it as long as I am here.

Now, however, I must modify my policy, for two reasons. First, I think that writers (like musicians) must be paid, as they would still be if we were not slaves to the Internet. In short, the lovers of such work should pay for it, if they can, and if a lot of time and effort had gone into it, making it a thing of value. And now my circumstances make it necessary for me to put my money where my mouth is (as it were), by charging my subscribers for some works of mine (this change will start next week). To put it briefly, my health has had me on sick leave these last four years, entailing, first, a cut in salary, then disability when that ran out; and that was used up a few months ago, so I have no income from NYU (where I hope I can go back to teaching in the fall, if just half-time).

Starting on or about January 15, I will be increasing my subscription pricing, to make it comparable to that of other Substackers with similar readership. If you subscribe now, or by mid-January, you will be grandfathered-in for life at the current rate of $5/month, or $50/year (provided that you don’t let your subscription lapse).

Note: If you’re reading this from the Substack Reader app on your phone and you wish to upgrade to a paid subscription, then tap here.

Now, this change certainly will not affect our “vax”-related compilations—the “died suddenly” reports, which we’ve been posting every week since early 2022, the news of injuries among the jabbed (primarily celebrities) and any other items, or data, that will help reconfirm the abnormality of what’s going on worldwide, and its direct relation to the “vaccination” drive. Since I, and our researchers (their work managed by the excellent Joe Surkiewicz, an old friend and real reporter), see such compilations as a (literally) vital public service, and to all humanity, we will continue to make them available for free. Thus non-paying subscribers may go on receiving (and, I hope, sharing) such life-saving material, which I class with the desperate wartime testimony of survivors Rudolf Vrba, Alfred Wetzler, Ya’akov Kurtz and others, the Catholic Pole Jan Karski, the inexhaustible Ben Hecht, and all the rest who struggled to alert the world to what was happening “in the East”; and, no less, I see our compilations, and other evidence of the ongoing democide, as comparable to Gareth Jones’ heroic exposés, in The Times (UK), of Stalin’s famine in Ukraine (a horror vigorously pooh-poohed as imaginary by Walter Duranty in the New York Times).

What we’re doing, in short, is working to break through the widespread denial of what’s happening, just as the Holocaust was (and still is) commonly denied; although the startling difference now is that the killing isn’t hidden from the rest of us by geographical remoteness, as Hitler wanted it unknown to all but those who worked on it. The global slaughter going on as if invisibly today is happening all around us every day, yet “our free press” will not and/or can’t report it honestly, even as they too keep dropping dead and/or becoming horribly unwell—along with all too many others dying of their “vaccination,” or crippled by their “vaccination,” as well as all those millions “suddenly” bereaved by “vaccination”: victims of a(nother) vast, expertly organized and managed military slaughter, which they can’t see, having been blinded to it by the unparalleled fear-propaganda hyping “the coronavirus” throughout 2020.

Daunting though it is, such mass denial is very gradually breaking down, as some few, and ever more, are waking up, in line with Charles Mackay’s observation, in his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841): “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.” Mackay was referring to the many “popular delusions” that had, out of nowhere, maddened entire populations since the Middle Ages, as he demonstrates in his fine book; whereas the “popular delusion” that “the virus” would kill everyone who wasn’t “vaccinated,” and the subsequent delusion that the “vaccines” have “saved lives,” while doing no harm, have been topdown creations, scientifically induced—and yet, for all the expertise behind those (let us call them) myths, people can and do cease to believe them; and we know, as readers have informed us, that our work here has helped wake people up; so it would be very wrong to limit its availability to those who can afford to pay for it.

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But while our many “vax”-related compilations will still be available for free, my essays, on whatever subject interests me, will henceforth be restricted by a paywall, so that only paying subscribers can “access” them. The same restriction will be placed on the video and audio podcasts that I intend to make, just of myself discussing this or that timely subject, and, by and by, podcasts in which I’ll talk to certain guests who have important things to say, but who (like me) have therefore been blacked out.

Thus “News from Underground” will go on seeking to fulfill its democratic purpose, by shedding light where propaganda has spread darkness through the land; but now I must charge something for those works requiring more of my own time and effort than our counter-propaganda spreading truth about the toll of “vaccination,” both to keep people “safe” from it, and to gather as much evidence as possible of this unprecedented crime, whose perpetrators will be held accountable. For if I go on posting all my work for nothing, there will be no “News from Underground” at all (and that would suit our enemies just fine).

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For monthly subscribers, here’s how you upgrade from monthly to yearly:

Go to your “News from Underground by Mark Crispin Miller” account” page — click here. Then, next to “Subscription | PLAN”, click on the “Change” button,…

• per month (current)

• per year

…then select “per year”, then click on the “Change plan” button.