Five Reasons to Subscribe to Splinter, A Good Website

You can help us tell Google to go fuck itself with a $5/month subscription and get a completely ad-free experience, a great looking t-shirt (plus a Splinter ball cap for annual subscribers), access to exclusive content, and any other perks that we or you can think of along the way that our supporters would enjoy. Every subscription makes a difference, as it makes us that much less financially dependent on the tech oligarchs currently swallowing society whole.

2. Mainstream Media has Proven to be Untrustworthy

While there are still plenty of terrific reporters at mainstream outlets like NBC or the Washington Post doing invaluable journalism that is not easily replicated with the resources of a smaller outlet like Splinter, it is clear as day that the ownership of mainstream outlets is enthusiastically ready to bend the knee to the lawless Trump administration in a way that they were not in 2017. We won’t sugar-coat the damage that Trump and Elon are doing, while making sure to call out any of their Democratic allies helping them strip the country for parts so they can sell it to the highest bidder.

Want to know what’s really happening in the Trump 2.0 era? Splinter will tell you. Our Deputy Editor Dave Levitan has already filed eleven essential reports from inside the government on Trump’s assault on the National Institute of Health, the National Cancer Institute, the NIH again, the entire federal government, the Department of Health and Human Services, the NOAA, the NIH again, and how courts for now still work even though racist, too-online children are running the country as it is becoming difficult to imagine what American science will look like going forward. Because of Dave’s dogged reporting, we know that federal employees are mad as hell and not going anywhere. This is the kind of fearless journalism that your subscription dollars will go to support.

3. Splinter Covers the Biggest Story in the World

Upon getting the Splinter Editor-in-Chief job, my first decision was to center climate as a regular part of our coverage, as I have long been dismayed at how little attention this issue gets in the mainstream press relative to its gargantuan impact. I knew we would still follow the Splinter traditions set for us in the sections in the header, but Climate would join them and become a much more central part of Splinter’s coverage. We were immensely lucky to hire Dave Levitan, who has written about climate change and science everywhere that words are sold. He also wrote a terrific book called Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science that has only become more prescient with each warming and idiotic day.

Dave has covered the climate crisis from every angle every week of new Splinter’s existence, providing a critical resource for readers to understand something that threatens us all. I will also chime in from time to time, particularly about the catastrophic economic angles that extend from this sprawling issue. Climate change is the story of our era, and we plan to tell it here at new Splinter, and you can help keep this kind of essential coverage alive with a subscription.

4. Splinter Still Has News and Opinions that Get Under Your Skin

I have spent a lifetime around politics and even studied it once upon a time, and I have, shall we say, opinions that get under some people’s skin, and I seek to publish other talented writers with well-formed and prickly opinions too. Some of my takes have been proven wrong, some have been proven right, but they’re all what I really think and believe, and when I’m clearly wrong, I’ll say so and address it. I also won’t hesitate to explain my thinking behind important headlines to our readers and update what I wrote as necessary if I think I fell short of my standards. I cut my journalistic teeth during the blog wars of the first Trump administration at Paste Magazine as one of those dreaded Bernie bros with experience explaining the tricks that media likes to pull, like when CNN admitted to me on the record that they screwed up during one of Sanders’ town halls. I see my role akin to a political sherpa, as I try to use my terminal political brain poisoning for good to help explain this batshit world to normal folks.

I also have a master’s in finance, which helps me understand how the market is really interpreting Trump and Elon’s madness. All last year, Joe Biden and the media told you the economy was good because line make boing, but while I was still in finance school, I detailed how inflation is not going away and the economy is actually fragile in part because everything is too expensive and the rent is too damn high. The economy is flashing warning signals and the largest market in the world is saying it’s worried that Trump and Elon could seriously break things, and I will stay on this complex story that directly affects your bank account.

5. Splinter Reports the News Too

Splinter is much more than just two guys documenting the end of the world every day while momentarily fleeing to the new Sports and Musings sections introduced as part-mental health breaks, part-business decisions to try to circumnavigate Google Ads’ hatred of political content. We have a robust group of regular writers like Jen Kirby, Roqayah Chamseddine, a very talented up-and-coming Irish writer in Tiernan Cannon, Caleb Brennan (whose work can also be found in places like The Nation, The Baffler, and InTheseTimes), Jason Tabrys who is also a Senior Editor and Writer for Uproxx, and Ross Pomeroy who is also the Chief Editor of RealClearScience. They have all have brought their expertise every month to help rebuild Splinter into a kind of all-encompassing political news and analysis outlet that is difficult to find on the web, and these folks are where the vast majority of your subscription dollars will go.

Jen Kirby has been with us since the restart of Splinter, covering the immense implications of American foreign policy from her unique vantage point in Europe—especially the war in Ukraine, even traveling to Lviv to provide first-hand documentation of this conflict reshaping the world. Jen was on the weapons shipments to Israel story mere weeks after Splinter’s relaunch in March of last year, and she wrote one of the definitive articles on the web articulating why Joe Biden’s Israel policies have been such a failure when compared to past Republican presidents. Jen has conducted extensive and informative interviews with experts like Dmitri Alperovich on the burgeoning Cold War with China and Fatima Ahmed on the conflict in Sudan the world forgot that has displaced more than eight million people. We are incredibly lucky to have her as a core part of Splinter, buttressing our credibility with her immense foreign policy bona fides that can also be found in outlets like Foreign Policy and Vox.

Roqayah Chamseddine, co-host of the popular Delete Your Account podcast, reports directly from Lebanon for Splinter. She was at the funeral that Israel attacked in their massive pager assault that was anything but targeted, as the American media (again) dutifully repeated from Benjamin Netanyahu’s talking points, while Roqayah told you what really happened for Splinter. She reported on Israel’s illegal assault on Lebanon that was condemned by the United Nations and eventually displaced her and millions of others, and she bravely returned to document the aftermath of the attacks in Beirut. Roqayah’s recent report on Israel’s ceasefire violations in Lebanon is already a prescient preview of Israel’s mounting ceasefire violations in Gaza and their attacks in the West Bank. She has interviewed doctors in Gaza who paint a horrific picture of a massive health crisis driven by Israel, and has provided the type of on-the-ground coverage of locals that is not something you see often in a mainstream media that mainly reports the Israeli perspective. Even though mainstream media has largely moved on from covering the Israeli-American genocide of Gaza, we will not, and Roqayah’s dogged reporting from a warzone will be essential to understanding what comes next.

In addition to continuing the tradition set before us as lefty rabble rousers while aggressively centering climate coverage, Splinter has become an invaluable foreign policy website providing a wide range of viewpoints and reports from around the world that are difficult to find anywhere else, let alone all in one place. Our promise to you is that we will wake up every day with the goal of helping our readers better understand this increasingly unhinged and confusing world, and your subscription dollars will go towards our suite of writers who help analyze and report on all this madness. Additionally, our owners at Paste Magazine are putting their money where their mouth is in their pledge to support fearless journalism and are sharing 25 percent of subscription revenue with our writers. We would be honored if you would subscribe to Splinter to support our work to grow this good website back into the force it deserves to be, and help us in our mission to tell Google to go fuck itself once and for all.