I told a local civic club why Substack matters

…. And how I ended up on Substack. (Only two members had even heard of Substack).

Here I am shaking hands with Troy Exchange Club president Jerry Beckett (right), a long-time friend and retired State Farm insurance agent. I don’t think many civic clubs in America have heard a talk like I just gave this group.

Last week, I was the speaker at a meeting of The Troy Exchange Club. Club president Jerry Beckett asked me to speak about the “re-booted” Troy Citizen newspaper, which I am now publishing on Substack and am marketing as “Alabama’s first Substack newspaper.”

While I spoke about the new Troy Citizen venture, most of my 30-minute talk was about Substack itself and how and why I became a Substack author. (See audio link to my talk at the end of this article).

I couldn’t tell this “back story” without mentioning the true impetus for the explosive growth of Substack - which was the Covid lockdowns.

As I told club members, I’m “fairly well known” around the country and the world as a Substack author who questions many of the authorized narratives about Covid.

However, hardly anyone in my hometown of Troy (population 19,000) knows what Substack is … or that a significant number of authors and readers flocked to Substack because they were seeking journalism and commentary that is seemingly off-limits to the “mainstream” news organizations and their journalists.

In my talk, I also discussed the “brand” I have probably developed as a “Covid Contrarian” author.

I found a niche …

My investigative journalism niche is, of course, research into “early spread” - the hypothesis that a novel coronavirus was “spreading” months before the experts and authorities have ever acknowledged.

When I tell people about this research focus, I usually get a positive response as many people also think this could have been occurring. (It’s not rare to find people who think they or family members experienced flu-like illness they believe could have been Covid … before Covid was supposed to be in America).

That is, few people think this is a particularly scandalous area of inquiry.

However, I quickly discovered few people appreciate the implications of my “early spread” hypothesis.

As I told members of this local civic club, I don’t think a “few” people contracted this virus months before the lockdowns of mid-March 2020. I think, based on voluminous research, that “millions” of Americans had already been exposed to this virus.

For me, the main take-away from this theory is what the world didn’t see in the months before official Covid. What nobody observed was a huge or significant number of “excess deaths” in the months between October 2019 and March 2020.

This observation has caused me to conclude that while the world probably did have a “contagious” virus (that was making millions of people “sick”), this was not a “deadly” virus to the vast majority of the world population.

If the virus was no more deadly than the seasonal flu, there was no need for lockdowns (which happened far too late to stop spread) and there was no need to receive a “warp speed” experimental “vaccine” to save one’s life from a “deadly” virus.

That is, if it was proven, “confirmed” or generally accepted that the “start date” of virus spread commenced months earlier, the entire narrative of Covid would have been dramatically different.

I also told civic club members I believe at least some officials must have known this virus was spreading … and have covered up this fact.

To me, this constitutes a scandal far more shocking than, say, Watergate.

For example, in Watergate, nobody died because of the cover-up of a botched burglary or some “dirty tricks” that Nixon appointees might have engaged in.

Also, no citizen’s daily life was turned upside down by the response to Watergate. Here, a compare-and-contrast analysis of the government’s response to the “deadly” pandemic is interesting (at least to me).

Part 2 of a stunning scandal …

While I think I made my point that evidence of “early spread” suggests this virus was NOT “deadly” to 99.9 percent of people who contracted it, I neglected to tell club members of Part 2 of this still unreported scandal.

Part 2 is that if “Covid” wasn’t killing the millions of people said to have died “from Covid,” what did kill these people (as all excess deaths cannot be faked and did occur on a massive and unprecedented scale)?

The most shocking conclusion of my early spread research is that millions of citizens must have died from “iatrogenic” causes - and not, as we were told, “from Covid.”

Deaths from ventilators, from prescriptions of the “toxic” drug remdesivir, from withholding antibiotics, from dehydration and the administration of powerful sedatives and from isolation in hospitals and nursing homes, as well as deaths from unnecessary panic must account for/explain the vast majority of “Covid deaths,” per my contrarian hypothesis.

Of course, excess deaths continue to be recorded at unprecedented rates, a statistical fact that strongly suggests the Covid “vaccines” are probably the leading cause of the excess deaths that have occurred from January 2021 through today’s date.

Most people don’t appreciate how extreme censorship has been for ‘dissident’ writers …

In my talk, I also reference how alarms over endemic censorship are another popular topic among one subset of Substack writers (actually, the writers who “put Substack on the map.”)

While I shared my views with 15 or so neighbors who attended this civic club luncheon, I also told members I am NOT going to highlight these issues at my new local Substack.

This acknowledgement of the obvious reveals my expectation that writing about these topics would, perhaps, cause many Troy Citizen subscribers to either not subscribe or cancel their subscriptions.

As I pointed out in a recent Substack post at “Bill Rice, Jr.”s newsletter,” my new goal is to find a way to increase my Substack revenue by producing local, non-controversial content - which could allow me to continue to produce my “national” Substack, where I still challenge conventional wisdom with almost every post.

… Still, I thought club members might be interested in learning more about the “backstory” of the growth of Substack and how one local freelance journalist became one of the authors who is trying to do the work New York Times and Washington Post (non) journalists will never perform.

It’s a new world of journalism when the real journalists exist, largely, only on Substack and this roster of contrarians includes a small-town writer producing stories from his study computer - a person who, for economic and social reasons, has concluded it’s probably best to keep his most-important work from his neighbors.

Note: For those who have 30 minutes, here’s an audio version of my talk. Thanks to my friend and Exchange Club member Duncan Lindsey for recording this talk and posting it to his website. My talk begins about two minutes into the audio.

(Eighteen months ago, I thought I might have 750 paid subscribers and 20,000 total subscribers by now. Today, I’m just happy to keep my paid subscriber number above 300. I’m back to 299 and have been hovering around 300 for the past seven months. This, in fact, is why I started my local Substack. I appreciate my loyal readers who are at least keeping this site “treading water.”)

Also, I appreciate the dozen or so readers who routinely leave me “tips” in my Ko-Fi jar …

One-time Ko-Fi donations greatly appreciated!