Who is Bill Rice, Jr. and why should I read his Substack?

Or just skip down and read the last paragraph.

With new Substack authors, it’s customary to write a brief bio including some prose explaining why this venture is important to you.

For me, the main reason is easy to identify. I now get to write about anything and everything that interests me. More specifically, I now have a platform to write about topics I think are very important but are largely “off limits” to mainstream journalists.

For example, in a future dispatch, I’m simply going to list scores of articles I’m going to write that I KNOW my journalism peers in corporate or legacy media newsrooms will never write.

In one post, I’ll achieve two goals:  I’ll provide readers an idea of the type content they’re going to receive from my Newsletter. This list will also highlight the vast number of important topics that are taboo to so-called journalists.

One of my future articles will be on the rapid growth of “workarounds” people have to come up with to deal with inflation. For example, if you had to quit paying a house-keeper to clean your house, you’ve employed a “workaround.” Once I zeroed in on the “workaround” concept, I started seeing them everywhere.

The mainstream media won’t cover important topics? One easy micro “workaround” is to cancel your subscription. Substack itself is an example of a “workaround.” It’s a workaround for readers who’ve given up on the Fourth Estate, and it’s a workaround for writers who by now know we’ll never get our articles published at captured mainstream news organizations. Our workaround? Start our own Substack site and go around the “gatekeepers of the news.”

If this Substack catches on, it will probably be because of what’s perhaps my greatest talent - coming up with good story ideas.

If a story is important to an author, he’ll be motivated to write an article where readers might say, “Yes, this IS important.” Or: “I’d never thought about that before.” Or: “Why hasn’t the mainstream media covered this?” Coming up with great and original story ideas is more than half the battle.

I happen to believe many accepted “narratives” are false or dubious. This is not a trivial observation. Once accepted as gospel, and then put into policy via laws or Unconstitutional emergency orders/mandates, bogus narratives can actually kill people. Not only can they harm “public health,” slowly - and then all at once - they can crush the quality out of life.

As it tuns out, I’m launching my Substack newsletter in a time when important journalism has never been harder to find. Just like the boy in “The Sixth Sense” who sees dead people everywhere, I see bogus or dubious narratives everywhere.

Like many discombobulated Americans, I’ve been looking for “solutions” that might staunch this inexorable movement towards Global Insanity. The role I’ve identified for myself in this existential battle is simple: Come up with important and neglected story ideas. Write these stories as best I can.  Dive deep into one little pond; come up for air, and then dive into another pond few people have visited. If a story connects one important dot with another, point this out.

Variety is the spice of life, so while many of my stories will deal with the Most Important Story of Our Times (Covid), I’m not going to limit my writing to some novel respiratory virus (even if said virus did turn the word upside down). Movies, sports, education, lessons imparted by that thing called life … and a partridge in a pear tree might end up providing my muse for the day.

This Ain’t My First Rodeo …

While this is my first Substack Newsletter, I’m not new to journalism. My journalism career traces to Mrs. Swisher’s high school journalism classes, where as a sophomore my “Mr. Bill” column earned a Little Man on Campus a few ego-boosting accolades. By senior year, I was co-editor and was writing most of the paper  (sadly, few high schools today even have a school newspaper).

In college, I never took a journalism class but this didn’t stop me from being hired as the sports editor at my hometown newspaper. Since that job, I’ve worked at several newspapers (none large) as a staff journalist, managing editor, photographer, ad sales person and, for about seven years as publisher of my own weekly newspaper.  In that job, I did everything one can do at a newspaper, including taking a weekly paper route.

I’ve written too many feature stories, City Council stories, Little League stories and beauty pageant stories to count. I’ve also written  hundreds of “save-the-world” columns, none of which seemed to have saved the world.

(My late mother once told me my best columns were my silly, stream-of-conscience babblings that somehow always came back to a half-way profound theme. So, as a nod to Mom, I’ll probably surprise readers from time to time with my knock-offs of Lewis Grizzard, Dave Barry or a Steven Wright stand-up routine).

A few years ago, I belatedly got interested in producing investigative journalism …. because I thought it was important and I rarely saw it.

Several years ago, I started calling myself a “freelance” journalist and started writing more serious pieces that were read by people outside my hometown. Articles and opinion pieces I’ve written have been published at The American Conservative, UncoverDC (where I”m a contributor), Zero Hedge, Golf Magazine, The Daily Sceptic, The Brownstone Institute and The American Thinker among other sites.

I’ve learned two things as a freelance writer: Someone somewhere might be able feed a family with incomes from this job, but I’m not this person …. Most of the stories that interest me will never be published at the mainstream news organizations.

I used to write mini-stories and put them on Facebook. However, when Covid arrived and I started sharing “misinformation” about that topic, the bans rolled in like waves. Over the last few years, the bulk of my writing has been “published” in the Comment Sections of other Substack sites and the few sites that still allow reader comments.

So if someone outside of Troy or Montgomery, Alabama has heard of me, it’s probably because I was making posts when I should have been doing more Covid research (although I do have a computer full of saved Covid files, which I’ll now get to use).

This concludes my “Intro” piece …. Which didn’t really tell people the real reason I’m champing at the bit to get started. I don’t like what certain people and organizations are doing to my country and are getting away with. Our mainstream journalists are awful and are taking a pass on the most important stories of our times. I don’t know if I can play even a tiny role in changing this, but I’m damn sure going to try.