The cost of doing business
Government agencies across Georgia are charging me thousands of dollars to expose election deniers currently working in government. I'm asking for a little help.
On this day 39 years ago, I was born in Peoria, Illinois. I assume it was cold and gray, as it always is this time of year. My mom says that the day before, her doctor told her not to worry: the girl she was expecting wasn’t coming any time soon. The next day, I arrived. I’ve been thinking about my mom a lot at the beginning of this year as I’ve questioned whether this work is still something I want to do. Can isn’t a question anymore. I know I can do it, the question is whether I want to — whether getting involved in all these fights over the past decade-plus and not seeing much in the way of positive change is good for me. My mom says it is still important, and that she had the same questions when she was a social worker in Peoria when I was growing up. Social work — and journalism, at least the kind that I practice — are hard ways to make a living. You get up every day and battle forces much, much larger and more powerful than you in the hopes that your work will make a difference. Sometimes it does; more often, it seems like it doesn’t.
If all this fighting to expose wrongdoing weren’t enough, I have to fight against my own industry. In a world besieged by scandal and tragedy, convincing editors and publications that whatever story I’m working on is worth their time is just another battle I have to fight. I fight to expose the wrongdoing, then I fight to get it exposed. Then I have to fight to get paid for my work, the details of which I won’t bore you with here. Suffice to say that I still have not been paid for a story that took all of last year to report. That’s not abnormal for the journalism industry.
Then there is the cost for records I obtain. Georgia is especially bad about this. In many states, government agencies don’t charge you for records because it’s seen as a function of government. Georgia, for all its conservative Republican “small government” nonsense, doesn’t see it this way, and routinely charges people obscene amounts of money to obtain records that show what their elected officials are up to. (This is one of the many great hypocrisies of the conservative view of government — the government is bad and should be as small as possible, but if you try to find out what’s going on they should also get to charge you an arm and a leg.) One of the last stories I wrote here about the former director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation having ties to election deniers cost me almost $400 in records fees. The GBI charged me this amount in order to provide less than five pages of documents. Other agencies are no better: Spalding County has charged me and one of the publications I have written for more than $7,000 for emails from its board of elections. A reminder: this is a board of elections staffed with election deniers who tried to break the law and breach election equipment in an attempt to prove non-existent fraud.
Finally, there is the simple fact that I’m the only person performing this work. No one is keeping tabs on election deniers and other insurrectionists working at county election boards in Georgia and elsewhere. No one is connecting those dots to the larger universe of insurrectionists that I’ve been tracking through my work on Insurrection Exposed. For good or ill, I have found myself in the category of insurrection hunters. That’s what I do now and I’ve come to terms with that. I would like to get my book published and have had some interest — and more rejections — but if that doesn’t happen right now I won’t be upset. That’s because the simple fact of the matter is that this work is important. Even if I’m doing some small part like exposing election deniers in middle-of-nowhere Georgia, it still matters to someone: It matters to the people there who believe in things like democracy, equality and progress.
While I wish I could make all of my work free so that it can be seen by the widest group of people, I also have to make a living. Frankly, if it weren’t for Georgia’s terrible fee system for its open records law, I wouldn’t have to make the decision that I’ve made to turn on paid subscriptions for this newsletter. But hopes and reality often don’t mix. So, I’m asking that if you support my work on exposing wrongdoing — which for the near future will continue to focus on election deniers and insurrectionists in Georgia and elsewhere — that you sign up for paid subscriptions to Where Do We Go From Here. I’ll still publish free posts like this one, but a lot of my work — the work that costs me money and time — will be behind a paywall.
I’m not asking that much — just $5 a month. For that you’ll get access to all my paywalled stories about election malfeasance here in Georgia and everywhere else that comes across my radar, plus the full archive of all my work going back to the beginning of this newsletter, when I was reporting on immigration at the border.
Considering the amount of material I’ve been amassing in the last year and few months, I’ll be writing exposing insurrectionists and other bad guys across the country at least once a week.
You can subscribe by putting your email in one of the boxes on this post and clicking “Subscribe.” Then you’ll be prompted to choose your subscription plan.
I hope you decide to stick around.
Your work is extremely important, keep fighting the good fight. It's not just Spalding County depending on you.