Come hang with us. Come grow with us. Come win with us.
The first time I signed on with The Bulwark, it was mostly out of pique.
That was almost five years ago, when JVL, Sarah, Bill, and Charlie were first pouring the foundation for this place. I’d been a kid reporter on JVL’s webteam at The Weekly Standard—a conservative magazine that had been fearless enough in telling the truth about Donald Trump that its billionaire owner had pulled the plug over it.
I was mad at everything—mad in general about the death of the Standard, mad on a personal level about the loss of my first amazing job, mad on an ideological level about how the conservative movement I’d grown up in was letting itself be engulfed by the Bad Orange Man without putting up a fight. The Bulwark’s opening pitch at that moment was, “What if we just started poking these jokers in the eye?” Sounds great, I said.
In a lot of ways, things have gotten even stupider since then. Trump may have lost the White House, but his personal emasculation of the Republican Party and his goons’ ideological takeover of conservatism—then still a work in progress—are now basically complete.
But when JVL asked me to come back home earlier this year after a few cycles covering campaigns for another batch of old TWS pals, I took him up on it, not in anger, but in a sort of fierce pleasure. Because The Bulwark has become more than just an institutional cri de coeur about the ongoing weakness and fecklessness of Conservatism, Inc. It’s become part of a genuine movement—a motley crew of people right, left, and center who put country before party and the survival of our constitutional democracy above all.
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We aren’t anybody’s party organ, and we’re not all that worried about making friends. We think deeply about the news and tell you what we think—honestly, in good faith. And we want to make a real impact, which means we want to be read even by those who aren’t our fellow-travelers on everything. That’s why the lion’s share of the content we publish—all the articles, Tim’s flagship podcast, Morning Shots from Bill Kristol and me, Overtime from Jim Swift in the evening—is effortless to access. No paywall, no registration wall—no ads, even. Take up and read.
If you’d asked me five years ago whether there was an audience for this sort of thing, I wouldn’t have known how to answer. In that moment, the answer didn’t really matter to me: I was ready to rage against the dying of the light for an audience of nobody but my editors.
As it turns out, not only is there an audience who wants to read and listen to us. There’s a community who wants to support us and help The Bulwark to grow.
If that describes you, but you haven’t gotten around to taking the plunge yet—why wait?
We’re growing, and we want to keep growing. That’s the beauty of the subscriber model at a place like this: The more people sign on, the more resources we have to pour into the product, and the bigger our bullhorn gets.
Of course, it’s not all about supporting the ideological program. Sure, you can get plenty of juice free, but there’s some great stuff beckoning from behind that small paywall—The Triad every weekday from JVL, Joe Perticone’s biweekly congressional newsletter Press Pass, and enough primo podcasts to tame even the most hostile commute.
Come hang with us. Come grow with us. Come win with us. You’ll be glad you did.
—Andrew
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