Even though I’ve been making these annual appeals for several decades now, I’m a terrible fundraiser. I was even let go as a canvasser right out of college for a Nader-raider environmental outfit working to save the Chesapeake Bay from being poisoned. I spent too long at the door proselytizing about the issue and not enough time hitting people up for cash and checks. I missed my quotas night after night.

Writing these letters should come easier. But it doesn’t. Here I go again, talking when I should be selling. I’m never quite sure the buttons to push, the heartstrings to pull, and financial alarums to broadcast.

I’ve been around some really talented fundraisers. I’ve seen it done smoothly and efficiently. Few people could refuse a call from Alexander Cockburn asking for an emergency infusion of cash. My old friend James Monteith saved the Oregon Natural Resources Council, one of the most potent grassroots groups of the 1980s and 90s, from financial ruin once every couple of years.

But by far the most gifted fundraiser I knew was the arch-druid himself, David Brower, who used his unexcelled persuasive powers to transform the Sierra Club from a mountaineering clique of Bay Area elites into the world’s most powerful environmental group. Cockburn, Monteith and Brower all had charm and charisma, which they ruthlessly exploited. I lack both. I’m not timid about asking for money, just inept at the craft.

Brower once told me that the secret was “letting the work speak for itself and not to fear the consequences.” Do the work without fear of reprisal and the people will support you when you need them.

Brower knew what political retribution felt like. In 1966, the Johnson Administration suspended and then revoked the non-profit status of the Sierra Club, citing its aggressive advertising campaign against a bill that would have authorized canyon-flooding dams on some of the West’s wildest rivers. One of the most impactful of the ads read: Should We Also Flood the Sistine Chapel So Tourists Can Get Nearer the Ceiling?”

The ad proved a dam killer and so infuriated the federal government that the letter informing the Club that their non-profit status had been suspended was hand-delivered by a federal marshal. “For dramatic effect, I suppose,” Brower later quipped.

This is, of course, the precise strategy Trump is apparently pursuing as part of his campaign to shut down non-profit groups he perceives as enemies of his administration. Some pundits have said he got the idea from Viktor Orban’s suppression of civic groups in Hungary, but the domestic precedent had been set 50 years earlier that bastion of napalming liberals, the Johnson Administration.

The Club lost its tax status, but saved the Grand Canyon and emerged from the battle an even stronger and more politically potent organization.

Lesson learned. Let the work speak for itself. Don’t fear the consequences.

With all respect to you Søren K., we’re not afraid, we’re not trembling and our objective as journalists remains the same as it was in the 1990s when the first CounterPunch newsletter went to press: to question the received wisdom, call out political cant and cliches, expose injustices and follow the money wherever it leads and into whoever’s pockets it stuffs. As CounterPunch founder Ken Silverstein, still one of the best investigative journalists around, said: “We’re journalists, not ideologues. Everyone is fair game.”

And that’s the way we’ve conducted our work for more than three decades. We haven’t shied away from putting liberal and progressive icons (including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Paul Wellstone, Obama and Bernie Sanders) to the same scrutiny we imposed on the right. This has sometimes engendered fierce blowback from our readers. My reporting on Sanders during the 2016 campaign so irritated a few of the more excitable Bernie Bros that I began receiving hyperbolic threats to do gruesome bodily harm not only against my own delicate person, but more outrageously, our family. So it goes in big-time journalism. My critique of Bernie rang true. Still does.

I got a note from Danny Warner from somewhere in the Swiss Alps with his Friday column saying that he’d attacked the same subject as Dean Baker did earlier in the week, but from a different approach. The more angles the better, as far as I’m concerned. I like the idea of CounterPunch writers playing off each other, even refuting each other, in a kind of polemical dialectic that will move us forward, or keep us moving at any rate, and not mired in an intellectual stasis. No one, I presume, wants to hear the same take day after day until the “last syllable of recorded time”. Or bankruptcy.

Becky’s set forth our tenuous financial situation. I encourage you to look it over. It’s dire, but salvageable, if only a small percentage of daily readers of CounterPunch pitch in $25 or $50. Joshua has laid out what’s at stake in the world we’re reporting on. It’s equally dire. A true existential crisis and by existential, I mean a matter of life and death. And not just for humanity.

We’re not so grandiose as to claim that we’re going to save the planet from climate change or stop a genocide. We don’t have the guts of the Palestinian reporters in Gaza. We’re not putting our lives on the line, except in the minds of some cyberbully couch potatoes who haven’t seen sunlight since Ye called himself Kanye.

But we’re not going to lie to you either. We’re not going to sugarcoat reality or feed you false hope. We’re not going to play political favorites. We’re going to call it like we see it, unbound by the dictates of foundations, advertisers, political parties, or big donors with an agenda to push.

In the early years of CounterPunch, we alternated between two mottos on our masthead: “Power and Evil in Washington” and “Tells the Facts, Names the Names.” We’re still telling facts in an age when facts are being adulterated, perverted and fabricated.

We’re still naming names in an age when thin-skinned billionaires finance site-killing libel suits capable of sinking you financially before you even get to depositions.

We’re still trying to be journalists at a time when journalists are an endangered species, targeted for extinction not only by the nabobs of MAGA but their own bosses, many of them Private Equity pirates, who want to replace reporters with AI scribes (See Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and Newsweek or the article “summaries” in the Associated Press, the New York Times and CNN) or have them micromanaged and disciplined by the likes of Bari Weiss, the ultra-Zionist editorial dominatrix now running the once venerable CBS News for Trump’s billionaire pals the Ellisons.

How does CounterPunch fit into this strange new media ecosystem? Well, by continuing to expose “power and evil”, even when the powerful and evil are publicly exposing themselves daily like school-yard flashers and daring you to do something about it.

Our job as I see it is to present American history clearly and to highlight the continuities of power that have sustained forever wars, racial oppression, environmental destruction and gaping economic inequality across political affiliations.

You don’t have to swallow all of Michel Foucault’s philosophy to understand that a critique of power–who wields it, how it’s leveraged, who it harms and who profits from the damage done–is vital to understanding how we got to where we are.

Where we are? We’ve entered a time of shattered illusions: The illusion that there ever was such a thing as “political norms.” The illusion that the West ever operated under a “rules-based order.” The illusion that the power of our government is limited by checks and balances and the of separation of powers. The illusion that the US is a nation of laws enforced by an independent judiciary. The illusion that the Bill of Rights applies to all. The illusion that we’d entered a post-racial society. The illusion that we’d intervene to stop, not help commit a genocide.

I’ve been writing about Gaza every week for the past two years, including more than 100 entries in my Gaza diary. It’s a horror story that should frighten every American, a story of mass slaughter, child murders and starvation–a genocide that our government has armed, abetted, condoned and shielded over mounting disgust of most Americans, left and right. This is another lesson in power. Trump has proved who holds the dominant hand in the US/Israel relationship and he has used it to constrain Netanyahu more than once, if only for his own self-interest and glorification. Biden could have done the same at any point in his presidency. But never did. Not because Netanyahu bullied Biden, but because Biden supported Israel to the hilt and backed its policy of destroying Gaza as a livable environment and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Strip. There are vast differences between Trump and Biden, but the continuities are even greater. Both have used power in the service of evil. And it’s our job to probe and expose both.

So my appeal to you in these desperate hours for the Republic is an appeal to reason, an appeal to the importance of facts, an appeal to political independence and free thought, an appeal for the value of doing the work without fear of retribution, even though it may be coming.

If this is important to you, if independent journalism still means something to you, then now’s your chance to help sustain it, to keep it alive with a darkness descending.

A beneficent donor, who has supported CounterPunch for many years without asking anything in return except for us to continue what we’re doing, has promised to match every donation of $50 or more through the next week. That means if you contribute $50, it will become through the magic of mathematics: $100.

We’ll be here until they turn the lights out.

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