We'll Never Bend the Knee

And four other reasons to support Discourse Blog in 2025.

Well, here we go.

Today, four years after the storming of the Capitol, Donald Trump’s second electoral victory is set to be certified in Congress. In exactly two weeks, Joe Biden and what’s left of his brain will ride off into the sunset having gifted us a genocide and four more years of Trump. And the world will brace itself for whatever’s coming next.

It’s not going to be easy. We have some very challenging times ahead of us. But Discourse Blog is more committed than ever to meeting those challenges head-on. And to do that, we need your help, and your financial support.

Here are five reasons why we think you should back Discourse Blog in 2025.

We’ll never bend the knee to Trump, or anyone else.

There is a mass effort underway to kiss Trump’s ring now that he’s been elected again. People who were calling him Hitler 2.0 (cough Joe and Mika cough) are racing to get back into his good graces. Business leaders and politicians are setting their grovel dials to 11.

We say to hell with that. Everyone currently kowtowing to him is doing so out of noxious self-interest. He is just as much of a blight on the world now as he’s ever been, and we won’t shy away from saying so.

At the same time, establishment types have spent the past 10 years hoping that Trump will somehow disappear into thin air, everyone will forget that this country is falling apart, and neoliberalism can happily continue to ravage our world. We say to hell with that too. This country needs actual resistance, not the #Resistance, and we’ll say that as loudly and often as possible.

We got 2024 right.

Just weeks before the election, James Carville confidently predicted in the New York Times, “America, it will all be OK. Ms. Harris will be elected the next president of the United States. Of this, I am certain.”

Meanwhile, here’s what Katherine wrote about the Harris campaign a day after Carville’s column: “Every time I see another of the VP’s public appearances…I have to wonder if even she is trying to win this thing.” Here’s another thing she wrote about the campaign around the same time: “It is a campaign for no one, that stands for nothing; it’s a uniquely depressing value proposition as our country provides the weapons that are burning people alive.”

Some people weren’t happy that we published those things (or that we refused to give Democrats a pass for their complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, an issue we will never stop centering in our coverage). But which news source would you say had a better handle on what was going on in the election? And which one do you trust more to accurately reflect what’s coming for us this year?

The billionaires are torching places like ours.

The space for truly independent media is shrinking more and more every day as the billionaire class sinks its claws into the industry. Just look at what’s happening at the Washington Post, which Jeff Bezos seems intent on killing off so he can get cozy with the incoming Trump administration, or the Los Angeles Times, whose beleaguered staff keeps having to fend off repeated, stupid interference from its billionaire owner. Even the way we distribute our stories is being destroyed by psychopaths like Elon Musk. The only way we can protect ourselves is if we sustain a subscriber base big enough to fend off these threats.

We’re in one of the toughest spaces in the business.

Discourse Blog frequently does very adversarial work about some of the toughest issues of the day. We try to have as much fun as possible, but we know that critical political journalism is inherently not going to bring in a CNN-level audience. That’s fine—the point of this place is not to be CNN! It just means that we have a harder mountain to climb. So we need you to help us climb it.

We’re all in this together.

We are living in a time of deep alienation and hyper-individualism. It’s so easy to feel alone and adrift—to think that there’s nobody out there who understands what you’re going through or the way you see the world. But one of the best things about Discourse Blog is that it gives all of us the knowledge that we’re not alone. We need that more than ever these days. The worst parts of human nature seem to be guiding the planet right now. We need places that foster the opposite—that are based around community and solidarity and kindness. And we need to support those places together.

So please—if you can, become a paid subscriber. It’s just $8 a month—less than the money you probably spend without thinking to get lunch or buy something at CVS. In exchange, we will work hard every day to make sure you get your money’s worth.

We’ve been doing this for nearly five years. With your help, we can keep Discourse Blog going for another five years, and beyond.

Thank you, and let’s face 2025 together.