Announcing my new column at The Washington Spectator: “The Wide Angle” — plus other news!
It’s been a few months since I’ve had the chance to update readers here on Medium; I’ve been working on several new projects and waiting to announce all of it in the proper order.
New Column: The Wide Angle
First, I’m very pleased to announce my new monthly column for The Washington Spectator called The Wide Angle. Hamilton Fish, editor of The Spectator, and I chose this name because of our commitment to bring fresh, longitudinal perspective and analysis to readers on a regular basis.
Too much reporting and journalism is constrained by financial considerations, tight deadlines, and the lack of time to do deep research and analysis. Even as so many journalists are doing incredible, detailed, and painstaking reporting, we felt there was a niche to be filled by a different style of inquiry informed by data, intelligence gathering, and long-term study — all rooted in meta-politics and the large scale forces that shape our daily political reality.
In The Wide Angle, we will bring you insights and inquiries derived from our ongoing research in something closer to real-time. We’ll also be publishing long-form pieces requiring more time to assemble (like the recent Paranoia On Parade) in The Spectator.
Our goal is to create a feedback loop with readers, and allow you to more readily participate in our investigative work. “Call me trimtab,” as Bucky Fuller used to say:
“Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Elizabeth again: The whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing on the edge of the rudder called a trim tab. It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving that little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. It takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole ship of state is going to turn around. So I said, ‘Call me Trim Tab.’“
“The truth is that you get the low pressure to do things, rather than getting on the other side and trying to push the bow of the ship around. And you build that low pressure by getting rid of a little nonsense, getting rid of things that don’t work and aren’t true until you start to get that trim-tab motion. It works every time. That’s the grand strategy you’re going for.
We hope that this modest feedback loop builds into a great wave that may ultimately help turn the ships of state in a more constructive and sustainable direction.
New Episodes of “Dave Troy Presents…”
Speaking of Bucky Fuller, I was honored to interview Alec Nevala-Lee, author of “Inventor of the Future,” his excellent new biography of Fuller — a complex character who inspired all manner of shenanigans which we’ll be exploring in future reporting.
Recent episodes have covered a range of related topics including Libertarian Exit with Raymond B. Craib, The Cult of Bucky Fuller with Alec Nevala-Lee, and The Mysteries of Eurasia with Joe Szimhart. If you’re not up on these latest episodes, they are among the best we’ve done so far, and I think you’ll find them very informative. Please check them out!
Elon Musk and Twitter Platform Risk: Join My Mailing List!
I’ve written in The Wide Angle and on Twitter about Elon Musk and his antics — while also taking care to contextualize and not amplify them. That aside, I believe it’s plausible that Musk and his allies will actually take control of the Twitter platform — assuming the deal is not blocked on national security (or other) grounds. Musk is currently under federal investigation surrounding his behavior in connection to the deal.
All that’s a long way of saying that it is a good idea for people who might come into conflict with Team Musk to consider mitigating platform risk and gaining control of their fan-base and ownership of their audiences.
For my part, I’m asking folks who may wish to continue to receive updates from me no matter what happens with Twitter (or Medium) to sign up for my old-school mailing list. You can do that here. I won’t be activating it right away but will do so if it seems necessary, and you can always opt-out if need be.
For clarity, here are the channels where we can keep in touch:
- The Washington Spectator for The Wide Angle (monthly column) and long-form journalism (like Paranoia on Parade.)
- Twitter for real-time news, commentary, threads, (sometimes) dumb jokes, and links to other media appearances. DM’s are OPEN.
- Medium for blog-posts, additional content beyond the column, newsletters, and other content.
- Dave Troy Presents for Podcast episodes with in-depth interviews and analysis… available on Apple, Spotify, Google, Amazon, and wherever you get your podcasts.
- Email me if you have leads, suggestions, intel, or other information which may inform our reporting; I say “we” with respect to my work because it’s truly a collaborative effort of many open-source researchers working to save our democracies. You can help, too.
I’m retiring the Situation Report series I published into the run-up and unfolding of the war in favor of these other outlets, partly because I said much of what I had to say about the war and its implications then — and that’s really not changed much at all. My assessment of the war is much the same as it was then.
Now we need to turn our attention to how this war resolves itself and articulate a better vision for what the world looks like in two, five, or ten years. That’s the focus of my current work.
Please also check out the interview I did last week with Anthony Davis for his “Weekend Show,” distributed by Meidas Touch. (Forgive the breathless headline applied by the marketers… I promise you this interview is quite deep and substantive.)
Coming Soon
We’ve been hard at work on a new series that covers just what the Kremlin may be up to with its program of information warfare, and how Russian Cosmism, a key component of Russian Nationalism, informs its worldview — and why it doesn’t make much sense to many of us in the West. This is a long, complicated story, and we’re looking forward to telling it in detail.
In the meantime, we’ve pulled together some key points that illustrate the gist, and which we’re sharing in case readers have information to share, or others are working on similar research and wish to collaborate. Our situation is dangerous; the more people that know about this sooner, the better.
- THE EVENT: Why the Kremlin May Seek to Focus Global Attention
- THE AQUARIANS: The New Age Movement And Russian Cosmism
- THE ROYALISTS: The Global Network of Anti-Democracy Activists
Please check this out and reach out if you have information to contribute.
I’m excited to continue to do this work and to share it with even more people. Thanks to all of you, and especially Hamilton Fish at The Washington Spectator, for seeing a void in the media landscape and working with me to fill it. We won’t let you down.
We’re interested in the major historical trends that shape current events. Tips? Ideas? Drop us a line via email or Twitter DM.
For an even deeper dive, check out my other writing here on Medium, and my podcast series, “Dave Troy Presents,” wherever you get your podcasts.
