A Hearty Thank You!
This publication has achieved 100 paid subscribers!
This is being written under less-than-ideal conditions, which is currently sidelining me with a severe and immobilizing migraine. I’m sharing this not for sympathy, but for transparency. I hope to be well enough to publish the remaining newsletters for this week in the coming days, and I appreciate your patience as my body catches up with my intentions.
At the same time, life has a way of insisting on joy! I’m recently engaged, and it is a reminder that even in disorienting moments, there are futures worth planning toward.
Now, to the main topic at hand.
I want to say thank you and reaffirm that this publication exists to connect history, scholarship, and current events in a media environment that too often rewards amnesia and comforting myths. What began in 2022 as the work of a frustrated media monitor, one who was overexposed to cable news, stale narratives, and recycled talking points, has now grown into a daily, reader-supported publication that recently reached Substack Bestseller status with over 100 paid subscribers.
That milestone matters not as a destination, but as proof that there is an audience hungry for clearer thinking and historical honesty. Across years of work in media accountability, policy research, and civic institutions, one truth became unavoidable: Trumpism was not a rupture from a noble past, but a reckoning with long-standing failures of hollowed institutions, unexamined hierarchies, and stories about American progress that never fully accounted for race, class, power, or demographic change.
The world before Trump did not collapse into his rise. Instead, it actually produced it.
This publication rejects the idea that the task of our moment is to restore an imagined era of better governance or “true” conservatism, a narrative still promoted by many of the largest anti-Trump platforms. Instead, Stew On This is committed to understanding how we arrived here, without nostalgia or illusion.
At its core, this is a project accountable downward to readers, not upward to institutions, donors, or Beltway consensus. The goal is not outrage or reassurance, but rather understanding, as well as offering readers the space to think publicly, rigorously, and in good faith about the country we are becoming, even on days when clarity has to be fought for line by line.
You can still subscribe for 30% off a full year of the complete Stew On This experience. That’s $35 for the year or $3.50 a month. Think of it as investing in clarity, not noise.
A paid subscription gets you:
Full access to the archives
The ability to comment and join the conversation
Stew’d Over, the bonus daily newsletter!
Live Ask Me Anything sessions with paid readers — coming 2026!
This independent work is sustained by readers who want more than headlines and hot takes.
Congratulations on reaching 100 paid subscribers. And, more importantly, congratulations on your engagement!