Raising Hell: The Future Is Now
“We don't want any of that sort of thing up here," - Joh Bjelke-Peterson, longest serving Queensland Premier, on condoms, as per Sydney Morning Herald.
Astute readers of Raising Hell may have noticed that the restart on the newsletter is late in this year of our lord, 2025. There are two reasons for this. The first is that over the holiday break, I picked up shifts helping out with Al Jazeera English and Guardian AU as an extra set of fingers and an all-round content monkey. In addition to this, while everyone was getting merry and presumably not handling illegal fireworks, I put together what has become a new longread for Drilled asking why Australia’s conservatives have become so obsessed with Ontario’s nuclear industry.
That write up is with the fact checkers and I am hopeful it will run soon. I have another long read, written in collaboration with Rebecca John for DeSmog, on how the oil industry helped get public relations started in Australia following the discovery at Rough Range-1 in 1953. Using previously unknown documents pulled from dusty archives, it tells how the guy who taught the American tobacco industry to lie like its oil industry also taught the Australian oil industry to lie like their compatriots back home in the USA. I am hopeful that story will run towards the end of February.
On top of this, I am muddling through putting together an excursion out to far northern Western Australia to report from the field about a Texan fracking company moving into the area (thanks to Raising Hell’s paying subscribers). I am also currently building a new investigation into the situation at Port Pirie that I initially reported on in November last year. If you missed that one, it’s probably because it involved reports that dead birds found in the town died from acute lead poisoning, suggesting a major public health crisis. With the support of Raising Hell’s paid subscribers, I am now working on a follow up, with one of two Freedom of Information applications on foot and a whole lot of questions in with the relevant authorities.
Putting all this together, of course, takes time — in addition to the time needed for life, like buying groceries, being with my partner and actually having time off. The initial delay in restarting the newsletter happened because, about a week ago, I took three days off to do nothing — and it was pretty glorious.
Which brings me to item two. I had hoped to be able to share the primary documents and research from these investigations with Raising Hell subscribers in future issues. This newsletter started as a reaction to a frustrating encounter on another investigation into a chemical leak in Port Pirie where my research was lifted from the FOI disclosure log by another young reporter as I was attempting to place it with a publication while also trying to finish up work on a book. The story came about through my networks, and my shoe leather, but ultimately it was claimed by others.
Since then, Raising Hell has become something of a public workspace, where I share my early thinking about an issue, talk about the documents I have found through research, carry out experiments to better learn how this whole newsletter-based journalism business could work, and talk about talk about the results of my investigations. It is also a place where I promote the result of these investigations for those who wish to keep up with it, and where the editorial philosophy has more or less been: “whatever the hell I feel like”. As a little treat, I also make sure to throw in a darkly ironic and oddly motivational quote from dictators, genocidaires and the worst people in all of history.
The thing is, we now have “Donald Trump: The Sequel'“ playing out in the US with his vision for a “Greater America”. We know from history that any time a political leadership anywhere starts talking about a “Greater Anything” — even without harbingers like Elon Musk out there shooting off Nazi salutes — you are in for a bad time. Normally this would be just contained to one jurisdiction, but as the global superpower, the US has its interdependent fingers in nearly every pie, meaning we are all affected by what happens over there — just as Canada. An insurgent far-right is very much on the march across the lands, even here in Australia. It has been plain in recent days that Coalition leader Peter Dutton is aping MAGA in the lead up to another federal election — one Prime Minister Anthony Albanese so far seems ill-equipped to fight. The vibes, it would be fair to say, are grim.
This is what makes choices now all the more important now. For instance: I like Substack. It is a good, intuitive platform that functions as something like a Patreon with a publishing component specifically for anyone in the business of doing words for money. It’s simple: I type things, those things go out, people sign up to get more things if they like them. Rinse, repeat with a limited amount of internet panhandling. The trouble is that, as some readers may already know, Substack has a Nazi problem. For the longest time, the company that owns Substack has pitched itself as wanting to be the go-to platform for writers. All writers. That includes Neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer. When confronted about this by The Atlantic, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie responded with a long, drawn out defence of the company saying that “we don’t like Nazis either” but “we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.”
“We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power,” McKenzie added. “We are committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts.”
However good Adolf’s Volkswagen was in 1936, it was still Adolf’s Volkswagen.
I’m not going to go hugely into this issue. That has been outlined elsewhere by others, better than I can (though for more on why this matters, see The Nazi Bar problem). All I’ll say is that there’s a reason why, culturally, we in the English-speaking world shoot Nazis in video games. The other thing is there’s a related issue: maniacs like Andreessen Horowitz have a significant investment in Substack. Horowitz, besides being an idiot, is a close pal of Elon Musk and an informal advisor to Donald Trump. And though I take a pragmatic view about using the tools available to me — when peasants rose up they used the pitchforks their masters issued them — it does not seem wise to continue on when these guys literally own the digital printing press.
And then there’s still the Nazis.
With this in mind, I am finally getting around to investigating something that has been on the horizon for some time: moving Raising Hell to another platform. This, however, comes with certain challenges. Since starting the newsletter, I have been deeply concerned with keeping to schedule to providing some sort of value, especially for my paying subscribers. Any hiatus, however temporary, makes me nervous. But there are a bunch of questions to answer, like whether it is even possible to seamlessly move subscribers, including paying subscribers, across to the new platform, or whether I will have to ask people to re-resubscribe? Should I just start publishing to a personal website and have some sort of Patreon attached? Do I, for instance, need to kill all payments to the Newsletter and then ask people to resubscribe? Will people follow? How easy will this be to set up and manage? So far Substack has a set-and-forget system for handling all this that I deeply appreciate; how much more hands on will I need to be?
The last time I looked at this, the alternatives did not seem to offer the same functionality or would have charged me for the privilege of publishing. Doing the work to answer these questions and carry through any change takes time and planning — and lately time has been in short supply. Based on my experience as an early adopter of BlueSky, for instance, I expect a number of people will drop off. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen: moving away from Twitter was the right choice then, and one that left me better off in the long run. I suspect this will be the same.
What it does do, I think, is give me a chance to re-think what I want this newsletter to be — or whether it should continue — and to ask you what you might want to see more of. The aim has so far been to publish on a fortnightly basis so as not to bother people too often, and so I can focus on putting together original works of journalism as a precariously employed freelance journalist. Maybe that’s no longer enough? Maybe there is interest there for me to focus on a particular beat, round or issue? I genuinely believe climate change is the story of our time and that is what I want to be focussing more of my time on — but then maybe my current approach is the correct one? If you have thoughts, maybe let me know.
In the meantime, I’m going to putting Raising Hell on a brief hiatus until I can work out what to do. I may move to publishing something once a month, but I also reserve the right to publish at any time if something significant happens — perhaps even for each of the longreads I have coming. Whatever happens, I’ll update you as I know more.
Good Reads
Because we here at Raising Hell know how much you love homework…
Laleh Khalili writing in the London Review of Books has this great piece about why Donald Trump is so obsessed with Greenland, and specifically looking at the role that particular landscape played in the US nuclear program.
Rebecca John and Geoff Dembicki have this report for DeSmog from outside a London magistrates court where Exxon, a public relations firm, and a private investigations outfit are on trial for attempting to hack-and-leak the emails of its fiercest critics.
Ariel Bogle has this great investigation in The Guardian AU about a Tasmanian public relations firm that went around the Apple Isle buying up local papers to extend its reach.
"Many books about climate change are worthy but dull. Slick, however, is as readable as it is shocking." - Richard Denniss, The Australia Institute, writing in The Conversation.
“A pretty hard-hitting look at the relationship between the fossil fuel industry and its disproportionate influence on government policy and culture.” Tim Winton, as quoted in Sunday Best, 20 October 2024.
Reporting In
Where I recap what I’ve been doing this last few weeks so you know I’m not just using your money to stimulate the local economy …
‘Former Miss America’s Australian nuclear tour clouded by Chinese AI blow to her employer’ (RenewEconomy, 30 January 2025).
‘The Rock Eisteddfod showman spruiking nuclear power energy’ (The Saturday Paper, 25 January 2025).
‘Old king coal risks leaving Australia “in the dark” as aging power plants grow unreliable’ (RenewEconomy, 23 January 2025).
‘Gas industry cooks up a “culture war” as the electrification of everything gathers pace’ (RenewEconomy, 17 January 2025).
‘Australian outfit seals “monumental deal” to buy electrolysers for giga-scale green ammonia project (RenewEconomy, 17 January 2025).
‘Peter Dutton’s “always on” nuclear power is about as reliable as wind and solar - during a renewables drought’’ (RenewEconomy, 14 January 2025).
‘“Gas eating gas:” Analysis warns new supply will do nothing to alleviate high prices’ (RenewEconomy, 13 December 2024).
‘The renters caught in Byron Bay region’s housing crisis: “I feel like there’s a fire under my arse”’ (Guardian AU, 21 December 2024).
‘Victoria networks want to be first to own and install EV kerbside chargers on their power poles’ (RenewEconomy, 19 December 2024).
And a whole bunch of liveblogs on Gaza and Australian News.
In book-related news:
I spoke to Dr Karl for his podcast, Shirtloads of Science about Slick and what I found.
Before You Go (Go)…
Are you a public sector bureaucrat whose tyrannical boss is behaving badly? Have you recently come into possession of documents showing some rich guy is trying to move their ill-gotten-gains to Curacao? Did you take a low-paying job with an evil corporation registered in Delaware that is burying toxic waste under playgrounds? If your conscience is keeping you up at night, or you’d just plain like to see some wrong-doers cast into the sea, we here at Raising Hell can suggest a course of action: leak! You can securely make contact through Signal — contact me first for how. Alternatively you can send us your hard copies to: PO Box 134, Welland SA 5007
And if you’ve come this far, consider supporting me further by picking up one of my books, leaving a review or by just telling a friend about Raising Hell!
Love what you’re doing and support you totally in whatever you decide about a platform for your newsletters going forward. I share your concern about the Substack affiliation.