Two weeks ago I was sitting in a parking lot in Bamberg, South Carolina looking at a Dollar Tree to my right and a Dollar General to my left. The “General” in Dollar General was missing from the sign. In between the stores was an empty storefront with the remnants of a faded sign that said “Discount Store.” I drove around town and looked at things like I always do and found some people to talk to like I sometimes do and then went to a $60 motel that used to be busy before the interstate killed traffic on the rural highway through town and made motels like this one into places where people do drugs instead of where families stay on their way to Disneyland. In the morning when I left, I noticed that a room in the corner of the building had personal effects hanging from the window and lawn chairs out front because someone lived there. None of these strange observations were necessary to include in a story that I wrote from Bamberg about Nikki Haley being born there and the coming South Carolina Republican primary that will be published by The New Republic.
For a long time I have been seeing things like what I saw in Bamberg and wondering whether anyone else sees them the same way that I do. When I see something like three dollar stores right next to each other but one of them didn’t make it I can’t help but think that this whole thing is doomed. When I realize that someone is living in a motel that I wouldn’t want to spend more than a night in while other people are grotesquely wealthy for being immoral scumbags, I wonder how people can call this the greatest country in the world. Everywhere I go I see things that make me think this country is going down the tubes and not for the reasons that a lot of people say. I feel like we’re doomed not because there are maybe more immigrants than there have been in the past or because trans people want to be called by certain pronouns or because of any of the other reasons that people at at Donald Trump rally are upset about, but because we are an inherently violent and ignorant nation filled with people who think the best thing you can do is to get as much stuff as possible for yourself in case it all goes to hell and you need all those things to keep you safe or your stomach full. I think we are doomed because we don’t have a collective sense of morality that says we’re kind of all in this together. If you think I’m wrong just take a trip somewhere and see how people act in the airport and on planes. There is an absolutist individualism that abounds in this country in which everyone is their own island, and everyone else is a threat to it.
We all get pretty much exactly what we want all the time — our games, our movies, our shows, our social media feeds, our news. We stream for free at 35,000 feet instead of taking a few hours to just think or — God forbid — read something on a page and not on a screen because the airlines know that if they let us have some of our stuff we’ll be a bit happier about the increasingly dehumanizing act of air travel. They used to charge us for every second of WiFi on a flight so we could watch our own stuff but now they give it to us for free — as long as we’re watching the content they’ve partnered with in whatever mutually beneficial monetary relationship exists between this studio and that airline, between this streaming service and that internet provider. They know if we don’t get at least some of what we want then we will get upset. And we can’t have people getting upset, because if that happens then other people might get upset too and the whole system is threatened. Getting upset is exactly how a protest turns into a riot, and a city turns into something that looks like a warzone. I’ve seen it happen more times than I care to remember.
I think about this stuff too much and wonder if anyone else notices the madness and absurdity of everyday life and how it seems like we’re living in a world on the edge of destruction that we only occasionally acknowledge because we spend most of our time distracting ourselves from reality. I think we are doomed by the very technology that makes this newsletter possible while being simultaneously doomed by climate change, authoritarian politics, capitalism and a culture that has turned everyone into a content creator despite most people’s lack of anything worthwhile to contribute. Most people spend their free time consuming content that is relatively harmless but entirely pointless — an entire world subsumed into one big content machine that reduces the human experience into mildly entertaining reels and posts that tell us nothing about the realities that threaten our very existence. This is where I’m supposed to make a metaphor about the Roman emperor who played the fiddle while his city burned.
When I got back from Bamberg I listened to AM talk radio while I went through the car wash. The host of the show asked callers to call in and tell him what we should call undocumented immigrants since a Democratic politician said that to call them “illegal” was dehumanizing. The host of the show said a friend of his suggested we all call them “rapist vermin.” Jeanne from Montana called in to say she thought we should call them “the invaders.” Rob from Pittsburgh agreed and said we should call the men, women and children coming to America for a better life “the invading armies of our enemies.” The host also agreed and then signed off for a commercial about a cellular plan that listeners could feel good about because the company was American-owned and didn’t align itself with progressive causes like whatever “woke” means to people like Rob from Pittsburgh and Jeanne from Montana.
This kind of thinking dooms us, I thought. The world is changing and we refuse to change with it. It may sound crazy but what the American Doom means to me is actually hopeful: like any good recovering alcoholic like myself, you can only save yourself when you’re at your most desperate, and as Americans, we are getting damn close to that. So, officially, welcome to the new incarnation of this newsletter — American Doom, which you can consider a prologue to my forthcoming book with the University of Georgia Press, If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened, to be released in spring 2025. You’ll be hearing from me every other week here, starting next week with a piece about my time in South Carolina ahead of the Republican primary there, where Nikki Haley’s campaign will suffer its fatal blow thanks to the racist forces within her own party — forces she has dismissed as not all that powerful.
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I’ve decided to change the name and some of the tone of this newsletter to address the disturbing reality I see pretty much every time I leave the house. I’ve decided to write more honestly about what I see and care less about whether it fits into some SEO-driven template that people like me have been told will be our savior on the path toward financial freedom. The reality is that most people like me — writers, journalists, artists, creatives — will never achieve the level of success that allows them to live the lives of the richest among us, and if we do, we are sure to have sold out in some way. I’ve come to accept that I may never make more than $50,000 as a journalist and a writer no matter how many exclusives I rack up for publications while I withhold information from this newsletter. That being said, I’m hopeful that by providing more of what I find and see through my work that more people will pay to subscribe to American Doom and allow me to keep doing what I love.
For all the bad news about layoffs and publications shutting down, I’m here to tell you that journalism isn’t dying — it can’t really. It will always exist in some form or another but what it looks like is changing. Small and medium-sized newspapers, if they still exist, are often mere shadows of themselves. In Peoria, where I got my start in journalism, the newspaper exists mostly to provide stories about restaurants that have closed or are opening, or to generate click-baity headlines that drive rage-reads and scores of Facebook comments. Alt-weeklies, where you might have once gotten the types of stories not covered by your local, family-friendly newspaper, are mostly non-existent. Websites that provided alternative news coverage — places like VICE, where I used to write fairly frequently, and Buzzfeed — aren’t what they used to be. The last vestige of the free, fun and informative Internet, Twitter, is a shell of itself where you’re not even guaranteed to find news if you search for it. Under Elon Musk, the poster child for the brain-rotting Internet that kills creativity in favor of vulturistic monetization and bad faith absolutism, Twitter has become an ill-trafficked wasteland filled with right-wing meme lords laboring under the delusion that they can become rich and famous if they just keep posting the doom loop content that is dumbing down an entire generation of Americans. It’s all very bad and it’s not going to get better anytime soon, so I might as well say exactly what’s on my mind and share the findings of my investigations here on a more regular basis, because keeping things to myself in the hopes that the information I uncover — published in the form of a story I’ve sold to a news outlet — is going to be the “exclusive” that changes my fortunes has not thus far worked. Gathering acorns in a pile for weeks, months and years on end so that I can wrap them up in a nice little bow and hand them off to a publication and get a big story has not gotten me much farther than I was 10 years ago when I started freelancing. So I’m going to do my best to start dropping those acorns here on a more regular basis.
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This past October marked a decade of freelancing for me. Ten years of filing dispatches and conducting investigations across the country for a wide variety of publications. Ten years ago this August I got my big break in Ferguson following the killing of Mike Brown by a police officer there. I care deeply about the issue of police brutality and after Ferguson a lot of publications said they did, too. Last year, American police killed more people than they had since the year before Brown was killed, but you wouldn’t know that because major publications had reported the hell out of it, you’d know it because you read newsletters like mine. That’s just one of the many instances I’ve had recently of looking at something and wondering whether anyone else saw how fucked up it was, or whether I was the only person having that thought.
After 10 years of doing this I’m not much closer to financial stability than when I started. Now, there’s more experienced and capable journalists than ever before who are looking for work. I don’t say this to complain or to make people feel bad for me — I have a very good life and am very lucky to be able to do what I do. I say this because I think it’s illustrative of a larger point: that the promises of the country in which my parents grew up — work hard, be kind, be responsible — don’t seem to apply anymore. It seems like the bad guys keep winning. Unserious, irresponsible, mean and ugly people continue to be rewarded for their bad behavior, and the only reason that’s been happening is because we have collectively decided that acting like an asshole who nakedly clamors for money and power at the expense of everyone else is OK. More than just OK, it’s good. Maybe it’s always been that way. Maybe that’s the American id, but it seems like it’s worse now than it’s ever been before. Lying, cheating and stealing to get what you want despite its affect on everyone around you is a feature and not a bug of much of America. This, more than anything, is why we’re doomed.
Changing the name of this newsletter and reimagining what goes here has been freeing, in a way. But it’s a freedom borne of necessity. I don’t expect things to get better in journalism anytime soon, so all the work I normally do in the hopes that some publication will pay me a livable wage for a story will probably begin finding a home here. I can no longer justify holding back information so that I can include it in some story days, weeks or months down the road. Taking that into consideration, I hope to be more open here, and to provide more about what I find in my various investigations and travels as I find it.
After my trip to Bamberg and a few days back in Savannah, I went to Los Angeles last week with my wife to celebrate my 40th birthday. Along the way, I decided to reread The Long Goodbye. In it, Marlowe notes that the “average man is tired and scared, and a tired and scared man can’t afford any ideals.” Fewer, truer things have ever been said about humanity’s motivations. In a novel set in L.A. by Raymond Chandler, Marlowe’s observation seems specifically applicable to America: this country tires and terrorizes us, and in that scared and tired state, many of us have lost our way. I hope not to. Places like American Doom seem to me like one of the last places we can find thoughtful solace amid the madness that surrounds us. I hope you’ll make this your home for that kind of writing.
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P.S. All the images in this post are mine. The first is from Allendale, S.C. The second is from a Sons of Confederate Veterans meeting place just down the road from Bamberg in Barnwell County, S.C. The last image is from Santa Monica. Signing up for a paid subscription to this newsletter is the best way to guarantee that writing and reporting like mine continues to exist in a world in which real journalism is struggling for relevancy. Plus, your subscriptions help pay for things like records requests from government agencies run by people who pose an existential threat to democracy. If you like what you see here, please consider a paid subscription and tell a friend. Onward.
This is too generous in the second part: "we are an inherently violent and ignorant nation filled with people who think the best thing you can do is to get as much stuff as possible for yourself" strikethru > "in case it all goes to hell and you need all those things to keep you safe or your stomach full."