For those of you who became regular readers at any point after November 30, 2021, you would scarcely recognize the National Zero of the before time: 17 months and 5 days of mostly copied and pasted content largely ripped from other sites, much like Political Wire, JoeMyGod, Rick Hasen’s Election Law Blog, and some others. This wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule as Jack – a guy with actual experience in the industry – would mostly compose his own articles while I, who never did despite having “studied” journalism before dropping out of school, did not. I just copied and pasted shit.

A lot of it. The volume was considerably higher when the hardest part of pasting in the first paragraph or two of a CNN or Washington Post article is coming up with a snappy headline to go with it. Which was cool for a while, but after that first year something began gnawing at me inside, a feeling that this site could never truly be its own product if most of the news and analysis – the actual real reason you’re all supposed to be here – was just written by someone else.

Making that switch was a big fucking deal for me, something I seriously doubted I was capable of before something snapped and I just forced myself to do it. The support and encouragement from those of you who were here before and after that switch is utterly humbling.

Jack deserves the most credit for the shift however. He never once challenged me directly, but the guilt of watching him actually put work into this while I hit CMD + C and CMD + V to make most of my “articles.” I sure as shit wasn’t listening to the MAGA trolls who mocked me for the copypasta.

My only regret is not having done it sooner. The 2020 election and its aftermath would no doubt be much more fun to look back upon if I hadn’t thought this was too difficult. And it is hard, just not as hard as I’d expected. After all it’s simply aggregation recomposed from another source, giving me flexibility to add my own insights or be a sarcastic asshole or smartass analyst or not.

Plus the carveouts I allowed myself for press releases, public statements, tweets, court documents, so on and so forth are generous (and tweets, images, videos, etc). So I can still be a lazy bastard and copypasta the content in plenty of circumstances that I can get upstream far enough.

Anyway, thanks again for the feedback and almost entirely constructive criticism over these last two years. We sure as shit aren’t going back to the old days of stealing other people’s stuff.

…unless it’s the government’s.