I am homeless. I have no income. No institutional backing. No editor shielding me. No foundation check arriving quietly to reward my bravery.

This is not because my work lacks rigor.
It is because it has too much.

I did what journalists are trained to do — and what systems quietly punish: I followed the facts all the way through. I did not stop when the story became inconvenient. I did not soften conclusions to preserve access. I did not trade truth for proximity to power.

And so I have nothing — materially — because I told the truth.

When Journalism Becomes Economically Impossible

Without quality journalism, America fails. That is not opinion. It is constitutional design.

The First Amendment exists because the framers understood something we now pretend to forget: a democracy cannot survive without an independent press capable of investigating power, exposing abuse, and informing the public without fear of reprisal.

When journalism collapses, democracy collapses with it.

Democracy does not die only when ballots disappear.
It dies when truth becomes economically impossible.

What has happened to me is not merely nonpayment. It is extraction.

I have been stolen from — at scale — to the tune of billions of dollars. This is not metaphor or exaggeration. It is documented. It is sourced. It is traceable across systems, institutions, and transactions. I have written extensively about this theft in published essays on my blog, with evidence available to anyone willing to look.

This matters because it exposes how modern press suppression actually works.

We are taught that tyranny announces itself with boots and banners, with book burnings and overt censorship.

That is a comforting lie.

Modern tyranny is administrative.
Financial.
Reputational.

It does not need to arrest journalists if it can simply starve them. It does not need to ban reporting if it can quietly drain, divert, and erase the reporter.

In this system, lies are profitable. Managed outrage is sponsored. Dissent is welcome so long as it is theatrical, temporary, and ultimately harmless.

But sustained truth — documented, specific, naming patterns, incentives, and consequences — must be neutralized.

So the funding disappears.
The doors quietly close.
The emails stop being returned.

And when that is not enough, the work itself is taken, monetized by others, and stripped from the person who produced it.

This is how control functions now: not through overt suppression, but through enforced precarity and silent expropriation.

The Cost of Refusing to Look Away

I have reported on violence that repeats because perpetrators are protected. On systems that punish those who speak while insulating those who harm. On institutions that perform concern while maintaining the conditions that make abuse inevitable.

I have documented, verified, corroborated. I have done the work journalism claims to exist for.

And for that, I am not paid.
For that, I have been stripped of what I produced.
For this, my life is in constant, ongoing, extreme danger.

Here, I am forced to panhandle for food.

I do not have enough money to pay the $20-a-month fee for my Google One account — the account that contains many unpublished investigative articles. I do not have the $15 a month required to fund my new Ghost publishing platform. I do not have a laptop. I do not have a house. I do not have access to most of the basic necessities required to live, let alone to report.

This is not accidental.
This is the point.

I am not an outlier. I am the archetype America claims to revere.

I am the journalist we celebrate in films and books — the one who follows the facts, refuses to look away, names what others are too afraid to touch, and accepts personal risk in service of the public good.

I am the vision of journalistic greatness this country tells itself it upholds.

I am, by any honest definition, the American hero version of a journalist — the dream, the myth, the ideal.

But in America today, that figure is not protected.
She is not resourced.
She is not honored.

She is homeless.
Destitute.
Targeted.
Silenced — not by law, but by design.

I do not lack talent. I do not lack discipline. I do not lack evidence. What I lack is the ability to survive while telling the truth — because we are no longer living in a functioning democracy.

We are living in a tyranny that cannot tolerate sustained truth, and so it ensures that those who produce it cannot live.

This is not a failure of character.
It is a failure of country.

A Reckoning for Those in Power

There is one more truth that must be spoken plainly.

The men who hold authority in this country — in government, media, finance, technology, law enforcement, and the judiciary — should be profoundly, viscerally embarrassed.

Not defensively offended.
Not rhetorically dismissive.
Embarrassed.

Because this is what their leadership has produced.

They have failed to protect the most basic democratic function: truth-telling without annihilation. They have failed to defend reality against convenience, power against accountability, and courage against comfort.

They have failed America.

They have failed reality testing itself — the ability to distinguish truth from threat, evidence from inconvenience, accountability from attack. They have failed to tolerate facts that implicate them, systems they benefit from, or structures they are too cowardly to confront.

They have failed because they could not handle the truth.

A functioning society does not render its truth-tellers homeless. A healthy democracy does not starve its journalists while rewarding those who distort, distract, and pacify. A serious nation does not allow the people documenting abuse, corruption, and systemic violence to be stripped of livelihood while perpetrators remain insulated, employed, and powerful.

Yet that is exactly what has happened.

And it has happened not by accident, but by abdication.

By men with titles who chose silence over responsibility.
By men with platforms who chose access over accuracy.
By men with power who chose self-preservation over duty.

They allowed a system to emerge — and to harden — in which truth is punished, lies are subsidized, and courage is treated as a liability.

History will not be confused about this moment.

It will not ask whether they were polite.
It will not care whether they were comfortable.

It will ask whether they stood up when reality was under attack.

And the record will show that when confronted with sustained truth — documented, sourced, and undeniable — too many of the men in authority chose to look away.

That is not neutrality.
That is not complexity.
That is failure.

Not mine.

Theirs.