The Opposition Report #1

Note: The Opposition Report is cross-published on Patreon.

Welcome to the first issue of The Opposition Report, a new monthly offering for our patrons. It has been a dizzyingly eventful year so far, and April has only just begun. I do not anticipate that we will be getting a break at any point in the next four years. It is quite difficult to keep up with all of it. Indeed, professional journalists cannot keep up with it; they are constantly scrambling to stay on top of their particular beats. Never mind the whole situation.

For non-journalists, I wouldn’t even recommend trying to stay comprehensively on top of it. Subscribe to a few daily or weekly summaries; TPM’s Morning Memo, for example, is incredibly valuable. Most other major news outlets have newsletters like these, and they really do help. They go a long way.

But even now, there is only so much that happens in a day. And it is difficult to read a month of daily summaries and end up with a sense of what the overall shape of that month has been.

When thinking about what value I could provide to our patrons, a monthly summary came to mind because it is something I would like to have, truthfully. My efforts to stay on top of events this year left notions like healthy or advisable behind in the first week of the new administration. My orientation towards new reporting can only be described as “hoarding.” Even so, I have to acknowledge my limits. I simply cannot keep up. No one can. But I will do my best to provide an accurate outline of the whole, with some pieces sketched in greater detail than others.