It’s Our Sixth Birthday, Friends

Nobody achieves any worthwhile goal alone. It takes a village. It takes concerted effort. PolitiZoom launched six years ago today. We were at that point still associated with our sister site, Daily Sound and Fury, and our pieces cross-posted over there. We got very little traffic here, initially, because such is the way of the internet. This isn’t like Field Of Dreams, where if you build it, they will come. The internet is immense and we were a fly speck in cyberspace.

But persistence and passion are qualities that can surmount obstacles. I decided a while back that our journey through cyberspace was similar to that of The Little Engine That Could. Yes, we were surrounded by much bigger blogs that had been around as long as the internet itself had been a force in the world. What made us think we could compete?

You don’t copy your way to success. That’s a guarantee. If you succeed in any field, whether it’s a cup of coffee or a brand of ice cream or a political blog, it’s because you’ve got something going that isn’t found any other place. We write about the same events and personalities, yes. But we have a certain angle, insight, personality, something that has grabbed enough attention over the past six years to where we are thriving when other blogs have gone out of business.

And this is not a linear business. By no means. We sometimes have weeks and months that are a pure dopamine high. And then things slack off for some reason and it’s slough of despond time. We’ve all discussed it, we’ve all experienced it and we have no answers. This is a business of peaks and valleys. When you’re hot, you’re hot, when you’re not, you’re not.

It’s a bit like that famous passage from Shakespeare In Love, “Allow me to explain to you the nature of the theater business. It is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. So what do we do? Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well. How? We don’t know.”

It turns out well if you show up and give it your all. This is not a set it and forget it business.

We are a small group of thoughtful, committed writers who met up on Daily Kos, initially. Michelle Dale’s handle there was Mopshell and Dino Durrati’s handle there was Durrati. They were both on that platform for a long time, as was Joe Murfster35 Murphy and Denis Elliot. I was the newcomer to Daily Kos in 2016. My story is simple. I was malpracticed by a quack doctor and was living in poverty and sickness. To be honest, I didn’t think I would live that many more years. And to be brutally honest, I didn’t have that much to live for. What material prosperity and professional achievement I had had been pretty much wiped out by being misdiagnosed and improperly medicated.

So there I lay, in my sick bed, in a rented room with a disability check as my only form of income and lo and behold, this horrendous creature came down the escalator of a New York skyscraper one day and I saw him for who and what he was. It was beyond my comprehension that this being could be considered a serious candidate to lead this country. The best description I ever read of Trump is, “It’s almost impossible to believe he exists. It’s as if we took everything that was bad about America, scraped it up off the floor, wrapped it all up in an old hot dog skin, and then taught it to make noises with its face.”

And what was even more incomprehensible, is that there were so many others who did not see him for who and what he was. The “Let’s give him a chance,” crowd, remember them? It reminded me of that John Carpenter movie, They Live, where there are aliens amongst us and only with the aid of special glasses can their true form be perceived. I didn’t have any special glasses, (unless the filtration system in my brain that perceives human nature can be called that) but I saw the monster that Trump is and was from the get go and unfortunately I have never been wrong.

So we all met up on Daily Kos, me being the last of the group. Through a twist of fate, a user over there found a blog named Impeach Trump, and she wrote me and told me that that blogger was copying every single thing I ever posted on Daily Kos and putting ads on my work. Which was fine. Daily Kos is under a Creative Commons license and so what was published there was fair game. My issue was that the editor wasn’t giving me credit for my work.

But there was another blog called The Trump Impeachment (reason? People were Googling the hell out of the words Trump and impeachment, and when you’re brand new on the scene, you need to be able to get going in the search engines somehow) that did use my work and they gave me credit. So I contacted that blogger to ask him what the actual rules are in this business and he got back to me and said, “I’ve been thinking about reaching out to you for a long time. I’d like to pay you to be a featured writer but it wouldn’t be much.” Hey, when you’re living on a disability check, even the tiniest paycheck is welcome. I needed the money, but that wasn’t the issue. I was a professional writer from that moment on, September of 2017. To me that was a big deal and it remains a big deal. I will go to my grave feeling that way. To do something that you love is gratifying, intrinsically. To get paid to do it, is next level. And to be able to eke out a living doing it is a joy that few people know. I am blessed that I am one of them.

Back to our beginnings, I brought my friend Murfster 35, Joe Murphy to Daily Sound and Fury and then a writer named Jason Miciak and Durrati joined us later. PolitiZoom was launched on March 6, 2018 and the four of us posted on both sites until January of 2021 when Daily Sound and Fury was sold to other parties who had their own ideas about how this business works. The two sites split in January, 2021 and Denis came on board along with Mike Black Max Tuck, who died from cancer the following year. Mopshell came on board and now we have Megan Hamilton. And that is our crew, as we trek through political cyberspace.

The years have flown by. Six years is a long time. And the site has grown from a tiny, grassroots endeavor, of minimal traffic, to a site which gets up to two million pageviews in our best months. That’s not gigantic, but it’s not tiny. (A heavy traffic site is five million views or more, to give you some perspective.)

And we’re growing and expanding. We have a YouTube channel which has been dormant for some time and we will be reviving that.

We didn’t do it alone. We did it with you. Our modest success is due to the thoughtful, committed group of citizens known as Democrats — and like minded people all over the world — who have been most generous and loyal in their support of our efforts here. We are all humbled and gratified to see how far we’ve come and we are optimistic about where we’re going.

We cannot thank you enough for all that you’ve done to support our mission here, which is to see America remain a constitutional democracy and to see the horror that is Trump and MAGA purged from the body politic — or at least go into remission. Evil never dies, it merely reinvents itself.

Thank you for six great years. And now we begin our seventh year, today, and seven is a lucky number. And we will change the world. As Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.” I have lived to see the wisdom of her words.

Barack Obama said, “Be the change you want to see.” If you’re new here, welcome and join us. You’re in for one hell of a ride. The wheel of history goes round and there are times in life when things get very basic. 2024 is one of those times. What is happening now is a contest between Good v. Evil. It is that basic. We’re on the side of good and that has a magic and a strength all its own.