My FREE membership option is for anyone interested in exploring the critical issues I write about.

My PREMIUM membership plans are for those who want to go further, support my work, and take action to shape a brighter future.

It’s for people who want to live free, who value honesty and personal responsibility, and who believe in peaceful and cooperative coexistence with each other and with our natural environment.

Learn more about my mission and core values on my About page, and if you share my goals and principles, a membership is calling your name!

Signing up will create an account for you on this website, and then you’ll be able to use the link in the site’s main navigation menu to log in.

Once logged in, you’ll also be able to directly access your account page from the main menu.

There, you can update your personal information, upgrade your membership plan, or cancel your subscription. If you cancel, you’ll continue to have access to member benefits until the end of the paid term.

With a PREMIUM membership, you’ll also be able to access the Truth Action Network, an exclusive private community where there are additional account and profile settings.

For information about how your personal data is protected on my website, please see my privacy policy.

No, I do not offer a free trial because there is already a FREE membership option to access my articles, giving you a taste of what you’ll get with a PREMIUM membership.

Then, if you decide to try a paid plan for more benefits but are unsure about making the greater up-front commitment for an annual or lifetime plan, you can just try it out for a while with the low-cost monthly plan.

You can then also upgrade to an annual or lifetime plan easily from your account dashboard.

Requiring payment to access the private online community, instead of allowing temporary free access, also acts as a gate to ensure only serious and committed people enter.

Yes. Your credit card information passes directly and securely through my preferred payment gateway, Stripe, without touching my website’s server. So, your card data is not stored on my site.

Nevertheless, my server is certified PCI compliant, which is a security standard for e-commerce and other types of websites that accept online payments.

You can learn more by viewing my privacy policy.

Yes, I respect your privacy and will never share or sell your personal information.

And while no website is guaranteed to be 100% secure, I take my site’s security very seriously and use best practices, including using only trusted and reputable WordPress plugins, keeping software up-to-date, using a firewall, and more.

While credit card data never touches my server, I have nevertheless received PCI compliance certification, which is an industry standard for secure online payments.

Learn more about how I respect your privacy and how this site may use your data by viewing my privacy policy.

Yes. It is an ethical standard and legal requirement of mass e-mailing to ensure recipients have an unsubscribe option. (Without that, or without explicit opt-in, it’s known as “spam”!) There’s an “unsubscribe” link at the foot of all my newsletters.

Your membership includes a subscription to my newsletters. Unsubscribing from the newsletter will not end your membership subscription. You just won’t get the emails.

I strongly encourage members never to click the unsubscribe link since then you won’t be notified when I’ve published new content or send exclusive members-only emails.

You can always manage the topics you receive information from me about as well as the types and frequency of emails by clicking the “update your preferences” link also included at the foot of all my newsletters.

If you do unsubscribe from the newsletter, whether intentionally or accidentally, you can always resubscribe at any time using any of the sign-up forms you’ll see on my site. Just be sure to use the same email associated with your membership so my system will know it’s you!

Unsubscribing from my newsletters also will not affect transactional emails related to your membership, such as payment confirmation or subscription renewal emails.

Additionally, email notifications for activities in the Truth Action Network are managed separately via your account notification settings within that private community (which is actually a separate website seamlessly integrated into this one for your convenience—including a single login for both sites).

Absolutely! If you feel the value of my work is greater than the price of a membership, I certainly welcome the extra support.

You can always also tip me via the form on my Donate page.

I do publish on Substack, which has its benefits for both writers and readers, but the platform I’ve build here is far more powerful and suitable for the purpose.

Substack takes a hefty 10% cut of paid subscriptions on top of the usual bank transaction fees. Here, we can cut out the middle man so more of your dollars go toward the purpose it was intended.

Importantly, Substack is built on the paywall model, whereas my self-hosted platform is designed to avoid the paywall because I believe that access to critical knowledge should not depend on one’s income level.

I am more censorship-proof maintaining full ownership and self-hosting. Substack has served as a safe haven for independent journalism, but we’ve seen people flock to publishing platforms before that ended up censoring. We shouldn’t be putting all our eggs in one basket!

Beyond that, Substack is very basic. I have much more control and functionality with my own site and tech stack. I value ownership and full control!

A membership program like the one I’ve created, including a full-featured learning management system (LMS) for online courses, is not even a possibility with Substack.

My self-hosted email newsletter software is incomparably superior to Substack’s basic email delivery service.

And mine is not just an email delivery system—it’s full-fledged customer relationship management (CRM) software housed on my own server. (And all for far less than the cost of a third-party email service provider like MailChimp or Active Campaign.)

This has enabled me to fully integrate my newsletter system into my site, including my online shop, membership program, and donation management system—no reliance for me on third party websites for any of this. This enables me to personalize the emails I send while enabling site users to manage information like name, email, billing and shipping address, membership subscriptions, or recurring donations all with a single account login.

With my own site, I have far greater analytics capabilities to better understand and serve my audience, not to mention full control over site design and functionality. (And, by the way, I use a self-hosted website traffic analysis tool, not Google Analytics or other third party requiring a tracking code and cookies. It’s just another step I’ve taken to help ensure your privacy when visiting my site.)

Substack is extremely limited in all these areas, and I do not like limitations!

In short, I have built my own superior custom platform for conducting paywall-less and more censorship-proof independent journalism while creating a unique membership program—unlike anything else out there—to deliver extra benefits for paying members.

(In fact, to build this unique system, I had to push the boundaries of what the WordPress environment is capable of out of the box, working with numerous software and theme developers to ensure their products play nicely together, resolve bugs, and enhance functionality not only to meet my own needs but for the benefit of all their customers.)

So, those are some of the main reasons why I built this platform instead of just using Substack to generate subscription revenue.

What I mean by a “lifetime” premium membership is that you will have this level of access for the life of my membership program with just one payment—as opposed to paying a recurring subscription.

This offers loyal readers an option to save money over the long-term with a great up-front commitment.

I might add member benefits to the lifetime plan in the future, but you’ll never lose any, and you’ll never have to worry about me raising the price for my subscription-based membership plans.

You won’t lose any money.

When you upgrade your membership, the membership software I use automatically refunds you for the unused time on your current plan, and your new plan begins immediately.

You only pay the difference after that credit is applied—no double-billing or wasted time.

So, you can easily upgrade at any time!

No!

I’ve put a lot of time and effort into building a completely unique platform from which to conduct my journalism as independently and as censorship-proof as possible.

I have also sought to protect my website visitors’ privacy. For example, I use self-hosted traffic analytics software, so there are no Google Analytics tracking code or cookies for you to worry about.

As part of these efforts, instead of using a Facebook group or other third-party platform, I similarly developed the private members-only community using self-hosted software.

My site uses WordPress as a content management system (CMS), which is free and open-source software that you can extend the functionality of with plugins, or software add-ons.

The Truth Action Network is self-hosted on my own website’s server. There’s no data mining. No manipulation of algorithms to show you only regime-approved messages. No faux “fact check” labels slapped on your posts.

And while the community is technically a separate website, I have fully integrated it into this site—so with a Premium Membership, you can conveniently access both this site and the private community with a single login.

Yes! 

The big idea of this community is to help each other. And one way we can do that is with an exchange of value.

There are a few simple guidelines. Basically, don’t be spammy. Genuinely contribute to the community and provide value, and keep any business offers within that context.

The only other thing is that one way I fund my journalism is with affiliate marketing, so just kindly don’t compete with me if you happen to promote the same thing as me.

Beyond those simple guidelines, if you are already making money online, be an inspiration to others and show them the way. Share your knowledge and encourage others to start a work-from-home side hustle—or even to quit their jobs to start their own business.

As long as you are serving community members, offering your products or services is perfectly fine. In fact, I encourage it.

I have long wanted to create online courses to help people on a wide variety of topics, but I never had the system in place or the resources required to focus my time on executing my plans. By signing up as a PREMIUM member, you’ll be helping me bring my vision to life.

My big-picture goal is to help revolutionize journalism by effecting a decentralization of the control over the flow of information.

To that end, I aim to create a course for citizen and independent journalists to teach skills and share what I’ve learned over the years through my own successes and failures.

This idea evolved out of a one-on-one writing coaching program I used to offer, which I came to realize would actually be much more effective—and more widely accessible—as an online course.

The first step of that program was all about getting into the right state of mind and developing the organizational and productivity skills to work efficiently and effectively.

So, the first course I’m developing is a productivity course teaching the systems, methods, and tools I’ve used to make it possible for me to do independent journalism full time. No matter what your own line of work or personal goals, we can all be more efficient and productive with our precious limited time!

And while my coaching program was aimed at people wanting to do journalism, too, a big part of it is acquiring skills needed to consume news media without being duped by propaganda—and that’s something we all need to be able to do.

(Too bad most professional journalists working for major media corporations don’t seem to have those same skills!)

So, the second course I will offer will be to train students in those skills.

Farther down the road, I will complete my vision by creating a journalism course for those interested in taking greater action while staying independent.

Beyond that, I have ideas for courses on all kinds of topics I’ve covered deeply over the years, from the Israel-Palestine conflict, to navigating the parental decision-making process for childhood vaccines, to how to start and manage your own website (without spending a fortune hiring a web development company). 

And who knows? Valued members of the Truth Action Network who demonstrate knowledge, skills, and leadership could not only organize their own groups but partner with me to offer courses about pretty much anything!

With your support, I’ll be able to bring my vision to life, and together we can help effect the paradigm shift necessary to achieve a truly civilized society.

It’s easy. You just apply to become an affiliate, and once your application is approved, you’ll have access to an affiliate dashboard where you can grab your affiliate links and view your referrals and payouts.

A PayPal account is required to receive payments.

The default affiliate link is to my site’s homepage, but you can generate a referral link to any page of my site. Say you like an article of mine, so you copy the link, paste it into the link generator in your dashboard, copy the unique referral link it will create for you, and then share the link as usual.

The difference is that now if someone clicks your link and ends up buying a premium membership or one of my books, I’ll share the earnings with you.

Of course, you can always feel good about sharing empowering knowledge in the face of adversity, but the affiliate program is just a little extra incentive to help me circumvent the censorship and to stand up and speak out about critical issues.