Lines Form on the Left and Right

Let me tell you a story about three renegades and the pact they made eighteen years ago to improve the world. When David Watkins, Robert Farley and Scott Lemieux banded together to create this blog, they were not scions of publishing titans of the Hearst-Pulitzer variety. They had no special access or entrée. No cash-addled venture capitalist bankrolling their fevered vision of sophisticated news analysis soundtracked by Warren Zevon. They were simply three workaday stalwarts committed to the proposition that there must be something preferable to the increasingly, overwhelmingly stupid news coverage provided by most other outlets. 

Were they insane? Was it preposterous to think this was achievable? I don’t know. I was too busy dicking around various cities in the Midwest in some half-formed scramble for graduate degrees and cocktails to have been paying much attention — the prismatic apex of my so called “missing years,” which no biographer will ever be able to piece much together from. At least I hope. 

It was the time of “swift boating,” when Karl Rove was widely lauded as the most brilliant political strategist in generations — a dour, unctuous and cowardly Clausewitz whose principal insight was that the road to the presidency went through the black hearts of Ohio’s most prejudiced citizens. No, I was not fully conscious for the horror. It was too much. But those three storied gentlemen proceeded undeterred. Eighteen years ago Lawyers, Guns & Money was born.

Long before they allowed me to tag in with my dumb musings about baseball and Pavement or whatever, I was a huge fan of LG&M. The central insight of the site’s founders — that getting decent information and analysis regarding current events was becoming increasingly difficult — proved to be only too prescient. I don’t need to tell you that the contemporary digital media landscape seems to have emerged from the most deviant imaginings of a psychopathic Merry Prankster. I don’t need to tell you that pretty much all of our institutions are failing us in practically every conceivable way. This is obvious on its face.

What is not obvious is why this is happening, and what, if anything can be done about it. That’s where LG&M comes in. A one-stop-shop for insight and expertise on everything from labor law, to geopolitics to what passes for our current legal system, this site is an incredibly valuable resource — nothing less than a port in the roiling storm of entropy that seems with each passing day to become more fraught and chaotic. The shit really has hit the fan, to quote the man himself.

It’s also, crucially, a community. This could not have been cast into any more bold relief than when Covid left us isolated in so many ways — bereft of the normal avenues of conversation and commiseration so essential to keeping the modern mind from exploding. The subscription price they ask for this — we ask, I guess — is nothing. Access to the archive? Free. Want to join the LG&M family of commenters? Just sign up and keep it civil.

So, one day a year we do this. We ask for you to ponder what this site means to you and contribute what you can, as long as it is within your means. If this is a bad time for liquidity, you can contribute in other ways — by participating in constructive conversation, spreading the word and inculcating the fleeting but very real hope for a better world which caused Scott, David and Robert to bring us this wonderful resource from that impossibly lost-to-time period when Tom Brady was still one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL. For this girl, I’ll just say, I’m Team LG&M forever. You know what that means: 18 and life to go. 

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