How To Make Millions from Trump Derangement Substack

I analyzed data and patterns from the top 30 TDS slop merchants so you don't have to

Jan 22, 2025

Cross-post from How To Subvert Subversion with Yuri Bezmenov

This is a good sign. This Substack author is barking up the same contrarian research tree as me. This piece documents the huge growth of Substack authors who are getting rich (with curious subscription numbers) by advancing Trump Derangement Syndrome. Reich now has more than 575K subscribers and, as the author notes, the paid numbers in his chart probably are low. I also need to add Mr. Bezmenov to my list of "Contrarian" authors. -

Bill Rice, Jr.

Comrades: Trump Derangement Substack is a lucrative human centipede of slop.

Dozens of writers are making millions feeding TDS copy pasta to broken brains. As I predicted two years ago, they are migrating to Substack en masse as MSM collapses. Instead of becoming true independents, they are spewing the same propaganda here as they would for their former employers. After monitoring the asylum inmates through a separate Substack account, I have compiled a detailed table of the top 30 slop merchants and 10 observations below.

Here is the key to the data:

%Trump: Percentage of their articles that are about orange man
%Pay: Percentage of their free subscribers that pay
%Like: Average percentage of free subs who like each post (eyeballing January 2025 activity, not an exact calculation)
%Com: Average percentage of comments relative to likes
#/week: Average posts per week
Yellow: Number is likely higher, but exact details are not available
Red: Number is suspicious (see #4 below)
Creds: The regime propaganda institutions they used to work for

Here are the trends:

Repetition: TDS writers regurgitate the same predictable slop and sound exactly like each other, so all of them could be easily replicated by an AI prompt like “Write an essay about why Trump is wrong about [CURRENT THING].” - in their warped minds, nothing is worth writing about except orange man.
Cult affirmation: The emotional fearmongering language and narratives induce hysteria and solicit payment to join “The Resistance” - the most frequently used mockingbird incantations other than Trump are democracy, fascism, MAGAt, Christian nationalism, racist, misinformation, conspiracy theory, etc. Imagine the effect this has over decades of propagandizing and grifting.
Overlap: Most TDS readers will subscribe to a dozen of the writers on this list and pay for several of them, as the left is more willing to give money for causes they support - in aggregate ~1 million TDS readers pay over $50 million per year. Conservatives are outfunded here by >10x and >100x when it comes to patronage networks.
Red flags: Substack’s paid conversion rate is 3-5%, but some TDS writers achieve much higher while having suspiciously low engagement on likes and comments. I trust the Substack team on the data; what I don’t trust is the ability to create a bunch of email addresses, new accounts, and credit card swipes to launder dark money like ActBlue. It’s insane how The Contrarian racked up 300,000+ subs in only a week, but then again the boomer audience has tons of time and money, plus they were the only voter block that shifted blue in 2024.
Demographics: Almost all TDS merchants and their readers are white boomers and I’d bet all of my Substack income that they don’t live in diverse areas - they are likely paying for propaganda with taxpayer funded pensions and social security.
Wealth hypocrisy: All purple checks (>10,000 paid subs) are making at least $500,000+ per year, with several of them clearing a million which is top 0.1% level income - they are benefitting from Trump’s victory, even though they hate him and all billionaires.
Echo chamber: Paywalls and blocking are strictly enforced to keep out any dissenting opinions and promote humorless scolds - the comments sections are displays of mental illness that show how none of these people ever interact with anyone who has a different opinion.
MSM: Most TDS writers came from MSM and are now attacking it from left, claiming their former employers are not negative enough about Trump - looking at their faces and hearing their voices will send shivers down your spine. This is how Ryan Rouths are radicalized.
Censorship: I will never call for censorship the way they have against dissenting writers, but I will reserve the right to mercilessly mock and meme them.
Queen HCR: Heather Cox Richardson dominates everyone else with 1.7 million subs, but the funniest part about her articles is that she cites all of her sources - unsurprisingly all of them are links to regime propaganda outlets.