Introducing the Founding Member level

You can now show your support... and get a rare challenge coin

To start, thank you for reading this substack.

Today, I turned on the subscription feature for this substack. To be clear, you do not need to pay for a subscription to access anything here. The content is free—it always has been free and will always be free. There is no paywall, and there will be no paywall that will limit your access to posts or videos or prevent commenting. I continue to encourage you to share whatever you find here with your networks.

A subscription is a way to show your support. Of course, you do not need to buy a subscription to show your support. You can read, occasionally like, and share posts to support my writing here.

Your financial support will help move this substack forward and, secondarily, help pay for my blog’s continuing expenses. As some of you may already know, this substack is an extension of, or perhaps a rebirth, of my mountainrunner.us blog, which I launched in 2004. I maintain that site since it is heavily cited in numerous books, government reports, and reports from think tanks and academia and because readers asked that it remain available. Unlike this substack, the blog isn’t free and has annual hosting and security costs.

A special bonus awaits the first thirty subscribers who join at the Founding Member level. Founding Members will receive in the mail a numbered challenge coin I made, at my own expense, for the Broadcasting Board of Governors back in 2016. I received them soon before the last official meeting of the BBG before the President signed the legislation abolishing the board and making the agency CEO a political appointee.

THe BBG challenge coin designed and made by Matt Armstrong in 2016.

As you can see in the images, the logos of the five broadcast networks appear on the front of the coin. The back has the BBG name and the coin’s serial number below the agency logo. On the edge of the coin is “Exporting the First Amendment since 1945.”¹

I made the coins to build spirit and pride in the agency and to elevate connections with other agencies.

The coins are numbered 1–200. I have #1. At that last meeting, I gave my fellow board members and the agency’s CEO each 5-10 of the lowest-numbered coins to hand out as they saw fit. I have no idea what my colleagues did with their coins. Maybe you already have one?

That’s it for this post. Thanks for reading.

1. This reflects my argument that the Voice of America, which promotes freedom of speech and the freedom to listen by distributing factual news and information, originated in September 1945, when VOA was transferred to the State Department. Before then, when VOA was under the Office of War Information, it was a classic “propaganda” operation with highly filtered content.