Dear subscribers to my newsletter “What You’re Not Being Told”,

First, thank you for subscribing to my newsletter.

Thank you for supporting my work fighting for accountability and justice in America and around the world. Not only does your support help me, it is also a gift to the future generations whom, with our efforts (and it is with effort only that this will succeed) will benefit from a free and fair world, where everyone has a say of some kind, a vote.

We don’t fight this fight just for us, of course, we fight it for our children and our children’s children, “from generation to generation”, our fight lays the foundation for better, freer, more prosperous lives for them. The arc of justice is long, and never easy. This past decade has reminded us how fragile our “democrazy” really is, we take it for granted, we lose sight of our own power and our ownership of our own lives, we lose it.

My experiences, partially detailed here, opened to my eyes to a huge vulnerability for our “democrazy” here in the states, and around the world, and it is this vulnerability that I am mostly calling attention to over and over in this newsletter. Like Paul Revere, I’m holding up a lantern and riding through night, “The tyrants are coming! The tyrants are coming! and this is how they’re vanquishing us”, hoping that all those hearing my message, hop on their own horse, grab their own lantern, and ride and ride till we are all acting as one to protect and enshrine our liberty, our right to life and the pursuit of happiness, with right actions, strong words, justice, law and order.

This is our vulnerability then, hiding in plain sight: due to entrenched misogyny and thousands of years of a patriarchy that denied the humanity of women, denied us a voice, and kept us subjugated with oppressive systems, enslavement, physical abuse, demeaning stereotypes, when we give women a vote, unless we are also ensuring theirs and their children’s physical safety, our democrazies are horrifically threatened by men without scruples, theocrats who see women as chattel, a tolerance of and protection for male violence against women, and a bizarrely delusional blindness, most likely inherited from thousands of years of such, to this going on everywhere, especially found in the men, unsurprisingly. After all, they’ve benefited hugely from this disparity in experiences.

All of which makes women highly susceptible (through no fault of their own) to being successfully terrorized into compliance. All it really takes is a gun in the house (not even that, maybe just a beating or two, no protection from anyone), without saying a word, the man gets compliance from the woman, especially true if there are children in the house, with everything, including and, most impactfully, with their vote.

I’ve written many articles talking about this, here, here and here (and many more, feel free to explore my archive yourself). I’m not alone raising awareness about what is happening to women. There are many women (here’s one), and its all women as far as I can tell (and FOR SHAME) talking about the evils of family court, about terrorized, compliant women (named “coercive control”), the consequences of a law enforcement that does nothing to protect women and their children other than write up a “restraining order”. The women and children consequently then killed by the predator despite them desperately, repeatedly, begging for protection from law enforcement. So far, there are no consequences for this massive failure of our employees, law enforcers, our civil servants, and that needs to change dramatically for everything to change.

I think I may be the only one actively making the connection between this situation, this continuing brutal but hidden subjugation of women, and the dire vulnerability this poses to democracy everywhere.

Where is the data for what I am asserting?

Fair question. I’ve included much in my articles, there are websites trying to make scientific guesses, but the biggest problem is there is no large quantities of quality data about male violence against women and the outcomes, especially true here in the states compared to Europe.

This glaring lack of data certainly doesn’t have to be, and certainly shouldn’t be. Even as simple thing as that would assuredly save the lives of countless women and children.

Here is a sample of some data gathered in Europe. For sure, its far far far worse in the states. This is true for many reasons, but the obvious one is no one is looking and no one is tracking this violence. The second one is guns. In later articles, I’ll discuss the differences between how the rest of the world is handling male violence against women (nowhere good really) versus the abysmal way we are failing women and children here. I don’t this this is happenstance, I do think there is some coordination here behind closed doors.

So why aren’t we doing this? Why don’t we simply mandate that all law enforcement, every agency in the country, hospital, every official person, etc. that comes in contact with victims of male violence, becomes a mandated reporter? We already do that with child abuse reports, with anyone admitting to threatening physical harm, we could easily change the laws around this.

Here is why I think we aren’t:

Partially, we may collectively be the victims of a cover-up situation by the ones benefiting the most, partially, no one believes women (thousands of years of a patriarchy denying us the data of our own lived experiences), and partially, men are terrified (maybe unconsciously) of discovering the true scope of their predation on women, how dangerous they really are to us, how far their vision of themselves deviates from the reality.

The data we do have on this topic points to shocking and alarming amounts of violence by men against women, murder, rape, trafficking, financial enslavement, all without proper protection from law enforcement, civil servants paid for by tax dollars, 50% of them women. As awful as this is for women and children, as terrorizing and fundamentally unamerican (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness?), it is the global effect and outcome of this horrific injustice that staggers, the way this shapes behaviors and life-choices. Yet all this seems to remain stubbornly hidden, mostly discussed and publicized only by the victims, or by other women, despite so much evidence that this is a massive problem, even without all the numbers yet in.

I will be writing more about my findings on this problem of data collection failure as a hugely harmful, destabilizing influence on our democracy down the road.

As I hope you have seen in my articles, my work, though I sincerely believe crucial to our ongoing democratic institutions, is harrowing and difficult. My life is constantly being threatened, I am being threatened with murder and torture on a somewhat regular basis. I will continue to document this (unless they get to me) and maybe eventually, our law enforcement will do its job.

On one level, threats from powerful people are validating, clearly, I’m on to something big; clearly, the people who are benefiting the most from this vulnerability in our democracy see me as a someone who might successfully strip them of their illegitimate power. Yay to that. On another level, I need more support and more resources for the critical work I’m doing.

I need more support to focus more of my time on investigations and on writing. Further, I’d like to start creating podcasts for the newsletter as well, and need to upgrade my tech to do so.

So here is my ask:

Today is #GivingTuesday in the U.S., a day when many people and organizations are moved to make donations to causes they cherish and support.

If you can, please change your free subscription to a paid one. If you can manage being a “Founding Member”, $210 (or less, you can set the amount down to $70), that would be great. If you can pay a year’s subscription up front, $70, also good. Even if it’s just a monthly $7, still, that would help. There is also a 20% discount for groups—and wouldn’t my newsletter be a great foundation for consciousness raising, for book groups, any kind of women or civic rights organizations?

Finally, every American citizen, probably every citizen of a democracy, should be seeing my newsletter. Our existing media is failing us. Please refer “What You’re Not Being Told” to your friends (there’s a way to do this within the substack app), on your social media, make signs, create songs, take out a billboard, put it on t-shirts and mugs, etc, etc, etc.

Jump on your noble steed, grab your lantern, sound the alarm: let’s do this.

Sincerely,

Jodi

(If you are interested in my business/language writings, henceforth I will be putting those in this other newsletter, so please hop on that one for more of that kind of stuff :)