Hello, friends!

You’re receiving this e-mail or reading this article because you are a subscriber (or, perhaps, soon to be a subscriber?) to The Progressive Cafe, formerly on Substack and now on Beehiiv.

Today we’re going to talk mostly about what this platform is going to be used for going forward, and I hope you’ll stick around for it.

And as always, if you have a suggestion for a topic for me to cover, I’ll be happy to cover it here!

Originally, The Progressive Cafe was a generally-weekly publications where I’d bring you some kind of dive into some topic or another. For example, here’s one we did back on June 1st, 2024, about the proposition of a national service plan in Britain and whether that’s worth taking a look at in the US. I love doing deep-dives, but I don’t know about making that a weekly project simply because sometimes something will take longer than a week to make, while other times something I might want to say might be in response to a breaking news situation.

But the trick is, for breaking news situations, I’ve been using my Youtube channel, Dystopian Review, to make “Dystopian Report” where I focus on the more dystopian aspects of news events under the Trump regime. For example, here’s a video I made about Twitter’s CSAM-generating chat bot, Grok. After all, what’s more dystopian-coded than a CSAM making machine?

You can kind of see how this presents me with two different paths to related, but different goals, right? I can probably scrape together a justification to talk about Medicare For All as part of a Dystopian Report, and can even talk about healthcare as a dystopian “pay to survive” system, but it’s hard to make that a topic in-and-of-itself.

…Meanwhile, my old Substack has an article on Medicare For All I was planning on linking to, but it doesn’t seem to have transferred over to here; at least not yet? That’s…Disappointing. But it’s also fixed easily enough - just copy-paste the old article and images and we’re good, I think. In fact, it might even give me an opportunity to touch it up with any new facets or changes since the original was published.

Sorry, that kind of broke my brain for a second.

Anyway, as I was saying: Dystopian Report is great for talking about the darker-edged stuff, but when it comes to talking about stuff that’s aspirational, that’s hopeful, that’s for-a-better-future? That stuff doesn’t necessarily come across as well on a Dystopian-themed channel.

And as for talking about depressing, dystopian news at The Progressive Cafe? The problem is simply inverted; do you really want to hear me talk about the surveillance panopticon here? I’m sure it gets some mention, sure, but is that what people really want to talk about at a place ostensibly about the hope of the future?

So why try to force one theme too strongly onto another?

Plus, they’re different mediums entirely. Dystopian Report is typically a short, 5-12 minute long video talking about a topic with some visual stuff, but mostly me talking at a camera reading a script. The Progressive Cafe is the script, in a sense, since it’s all written.

The Progressive Cafe will be able to stand on its own as a source of me making positive, up-beat content. Or, at least, if not always up-beat, then definitely goal-oriented. That’s not to say Dystopian Report isn’t goal-oriented, I always try to leave action-items, but that’s also much more “for venting frustrations” than it is “for accomplishing concrete policy goals.”

The Progressive Cafe will try to return to its original shape and position as a place where we talk about goals we can reasonably achieve and how to get them done. It’ll be a resource that, well, for starters I can take and link to when I talk about something in Dystopian Report. “Oh, I talked about health-care. I can link to an article all about that!” And as for you? You can link these articles to your friends and say, “See, this guy has a plan. It might be a terrible plan, maybe we could do better, but it’s a plan to get started on.”

And that’s all I think I could really ask for out of myself, that I help other people get a start to doing something great. The leftover teacher in me smiles at that.

Thank you so much for joining me, and - as ever - my warmest regards,

—Jesse Pohlman