I’m Nafeez, a 12-year investigative journalist, bestselling author, documentary film-maker and global security scholar – formerly of The Guardian and currently writing a weekly column for Vice Motherboard.
I’ve been praised by the likes of Gore Vidal and had spats with the likes of Christopher Hitchens. I’m the winner of two Project Censored Awards for my Guardian journalism (this year for my report on Ukraine, and last year for my article on food riots) and was selected among the Evening Standard’s ‘Power 1000’ most globally influential Londoners for 2014.
I tell the stories you won’t find anywhere else about big global issues that affect us all, digging deep to investigate complex invisible realities behind world trends – from geopolitics and intelligence games, to foreign policy agendas and the police state, from resource crises and economic meltdown, to grassroots movements and new technologies. I write to help people make sense of how all these fit together, but also to empower people with a sense of what is possible by exploring real-world solutions to our global challenges. But to keep telling the hard-hitting stories that need to be told, I need your support.
Censorship: «Palestine is not an environment story»
My last article for The Guardian, where I wrote on the environment site about the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises via my Earth Insight blog, was an exclusive analysis of the role of Gaza’s off-shore gas reserves in partly motivating Israel’s Operation Protective Edge. It is by far the most popular article on the The Guardian website about the Gaza conflict (last time I checked it had about 67,000 social media shares). The day after posting, my editors unilaterally terminated my Guardian contract on the grounds that this was not a legitimate environment story.
Yeah, right.
The termination was particularly odd given that since having joined The Guardian in 2013, I’d received millions of views, and become by far the most popular Guardian environment blogger, putting out stories such as my interview with ex-CIA official Robert Steele on the ‘open source revolution’ (44,000 FB shares); the Pentagon’s Minerva project and Ministry of Defence initiatives (47,000 FB shares) targeting domestic activists and political dissidents; the little-understood link between NSA mass surveillance and Pentagon planning for the impact of climate, energy and economic shocks.
Clearly, my work had touched a nerve somewhere – and my Gaza piece was seemingly the last straw. «You’re writing too many non-environment stories,» one of my editors had told me. My report on Israel’s efforts to control Palestine’s gas resources, he said, is «not an environment story.» This experience at The Guardian is undoubtedly the most egregious form of overt censorship I’ve ever been subjected to as a journalist – and, ironically, from a publication that styles itself as «the world’s leading liberal voice.»
Breaking suppressed stories that no one else will tell
I’ve written about the Egyptian uprising, the Syria conflict, the rise of Boko Haram in Nigera, the breakdown of Ukraine, and the militarisation of Thailand – bringing to light how western hubris combined with the unsustainability of flawed models of governance, neoliberal austerity and fossil fuel dependence are unravelling regional order with unforeseen consequences. I’ve also broken major stories on state-sponsorship of al-Qaeda terrorists, the use and abuse of double agents, Sibel Edmonds and the continuation of «gladio», how Ed Husain’s memoirs were ghostwritten in Whitehall; and much, much more.
Since leaving The Guardian, I’ve continued to break exclusives you won’t find anywhere else: on the UN’s endorsement of agroecology to solve the global food crisis; how Pentagon social media data-mining is fine-tuning the CIA’s drone strike kill lists; the western covert operations behind the rise of ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS); the Pentagon’s exploitation of ISIS to ramp up mass surveillance; IRS whistleblowers exposing US Treasury and IRS executive facilitation of fraudulent multi-billion corporate tax giveaways; and the Pentagon’s plan to maintain global military dominance by creating Skynet.
The challenge is that I’m increasingly forced to make hard choices about what I write. Major, hard-hitting investigations often simply can’t get commissioned by establishment outlets resulting in their being postponed or deprioritized.
People-powered journalism
I’m using Patreon to create a sustainable platform to give you cutting-edge independent journalism on the issues that matter on a full-time basis; and to move toward a new model of crowd-supported media that is publicly-accountable, holistic, fearless in its integrity, rigorous in its research, and driven by the values of compassion, truth, and justice.
With your support, I will tell the stories I can’t get paid to write anywhere, the stories that establishment media are too scared to commission. Your patronage will allow me to ramp up my independent journalism full-time to go where others fear to tread, to chart the full-scale of the planetary emergency we face together, to explore the possibilities for living ethically and transforming our world, to uncover the corruption and wrongdoing that is so endemic in the ‘national security’ apparatus, to expose wilful state-terrorism and complicity in human rights abuses at home and abroad; to name just a few critical issues.
My mission is to give you the facts to really understand events in a way the rest of the media simply won’t tell you. I’ll also be exploring alternative (positive and negative) visions of the future. Whether that means show-casing some of the exciting innovative transitional projects that communities around the world are implementing, or interviewing leading visionaries, scientists, or thinkers pioneering harmonious fulfilling ways to live, with your support I’ll canvass the stuff you need to know.
INSURGE: A new platform that investigates power to empower people
If it works out, I’ll dedicate myself to this on a full-time basis in a way I’ve not been able to do before, writing daily and creating new video and audio projects to empower you with the facts across a range of media. I’ll post my work on my blog, while continuing to pitch to a range of media outlets to maximize exposure and get the story out to as wide an audience as possible.
You can pay me as much or as little as you like, or even make a one off payment and stop. If you subscribe, I’ll invite you exclusively to join up with me and your fellow Insurge patrons to become members of a private social network where we can build a global, online community of like-minded thinkers and doers to brainstorm on issues, share ideas and insights, send me feedback and tips for new coverage/investigations – and to be an integral part of the future of digital media.
If this experiment is successful, if we can get to a certain amount per month, I’ll take this project to the next level: With your support I’ll create a new, people-powered multimedia investigative journalism collective with its own dedicated website, where I’ll commission new investigations and hire amazing journalists in my network. At that point we’ll be able to explore together how to make our people-powered global newsroom a global force to be reckoned with.
