Did Medium’s New CEO Just Call Me “Divisive” and “Under-Informed?”

It sure sounds that way.

My 5th-grade English teacher accused me of plagiarism. My 8th-grade English teacher accused me of plagiarism. My 10th-grade English teacher accused me of plagiarism.

My college anthropology teacher accused me of plagiarism. My graduate thesis director accused me of plagiarism.

Each time, the burden of proof fell on me. The only evidence they had was that it was “too good.” So, I had to narrate my writing process. Sometimes, I had to show them drafts.

These days, I don’t get accused of plagiarism. I just get accused of seducing readers with my “under-informed” viral clickbait. It’s the same thing, just different phrasing.

It never ends.

Medium’s new CEO wonders if I’m “divisive.”

Recently, I said I was thinking about leaving Medium, because the platform had made a very decisive turn against writers like me. It’s reminiscent of the days when male self-help writers dominated with catchy, superficial listicles that enshrined their own personal worldviews as life advice. My piece generated quite a response.

It even caught Tony Stubblebine’s attention.

Among other things, he wrote:

Is Jessica a divisive writer who generates a lot of these [hides/unfollows]? I don’t know the answer…

We have a lot of very credible writers who get swamped by under-informed, but more virally crafted content.

I think Tony does know the answer to the question he posed. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have asked it.

He thinks I’m under-informed clickbait.

Now, did Tony come right out and say I was under-informed clickbait? No, of course not. He implied it, after taking a very long time to explain why I was “wrong.” When Jessica has problems, maybe it’s because she’s divisive. When “very credible writers” have problems, it’s because they’re getting swamped by clickbait. By the way, “divisive” and “under-informed” just happen to be how a gang of bitter self-help writers have been describing my content for the last year.

Huh.

I might be divisive, but I’m right.

Here’s a list of my divisive opinions over the last year:

• The pandemic wouldn’t end.
• Bitcoin would tank.
• The stock market would nose dive.
• Joe Biden’s presidency was in deep trouble, and he was alienating large swaths of his own base.
• It would take far more to defeat Vladimir Putin than most of us were ready to sacrifice, and prolonged proxy war wasn’t the only or even best route to go with him. Also: Putin has done nothing that the U.S. hasn’t done 10 times over. It just gets less ink.
• China was preparing to invade Taiwan.
• Monkeypox would become a major problem.

Sure, you can disagree with these opinions. Every single one of them turned out to be spot on.

China hasn’t invaded Taiwan, mainly because Biden sent Nancy Pelosi over there to make a very clear point: We would drag the entire world into nuclear armageddon to protect those chip factories. Right around that time, congress passed a massive bill to kickstart the domestic production of those exact chips.

Oh, and Monkeypox became endemic.

Weird, huh?

There’s a considerable amount of research and thought that goes into my “divisive, virally crafted” content. I have a PhD. I’m a tenured professor. I don’t just teach English. I teach writing and research methods to undergraduate and graduate students across the college. I taught myself how to do critical discourse analysis, and published it. I practically double-majored in college, because I dragged in so much advanced credit my advisors didn’t know what to do with me. I could’ve graduated a year early. Instead, I took a semester of Arabic for fun. I took French and Chinese history for fun. I took Latin American history, Middle Eastern politics, and philosophy. I don’t throw a “PhD” behind my pen name because I want readers to focus on my words. (I also wear glasses, but not in my profile photos.)

I could’ve gone to an Ivy League university. Instead, I stayed home to take care of my abusive, schizophrenic mom.

I’ve always kind of regretted it.

I don’t just pump out “how to be a millionaire” or “how to think like a stoic” over and over again.

I’m a writer.

I wasn’t always a clickbaity doomer.

Before the self-help writers got mad at me for writing doom bait, I was a successful writer in their genre, too. I wrote life and relationship advice. My best relationship piece got 1 million views.

Take a look:

That’s a small, small sampling of what I used to write, back before a pandemic and a corrupt president shattered my last ounce of faith in humanity, and prompted me to start sharing my views beyond the personal realm. So, the idea that I’m simply cranking out divisive doom porn because I can’t do anything else?

It’s bullshit.

It’s a narrative crafted by bitter grifters who used writing as a launching pad for their pyramid schemes. It’s a lazy complaint from those who never did anything but come here and brag about how much money they were making, or talk about what an asshole they used to be before going to a Tony Robbins seminar.

Eventually, everyone got sick of it.

If I stopped writing about relationships, it’s actually because Medium started cracking down on those pieces.

Yep…

There was a time when the “real problem” here wasn’t clickbaity doom, it was all those clickbaity relationship articles by women. I couldn’t publish a word without getting hammered. A lot of us saw it as a desperate, last ditch attempt to redirect attention to their other failing publications, which were getting “swamped by viral content.”

Whatever I do, it’s somehow “wrong.” It’s somehow “stealing views” from other, more worthy writers.

It’s cheating.

Am I going to leave Medium?

I’ve got to say, I’ve been surprised and encouraged by all the comments so far. They mean a lot, and I’m reading them all. I’ll be responding to them over the next couple of days.

I’m not going to vanish from Medium. I’ll probably be publishing more of my political commentary on Substack.

Go here.

I’m going to offer a lot of work for free, and I’ll be creating a tier of premium content as well.

As for Medium, I plan to keep writing in some form. I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like yet.

Meanwhile, I guess Tony is going to have to make a decision. He can keep insinuating that I’m a divisive clickbaity doomer and stripping distribution from my work while denying it, or he can actually take some time to become familiar with one of the best writers currently active on his platform. He can decide to show support and appreciation for my work, or he can accuse me of cheating.

I guess we’ll see.