Hello!
Thank you for signing up for The Dominion! This is very much an experiment and work in progress, but I hope you’ll stick around. The exact timeline on launching this “newsletter” is still being determined, and it won’t be launched for at least a few weeks yet, but I will share with you what exactly my plans and goals are with this new project.
The Dominion is going to be, at least for the start, a weekly newsletter. The content will be varied, but my plans are to split it up into four main sections each week. There will be a section focused specifically on Canadian politics, a section focused on something else I’ll loosely term political theory, a section where I will answer some questions submitted by subscribers, and a section where I do a roundup of interesting things I’ve read over the past week worth your time. In short, it will be a slightly more organized, coherent, and thought out version of my Twitter feed.
The content won’t be rank punditry. It will be more detailed than tweets are, but I also will not be writing it like a column or essay. This is deliberate. My intention here is to offer honest and interesting reflections that require it to be thought out and coherent, but not filtered through the editorial process that often makes writing less interesting, albeit more polished.
It’s also going to be written from my heterodox right-wing perspective, the one that I assume people signing up are interested in. The main reason I decided a newsletter would be a worthwhile project is precisely because I think it is a good platform to enable an unfiltered perspective to develop and shine through, and start connecting like minded people who share similar perspectives with each other. Newsletters appear to be growing in popularity, and I think they have the potential to recreate some of the best features of the golden age of blogging in the 2000s that has sadly disappeared. It should also be a much less toxic environment than platforms like Twitter.
My other primary goal, one I hope many of you are interested in as well, is to develop this newsletter as something of a network and digital meeting place for like-minded conservatives and heterodox right wing Canadians, ones who want to revive and rejuvenate morribund Canadian conservatism, and conservatism more broadly. I welcome and encourage non-conservatives and non-Canadians to subscribe and contribute to the community as well, but I think this will be the audience most attracted to it. Newsletters, and Substack specifically, provide a good platform to engage in cordial and worthwhile conversations, and this is something I hope develops out of this. I will have more to say on this in the first newsletter I send out, which will double both as a newsletter and a mission statement.
Lastly, I will be keeping it free to start, but at some point in the future I hope to move to some sort of low cost subscription model, one that will keep it accessible, but support this side project which I intend to dedicate real time to. I have enabled voluntary donations through the site for now, but they are voluntary. If you have a few dollars a month to spare to support the project, please do, but no content will be paywalled for now.
The Dominion is a work in progress, I am excited to see where it goes, and I am happy you have decided to give it a try!
Ben
Good luck, Ben. Let me know if I can help.
Are you open to guest submissions? You mentioned being quite busy these next few weeks, and I'd love to help maintain the blog's regularity.