Reintroducing Blue Amp Media
We have added 581 paying members since June. If you are one of them, welcome, this is for you.
When a publication grows quickly, people reasonably want to know what is behind it. That is a fair question to ask of any newsroom, and it is a better question than most readers ever get around to asking of the outlets they have trusted for years. We would rather answer it completely and early than partially and late.
So this is the whole thing. What we are. What we believe. What we have published. Where every dollar comes from. Who owns us. There is no second page, because there doesn’t need to be.
What Blue Amp Media Is
Blue Amp Media is an independent progressive news and commentary company. Our stated mission, which has not changed since the day we opened, is to amplify the good, expose the bad, and hopefully to make you laugh along the way.
We publish at blueamp.co and make videos at Cliff’s Edge on YouTube. The current shows are AMPED UP with Cliff Schecter & David Shuster, Tequila Talk with Cliff & Joe Walsh, The Epstein Update with Ellie Leonard and Kait Justice, our newest addition, World War NEXT (and a few other surprises we hope work out). Over the past six months we published 224 pieces. Nearly 46 percent of you open each one, roughly double the open-rate a newsletter our size is supposed to get. And it’s considered near-unicorn status for a newsletter with over half a million subscribers.
We do not take it for granted.
Cliff Schecter founded the company. He wrote ads for the Biden campaign in 2020 and has been a political commentator and author for two decades. David Shuster, formerly of MSNBC, hosts and contributes. Ellie Leonard was a contributing editor—she spent this year doing original document work on the Epstein files nobody else was doing. Ellie recently left to stand on her own and work on some new projects, and we wish her nothing but the best. She deserves it. Lawrence Winnerman is our chief operating officer until September 30th, when he steps away from that role into a smaller one, as he too wants to to grow his Substack. There are contributors, producers, and freelancers beyond that list, and they are credited on everything they touch.
What We Are For, and Against
We are for liberal democracy, and think it’s currently losing ground around the world and here at home. We are against authoritarians—all of them, without a carve-out for the ones who are supposed to be on our side. This year we’ve gone after Trump, Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan, Netanyahu, Mohammed bin Salman, Xi Jinping, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Ilham Aliyev, Javier Milei, Aleksandar Vučić, Bashar al-Assad, Ali Khamenei and every other tyrant deserving far worse than our pixeled tongue-lashing in this publication. A strongman—meaning a murderer—doesn’t become acceptable because we share some policy ideas or faith.
We are for a real social safety net and for paying for it honestly. We’d end Trump’s unfathomable corruption, cut defense spending significantly, close the carried interest loophole, rip apart monopolies, tax all income above $25 million at a significant rate (75%? 80%?), create a billionaire wealth tax, tax funds billionaires borrow against the value of their stock portfolios so they can’t avoid paying it, end dumb subsidies (see Musk, Elon) and use the funds for universal healthcare through a single or multi-payer system, universal paid family & medical leave, and universal childcare. And more.
We are for standing with allies actually fighting—we have put Ukraine on this page repeatedly, including an hour with Ken Harbaugh on the women turning intercepted Russian text messages into drone strikes. We believe in strengthening and growing NATO, one of the greatest drivers of peace and prosperity the world has ever known. We think billionaires who rig markets, conduct corporate raids, and buy governments should be called what they are, which is why we stopped calling them billionaires and started calling them predators.
We are not the press office of the Democratic Party. We criticize Democrats when they earn it, and this year they’ve sure earned it at times. In August, Cliff endorsed Seth Bodnar, a Green Beret running for Senate in Montana as an independent, who has said plainly that he will not caucus with either party. We’ve put Never-Trump conservatives on the show—Miles Taylor, Steve Schmidt, Joe Walsh every week—because the coalition that beats fascism is everyone else, per Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of “When Democracies Die.” The test we apply is not whether someone is a Democrat. It is whether they are on the side of democracy, of sanity, and of telling you the truth about what is happening.
What We Have Actually Published
Arguments about a publication are cheap. Here is the work, from the last six months. All of it is on the site right now.
Ellie Leonard found the Epstein email. Five days after the 2016 election, Jeffrey Epstein told a contact exactly where he was. She found it in the files, sourced it to the document number, and published it in August. It is part of a body of original Epstein reporting she has built all year, including the four FBI interviews of Jane Doe #4 and the thirty-seven pages the Department of Justice has still not released.
Hunter Biden sat down with us for an hour. Not a clip, not a statement—an interview, on AMPED UP in August, about his father’s health, about addiction and recovery, and about faith and empire in a way we did not see coming. It broke news. It was the best-read thing we did all year.
Andy Borowitz stopped pretending to be neutral. “I am a Democrat. I have never pretended to be both-sidesy.” On satire, on Fox, on why equal-opportunity comedy is a lie, and—at length, and better than the political stuff—on Will Smith’s tax bill and the sweet potato pie episode.
David Shuster wrote “The FBI Believed Her.” A civil jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse. The FBI interviewed Jane Doe #4 four times and found her credible. Thirty-seven pages are still hidden. Three hundred fifty thousand of you read it.
We explained what is actually happening to the economy. “This Isn’t a Recession. It’s Worse.” Five thousand words on the cushion running out, what the CEOs already knew, and the question no politician had been willing to ask. It is the most-read piece in the history of this publication.
Jamie Raskin, David Pakman, Glenn Kirschner, Amy Hoggart, Justin Wolfers, Nikki Fried, Ivo Daalder, Alexander Vindman, Ken Harbaugh. Congress members, economists, generals, comedians, prosecutors, ambassadors. All of them this year. Most of them behind the paywall.
We covered the vetting disaster on our own side. "The First Rule of Politics: Know Your Candidate Better Than Your Opponent Does." Cliff and Democratic opposition researcher Brett Di Resta on why campaigns keep nominating people nobody checked—it’s not bad luck, it’s what happens when a party confuses loving a candidate for vetting one. It wasn’t a comfortable piece to run. We ran it.
We put a Green Beret independent on the show and endorsed him. Seth Bodnar will not caucus with either party. Cliff endorsed him anyway, which is either a contradiction or the entire point, depending on what you think this publication is for.
We published “Zionist.” In June, our chief operating officer—who is Jewish—wrote five thousand words about purity tests on the left, in which he stated he thought what is happening in Gaza is a genocide, that he wept for Yitzhak Rabin, and that he’s been told by people on both sides that he does not belong to them. We published it under his name, and it’s still up. Cliff disagreed with his take. Yet, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, a truly independent outlet must possess the ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time.
We kept the Epstein files on the front page for eleven months. While the story cycled in and out of the national press, it never left ours. That is not a strategy. That is just refusing to get bored.
Where the Money Comes From
Here is the entire business.
Subscription revenue: Low-to-mid six figures
Everything else: YouTube advertising share, plus a small number of consumer sponsorships whose names you hear read aloud in the ads.
Institutional owners: 0
That is it. That is the empire.
We say that plainly because the size of this company is the most disarming fact about it. What we make, gross, before we pay a single contributor, is like what 1.5 mid-career software engineers cost a normal firm. There is no war chest. There is no dark money. There is a group of people, a ring light, and our thousands of subscribers—you—at sixty dollars a year.
No government has ever paid this company a dollar. Not as a company or any of the individuals who make up this company, not through an intermediary, not for a sponsorship, not for a placement—not ever. Blue Amp Media has never taken a dollar from AIPAC or any pro-Israel lobbying group. We have also never accepted money from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Turkey or any of the other 185 member countries of the United Nations. There are American outlets that do take foreign state money, as well as American politicians, universities, think tanks, professors, non-profits, etc. It’s a real and underreported story, it is deeply propagandizing our country and undermining our democracy, and we’re not a part of it.
As for who owns us: Cliff and one business partner hold the large majority of the company between them, and there is a small third stake held by a silent partner. That is the whole cap table. No institution owns a piece of Blue Amp Media. No advocacy organization, no foundation, no party committee, no government, no fund. Nobody outside that table has ever had a say in what we publish, because there is no mechanism by which they could.
The Other Company, and Why It Filed as a PAC
Cliff owns two businesses. This is the part that has confused people, so we are going to go slowly.
The first is Blue Amp Strategies, a political consulting firm he registered in Ohio in 2020—before this publication existed. It is his political advertising and PR firm from which he made ads for House Democratic races, President Biden (2020), and others— which has lately been mostly quiet, as Cliff’s been busy here.
The second is Blue Amp Action. Part of what BAA does is email fundraising for Democratic candidates and causes. It’s the “chip in five dollars” email you’ve deleted many times. Political operatives—and some independent writers—have owned businesses to help candidates and causes they care about raise funds online for 25 years. Cliff chooses—if you read the BAA emails—to put the unsubscribe button at the top, not hidden at the bottom. He shares where donations go at least twice each email, though that’s not required by the FEC. It’s to be as transparent as possible.
The second part of BAA is Blue Amp Media, which is this. The newsletter, the shows, the videos, the thing you pay for.
The reason why the fundraising work has run through different entities at different times—first an LLC, then a PAC (which was registered with the Federal Election Commission in October 2023 and terminated in March 2026), then an LLC again, is that this is what fundraising platform ActBlue told Blue Amp Action to do at different times—based on legal advice they got. BAA complied. Its final report shows zero dollars on hand.
Every filing it ever made is public, free, and searchable at fec.gov, and we would rather you go read them than take our word for anything. One thing you will find? To date, we’ve raised ~$4 million directly for ~400 campaigns or causes nationwide. We’re pretty proud of that fact.
And here is the thing worth being very clear about, because we think it is a big source of the confusion.
A “PAC” is a filing status, not an ideology.
It stands for “political action committee,” and it is the legal category the federal government requires you to occupy if you want to raise and move money for candidates. Tens of thousands of them exist. Your union has one. Your professional association probably has one. It is a disclosure classification—roughly as sinister as “LLC.”
AIPAC is an organization. It is a lobbying group and a PAC, which is why it ends in those same three letters. That “a PAC” and “AIPAC” sound alike is just the English language. A PAC is not a small AIPAC, any more than an LLC is a small Lloyd’s of London. Additionally, we’ve never worked with AIPAC and never would because they mostly support horrible Republicans and Bibi Netanyahu’s autocratic government, not the people of Israel.
If you did not know that, there is no reason you should have. Campaign-finance structure is deliberately tedious and most people have better, healthier hobbies. But it is the difference between a filing cabinet and a conspiracy, and it is worth ninety seconds of anyone’s time.
Does Cliff own two companies? Yes. Is that unusual? No. It has never been hidden, and the reason you can read the second one’s books during the period it was a PAC, down to the penny, is precisely because it was registered, filed, and disclosed the way the law requires, with full transparency.
The Soundcheck Fund
A year ago we started a small grant program called the Soundcheck Fund. The idea was that the collapse of the corporate media model has left a generation of young progressive creators with an audience, a phone, and no money. That a $500 grant at the right moment can be the difference between someone finding their voice and someone giving up.
So we gave grants—five hundred to a thousand dollars—to independent creators. We announced who they were, by name, in a public post in September 2025, which anyone can still read. They did not work for us. They were not told what to say. They were not asked to cover us, credit us, or agree with us. We gave them money and got out of the way. Which those on the Left with a lot more money than us should be doing all the time if they want to actually beat fascism.
We are proud of it. We would like to do it again, and make it even larger. If helping young creators with a little scratch is a negative, well, then, guilty as charged.
One More Thing
We are going to say this once, carefully, and then get back to work.
This company has a Jewish owner and Jewish people in senior roles, including some of the people who wrote what you just read. We have noticed that when the argument about Blue Amp Media is drawn as a picture, it tends to come out the same way: money, arrows, hidden control, a foreign hand, and an audience being worked on without its knowledge. We are not going to tell you what the people drawing it meant. We will just say that we recognize the picture, that our grandparents recognized it, and that it has a long history of being drawn about people like us by people who would have told you, sincerely, that it was only about the money.
We are the publication that put out “Zionist” in June, under a Jewish byline, in which its author called what is happening in Gaza a genocide. We are the publication that goes after Netanyahu by name. We are also the publication that believes the Israeli people are no more responsible for what their autocratic leader does than we are for what Trump does. Or we all killed Alex Pretti. We all bombed Columbian fishermen. We all illegally attacked Iran. And, yes, without hesitation we believe Israel has the right to exist. Much like another country, Pakistan, created one year earlier than Israel by taking Indian land with the same kind of British mandate that created Israel. Nearly seven million Indians died during that displacement by best estimates.
If you think Israel was stolen, then there is simply no way you cannot think Pakistan was stolen too, or you are intellectually incoherent, an antisemite, or both. So, yes, we wholeheartedly support the existence of the state of Israel. And for this we will never apologize.
All of these things are true at the same time, and anyone who needs them to be simpler than that is not living in the real world, where context matters. They are also asking us to be something other than honest.
That is all we are going to say about it.
What We Are Asking
Blue Amp Media is funded by our loyal, paid subscribers and nobody else. That is the whole answer to who we work for, and it is also the whole vulnerability: if those people stop, this stops. There is no institution behind us to make up the difference, which is exactly why there is no institution in a position to tell us what to write.
Sixty dollars a year. Five dollars a month. It buys the Epstein reporting, the full interviews, the weekly shows, and the part of this operation that does not have to answer to anyone but you. And now that you’ve seen the books, you know it’s true.
If you have been reading free for a year and you have gotten something out of it, now is a reasonable time to join us—as we go to the mat these final two months to put a huge dent in domestic fascism, and fight to fully return to liberal democracy.
—Blue Amp Media
Thank you for all your hard work and speaking the truth!
Yes, thank you, but I hope Ellie still comes to visit!