FOCAL POINTS: A Fully Operational Battle Station for Replacing the Moribund MSM

A journal of investigative scholarship and reporting for our new era of free speech and freedom of information

Dear Readers,

As I noted earlier today, the Trump administration’s stridently free speech and freedom of information posture is ushering in a golden age of investigative scholarship and reporting.

Likewise, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. taking the helm of Health & Human Services is a stunning turning of the tables on the villains who have long run that agency like racketeering capos.

With such an extraordinary reversal of fortune, we have decided to modify our Substack newsletter into a publication that better reflects our core mission as investigative scholars and reporters.

With all of the breathtaking disclosures being made by the DOGE wrecking crew—and with the new Task Force for the Declassification of Federal Secrets announced—we intend to shift from a defensive and reactive posture to going on the offensive against the entrenched interests that have run this country for God knows how long.

Courageous Discourse was initially conceived in December 2021, when Dr. Peter McCullough and I were under heavy censorship fire. Back then, speaking the truth—as best as we could ascertain it—was a courageous act in that doing so often resulted in suffering severe penalties.

Dr. McCullough learned this when he was fired from his senior hospital position, sued, stripped of all his professorships and editorships, and branded by Medscape as one of the “Worst Physicians of 2021,” along with a rogues gallery of doctors convicted of performing fraudulent, unnecessary surgery, mass murder, making false diagnoses while under the influence of drugs, sexual harassment, and assault. Dr. McCullough’s crime was to treat his patients to prevent them from suffering hospitalization and death.

The picture has radically changed since those dark days, when we were shellshocked dissidents. To reflect this new era, we have decided to develop our newsletter into a publication with the look and feel of an online investigative magazine.

We are also changing our name from Courageous Discourse to FOCAL POINTS. In our current cascade of disclosures—our Apocalypse Now—one of our biggest tasks is deciding what to focus on.

Our Subscribers will continue to receive their e-mails from Dr. Peter McCullough, John Leake, and Nicolas Hulscher, but the email notification will read “from Focal Points (Courageous Discourse).”

Our objective is to move beyond the confines of a bunker of dissident, heterodox investigative scholarship. With inveterate dodo birds like Andersen Cooper facing extinction, we intend to replace them in the mainstream of U.S. reporting.

Instead of being embattled by censorship, we are going to take the battle to the Swamp Critters and their mainstream media stooges. Rather than suffering their impertinent “fact checking” and “community standards” humbug, we intend to expose the whole parcel of insufferable twits who have lorded their mendacious orthodoxies over us for the last four years.

I’d like to emphasize that this is no Pollyanna announcement. Human nature being what it is, we must always remain vigilant. We know that Washington has a way of corrupting the idealistic and well-intentioned as well as venal and mercenary, so we will keep an eye on our friends who are now taking up residence inside the Beltway.

At the same time, we are delighted to embrace what appears to be a better time in the offing. As Shakespeare elegantly put it:

There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.

Instead of beating against a current, we believe we are now riding a favorable tide. Instead of censoring and persecuting us, the current Executive Branch is (by all appearances) supporting our cause.

Dr. Peter McCullough, Nicholas Hulscher, and I are thrilled to enter this new and expansive era of of investigative scholarship and reporting. Welcome to FOCAL POINTS!