THE RETURN OF DEMON FORCES

Dimitri here —

I know many of you have been waiting patiently for the next installments of Demon Forces, and I’m excited to announce it’s finally kicking off next month. That said, several factors have led me to adopt a new approach, so I’d like to take a moment to break down the past, present, and future of Demon Forces, and how the format of the series is going to evolve going forward.

When I started Demon Forces in early 2022, it was intended to be a temporary solo miniseries replacement for regular SJ episodes during Khalid’s brief hiatus. It was the same situation in early 2023, when I had the opportunity to spend several months fully immersed in research and production, but since we've been back on our regular recording schedule, it’s been a challenge to set aside enough time and mental energy to crank out new chapters in between hosting/editing SJ full time.

I don’t say this to complain, because I love the work we do, but it is work, and when it comes to Demon Forces, I’m doing it all 100% solo. The original research, sourcing archival footage, editing the documentary videos, scoring the music, not to mention the deeply horrific nature of the subject matter and the sensitive approach that requires, all take an intense level of monofocus and emotional energy that materially amounts to running an entire second podcast. Put another way, Demon Forces has evolved to become its own specific audio docuseries within the wider SJ universe, and Khalid and I both agree that this necessitates a bit of restructuring.

So, starting today, we’re going to be rolling out a $10/month Demon Forces tier on the SJ Patreon. Moreover, Demon Forces will now be a MONTHLY series instead of an intermittent one. That means you can expect one new episode every month, starting in July and continuing until Demon Forces is complete.

Here’s how the release schedule will work: new episodes of Demon Forces will premiere exclusively on the $10 tier each month. When I’m done with a specific “chapter” of episodes (like the upcoming 3-5 episode Yugoslavia arc), I’ll release those episodes on the $5 Al-Wara’ feed. That way, all Grottoheads will still get access to the series, albeit on a slight delay. As for unlocking them to the public, I’m going to unlock the two parts of Demon Forces V in the coming days, but going forward, Demon Forces is going to be a Patreon-exclusive series until it’s all finished.

The good news is that Demon Forces is nowhere near finished. I don’t know yet what the final length will be, but we’re looking at least another year or two of episodes. This next wave of episodes will focus almost exclusively on the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, but we aren’t abandoning the greater narrative about Liberia - in fact, as you’ll soon see, these two conflicts were far more intertwined than you might assume. After Part VI concludes, we will return to Liberia and resume our deep x-ray examination of the first and second civil wars, the rise to power of Charles Taylor, and a whole host of absolutely shocking and insane events that unfolded in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.

Another reason I’m shifting Demon Forces fully behind the paywall is because I’m about to be delving into increasingly spicier aspects of the story, some of them involving living persons who might not appreciate what I direct your attention towards. The less said about it the better, but this story is my white whale, and I don’t want anyone disrupting it before it’s complete.

I have the deepest respect and affection for all of you who have supported SJ these last few years, so I don’t love asking you to give us more money, but the hard truth is that we need to increase our income in order to keep pumping out episodes at our classic Stakhanovite rate. We don’t need all of you to join the $10 feed, but we do need a vanguard to help us make it through these lean times. Like I mentioned in the last parapolitics episode, if we don’t continue to grow our revenue somewhat, I’ll have to find part-time work outside of SJ, and the free hours I have to research, edit, score, and record will be drastically reduced, which will inevitably result in less frequent SJ content for everybody. So your support isn’t just helping us pay our bills - it’s literally ensuring the continued production of Demon Forces and all the other work that we do.

The media industry is in its late death throes, investigative journalism has been systematically gutted, and truth in American popular media has never been closer to total abolition. I can assure you that Hollyweird (whatever’s left of it) is never going to “make” this story. Netflix/Amazon/sus Warner/Disney will not adapt it into a slick limited docuseries, and if they do it’ll be chock full of NATO and CIA bullshit. The only place this story is going to be told in all of its raw complexity and revelatory horror, free of narrative interference, with an obsessive laser focus on the right targets, is here on scrappy little SJ. I hope you’ll join me on the long march.

STAY VIGILANT,
Dimitri