June 12, 2026
Imagine our flush of excitement. After forty-and-some years of honest obscurity, toiling away in the rattier precincts of Baltimore, the city had at last deigned to notice us.
But hold on. It is not applauding. It is not thanking. It is suing us — for alleged “predatory” marketing.
How the wheel turns. In 1983, Mayor Schaefer himself snipped the ribbon on our new headquarters and bade us a hearty welcome to his city. That was a full year before the present incumbent, Mayor Brandon Scott, drew his first breath.
From that day to this we resisted every call to decamp “to the county.” We paid out millions in taxes and salaries, and we rescued more than a dozen of Mount Vernon’s grand old mansions from the wrecker and the rot.
Yet we were always on of the fringe — perched out at the far rim of permissible opinion. We hunt for news and notions that the herd has not yet swallowed.
Thus, did we find Dr. Robert Atkins. The AMA threatened to strip him of his license; the New York Times pronounced him a “quack” for the heresy that Americans were drowning themselves in sugar, and breeding diabetes and a hundred other miseries in the bargain. We published him for years. And in the fullness of time, the Times itself confessed that Atkins had been right all along.
Our financial sheets, too, run to the edgy and the provocative. We cried “bubble” in 1999, when scarcely a soul wished to hear it. We sounded the tocsin again in 2007. And we are ringing the bell once more, right now.
Will we be proved right again? Who can say? We have been right before. We have also been wrong — forecasting crashes that never arrived, or, have not arrived yet. We likewise steered our readers toward Amazon and Nvidia long before either was a name on every tongue — along with a fair number that never did become ‘household’ at all.
Our marketing merely mirrors the lurid character of our editorial. The Baltimore Banner, hoping to expose us as scalawags, offers the following specimen of our villainy:
Enhanced sexual performance or your money back…
There, laid bare, is the whole sinister enterprise.
Something “deceptive” in it? Some “ripping off” of the elderly? Had the city honestly thought so, one might suppose it would have mentioned it at some point in the preceding four decades.
But we never know in advance which of our guesses, inspired hunches, or deep cogitations will pan out. So, we have protected ourselves — and our customers along with us — by the simple expedient of refunding the money, within reasonable bounds, to anyone who cares to ask.
Pray then, who is the predator? For better than forty years we have bounced over the potholes, watched the rats scuttle across the street, paid private-school tuition to spare our children the ruin of the schools currently under Mayor Scott’s stewardship, and been threatened, on our morning walk to the office, that someone was ”going to hurt you real bad.”
Over those same years the city’s officials have spent more than $100 billion — ostensibly to cure these very afflictions, and failed so spectacularly that one suspects they were never truly trying. And perhaps they were not. The University of Illinois ranked the Baltimore judicial district among the most corrupt in the nation, with 352 convictions over a single recent decade.
Even the city’s own Inspector General is now suing the mayor, charging him with trying to block investigations into corrupt practices.
And while the officials marched off, one after another, to the penitentiary, roughly one Baltimorean in four simply packed his bags and left — from some 770,000 souls in the early 1980s down to a bare 570,000 today.
Have the schools improved, as we were promised? Are the streets any safer? Is there less trash in the gutters?
We want a refund.
Bill Bonner, Founder
