The Existentialist Republic publishes public policy and investigative journalism about the powers state and local governments hold under state constitutions and criminal codes, and about the federal officials who can be investigated and charged under those codes. Most articles end with a call to action that says whom to contact and what to ask for. The campaigns that come out of the reporting are on The ER, at theer.org, with the current documents, for free.
Our Feb. 16, 2026, article showed that every state can use its own criminal code to investigate and prosecute the people who ran the Department of Government Efficiency, and readers used the templates in that article to file more than 1,000 criminal complaints against DOGE by March 30, 2026. We sent the Make Corrupt Politicians Pay Act, our model bill that would let investors sue officials who trade on nonpublic government information, by email to every Democratic state legislator in the country and in print to 1,519 state legislators in September 2026.
We write model bills for state legislators to introduce, and the grand jury petition kits for the DOGE investigations are public for seven counties as of October 2026. We do this work as activists and journalists, and nothing on this site or on The ER is legal advice. Each reader decides whether and when to file a complaint or a petition.
Who makes it
Christopher Armitage is the founder and publisher of The Existentialist Republic and writes the articles. He is a legal scholar and journalist whose commentary has run in JURIST, a legal news service at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and in Verfassungsblog, a constitutional law forum based in Berlin. The Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute at New York University School of Law, has published his work on the capacity-building powers of states in State Court Report, the center’s publication on state courts and constitutions, and his working papers are on SSRN, an academic database. He is the author of The American Reformation and Toppling Tyrants, and his full biography is at christopherarmitage.com.
He files some of the complaints we then report on, among them the New York misconduct complaint against U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche and the complaint against Chief Justice John Roberts filed with the District of Columbia Office of Disciplinary Counsel, and the article on each complaint states that he filed it. Volunteers from the readership run the call and email campaigns.
Who pays for it
Readers pay for The Existentialist Republic. The money comes from paid subscriptions on Substack, from the books and merchandise in our online store, from the shop and memberships on Buy Me a Coffee, and from GoFundMe fundraisers that cover the printing and postage of one campaign at a time, such as the New Mexico grand jury petitions. The Existentialist Republic sells no advertising and publishes no sponsored content. Armitage owns the publication.
Every article and every call to action is free to read. Our volunteers and I do what we can for free. Paid subscriptions cover everything else, and they are what keep the kits, the letters, the filings, the model legislation and the articles coming. Don’t let a subscription be the reason you miss a meal or are late on rent. But if this work helps you and you can become a subscriber, you’re the reason more of it happens.
Corrections
Every article links to its sources in the public record. We correct any article that gets a fact wrong and add a dated note at the end of it saying what was wrong and what is right. We also list each correction below. Each campaign page on The ER has its own error report form and a dated change log. Report an error through the contact form.
This list begins in October 2026.
Republishing
Articles are free to republish under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. Credit Christopher Armitage and The Existentialist Republic in the byline, link to the original article, publish it whole and unedited apart from house style and references to time and place, and sell nothing against it, meaning no ads sold specifically against the article and no resale of the article itself. Photographs and illustrations are outside the license. Ask through the contact form before reusing one.
The model bills, the calls to action at the end of the articles, the petition kits and the letter templates are free for any use by anyone, with or without credit, and a legislator may introduce any of the bills under their own name.
Contact
Send tips, corrections, media requests and speaking invitations through the form below. A paid Substack subscription is changed or canceled from your Substack account settings, and Buy Me a Coffee’s help page explains how to cancel a membership there.
The sites
- theexistentialistrepublic.com, this site, has every article and every model bill, with the current calls to action and the campaigns underway at the top of the front page.
- cmarmitage.substack.com is where the articles are written and emailed, and where paid subscriptions are managed.
- theer.org, The ER, is the activism hub. Each campaign has its own page with the date of its last update, its current status, a link to the article that explains it, and the documents you need to take part.
- activistcipher.com, The Activist Cipher, is a free app that walks you through a campaign step by step, and no email address is needed to make an account.
- gavelgrab.org, Gavel Grab, is a separate legal news site on courts and judicial accountability that Armitage owns and edits.