The Contract, in plain terms.

The American Contract is funded by its members and its readers. Four sources: memberships (Promise, Commitment, Frontier, Covenant); one-time purchases of digital products; advertising and sponsorship; and voluntary support from citizens who give without joining. Institutional licences — schools, districts, nonprofits, corporate and government partners — are a fifth. We take no money from a political party, a campaign, or a candidate committee.

No advertiser, sponsor, donor, institutional partner, or member — at any tier, at any amount — has any influence over: · what a Civic Dispatch says, or whether one is published · the annotations in the Founders' Archive, or which documents appear there · any moderation decision, including one that concerns them · the Roll, its order, or who appears on it · a member's Covenant Standing, or any figure that composes it Advertising is sold against surfaces, never against coverage. A sponsorship buys placement. It does not buy a mention, a position, or silence.

Editorial authority rests with the owner of the platform, Tiny Cross-H.U.G., who is accountable for every published word. Where editors or moderators are appointed, their authority and its limits are recorded in the platform's audit log, and it can be withdrawn the same way. There is no anonymous editorial committee here, and no decision that nobody's name is attached to.

Where a Dispatch, an annotation, or a moderation decision touches an advertiser, sponsor, institutional partner, or the platform's own commercial interest, that relationship is disclosed in the piece itself — not in a policy page a reader has to go looking for. Aggregated third-party news carries its own standing disclosure: it is republished, not endorsed, and the original source is always named and linked.

This is not a claim of neutrality. The American Contract has a stated position and does not pretend otherwise — it is written into the Contract a member signs. What it is is a commitment that the position is ours, arrived at in the open, and never for sale.