What Muckrakers.Today is

Muckrakers.Today is the daily front page of American Muckrakers, an independent accountability journalism operation published by Parallax Advisory LLC in Asheville, North Carolina. We are a small, opinionated newsroom with a specific mandate: hold the powerful accountable and show the receipts. Not neutral both-sidesing, not clickbait, and not access journalism. Sourced, dated, checkable work about people and institutions with real power over other people's lives.

The site has three layers. The first is the aggregator you land on at the homepage: a curated front page of the day's most consequential reporting, ranked by an editorial model with a human editor's hand on the top slot. The second is our original work: the Muckrakers.Today press releases, the MUCK YOU! podcast, the Rogues' Gallery podcast and briefings, and the Grifters ledger. The third layer is a set of live accountability trackers that update on a daily or intraday cadence: the Putin Watch Index, the Body Count (Putin's War in Ukraine), the SpaceX Stock Price Fraud tracker, and the MAGA Dumbass of the Day archive.

We treat every one of those layers as journalism. The aggregator is editorial curation, not "the algorithm." The trackers are public editorial scores backed by weights, inputs, and dated sources you can inspect and dispute on the methodology page for each one. The originals are reported.

Mission

The mission is straightforward: expose grift, corruption, and abuse of power; make the receipts easy to find; and refuse to launder bad actors through polite framing. We started as a Democratic opposition-research operation and have grown into an independent publication, but the muscle is the same one: read every filing, follow the money, name names, and post the primary source next to the claim.

We publish because most of the public evidence about how power actually works, campaign finance records, court dockets, corporate filings, procurement contracts, is technically public but functionally invisible. Someone has to read it, index it, and put the names on a page a normal person can read on their phone at the bus stop. That is the job. Every tracker on this site is an attempt to make one specific slice of that evidence legible.

Who runs it

David B. Wheeler is the founder and editor. He is a former political consultant, opposition researcher, and small-business operator who has spent two decades in North Carolina and national Democratic politics. He is the President and Co-Founder of American Muckrakers, President of American Muckrakers PAC II, and the reporter of record for the site's original press releases and the Rogues' Gallery audio briefings.

Editorial support, research, and technical operations are provided by the Parallax Advisory LLC team. Named contributors are credited on the piece they wrote or produced. Where we use a machine-assisted classifier (for headline ranking, translation caching, or grift-file draft extraction), we say so on the page and a human editor still signs off before anything publishes. Nothing on the site is a chatbot's take dressed up as reporting.

How we source and verify

Every accountability claim on this site is tied to at least one dated, linked primary source. When the claim is a legal status, we source the specific charging document or docket entry (CourtListener, PACER, or the relevant U.S. Attorney's Office release). When the claim is a financial figure, we source the disclosure form, the S-1, the OCPF or FEC filing, or the tax return line. When the claim is a public statement, we quote it verbatim from a dated wire, broadcast transcript, or on-the-record interview and link to the original.

We prefer primary sources over aggregators. When an aggregator is the only source, we say so. We prefer named, on-the-record sourcing over anonymous claims. When anonymous sourcing is unavoidable, we say why the source was granted anonymity and what independent corroboration exists. Anonymous Telegram claims by themselves do not clear the bar and do not enter the trackers.

Editorial opinion and commentary are labeled as such. The Grifters ledger carries an explicit OPINION / ANALYSIS tag on entries that are conduct-and-mapping analysis rather than charged legal cases. The Putin Watch Index page and its methodology page carry a plain-English explainer that says what the number is and what it is not (not a prediction of any specific event). Editorial probabilities are opinions of the editors, not statements of fact.

The trackers, and why you can trust them

Grifters

A sourced, dated ledger of conduct by people in and around power, mapped to the specific statute the conduct arguably implicates. Every entry has a name, a role, a conduct summary, a primary source URL, and a dated year. Entries are ingested from DOJ press-release RSS and CourtListener/RECAP search, human-triaged, and gated by a statute whitelist so drug, immigration, and violent-crime cases do not enter the ledger, this site is about corruption and abuse of power, not street crime. See the Grifters page and the docket methodology for the exact rules.

Rogues' Gallery

Deep-dive dossiers on the figures we cover most closely: Vladimir Putin, members of Congress and their donors, cabinet-adjacent Trump-era figures, and a small set of regional targets. Each profile pulls together the reporting, the receipts, and original audio briefings in one place. Podcast RSS at /podcast.xml.

Putin Watch Index

A weighted 0 to 100 daily read on the pressure on the Kremlin, built from seven public inputs (elite attrition, economic stress, war pressure, isolation, domestic dissent, succession signals, exit-search demand). Every input is scored by a human editor from dated, linked sources. Full methodology at /putin/watch/methodology. The index also drives an "Attempts to Oust Putin" timeline, a Days Since Seen widget, a Window Index of suspicious deaths, a state-TV tone tracker, and a Who Succeeds Putin? board.

Body Count (Putin's War in Ukraine)

A conservative running estimate of the total dead in Vladimir Putin's war on Ukraine, both sides. Anchored to Le Monde's estimate of 500,000 dead as of February 27, 2026, and accrued forward at a deliberately conservative daily rate sourced to the Ukraine General Staff and CSIS. The methodology is on the page. This is journalism about a live war of aggression, not a scoreboard.

SpaceX Stock Price Fraud

Live tracker of paper value erased from SPCX (SpaceX common) since its post-IPO peak, plus a list of insider paper losses reported in the S-1 and follow-on filings, and a curated "Case Against SpaceX" news feed classified by an editorial model with confidence gating. Data is fetched daily from Polygon/Finnhub against a pinned baseline; a freshness watchdog refuses to publish stale figures.

MAGA Dumbass of the Day

A daily archive of one verbatim, sourced, on-the-record quote from the MAGA universe. Nothing publishes without a human editor's approval; the daily post to Bluesky goes out at noon Eastern only when a pick is human-approved and the source is re-verified at post time.

Corrections and complaints

When we get something wrong, we fix it on the page and log the correction. Write to corrections@parallaxadvisory.llc with the URL, the specific claim, and the source you believe is authoritative. We respond to every substantive correction request. If you are named in a Grifters or Rogues' Gallery entry and want to send a response, we will consider publishing a linked reply.

We do not remove properly sourced accountability reporting on demand. We do add clarifications, updates, and, where warranted, follow-up entries when new facts emerge.

Independence and funding

Muckrakers.Today is funded by direct advertising sold in-house (see /advertise), display advertising served through Google AdSense on some pages, newsletter and podcast sponsorships, and reader support. Ad sales do not influence editorial coverage: sponsors do not see, review, or approve editorial content before it publishes, and coverage of a sponsor is disclosed inline where relevant. Political and issue advertising is disclosed with the required paid-for line.

American Muckrakers PAC II is a federal super PAC (FEC ID C00896951) legally separate from the newsroom. PAC press releases published on this site are labeled as such and link to the official PDF. The PAC does not direct editorial coverage of the site.

Press Releases

• July 5, 2026
  Trump's Coin Made Him $636 Million. 989,000 People Lost $3.81 Billion.

  On-chain analysis of every TRUMP token trade since the January 2025 launch: 1,700 wallets captured $3.25B in gains while 988,905 wallets are down $3.81B. Reader intake at muckrakers.today/trumpcoinripoff.

  Read the PDF →
• June 26, 2026
  American Muckrakers Calls on Julian Beaudion to Withdraw from US Senate Race

  American Muckrakers urges Julian Beaudion to suspend his US Senate campaign over donor-fund spending and a pattern of South Dakota court actions.

  Read the PDF →

Contact

Press inquiries: press@americanmuckrakers.com

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Corrections: corrections@parallaxadvisory.llc

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Muckrakers.Today is a project of Parallax Advisory LLC, Asheville, North Carolina.