About this site

Divergent Dispatches : Subsidy of Iberian Free Press is an independent publication launched in April 2024 by Julie Dermansky and David Levy.

Dermansky credits the former Secretary of Louisiana Dept. of Energy and Natural Resources , Thomas Harris, for planting the seed for this venture. He surmised at a public meeting that Dermansky and Levy must be working together, which they weren’t. But they thought working together was a good idea, leading to the development of this platform.

Levy, owner of Petrotechnologies, a company that makes specialty parts for the oil and gas industry and Julie Dermansky, a multi media independent journalist met the day after Hurricane Laura struck. He volunteered to fly her over the storm's destructive path in South Louisiana making it possible for Dermansky to document damage to industrial facilities, active and orphaned well sites. From that time on, Levy and Dermansky began documenting numerous well sites.

Levy was appointed by former Gov. John Bel Edwards to be a commissioner to the State's Oil Field Restoration Program at the end of 2021. Dermansky's reporting on the State's handling of orphan wells including a report highlighting an injection well site on land owned by Exxon that highlights the work Levy did as a commissioner- seemed not to be well received by Harris. The reports raise questions about the state's ability to tackle its orphan well issue, an issue that the Biden Administration committed 4.7 billion dollars to tackle.

At the end of an Oil Field Restoration Program meeting on Dec. 15, 2022 that Dermansky was filming as part of her ongoing coverage on orphan wells, Harris singled Dermansky out asking "Does David Levy's camera person have any questions?". After correcting him, making it clear she doesn't work for Levy, she asked who decides which orphan wells get dealt with. It took over six minutes for Harris to provide Dermansky with an answer. During that time Harris twice insisted that Dermansky was 'out of order' when she pushed back against the jibber jabber he was spewing instead of answering her question. The back and forth between Dermansky and Harris that followed was largely left out of the official transcript of the meeting but you can watch/ listen to what was said here. (Dermansky's video camera was focused on Levy).

Inspiration to create this platform also comes from various sources including the Punk Rock subculture, Minotaure, a magazine published in Paris from 1933 to 1939 and John Heartfield, an artist whose photomontages raised alarm to the rise of fascism in Germany as Hitler rose to power.

Dermansky and Levy believe one of the reasons the climate crisis is worsening and fascism is on the rise is many media sources fail to correct misstatements made by government officials and the leaders of industry. They launched Divergent Dispatches to correct the record in an informative imaginative way.