Ducking the Big Tech Wrecking Ball
My, my, my…what a difference a handful of years can make.
Gone are the days when Twitter was merely a social media platform that people joked about just being a place where we would share what we were having for lunch. In 2020, we saw Twitter, Facebook, and Google emerge as major power players in an American presidential election.
Here’s an update for anyone who was off the planet or in a coma last year: It wasn’t a good thing.
The Big Tech platforms are rather heavy-handed in their treatment of conservative sites and pundits. Shadowbans, suspensions, and deletions of accounts are done casually and without any clear explanation as to why. I mean, we know the real reason why — we’re not toeing the leftist line here — but Dorsey, Zuck, and the rest of the gang aren’t even willing to do a little dance that would make it seem as if there are some actual rules we can play by.
The bad news is that Big Tech has no interest in the playing field being level. Ever.
The good news is that we have ways of dealing with that now.
We launched our VIP subscription program across all of the Townhall Media Mothership sites (PJ Media, Townhall, RedState, HotAir, Bearing Arms, and Twitchy) in the fall of 2019. As we are fond of saying in stand-up: timing is everything. We were able to get a head start on a way to combat the Orwellian pandemic and election censorship that was about to hit in 2020.
Full disclosure: I was never the kind of guy to use the word “Orwellian” before. Now it flies off of my tongue and fingertips with the greatest of ease.
I write about this a lot because it is important. The future of conservative media, journalism, and opinion depends on a firewall to protect it from the insidious whimsicality of Big Tech censorship. For the near future, that firewall is a paywall.
I also write about it a lot because we’re having a ton of fun on the other side of the paywall. It is an actual party over there.
Don’t get me wrong — there is plenty of serious writing and work being done for our VIP members, but we’re also going big with the lighthearted stuff because we are FREE over there.
Every Thursday, my friends VodkaPundit, Bryan Preston, and I get together some of our VIP Gold members for a live video chat that has now been dubbed “Five O’Clock Somewhere.” It’s three hours of wide-ranging questions and conversation along with plenty of — you guessed it — day drinking. Stephen, Bryan, and I are forever marveling that we get to call it “work.” We’ve got a private MeWe group where we swap recipes and stories with our VIP friends for the rest of the week.
I’m also doing three podcasts a week, one of them with my old friend and fellow comedian Kevin Downey Jr. I’ve also just begun to bring back a little of the old PJTV vibe with a weekly video called “Beyond the Briefing.”
A lot of what we’re doing is designed to be a respite from the news of the day or week. On “Five O’Clock Somewhere,” we spend far more time talking about entertainment, food, and booze than politics. Kevin and I are doing a weekly liquor tasting on our podcast. I write a column a couple of times a week called “Kruiser’s (Almost) Daily Distraction” that rarely mentions politics.
While the political online experience can be a bit too rage-filled, I guarantee you we’re having a righteous good time away from the prying eyes of the Big Tech censors.
Oh, in addition to all of the fun, our VIP subscribers get to say goodbye to ads.
The price is right for such an important endeavor. For under five bucks a month you can become an ad-free PJ Media subscriber. If you want access to the live chats along with VIP content from my colleagues across the Townhall Mothership like Kurt Schlichter, Kira Davis, Larry O’Connor, and Katie Pavlich, it’s still less than eight dollars a month. Use the promo code WUHAN and knock 25% off of those prices. Join us, won’t you? I mean, you should at least try it for a month just because our promo codes are fun.
See you on the other side.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member