Why do we run funding campaigns to ask our readers to financially support The Patriot Post? So that we’re not influenced by or beholden to advertisers, and so that leftist activists can’t strangle our revenue stream by targeting those advertisers. The latter is the occasion for this article.

First, if you are one of our financial supporters, THANK YOU! If you are occasionally annoyed that we ask for donations, please understand that it (A) keeps us connected to our readers and (B) is a heck of a lot better than some alternatives.

Perhaps you’ve also noticed that our site and emails are free of ads.

As our About page explains, “Because we do not depend on a single penny of ad revenue, we focus solely on providing you content that is actually newsworthy — worthy of your time — rather than constantly churning the ubiquitous topics which now dominate the mainstream media’s relentless 24/7 recycled spin.” Furthermore, “We do not accept advertising to ensure our advocacy and editorial content is not restrained by commercial influence — as is the case with all other mass media and social media platforms.”

As for the possibility of strangled revenue, recent news regarding some fellow conservative media sites validates Mark Alexander’s wisdom in going ad-free nearly 30 years ago when he launched The Patriot Post as The Federalist.

Ironically, a website called “The Federalist” is one of those now fighting back against financial threats from the Left. (If you want to know the story of our name change, check out the previous link). Breitbart, ZeroHedge, and other sites have similarly found themselves battling to retain their monetary lifeblood because leftist censors prefer to try to bring them to heel or shut them down. Not just conservative media, either, but X — one of the world’s biggest social media platforms.

Just this week, the European Union fined X 120 million euros ($140 million) for allegedly violating transparency rules, particularly with its blue check verification system. X reportedly refused to quietly censor users the way other platforms happily did, so the EU slapped the company with a fine.

“Freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy,” replied Elon Musk. “The only way to know what you are voting for.”

“Europe is going in some bad directions,” added President Donald Trump.

Indeed.

On a related note, Tyler Durden of ZeroHedge, one of the aforementioned targeted sites, posted an article last week explaining his site’s situation. It may sound eerily familiar (bold in the original):

Very early into the COVID-19 pandemic, ZeroHedge suggested that a little-known Chinese lab in Wuhan might know something about the novel coronavirus sweeping the globe. As a result, and as you know, we were subject to an intense demonetization / deplatforming campaign that included getting kicked off of Twitter, PayPal, Facebook and other platforms, dropped by our advertisers, and targeted by MSM hit pieces which colluded with foreign ‘watchdogs’ to inflict maximum damage.

These same groups also targeted outlets including The Federalist and Breitbart over various reporting, which suffered similar fates.

Now, thanks to a new book by investigative journalist Paul Holden that builds on reporting by Matt Taibbi, Paul Thacker and others, we learn that the origin of these campaigns, launched years before the pandemic, was none other than UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer’s political machine, which began targeting left-wing outlets speaking critically of Starmer such as The Canary, and then went after conservative outlets in America — just in time for the 2020 US election.

Durden details the “murky operation known as the Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN),” including who’s behind it and why, and its “umbrella” organization, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). It’s a sordid tale of phony “grassroots” activism meant to silence what George Orwell dubbed “thoughtcrime” in 1984. That book was a warning, but modern leftists treat it like an instruction manual.

My point isn’t to verify Durden’s allegations, though it certainly is the way leftists operate. They set themselves up as gatekeepers of the truth, and then go to battle against opposing viewpoints, often by choking off revenue. Remember GARM.

Our own experience with NewsGuard, a self-appointed arbiter of truth, proves that leftist “watchdogs” are really aiming only to censor any news site that doesn’t tow the Leftmedia line.

In the case of sites that rely on advertising revenue, this can happen by “discrediting” the site in the eyes of any company that might purchase ad space. If that happens often enough or with sizable clients, the site finds its very existence in jeopardy.

Fortunately, because our donors keep us going, the damage to our brand is more limited. Unfortunately, speech suppressors like the “journalists” who run NewsGuard can restrict our reach. We find it harder and harder to speak to our own Facebook followers, for example. If you choose to see our content on Facebook, its algorithm more often than not decides that you don’t actually need to see our content.

And if our audience of nearly 750,000 Patriots isn’t seeing what they said they wanted to see, it’s awfully tough to grow our audience beyond those followers.

Coming full circle, all of that is to say, be patient with our appeals for support. We chose to avoid the advertiser route for very good reasons, so we absolutely depend on our readers to keep The Patriot Post running strong for another 30 years and beyond.

Follow Nate Jackson on X/Twitter.